Parody and performance: Paul Muldoon’s subversive pastoral

Abstract

ABSTRACT Although a pastoral strand runs continuously throughout Muldoon’s work, he is infrequently characterised as a pastoral poet. However, ignoring the pastoral in Muldoon’s work is to ignore the very particular function his pastoral serves. Muldoon’s often overlooked pastoral poems not only perform what Oona Frawley has called the “necessarily hybrid” function of memorialising landscape in a space scarred by empire, but offer simultaneous critiques of the upshot of colonialism in Ireland – namely, a commodification of culture and cultural tropes. This essay argues that Muldoon’s pastoral poems rely on subversive performances of “stock Irish” characters, particularly those of child narrators or father figure characters, in order to both push back against and, sometimes, celebrate those expected cultural tropes. These pastoral poems, spanning decades of Muldoon’s career, all work in remarkably similar ways, relying on this narrative “voice throwing,” as Muldoon himself has described it, in order to engage in both politics and play.