Attempting to extend the limits of thinking and writing, to avoid
confinement in the name of disjunction, Muldoonís favoured place is
a dis-position; a case of being in ë[t]wo places at once was it, or one
place twice?í, or maybe three or four more. This dis-positioning
provides a sharp break from the way in which Muldoon perceives
Heaneyís earlier work. In an interview with Kevin Barry (1987) when
Muldoon was asked whether the Irish situation provides a limiting
position of fixed political allegiance, Muldoon answered:
Thereís no tribe in Ireland for which I would feel comfortable as a spokesman. I
wonder who would, who does, who is? I think Seamus Heaney flirted ñ I think
ëflirtedí is the word ñ with the idea of it for a while [Ö] But I donít think even
Seamus flirts with it now. From what I can work out of his recent poems, I
think Seamus is now much more interested in the idea of the free agent [Ö]^16This statement is important for two reasons: first, Muldoon draws a
distinction between Heaneyís early work and his later poems. This
was identified in the first chapter as those poems from Station Island
(1984) onwards. Second, the distinction relies on a division Muldoon
implicitly draws up between the crude nationalist who flirts with the
idea of speaking for the tribe and the post-nationalist who hopes to be
a ëfree agentí or uncontainable within a delimited sectarian space.
Interestingly, Muldoonís sees Heaney not entirely abandoning the
nationalist need for ëfree spaceí yet seeking freedom not through
expressing an attachment to Irish territory but through the need to
ëdiscover the extent of limitsí in the hope of thereby becoming a more
ëfree agentí. Muldoon parodies Heaney in his ëJanuary Journalí of
1992 which was recomposed in The Prince of the Quotidian (1994):
ëthe great physician of the earth/ is waxing metaphysical, has taken to
ìwalking on airî;/ as Goethe termed it, Surf and Turf.í^17 Heaneyís
recent poetry comes closer to Muldoonís dis-position between the pull
of gravity and transcendence. Discussion of deterritorialization in
Heaneyís work can be taken further by alluding to the tensions within
Muldoon between gravity and flight, the sensible and nonsensical, and
the grave and the hilarious.
16 Kevin Barry, ëQ. & A.: Paul Muldooní, Irish Literary Supplement, Fall 1987,
p.36.
17 Muldoon, The Prince of the Quotidian (Dublin: Gallery, 1994), p.14.