Much critical work on modern and postmodern Irish writers has rightly been founded upon the strong belief that a consideration of their Irish background is crucial to any study of their achievements. Yet this corrective to modern formalist criticism has itself been the subject of much discussion, if only because the concept “Irish background” is problematic at best. Indeed, when used in the context of Irish literature since the 1960s, the ground of Irish history is further problematized, if such a thing were possible, by the alphabetical armies—IRA, INRA, RUC, SAS, UDA, UDR, UVF—that clash by night and by day.

Some of the inherent difficulties in using “background” as an evaluative or interpretive criterion are revealed in responses to Derek Mahon's poetry, a central theme of which is the status of “background” in contemporary Irish verse. In Place and Displacement: Recent Poetry of Northern Ireland (1984), Seamus Heaney distinguishes Derek Mahon by placing him against the obscure background of Ulster's recent history. Heaney marks Mahon's apparent retreat from the world, and, reading “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford” as Mahon's key signature, he transcribes the poet's themes thus:

Mahon, the poet of metropolitan allusion, of ironical and cultivated manners, is being shadowed by his unlived life among the familiar shades of Belfast. Do not turn your back on us, do not disdain our graceless stifled destiny, keep faith with your origins, do not desert, speak for us: the mushrooms are the voices of belonging but they could not have been so compelling if Mahon had not created the whispering gallery of absence not just by moving out of Ireland but by evolving out of solidarity into irony and compassion. And, needless to say, into solitude.¹

Heaney represents Mahon's uneasiness about turning his back on Belfast and its history as an achieved political disengagement from the Troubles—an accusation leveled at Heaney himself when he moved from Belfast to the Republic in 1972.² In Heaney's view, Mahon's autonomy, his freedom from history, is maintained at great expense. Mahon's life is overshadowed by the unlived regions beyond it, and his poetic virtues are best defined as negations, while irony, compassion and solitude are evolutionary advances over solidarity with one's countrymen.

Dillon Johnston reads Mahon's work positively in his recent Irish Poetry Since Joyce (1984); but he also reads it in the context of a rejected history that “includes the Troubles in Ulster but is larger and less defined than that ineluctable homicidal process.” Having thus reduced Mahon's subject matter, Johnston finds the consolation and metaphysical significance of his verse “in survival and in the respites when one knows love or light from the hills.”³ Although these moments are wonderfully realized in his poetry, Mahon's achievement, here as in Heaney's critique, is at least as remarkable for what it excludes as for what it includes. Mahon's achievement seems to be an intensification of feeling and place afforded by a diminished scope.

Seamus Deane devotes a chapter of Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature 1880-1980 (1987) to Mahon and his “longing to be free from history.”⁴ In several pages of elegant analysis of Mahon's relationship to Irish politics, Deane reaches much the same conclusion as Heaney and Johnston: namely, Mahon's retreat from the disordered politics of Ulster into his highly ordered verse is achieved by restricting his scope. Specifically, Mahon maintains an apparent distance from the sites of Irish violence through an unwillingness to closely examine the precarious existence of his “liberal individualism, his ‘protestant’ ethic of the independent imagination” (CR 162). One may say that Deane senses an article of bad faith in Mahon's poetics.

These three reactions to Mahon's work can be traced directly to the various functions of place they discover there. To be sure, the establishment of place constitutes part of Mahon's dominant self-representation. Poems centered on specific places and that have placenames in their titles form a comfortable majority in Mahon's work. Yet, I wonder to what degree we should credit the priority of place over history in Mahon's poetry. The poems about the politicized landscape of Ulster are generally bitter, when they are not pluperfectly ironical. And, in many of his poems set outside Northern Ireland, the regnant spatial specificity is frequently contradicted by a discernible poetic gesture situating these places outside the margins of reality. That is, whether Mahon's preferred place is an autonomous imaginative space or an actual setting removed from ruined Ulster, its significance and consolation invariably deconstruct.

In “A Lighthouse in Maine,” for example, the poet describes a navigation aid in terms that seemingly deny its actual obsolescence, thus placing it in a transcendent category. Storing light rather than shedding any, the lighthouse resembles an ivory tower, a polished Buddha, the soul of Adonais. And the poet gives the reader directions to find this remarkable place. One makes, “… a right / Somewhere beyond Rockland, / A left, a right, / You turn a corner and / There it is … / Out you get and / Walk the rest of the way.”⁵ Apparently a Baedeker for those looking for intimations of immortality, this poem nevertheless insistently denies its own spiritual utility: for this wondrous lighthouse, the poet says, “might be anywhere”—Europe, Asia, North America. Thus, in the end the lighthouse seems pointlessly literalized, and its significance dilates into insubstantiality.

In other works in Poems 1962-1978 (1979) some places gain importance because the poet is absent from them. The significance achieved through absence is seen in the short lyric, “Thinking of Inishere in Cambridge, Massachusetts”:

A dream of limestone in sea light
Where gulls have placed their perfect prints.
Reflection in that final sky
Shames vision into simple sight:
Into pure sense, experience.
Atlantic leagues away tonight,
Conceived beyond such innocence,
I clutch the memory still, and I
Have measured everything with it since.(6)

In the apparent dialectic between Inishere and Cambridge, in the oceanic distance between them, the poet achieves a metaphysical criterion with which he judges all else. The surety of this lyric, however, is deconstructed by its own rhetoric. For example, the literal experience of Inishere, by which he sets so much store, is translated into metaphysical innocence by poetic legerdemain, through rhyme. Paradoxically, the knowledge gained on Inishere becomes important through a distance of time and space because it represents a state of “not knowing.” Thus, the poem becomes interesting not because it recreates a Wordsworthian spot of time, but because it subtly draws the reader's attention to what threatens the idyllic space. Cambridge finally overwhelms Inishere because the poet's alienation from it is never accounted for. In the language of poststructuralism, the vision and its significance are undone by their own difference.

The usual account of Mahon's fascination with places like Inishere cites his self-conscious retreat from Ulster's history. This was, of course, Heaney's point about “The Disused Shed in Co. Wexford.” Mahon's position on local history is given a straightforward account in “The Spring Vacation.” Here the poet resumes his “old conspiracy with the wet / Stone and unwieldy images of the squinting heart” that are the stuff of his memory of Belfast. But he finds it difficult to give adequate poetic attention to the “humorous formulae, / The hidden menace in the knowing nod,” to the common expressions of feeling among his fellows. The last stanza provides Mahon's conclusion about this situation:

One part of my mind must learn to know its place.
The things that happen in the kitchen houses
And echoing back-streets of this desperate city
Should engage more than my casual interest,
Exact more interest than my casual pity.

(Poems 4)

Despite the moral imperatives to know and express the life of Ulster, he resists them. And what approaches an acceptance of a vocation here finds contradiction in the degradation of the word “interest” in the last lines, as the obligations of fellowship shade into emotional usury. Moreover, when this poem appeared in Night-Crossing (1968), its title was “In Belfast.”⁷ The shift to a temporal focus in the new title indicates a significant change in Mahon's central concern. That is, when he writes of Irish places, he does so in the context of the historical availability of that place for poetic treatment. Likewise, in the last lyric of Poems 1962-1978, “The Sea in Winter,” Mahon returns to the same theme. Describing a visit to Belfast, he writes;

When I returned one year ago
I felt like Tonio Kröger—slow
To come to terms with my own past
Yet knowing I could never cast
Aside the things that made me what,
For better or worse, I am. The upshot?
Chaos and instability,
The cool gaze of the RUC.

(Poems 111)

While not ignoring the moral and political significance of the RUC, I believe it is rather missing the point to restrict the chaos and instability that beset the poet to the Troubles in Ulster. Mahon's apparently causal reference to Thomas Mann, his German sound-alike, effectively broadens the scope of the poem, making the RUC a synecdoche, albeit a formidable one. It is surely correct to call Mahon the poet of metropolitan allusion, but it is wrong to limit the significance of this allusiveness to Mahon's symptomatic desire to withdraw from the long, melancholy roar of Irish politics. Mahon is, of course, chilled by the Weltanschauung that travels under the RUC, but it poses a problem for poetry that is less parochial than it appears, as Dillon Johnston has rightly suggested.

To be sure, Mahon dreams of limestone in sea light because he abhors the apocalyptic destruction of Belfast. The cityscape is marked by “scorched gable[s] and burnt-out buses” (Poems 44). More generally, however, Mahon is equally repelled by a postmodern culture whose obsessions are bourgeois improvements and whose enduring monuments are consumer and industrial waste: “fitted carpets, central heating / And automatic gear-change” and other “Imperishable by-products of the perishable will” (Poems 45, 74). In these reductive representations of life Deane reads Mahon's desire to be free from history, a longing that marks him as a “recognizably” Irish poet (CR 156). But, as we have seen, it is quite another matter to satisfy this desire.

Mahon confronts a problem central to the postmodern literary imagination—the inadequacy of language to represent the plots of history or to convincingly imagine a counter to them. In “The Joycentenary Ode” appears another explicit statement about a visionary locale whose importance is not Romantic but linguistic. Toward the end of the “Ode,” we find this vision of place:

Gazing wist, folden
Gaviels, childers of leidt,
We cmome to a place
Beyond cumminity
Where only the wind synges.
Words faoil there
Bifar infunity,
One evenereal stare
Twintwinkling on the si.
This is the dark adge
Where the souil swails
its hurtfealt soang,
Hearing the sonerous
Volapuke of the waives,
That ainchant tongue,
Dialect of what thribe,
Throb of what broken heart—
A language beyond art
That not even you,
If you had lived
To a hundred and wan,
Could begin to danscribe.

(HN 47-48)

The dark age of the world is its dark edge, a place beyond community, where language is extraliterary. As a congruence of time and space whose language is beyond art, it is also beyond consciousness, even that of a latter-day Gabriel. Like the lighthouse in Maine, this dark edge might be anywhere. And a place that might be anywhere is no place. The attraction of this extrahistorical realm is contradicted by its own impossibility, its peculiar charm notwithstanding.

In the context of a political instability that borders on chaos, traditional poetry is a dying art. In the “Rage for Order,” an “etiolated,” “grandiloquent and deprecating” poet sits aloof from “his people,” who fill their time bombing buses and torching houses. The poet's imagination, figured in the glare of a high window, is nothing compared to the shattered glass of urban violence. Explicitly rejecting Wallace Stevens's neo-Romantic poetic, Mahon reduces the poet's “rage for order” to an “eddy of semantic scruples / in an unstructurable sea” (Poems 44). As Mahon writes in “Heraclitus on Rivers,” “The very language in which [a] poem / Was written, and the idea of language, / All these things will pass away in time” (Poems 107). A poet writes or he does not, but in the end his “desperate ironies” make nothing happen. Making history is left to the speaker of the poem, a man of action, whose “desperate love” (Poems 44) tears down only to build again.

Yet, to be historical one need not make history. Although Mahon places his poet figures outside the refuse of postindustrial society and beyond the violence of the Troubles, he nonetheless places poetry in an historical context—indeed, in a Hegelian one. The Irish presence in history has been subjected to various artistic treatments: Yeats systematized it, Leon Uris simonized it, and recently Paul Muldoon has anarcotized it and, at least on one poetic occasion, he has sodomized it. Mahon's treatment proves less particular and peculiar; his verges on the theoretical. Mahon's contribution is, I believe, the insight that modernist poetics—an aesthetic of the achieved poem, as Heaney defines it—can no longer contain the historical emplotments of a pluralist culture. Thus, while Mahon's poet figures remain apparently detached from Irish politics, they actually engage in a larger conflict with the wider alphabetical detritus of our culture: That is, the threat to the traditional poetic voice is not only the RUC and the IRA, but also MTV.

On occasion, Mahon seems to score a Pyrrhic victory over the forces of cultural darkness. In “Rock Music,” the poet suffers the mindless assault of heavy metal music, and the fart attack of Honda motorbikes driven by the young in search of “fortuitous sex.” This tumult of mass culture obviates the consolations of traditional literature: the poet tries to read a printed page but mutters despairingly, “As if such bumf could save us now” (HN 25). The following morning, the poet walks along the strand, and another genre of rock music, a kind from a geological age before the Rolling Stones, clears his head of the “residual roar” of the discotheques. The silence of the seascape may momentarily quiet the discos, but the pun in the title seems incapable of restoring vitality to the “bumf” literature has become.⁸

Indeed, when Mahon explores the limits of contemporary culture, he is most concerned with the apparent defeat of the letter. “The Terminal Bar” is Mahon's representation of one of the shabby taverns that surround the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York, the travestied pubs that are the Valhalla of New Jersey commuters. Not coincidentally, the lyric also brilliantly parodies Tennyson's “Crossing the Bar.” Instead of seeing the Logos in the Pilot's face, here we see the impersonal eye of the television—the “fetish and icon / providing all we want / of magic and redemption, / routine and sentiment.” When the modern Pilgrim enters this parodic sanctum, he admits that the tube has conquered:

Slam the door and knock
the snow from your shoe,
admit that the vast dark
at last defeated you—
nobody found the grail
or conquered outer space.
Join the clientele
watching itself increase.

(HN 52)

The heroism and the religious potentiality of journeys to far-removed places celebrated in the literary traditions have been rendered “bumf” by the fetish of mass culture.

In two important poems from The Hunt by Night (1982)—the title lyric and “The Globe in North Carolina”—Mahon develops a poetic that is not limited by a retreat from history or by a “logical working down to bleakness” (CR 156). Rather, in these poems he approaches the pluralism of culture with equanimity. This tonal change in poetics is effected by a subtle shift in the significance of place, one that admits of contemporary pluralistic valuation. To achieve this shift in perspective, Mahon looks to Paolo Uccello, the obsessed developer of perspective. What Mahon finds attractive, I believe, in Uccello's Hunt by Night is a triumph of style over content, intently achieved by him by keeping the viewer's attention upon the perfection of his technique. Specifically, in Uccello's Hunt by Night Mahon sees nightmarish images, “the ancient fears” of nocturnal pursuit, translated into shadows on nursery walls. Mahon transforms the apparent chaos of the scene into a “mutated … tamed and framed” picture of pure game. An analysis of Uccello's The Battle of San Romano indicates the features of Uccello's artistry that, I believe, attract Mahon: Uccello “has stripped every structure of its accidental aspects to transform it into a metaphysical component of an affray, one that is shorn of its historical significance and assimilated to an exclusively mathematical and figurative reality.”⁹ Confronting the unknown telos of the struggle in the painting—the end of Uccello's narrative is “Masked by obscurities of paint”—Mahon concludes that it is:

                              As if our hunt by night,
                                                  So very tense,
                                        So long pursued,
                              In what dark cave begun
          And not yet done, were not the great
Adventure we suppose but some elaborate
                              Spectacle put on for fun
                                        And not for food.

(HN 30-31)

The conflicts between culture and anarchy that concerned Matthew Arnold are, thus, accommodated to Mahon's imagination by being emptied of their content and emphatically stylized into a game. In this poetic, the Inisheres of past memory are no longer literalized places, but stylized ones. This is not an ironic reduction, in Deane's sense of the term, because Mahon has realized a profound insight of postmodern pragmatic philosophy. It is not, as Derrida would have it, that traditional metaphysics seeks to undo the world, rather the contrary. And Mahon has seen that a society ridden and driven by instruments of mass culture is emptied of metaphysics.¹⁰ What in other poems some sensed as ironic detachment has now become a necessary philosophical perspective on a pluralist culture.

‘The Globe in North Carolina,” the last and most accomplished poem in The Hunt by Night, is occasioned by the poet's separation from his wife in Ireland. To celebrate love for his transatlantic wife, Mahon performs an intricate and literal confusion of the ideal and the real in his depiction of the world. Instead of the antithesis between Inishere and Cambridge, here there occurs a diminution of idealized diction and, simultaneously, an elevation of the demotic. The result is a mirrored correspondence between the actual details of the Carolina night and the idealized constellations, a correspondence effected by the written word:

From Hatteras to the Blue Ridge
Night spreads like ink on the unhedged
Tobacco fields and clucking lakes,
Bringing the lights on in the rocks
And swamps, the farms and the motor courts,
Substantial cities, kitsch resorts—
Until, to the mild theoptic eye,
America is its own night sky,
Its own celestial fruit, on which
Sidereal forms appear, their rich
Clusters and vague attenuations
Mimic galactic dispositions.
Hesperus is a lighthouse, Mars
An air-force base; molecular cars
Arrowing the turnpikes become
Lost meteorites in search of home.

(HN 61)

Once this identification between the celestial and the earthly has been accomplished, the poet can now imaginatively reunite with his wife, the distance of their separation being trivial by comparison:

… what misgivings I might have
About the importance of
The merely human pale before
The mere fact of your being there.

(HN 63)

After this consummation devoutly to be wished, the poet returns to his surroundings:

Five miles away a south-bound freight
Shrieks its euphoria to the state
And passes on; unfinished work
Awaits me in the scented dark.
The halved globe, slowly turning, hugs
Its silence, and the lightning bugs
Are quiet beneath the open window
Listening to that lonesome whistle blow …

(HN 63)

Thus Mahon ends his deeply metaphysical poem in the idiom of country western music. That the final phrase is not discordant, either thematically or musically, indicates Mahon's achieved fusion of the vernacular and the lyrical in his historical acceptance of the pluralist culture he had deplored earlier. No longer beset by “Era-provincial self-regard,” he writes:

Here, as elsewhere, I recognize
A wood invisible for its trees
Where everything must change except
The fact of change; our scepticism
And irony, grown trite, be dumb
Before the new thing that must come
Out of the scrunched Budweiser can
To make us sadder, wiser men.

(HN 62)

The achievement of a poetics of pluralism issues not from the Romantic urn or the Modernist jar in Tennessee. Rather, it comes from the stylized icon of mass culture that has been emptied of its content, giving forth no epigrams about truth and beauty, only an onomatopoetic “scrunch.” Mahon has wittily united his sensibility and the heretofore resistant culture in the elliptical pun, the sadder Budweiser man. Never has so much been made of such small beer.

Moreover, the title “The Globe in North Carolina” is perhaps misleading, for the burden of the poem is not so much space but time, not so much physical location as the acceptance of historical change. Unlike Yeats, who was troubled by the mythical rough beast in “The Second Coming,” Mahon waits, in a historically materialist manner, for the “new thing” that will issue from consumer capitalism. Even the irony and scepticism of his—nearly—high-modernist poetic have been rendered historically trite, have been literally rubbed away through overuse. He has returned to the ethos of “The Hunt by Night”: “experience is an elaborate / Spectacle put on for fun” (HN 31). This perspective in The Hunt by Night is new to Mahon, and we might suggest that the poetic strategy in the volume has been to hunt by night, stepping over beer cans and listening to train whistles in the way prescribed by country music. We might also suggest that this poetic strategy has a Joycean precedent. We can recognize Mahon's achievement in “Globe” in Seamus Deane's remark about Joyce, who “anticipated the capacity of modern society to integrate almost all antagonistic elements by transforming them into fashions, fads—style, in short.”¹¹ What will issue from the Mahon's empty beer can is, of course, a style as ephemeral as any, whose short trajectory belies the “unity of culture” sought by Yeats and other mythologizers of history.

Upon the publication of his selected poems in 1979, Derek Mahon remarked that he felt himself “released, or partly, from the impertinent rhetoricism of what I suppose I must now regard as my ‘early work,’ and am at last in a position to begin.”¹² Mahon has begun in The Hunt by Night to see that his metropolitan allusiveness and his ironical and cultivated manners can be more than formalist attitudes, that they can be subsumed under a postmodernist perspective, modeled on the playful effects of Uccello. For Mahon this perspective is historically appropriate. In a recent poem, “Squince,” Mahon's perspectivist poetic includes the “forest of symbols”—swan, heron, Druidic stone circles, hill forts—as well as the “clear-cut / Resonant artifacts” of small shops and phone boxes. “We live now,” he writes, “in a future / Prehistory.”¹³ Ironic detachment has been supplanted by a strong historicist and pluralist imagination, more commonly encountered in work of Paul Muldoon and Ciarán Carson. Mahon has revised his Ruskinian revulsion over contemporary life at the base of poems like “The Apotheosis of Tins” and “Rock Music.” And he has begun to see postmodernist culture—such as it is—with a “mild theoptic eye” most sensitive to that culture's most characteristic historical feature—its manifold and mutable styles.

Mahon's perspective on place and history is the sine qua non of his recent achievements, and it is a necessary complement to the poetic of Seamus Heaney, Ireland's best-known poet, whose verse, as Deane has remarked, proposes consolation in “tradition, rural landscapes, folk custom, and [the] deep historical time”¹⁴ of Ireland's layered cultural memory. Mahon's theoptic eye surveys in broad historical perspective Heaney at his own work with his foot on the lug of a spade. What Heaney experiences as Mahon's absence from Ireland is really the warrant for his far-sightedness.

Notes

1. Seamus Heaney, Place and Displacement: Recent Poetry of Northern Ireland (Grasmere: Trustees of Dove Cottage, 1984), p. 9.

2. Blake Morrison, Seamus Heaney (London: Methuen, 1982), p. 72.

3. Dillon Johnston, Irish Poetry After Joyce (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 225.

4. Seamus Deane Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature (Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University Press, 1987), p. 156; hereafter cited parenthetically, thus: (CR 156).

5. Derek Mahon, The Hunt by Night (1982; Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University Press, 1983), p. 44; hereafter cited parenthetically, thus: (HN 44)

6. Derek Mahon, Poems: 1962-1978 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 27; hereafter cited parenthetically, thus: (Poems 27).

7. Derek Mahon, Night-Crossing (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 6.

8. See “Blewits,” in Paul Muldoon, Quoof (Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University Press, 1983), p. 36.

9. Gigetta Dalli Regoli, Uffizi (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1968), p. 32.

10. Richard Rorty, “Deconstruction and Circumvention.” Critical Inquiry, 11 (1984): 1-23.

11. Seamus Deane, “Heroic Styles: The Tradition of an Idea,” in Ireland's Field Day (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), p. 56.

12. Jonathan Barker, ed., Thirty Years of the Poetry Book Society: 1956-1986 (London: Hutchinson, 1988), pp. 151-152.

13. ‘Squince,” in Dánta Idir Ghaeilge agus Bhéarla (Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University Press, 1984), p. 9.

14. Seamus Deane, Review of New Selected Poems 1966-1987 by Seamus Heaney. Times Literary Supplement, March 16-22, 1990: 275-276.