ëTwiceí
A doubling is played out at a poetic level in Muldoonís poem ëTwiceí
(1994) which provides the epigraph for this chapter and whose
protagonist ëwould shift the balanceí as he stands ëgrinning from both
ends of the school photograph,/ having jooked behind the three-deep
rest of us to meet the Kodakís/ leisurely pan: ìTwo places at once,
was it, or one place twice?îí.^18 Photographed by a moving camera, the
boys run from one end of the picture to the other so that they can get
into the photograph twice. The speaker, in two places at once or one
place twice, shifts the balance by outlining the limits of identity, time
and space with a view to a double presence where the subject is not
one nor the other but both. In this way, the picture in the poem
deconstructs the relationship between representation and the real,
since any easy understanding of the mimetic function of the camera is
undermined as the picture does not reliably reproduce the real or
represent the present. The boy challenges mimetic forms of art
appealing to a different conception of space and time, whereby he is in
two places and two times at once. The poem enacts a doubling, a non-
binary or non-dialectical middle from where the chameleon poet
questioning identity grins. Here, identity is seen as a joke or
something that we perform or enact. The boy running from one end of
the picture to the other discovers his identities in the photograph only
after he has performed his trick. The poem becomes evocative of play
in the sense of theatrical improvisation, where there are no sure
models for the representation of identity, and where identity is
presented in terms of a comic enactment whereby the rules can be bent
and there is no script. In the poem ëpure presenceí becomes ëpure
differenceí.^19 So there is no true presence represented in the poem
only a conflict of forces that cannot present a simple origin or
identity.^20 As he runs, the boy provides a useful metaphor for
18 Muldoon, The Annals of Chile (London: Faber, 1994), p.12.
19 Cf. Jacques Derrida on Antonin Artaud in ëThe Theatre of Cruelty and the
Closure of Representationí, Writing and Difference, trans., Alan Bass (London:
Routledge, 1978), p.247.
20 Ibid., pp.248ñ9.