unavowed engagement ‘The More a Man Has’, rightly observes the startling discrepancy between register
andsubject-matter, but he describes the poem’s register in two ways, which suggest
rather different things about the poem’s speaker. ‘Part of the shock of this writing’,
he asserts, ‘lies in its playing off verbal and formalbrioagainst the brutality of
the incident described; rather than a pre-formulated language of description, or of
analysis (condemnatory or otherwise), Muldoon deals in a deadpan precision.’^36
McDonald’s formulation elides the difference between ‘verbal and formalbrio’
and ‘deadpan precision’. By equating these, McDonald suggests moral possibilities
latent in the ostensible heartlessness of linguisticbrio. To be ‘deadpan’ implies that
reactions and emotions exist, they are simply being suppressed, and McDonald’s
pre-emptive, derogatory identification of the alternative to suppression as ‘a pre-
formulated language of description or...analysis’ implicitly proposes a converse
authenticity and value for such suppression.
The affectlessness of ‘The More a Man Has’, and of Muldoon’s evasive approaches
to violence more generally, can be, and frequently are, seen as a cover for a moral
sensibility too aware of the inadequacy of language and the dangers of political
appropriation to speak directly, but one which, nonetheless, has ultimately ethical
aims. For example, Tim Kendall persuasively describes ‘The More a Man Has’
as a ‘brilliant brutal parable for contemporary Northern Ireland’, an allegorical
embodiment of the moral opacity of the Northern Irish situation: it ‘obliquely
conveys the terrible ‘‘Truth’’ that in a violent society perspectives quickly become
lost, motives and identities obscured’.^37 Edna Longley sees the poem’s refusal to be
tied to conventional morality as freeing it to explore, through formal innovation,
alternative, more productive routes to meaning. She ties such meaning to a break
with the over-determined versions of Irishhistory that she sees it as working in
reaction against: ‘the poem’s political message remains, above all, its medium, and
its medium is metamorphic.... Muldoon’s metamorphoses melt or expand rigid
understandings of history; make us experiencehistory as an arbitrary kaleidoscope,
a form of mental illness.’^38 I myself read ‘The More a Man Has’ as having a
covert moral dimension: I see itslinguistic promiscuity and imaginative liberties, its
deadpan affectlessness, as a many-times multiplied version of the chilling depiction
of a deranged mind I see in ‘Mink’, and, to a lesser extent, other poems.
However, to return to McDonald’s formulation, ‘verbal and formalbrio’, while it
can have a ‘deadpan’ quality read into it, is not identical with such. In itself, it cannot
be said necessarily to contain suppressed moral potential. The apparent pleasure in
language of ‘The More a Man Has’, its privileging of the non-referential,couldbe
read not as oblique reaction to, and therefore comment on, context, but as simple
rejection of responsibility to context, in favour ofthe freedom of art. Terence Brown,
for instance, characterizes Muldoon throughhis apparent ‘freedom from humanist
(^36) McDonald,Mistaken Identities,67–8. (^37) Kendall,Paul Muldoon, 116–17.
(^38) Longley, ‘Poetry and Politics in Northern Ireland’, 210.