The Implosion of Irish Elegy: Paul Muldoon’s “The More a Man Has, the More a Man Wants”

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to discuss Muldoon’s “The More a Man Has, the More a Man Wants” in terms of the implosion in the Irish elegy tradition. The poem comprises two points of rupture-the speaker and the victim-through which the poet problematizes the tradition of Irish elegy. Muldoon’s speaker differs from the conventional elegiac speaker in two ways. First, the speaker is suspicious enough to partly recognize his surroundings in contrast to the traditional lyric speaker; furthermore, his trope of the personification enables him to deromanticize the tradition of pastoral elegiac mourning. Second, the speaker distinguishes himself from modern melancholic elegists. In distancing himself from both the dead and the sites of viloence, the poet employs black humor, which enables him to lighten the ethical burden of writing poetry during the Troubles and to express a sense of embarrassment in the turbulent era when a conventional distinction between good and evil is no longer valid. The second point of rupture is the victim. As a postmodern antihero, the victim appears self-contradictory. He behaves as an ordinary human; however, he appears as an extraordinary figure superior to common people. The self-contradictory characteristics accompanied by his transvestism and the use of shibboleth make him different from modern antiheroes. The postmodern antihero also problematizes the borders between representation and reality. In ekphrastic stanzas, he hybridizes different contexts in leaping from one representation to another to creatively interpret the contemporary sectarian violence, whereby the Irish elegiac genre implodes.