'The Half-Sure Legislator': Romantic Legacies in the Writing of Derek Mahon and Tom Paulin

'The Half-Sure Legislator': Romantic Legacies in the Writing of Derek Mahon and Tom PaulinAuthor(s): Patricia HortonSource: Irish University Review, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Autumn - Winter, 2001), pp. 404-419Published by: Edinburgh University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25504885 .

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Patricia Horton

'The Half-Sure Legislator': Romantic

Legacies in the Writing of Derek Mahon and Tom Paulin

Romantic criticism continues its struggle simultaneously to define

and be rid of itself, a doubleness symptomatic of the continuing dialec tical relationship between Romantic construction and Romantic

critique. Even the most flamboyant new voices in the recent debate

continue to wrestle with a definition of "The Romantic" at the same

time as claiming to have found a way out of its ideology.1

As these opening remarks make clear, the question of how to define 'the

Romantic' and the challenge of dealing with the legacies of the Romantic

period continue to be a source of controversy and debate in contemporary criticism and writing. At least part of the dilemma stems from what some

critics have seen as an insistent overlapping between the Romantic period and the contemporary one. As Cynthia Chase argues:

Romanticism resists being defined as a period

or a set of qualities that can be comfortably ascribed to others and assigned to a historical

past. There are several reasons why this is so. One is that major

historical changes of the Romantic period still determine basic conditions of our lives: the invention of democracy, the invention of

revolution, and the emergence of a reading public.2

While that overlap may make itself felt in historical and political terms, it is equally applicable to literary history. As Raymond Williams has

noted, the Romantic period is the locus for a whole new set of ideas

about the role of the poet and the function of poetry, legacies with which

contemporary writers continue to engage and struggle.3 To this extent

Romanticism can be read as a set of responses for dealing with profound intellectual, social and political shifts in society. Since such shifts, as Chase

argues, 'still determine basic conditions of our lives' it is not surprising that many of these responses and strategies should be replicated across

1. Stephen Copley and John Whale, introduction, in Stephen Copley and John Whale

(eds.), Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts 1780-1832 (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 4.

2. Cynthia Chase, introduction, in Cynthia Chase (ed.), Romanticism (London: Longman, 1993), p. 1.

3. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1958),

p. xiii.

404



ROMANTIC LEGACIES IN DEREK MAHON AND TOM PAULIN

historical time, albeit mediated and inflected by specific historical and

cultural formations.

These issues are at the heart of my discussion of Romantic legacies, a

discussion which focuses on how two contemporary poets, Derek Mahon

and Tom Paulin, draw on particular elements of and debates about

Romanticism and find literary models among English Romantic writers.

They do so as a way of defining their own aesthetic/political stances

and also as a way of locating themselves within contemporary literary and political debates. By examining how Mahon and Paulin construct

Romanticism, by being alert to elements of kinship as well as to moments

of critical distance between them and their Romantic precursors, we can

trace a number of intersections between contemporary concerns and

those of the Romantic period. This discussion of Romantic legacies is also designed to be an

intervention in Irish critical debates about Romanticism. Within an Irish

context, discussions of Romanticism have been hampered by a refusal to interrogate the terms Romanticism or the 'Romantic'. One result of

this has been the tendency to assign specific elements of Romanticism to

Protestantism and other elements to Catholicism. Anthony Bradley's comments in 'Literature and Culture in the North of Ireland' provide a

case in point:

If the Protestant imagination reflects an alienated sense of its native

place and inclines toward the gothic mode (at least in fiction), the Catholic imagination celebrates the atavistic power of place and

tends toward the pastoral mode in poetry and fiction.4

Catholicism is here identified with a pastoral, rural world, and with

romantic nationalism, while Protestantism is identified with the Gothic, with alienation, and with a sense of cultural anxiety born of guilt and

fear.5 Bradley's comments are important because they make clear that

Romanticism in Ireland is understood and interpreted through a religious

4. Anthony Bradley, 'Literature and Culture in the North of Ireland', in Michael

Kenneally (ed.), Cultural Contexts and Literary Idioms in Contemporary Irish Literature

(Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988), p. 60.

5. For further examples of this tendency see Clair Wills, Improprieties: Politics and

Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) in which she

consistently associates Romanticism with 'nationalist tradition' and with an over

whelmingly conservative ideology; Luke Gibbons, 'Romanticism, Realism, and Irish

Cinema', in Kevin Rockett, Luke Gibbons and John Hill, Cinema and Ireland (London: Croom Helm, 1987), pp. 194-257, in which Gibbons denies that Romanticism and

Protestantism intersect at all in Ireland, arguing that 'Irish Romanticism' is charac

terized by 'an aversion to individualism and the clarity of vision required by the

puritan ideal'; Terence Brown, Northern Voices: Poets from Ulster (Dublin: Gill and

Macmillan, 1975), p. 119, argues that 'romanticism and Calvinism touch only at their

circumferences in an equivalent acceptance of passivity or rebelliousness in the face

of superior forces ? God or the imagination'.

405



IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW

framework. This is not surprising given the fact that English Romanticism is a predominantly Protestant affair and given the centrality of religion and religious traditions to Irish identity. What is problematic, however, is that Bradley fails to appreciate the multiple and complex ways in which

Romanticism and Catholicism, and Romanticism and Protestantism, intersect. Thus Bradley's remarks fail to account for the sustained and

deliberate use of the Gothic by Catholic writers such as Paul Muldoon

and Ciaran Carson.6 This article seeks to open up discussions of Roman

ticism in Ireland by using the work of Mahon and Paulin to explore more fully the intersections between Romanticism and Protestantism,

looking in particular at Mahon and Paulin's shared sense of kinship with

Shelley, at Paulin's growing identification with William Hazlitt, and at

ideas of the Gothic and of individualism in the work of both poets.

Although the poetry of Mahon and Paulin differs in important ways, their shared sense of Shelley's significance points towards important elements of overlap in their work. Both Mahon and Paulin, for example, share that suspicion of the aesthetic which Terence Brown finds in both

W.R. Rodgers and Louis MacNeice, and which we might therefore begin to think of as paradigmatic for the Northern Protestant imagination.7

Paradigmatic too is the tension Mahon and Paulin exhibit between, on

the one hand, a recognition of responsibility to a group or a set of beliefs

and, on the other, a need to set individual conscience above all controlling authorities. Their writing intersects in its concern with responsibility, freedom, autonomy and subjectivity, issues which stem from a sometimes

reluctant sense of Protestant identity. The links between Mahon and

Paulin are further underlined by their shared sense of kinship with

Shelley. In his work they find a reflection of their own dilemmas and in

his idealism, his love of liberty, his hatred of institutions, his antipathy towards the state, the crown and organized religion and, perhaps most

6. Gothic is here understood as a fascination with the irrational and with those areas

of experience which are considered taboo. With its roots in sexuality and violence, and its anti-classical stance, the Gothic has a transgressive function which surfaces in Northern Irish poetry, and particularly in the work of Carson and Muldoon, in

images of dismemberment, in hybrid forms, in distortions of perspective, and in

split selves and doubles. For a fuller discussion of this definition of the Gothic see

David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the

Present Day (London: Longman, 1980); for more on Ciaran Carson and the Gothic, see Patricia Horton, 'From Romantic to Postmodern: Imagining the Real in the Poetry of Ciaran Carson', Canadian Journal of Irish Studies (Spring/Summer 2000); for more

on Paul Muldoon and the Gothic, see Patricia Horton, '"A truly Uninvited Shade": Romantic Legacies in the Work of Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon', in Fran

Brearton and Eamonn Hughes (eds.), Last Before America: Irish and American Writing (Belfast: The Blackstaff Press, 2001), pp. 16-28.

7. See Terence Brown, 'MacNeice and the Puritan Tradition', in Kathleen Devine and

Alan J. Peacock (eds.), Louis MacNeice and His Influence (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1998), pp. 20-33. See also Brown, Northern Voices, pp. 114-27.

406




potently, in the anarchic, libertarian impulse in his work, they find a

model for their own responses to such dilemmas.

Mahon's relationship with his Protestant community and the problems of identity which result from that relationship are central to his work.

His poetry is a sustained attempt to escape the constraints imposed upon him by Protestantism and communal obligations, and to assert the

authority of the creative impulse and the autonomy of the individual

self. Given this context it is not surprising that Mahon should find in

Shelley a model for his role as a poet. Their work exhibits a similar concern with the authority of the poet and the autonomy of the self.

Thus, when Mahon calls himself a 'Shelleyan' and quotes as his 'credo'

these lines from Shelley's Defence of Poetry, 'The great instrument of moral

good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause', he is acknowledging with Shelley the supremacy and

primacy of the imagination.8 The rebellious stance adopted by Shelley and Mahon finds voice in this assertion of the individual imagination as

both subversion of and liberation from the given order.

The sense of kinship Mahon feels for Shelley stems from a recognition that they occupy a similarly marginal role with their social and cultural contexts. As a radical and a republican, Shelley's stance is atheist, anti

monarchist and anti-aristocratic, a position that led to a deeply antagon istic relationship with the conservative government of the time. For

Shelley, God is a 'hypocritical Daemon' and 'modern institutionalised

religion has destroyed (or at least suppressed) a vital element in human

society'.9 This marginality is reinforced for Shelley by his sense that

society does not appreciate the usefulness of poetry or recognize the

power of the poet. Faced with increasing modernizatioin and indus

trialization, Shelley responds with A Defence of Poetry, a manifesto in

which he argues that poetry reveals a higher kind of imaginative truth.

Only the artist, he asserts, is able to perceive the 'indestructible order'

which exists among all things.10 Mahon's perception of his position within society is strikingly similar

to that of Shelley. He sees himself as a marginal, persecuted figure and

his sense of himself as an artist rests on his oppositional stance to the

status quo, embodied most visibly in organized, institutionalized religion. Mahon is deeply at odds with his Ulster Protestant background, seeing

8. Derek Mahon, 'Question and Answer with Derek Mahon', interview with Lucy McDiarmid et al., Irish Literary Supplement, 10.2 (1991), p. 28.

9. Percy Bysshe Shelley, quoted in Joseph Raben, 'Shelley the Dionysian', in Kelvin

Everest (ed.), Shelley Revalued: Essays from the Gregynog Conference (Leicester: Leicester

University Press, 1983), p. 24.

10. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Defence of Poetry, in H.E Brett-Smith (ed.), Peacock's Four Ages

of Poetry, Shelley's Defence of Poetry, Browning's Essay on Shelley (Oxford: Basil

Blackwell, 1972), p. 26.

407




it as repressive and puritanical. 'Ecclesiastes', for example, shows

humanity languishing 'under/ The cold gaze of a sanctimonious God',11 while 'Matthew V. 29-30' subverts the scriptural reference in the title to

show how God's Word, taken to its logical extreme, leads to human

extinction:

If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole

body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of

your body than for your whole body to go to hell.

The kind of society that God wants leads quite literally to the body's dismemberment until 'at last, offence/ was not to be found/ in that

silence without bound'.12 Not surprisingly, Mahon also sees Protestant

ism as deeply hostile to art. The 'Protestant ethic', he argues, 'has made

it its business to dispel any karma that there might have been' within

Protestant culture.13 He is thinking here not only of Protestantism's

'abjuration of the image' ? a puritan suspicion of the aesthetic ? but

more particularly of the way in which Protestantism in Northern Ireland

has been associated with reason and order,, science and industrialization, to the exclusion of the artistic and the imaginative.14 This too is part of

the reason for Mahon's antipathy towards modernity. The world, as he sees it, is becoming increasingly dominated by economics and technology and like Shelley, Mahon's job is to reveal where society has gone wrong, to show that we have 'destroyed (or at least suppressed) a vital element'

in all the advancements we have made.

As rebels and outcasts, Mahon and Shelley adopt strategies of revolt

which are both individualistic and apocalyptic. However, while both

poets use the notion of the rebellious individual as a means of challenging the status quo, they do so in different ways. In spite of his anti-rationalism, for example, Shelley retains a measure of confidence in the secular

individualism of the Enlightenment and in the possibilities offered by the nation state, a confidence demonstrated in his Utopian vision of

universal harmony at the end of Prometheus Unbound:

11. Derek Mahon, 'Ecclesiastes', Twelve Poems (Belfast Festival Publication, 1967), p. 8. 12. Derek Mahon, 'Matthew V 29-30', The Snow Party (London: Oxford University Press,

1975), p. 15.

13. Mahon, "An Interview with Derek Mahon', interview with Terence Brown, Poetry Ireland Review, 14 (1985), p. 11.

14. For a fuller discussion of this aspect of Protestantism see Terence Brown, The Whole

Protestant Community: The Making of a Myth (Derry: Field Day, 1985) and John Hewitt, The Bitter Gourd: Some Problems of the Ulster Writer', in Tom Clyde (ed.), Ancestral

Voices: Selected Prose of John Hewitt (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1987), pp. 108-21.

408




The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains

Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man

Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless,

Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king Over himself.15

Such an optimistic vision is alien to Mahon's world where the self is

almost always solitary, alienated, doomed. Mahon aligns himself with

outsiders ? Beckett, Camus, Ovid, Monroe, Lowry

? whose visions

have been mocked, whose messages have been ignored and whose lives

have been ultimately destroyed by those who would not heed them. An

early poem 'Sisyphus' strikes the pose with 'Because I told sad truths to men ,..'.16 'Death of a Film-Star' gives clear expression to this idea.

Marilyn is the light in the darkness, but the glitter of her life is momentary, the vision fleeting: 'Stars last so long before they go scattering ash/ Down

the cold back-streets of the zodiac'.17 The artist knows, like her, 'That

when an immovable body meets an ir-/Resistible force, something has

got to give'. Mahon can find little common ground with the Ulster Protestant

community of which he is, albeit reluctantly, a part. He can only see

himself as estranged or opposed to that community. Indeed the guilt which surfaces in his work can be read as a Gothic expression of his sense that he has abandoned his community. 'Day Trip to Donegal', for

example, is ostensibly about a day trip to Donegal during which the

speaker sees a catch of fish, a nightmarish image which later returns to

haunt him.18 What is emphasized in the poem is the continuing innocence

which the fish exhibit in spite of mass slaughter, 'And still the fish come

in year after year'; and the physical horror of their death, their 'Torn

mouths and spewed-up lungs' as they flop about on the deck 'In attitudes

of agony and heartbreak'. The speaker believes himself to be protected from such events, insulated in the 'suburbs' which are 'Sunk in a sleep no gale-force wind disturbs'. By the end of the poem, however, the sea,

symbolizing the lives of those who have been consigned to death, engulfs the speaker, washing 'against [his] head/ Performing its immeasurable

erosions ?/ Spilling into the skull, marbling the stones/ That spine the

very harbour wall,/ Muttering its threat to villages of landfall'. Even

though he does not participate directly, the speaker feels implicated in

the mass slaughter and must, therefore, suffer the retribution, envisaged

15. Percy Bysshe Shelley, in Thomas Hutchinson (ed.), Shelley: Poetical Works (1970; London: Oxford University Press, 1971, p. 253.

16. Derek Mahon, 'Sisyphus', Twelve Poems, p. 4.

17. Derek Mahon, 'Death of a Film-Star', Night-Crossing (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 10.

18. Derek Mahon, 'Day Trip to Donegal', Twelve Poems, pp. 14-15.

409




as apocalypse and physical disintegration, that will be meted out to him

by those he has neglected or forgotten. 'As God is my Judge' plays out a

similar scenario. Here, the speaker, Bruce Ismay, British director of the

White Star Line, experiences an overwhelming guilt and responsibility for all those who died when the Titanic went down ? 'I drown again

with all those dim / Lost faces I never understood. My poor soul / Screams out in the starlight, heart/ Breaks loose and rolls down like a stone'.19 'A

Disused Shed in Co. Wexford' follows a comparable pattern, with a

speaker whose psyche is troubled by images of tortured, trapped souls

who call out to him for liberation and salvation.20 These poems can be

described as 'paranoiac texts', exhibiting a 'pathology of guilt' and a

sense of persecution which are 'primary motif[s] of the Gothic'.21

While Shelley may not suffer the same degree of anxiety or paranoia as Mahon, he clearly adopts the role of the persecuted artist, spurned and outcast from society

? 'I have everywhere sought sympathy and

found only repulse and disappointment'.22 The alienation experienced

by Shelley leads to a deeply nihilistic impulse in his work and to a gleeful

embracing of chaos and destruction. This takes Shelley into the

Dionysian, a realm associated with sexuality and drunkenness and more

broadly with the violent, anarchic and excessive world of the uncon

scious. This manifestation of the Dionysian is Gothic since it takes us

into the territory of taboo, into those 'areas of socio-psychological life

which offend, which are suppressed, which are generally swept under

the carpet in the interests of social and psychological equilibrium' P In

Shelley's work, these Dionysian tendencies surface most strongly in

relation to the creative process. 'Ode to the West Wind', for example, is a

paean to a violent and anarchic Dionysian spirit ? 'Wild Spirit, which

art moving everywhere;/ Destroyer and Preserver; hear, oh hear' ? in

which the speaker exults in his absorption into this primal force:

Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.24

Shelley's attraction to the Dionysian has two sources. On one level, the

Dionysian represents a release from subjectivity, from the pressures and

responsibilities of consciousness. It promises an escape from the dis

19. Derek Mahon, 'As God is My ludge', Night-Crossing, p. 31. 20. Derek Mahon, 'A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford', The Snow Party, pp. 36-8.

21. Punter, pp. 157,189. 22. Shelley, quoted in Raben, p. 91.

23. Punter, p. 405.

24. Shelley, Poetical Works, pp. 577-79.

410




appointments and disillusionments of the conscious world and brings the final assuagement of desire in the annihilation of the self and its

absorption into a dynamic force of primal energy. On another level,

however, the Dionysian represents the realm of the imagination and of

poetry, a territory in which the poet comes into contact with the forbidden

and the transgressive. This becomes clear in Adonais where the poet is

explicitly linked to Dionysus through his association with the panther ? he is described as 'pardlike' ? and in his carrying of the thyrsus.

When asked, 'who are thou?', the poet 'with a sudden hand/ Ma[kes] bare his branded and ensanguined brow,/ Which [i]s like Cain's or

Christ's'.25 Both messiah and sinner, the poet is associated simultaneously with transgression, prophecy and martyrdom.

Mahon's poetry reveals a similar fascination with the Dionysian. Like

Shelley he associates it with the irrational, with the repressed, and with

poetry: T believe that poetry and religion are related ... When Plato

banished the poets he was banishing the subversive Dionysian Spirit, which is lyrical and unamenable to rational explanation and control.'26

Mahon's attraction to the Dionysian manifests itself in a number of ways in his work. Most obviously it is apparent in his translation of The

Bacchae.27 At the heart of the play is the confrontation between Pentheus

and Dionysus, a confrontation between the rational, the totalitarian, the

patriarchal and the barbaric, the unconscious, the feminine. For Mahon

the play is an allegory of the way an authoritarian, rational Protestantism

has suppressed art and sexuality. The Bacchae emphasizes the absolute

necessity of acknowledging the Dionysian impulse and the dire con

sequences that result from refusing to accept its power. A stanza from an

early version of 'Courtyards in Delft' also makes explicit Mahon's

attraction to the Dionysian, and his sense that this impulse functions in

opposition to Protestantism:

For the pale light of that provincial town Will spread itself, like ink or oil, Over the not yet accurate linen

Map of the world which occupies one wall And punish nature in the name of God.

If only, now, the Maenads, as of right, Came smashing crockery, with fire and sword,

We could sleep easier in our beds at night.28

25. Shelley, Poetical Works, pp. 438-39.

26. Derek Mahon, 'Derek Mahon Interviewed', interview with William Scammell, Poetry Review?, 18.2 (1991), p. 6.

27. Derek Mahon, The Bacchae: After Euripides (Oldcastle: Gallery, 1991). 28. Derek Mahon, The Hunt by Night (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 10. The

stanza was excised in future collections.

411




In a manner reminiscent of Shelley's own allusion to the 'fierce Maenad'

in 'Ode to the West Wind', Mahon envisages a reassertion of the

Dionysian spirit, an anarchistic apocalypse which will bring the self back

into harmony with nature.

'The Andrean Flute', like The Bacchae and 'Courtyards in Delft', celebrates the return of 'the banished gods', the return of the suppressed

Dionysian spirit. The 'natural' setting of the wood, the traditional location

of Dionysian ritual, goes hand in hand with the 'furious rhythm', the

'primal scream' and the 'ancient cry', and with the falling away of culture, 'As if history were no more than a dream'.29 A similarly apocalyptic scenario is enacted in 'What Will Remain' where the speaker envisages a return to 'blank nature', a time before culture, before 'scripture'

?

with its double sense of biblical text and written word ? where questions of identity, home and belonging will be irrelevant. In this chillingly silent

world of 'dark/ Repose' the natural world will reclaim what civilized man has taken and there will be a reassertion of submerged primal

energies ? 'One dog rooting the/ Red guts of another'.30

Mahon's paganistic representations of landscape sit somewhat

uneasily within traditional Protestant representations. Broadly speaking, these fall into two categories. One set of representations is drawn from

the Psalms, used by the Protestant Planters of the sixteenth and seven

teenth centuries:

The Psalms of David was a work peculiarly appropriate for a settler

people to take as their spiritual and artistic staple. Their blend of

agrarian-pastoral imagery with a rhetoric of warfare and survival

amidst ungodly enemies must have provided the Presbyterian settlers with an

interpretative myth (a definition, surely, of art's social

function) of their own experience in the fertile valleys of the promised land wrested from the Caananite.31

Here Northern Ireland is seen as a promised land, a paradise inherited

by right by Northern Irish Protestants. A second type of representation is explored by Sean Lysaght who argues that '[t]he Protestant landscape of Praeger and Hewitt is ... a socialised landscape. That social ideal is

characterized by its emphasis on labour, education and order; in a solitary

landscape of the field sciences.'32 Here landscapes bear the marks of

cultivation, and it is through this cultivation of a primal, uncultivated

landscape that Protestants establish a sense of belonging. Mahon's

representations of landscape comprise an alternative and oppositional

29. Derek Mahon, The Andean Flute', The Hunt by Night, p. 22.

30. Derek Mahon, 'What Will Remain', Lives (London: Oxford University Press, 1972),

pp. 26-7.

31. Brown, Northern Voices, p. 6.

32. Sean Lysaght, 'Heaney vs Praeger: Contrasting Natures', The Irish Review, 7 (1989),

p. 71.

412




tradition, one which privileges not the pastoral and the cultivated, but the paganistic, the violent and the sexual. At their deepest level, such landscapes expose the 'violence and civilised repressions of Prot

estantism and colonialism, and their ultimate destruction in chaos and

apocalypse'.33 As with Mahon, the conflict between the institutional and the non

institutional, between the civilized and the repressed, is at the heart of Tom Paulin's work. As a radical republican who is deeply committed to a political, public poetry and highly suspicious of the lyric impulse, Paulin's approach to these issues diverges significantly from that of

Mahon. Where their work converges, however, is in an antipathy towards

'the universalising tendencies of Enlightenment rationalism' and a desire to privilege the individual and the particular over that which has been

standardized and institutionalized.34 It is here too that Paulin's work

intersects most powerfully with that of Shelley. The latter's antipathy to

the state, for example and, more particularly, his image of it as Minotaur, is the inspiration for Paulin's collection of essays, Minotaur: Poetry and

the Nation State.35 The debt is a significant one, indicating that Shelley's work strikes a chord within Paulin because it affirms individual liberty

against those institutions, invariably corrupt and rotten, which seek to

impose an unlawful authority. Particularly important fdr Paulin is that

Shelley's emphasis on the individual is republican and egalitarian, a

conscious response to what Shelley saw as the negative individualism

of first-generation Romantics such as Wordsworth and Coleridge. In his

work Shelley attempts to safeguard an idea of individual liberty without

succumbing to the egotism and isolation which can often accompany it.

This strategy is profoundly attractive for Paulin who is deeply critical of

the 'posturing' and 'subjectivism' of Romanticism, its cultivation of the

role of the Romantic hero.36

Paulin's links with Shelley are further reinforced in the fact that Paulin

has produced versions of two classical texts to which Shelley was also

drawn ? Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound and Sophocles's Antigone.

Shelley's Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci bear comparison with

Paulin's Seize the Fire and The Riot Act?7 All of the plays, in one sense or

another, are about tyranny, whether it be the tyranny of a father, or the

tyranny of the state. Both Shelley and Paulin see the protagonists in these

plays as figures of the artist. Prometheus, Antigone, and Beatrice, are

lone figures, dissenters, heroic individuals, and in two out of three cases

33. Neil Corcoran, English Poetry Since 1940 (London: Longman, 1993), p. 189. 34. Wills, Improprieties, p. 122. 35. Tom Paulin, Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State (London: Faber, 1992). 36. Tom Paulin, in interview with the author. 37. Tom Paulin, The Riot Act: A Version of Sophocles'Antigone (London: Faber, 1985). Seize

the Fire: A Version of Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound (London: Faber, 1990).

413




female, who challenge the established order at a cost of great personal

suffering, even martyrdom. In his rejection of authority, religious or

secular, Prometheus represents the poet whose only allegiance is to the

creative impulse, envisioned as fire. The Prometheus myth is also a

political allegory, however, and for both Shelley and Paulin is a metaphor for the revolt of the radical Protestant individual conscience against the

absolutist state. In Paulin's Seize the Fire, for example, the state is clearly totalitarian, cold, inhuman, mechanistic. As Prometheus tells Hermes

when the latter talks of the 'safety of the state' ? 'Don't kid yourself?/

you're only a drop of oil / in that machine' .38 The artist as criminal, rebel,

transgressor sets into motion an apocalyptic Dionysian energy, a

revolutionary potential:

That's why I stole that restless, bursting,

tight germ of fire, and chucked its flames like a

splatter of raw paint

against his state.

They seized the running trails and ran with them,

every mind fizzing like resin ?

racing, dancing, leaping free,

jumping up into the sky, and nudging deep into the ocean's bottom.

Every mind was a splinter

of sharp, pure fire that needled him and made him rock

uneasy on his throne.

See Zeus, shaken

as these new lights burn and melt his walls. Let Prometheus go out

and become one

with the democratic light!39

Unlike Shelley and Mahon, however, Paulin's representations of

apocalypse harness the Dionysian to a republican, egalitarian impulse. The roots of this form of the Dionysian lie not in alienation or in a desire

for annihilation, nor do they take the speaker into the territory of Gothic

transgression and repression. Rather, Paulin uses the Dionysian as a

republican impulse which promises both a merging of the self and society and a fusing of the public and the private in Enlightened democracy.

Paulin's The Riot Act, like Shelley's The Cenci, pivots on the confron

38. Paulin, Seize the Fire, pp. 61.

39. Ibid., pp. 63-5.

414




tation between innocence and tyranny. Sophocles's play provides an

imaginative parallel for Paulin with the situation in Northern Ireland

and, more particularly, with the relationship of the individual to the state.

In Ireland and the English Crisis, Paulin speaks approvingly of Hegel's assessment of the tensions in Sophocles's play:

According to Hegel... the sacred laws which Antigone revered are

"the instinctive Powers of Feeling, Love and Kinship, not the daylight gods of free and self-conscious, social and political life". As Hegel shows, in the play "neither the right of family, nor that of the state is denied; what is denied is the absoluteness of the claim of each". It is in the clash of these opposing "rights" that the tragedy resides.

Antigone represents the absolute assertion of family against the

state.40

The Riot Act, however, is not simply a play about the freedom of the individual and the law, or individualism and tribal pieties; it is also a

play about human laws and the laws of the gods. It is by the law of the

'gods' that Antigone considers it her duty to bury Polyneices, even

though this might be outside the law of the state. In spite of the comment

cited above, Paulin is consistently sympathetic to Antigone's point of

view and represents the state as tyrannical, with Creon likened to Paisley in his rigidity and inflexibility. There are attempts to show Antigone as

inflexible ? 'I can nor bend nor sell' she says ?

yet overall sympathy rests with Antigone and this is reinforced at the end of the play when

Creon realizes his mistake.41 The conflict between Antigone and Creon,

however, is also a conflict between the laws of reason and state, and that

law which is associated with the irrational, the unconscious, and with

tribal loyalties. The play's setting reflects this bias in the state ? 'The

stage is the grey of bedrock. Triangles, masonic symbols, neo-classical

architrave'.42 In an interview with Richard Kirkland, Paulin makes the

connection between this kind of architecture and rationalism:

I got haunted by this when I was living in this small town called Charlottesville which contained the great University of Virginia, a beautiful neo-classical structure. But after a while you realise that it

was no wonder that Edgar Allen Poe, who spent a year there as an

undergraduate, turned all gothicky because the rationalism of the architecture makes you long for something funky, long for the smell of the earth, long for grits and black-eyed peas, that kind of soul food. There is a kind of soulless quality to it.43

40. Tom Paulin, Ireland and the English Crisis (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1984),

pp. 27-8.

41. Paulin, The Riot Act, p. 14. 42. Ibid., p. 9.

43. Tom Paulin, interview with Richard Kirkland, in "'I am telling this exactly as it

happened": Tom Paulin, Paul Muldoon, and the Irish Critical Debate', MA diss.,

Queen's University, Belfast, 1991, p. 95.

415




This relates to what Paulin in 'Letters from Iceland: "Going North"', calls 'one of the interesting features' in Auden's work, that is his sense of those 'forces which a stable polity cannot accommodate'. Paulin goes on, 'Auden is aware of certain dionysiac forces which can become

dangerous if the city state takes no account of them. (For Auden, one of the central myths of our culture is the Bacchae for which he wrote a

libretto, The Bassarids).'44 The point is an important one and anticipates the connections between Paulin's own The Riot Act and The Bacchae. Both

plays pivot on the idea that the state is repressive, not only in the political sense, but also in the sense of privileging the rational and the ordered to the dangerous exclusion of the unconscious. This context is made clear

by Mahon's decision to preface his version of The Bacchae with the

following quotation from E.R. Dodds: 'Dionysus still has votaries or

victims, though we call them by other names; and Pentheus was confronted by a problem which other civil authorities have had to face in real life.'45 Shadowing both Mahon and Paulin's work is their

experience of the Northern Ireland state, a state which they see as

repressive, authoritarian and patriarchal and which refuses to take account of the unconscious, the anarchic and the individual.

Paulin's sense of kinship with Shelley is further signalled in the title for this article, 'the half-sure legislator', a quotation taken from Paulin's 'A Nation, Yet Again'.46 The phrase is adapted from Shelley's 'Defence

of Poetry' in which he argues that poets are the 'unacknowledged legislators of the world'. Both the phrase, and the modification that Paulin

makes are significant. In the 'Defence' Shelley affirms the supremacy of

imagination over reason ? 'Reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance' ?

and in doing so asserts the importance of the poet who combines the roles of 'legislator' and 'prophet'.47 While 'legislator' draws us into the civic world of contemporary political realities, 'prophet' draws us into a

more spiritual realm where poets are 'mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present'.48 What is at stake here, as else where in Shelley's Defence, are questions of authority and autonomy. Yet we ought to bear in mind that Shelley's assertions in the Defence come out of a double anxiety: first that poetry should in some way feed into

politics while not being circumscribed by it; and second the question of the marginalization of poetry into the increasing industrialization and utilitarianism of the nineteenth century. Paulin's description of the poet

44. Tom Paulin, 'Letters from Iceland: "Going North"', Renaissance and Modern Studies, 20

(1976), p. 72. 45. E.R. Dodds, epigraph in Mahon, The Bacchae. 46. Tom Paulin, 'A Nation, Yet Again', Liberty Tree (London: Faber, 1983), p. 45. 47. Shelley, Defence, pp. 23, 27.

48. Ibid., p. 59.

416




as a figure 'force[d] ... to play traitor/ or act the half-sure legislator',

importantly seems to pick up on the anxiety and uncertainty latent in

Shelley's Defence. The phrase 'half-sure legislator', therefore, acts not

only as a connective thread but also establishes a critical distance between

Shelley and Paulin. This critical distance is intrinsically bound up with

the supremacy that Shelley gives to the imagination and which Paulin is

unable to endorse.

The roots of Paulin's suspicion of the imagination lie in his recognition that poetry is Dionysian, a force which leads the poet into a transgressive,

Gothic territory and which is deeply at odds with Enlightenment ideals

and classical republicanism. For this reason Paulin has turned, in more

recent times, not to Shelley but to William Hazlitt who shares his

suspicion of the imagination. As Paulin argues in his study of Hazlitt, The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt's Radical Style, '[t]he force of imagin ative writing

? poetry in particular

? is a source of anxiety for the

radical critic, who feels intimidated by its irrational drive, its emotional

and destructive logic'.49 Hazlitt's anxiety is rooted in the recognition that the imagination is anarchic and excessive, a Gothic faculty marked

by 'exaggeration] ... excitement ...

inequality and disproportion'.50 However, as Paulin recognizes, in attempting to step outside the

subjectivism, irrationality and excesss which the imagination represents, the writer leaves her/himself trapped within the limits of materialism

and empiricism. Paulin resolves this tension by redefining the Gothic

and so redefining the imagination, moving away from a definition of

Gothic founded on excess and the irrational towards a tradition that

identifies the Gothic with the democratic and the regional. Although it

possesses less currency, Paulin is here tapping into 'a well-established

Whig tradition which sees the "Gothick" as native, Protestant and

"democratic"'.51 Again Hazlitt is a model for Paulin, for while his writing

betrays a suspicion of the Gothic it also reveals a simultaneous admiration

for it as a form that privileges 'the rough, the uneven, the unfinished' as

opposed to the smooth, the finished, the fixed.52 Here the 'inequality' and 'disproportion' of the imagination are transformed into a democratic, radical and essentially republican impulse and the Gothic is identified as a form which privileges the individual, the distinctive, the particular. This aspect of the Gothic is summed up by Tony Pinkey in his discussion

of Gothic architecture. He argues that the Gothic 'is not the embodiment

of a pre-given plan but rather takes form through the creativity of its

workers; it is what they collectively make it, thus bearing the intimate

49. Tom Paulin, The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt's Radical Style (London: Faber,

1998), p. 145.

50. William Hazlitt, quoted in Paulin, The Day-Star of Liberty, p. 39. 51. Victor Sage, The Gothick Novel: A Casebook (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), p. 17.

52. Paulin, Day-Star of Liberty, p. 203.

417




imprint of their cultural and regional particularity'.53 In identifying this

particular tradition of the Gothic Paulin is able to resolve the problem of

his attraction to the Dionysian, to the non-classical, to the irrational. Thus

Paulin's admiration for Jackson Pollock is grounded in his sense of him

as a 'great vernacular painter'54 whose action paintings reflect a sense

of spontaneity and immediacy which is characteristic both of a tradition

of Protestant libertarianism and of 'the nowness of the living spoken word'.55 In Paulin's formulation, Pollock unites the Gothic, egalitarianism and Protestantism. The emphasis on the vernacular in Paulin's descrip tion of Pollock is indicative of the way in which the individual voice

and the spoken word are also linked to the Dionysian.56 Existing beyond institutional control, that is not standardized through print, speech is

eruptive, revolutionary and deeply egalitarian for Paulin:

Latin belongs to institutions, committees, public voices, print.

Against that Parnassian official order, the springy, irreverent, chant

ing, quartzy, often tender, vernacular voice speaks for an alternative

community that is mostly powerless and invisible. The oral

community voices itself in a gestural tactile language

? 'freedom a

come oh!' ? which printed texts with their editorial apparatus of

punctuation and authoritative capitals can often deadend7

However, it is not until his work on Hazlitt that Paulin recognizes in a

self-conscious way the connection between speech and the Gothic:

'Hazlitt... would have realised, uncomfortably perhaps, that speech, by its very unfinished, unpunctuated nature, is impatient with a fixed

classical form. Perhaps speech is gothic then? All stops, starts, and sudden

jagged sallies, because, unlike prose, it doesn't run in paragraphs or aim

to exist as connected discourse.'58 There is a strong sense here and

elsewhere in The Day-Star of Liberty that Paulin, in engaging with Hazlitt, is working through and resolving his own dilemmas as a writer. That

such an engagement allows Paulin to move towards a theory of radical

Gothic and so resolve the ongoing tension he feels between political commitment and the poetic imagination, indicates the significance and

centrality that Hazlitt has come to occupy in his thinking. The work of both Derek Mahon and Tom Paulin intersects, then, in

important ways with that of Shelley and, in the case of Paulin, with that

53. Tony Pinkey, 'Towards a Gothic Criticism', in Richard Bradford (ed.), The State of

Theory (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 81.

54. Paulin, in Kirkland, p. 94.

55. Paulin, Minotaur, p. 13. 56. Paulin, Ireland and the English Crisis, p. 158.

57. Tom Paulin, introduction, in The Faber Book of Vernacular Verse (London: Faber, 1990),

p.x. 58. Paulin, Day-Star of Liberty, p. 277.

418




of Hazlitt. Broadly speaking, Mahon and Paulin's negotiations with

Shelley pivot on the question of how the poet should respond to the

demands and responsibilities of communal obligations, a question which was particularly urgent for Romantic writers themselves. Importantly, however, Mahon and Paulin read and construct Shelley somewhat

differently. While Mahon is drawn to the Shelleyan idea of the poet as

prophet, as transcendent genius and outcast, Paulin turns rather to the

radical Shelley whose fierce commitment to republican politics led to

his inevitable engagement in public issues of state power and individual

rights. In spite of such differences, what links Shelley, Mahon and Paulin

and finally Hazlitt is a common Protestant identity, making for shared

dilemmas ? about the importance and limits of individual conscience, about the nature of the aesthetic, and about the dynamics and legacies of their own Protestant identity and culture - and a comparable attraction

to strategies of dissent, individualism and apocalypse. These implicit and explicit intersections make clear that Protestantism is a meeting point for contemporary Northern Irish poetry and Romanticism. In addition,

however, they reveal that the manner in which Protestantism and

Romanticism interact is more complex and diverse than is usually

thought. In showing how both Mahon and Paulin use Shelley and Hazlitt as enabling models, in exploring how the Gothic functions not simply as a signifier of alienation but also of locality, and in being alert to the

enduring significance of religious traditions and identities, we can move

towards a fuller and more subtle understanding of the continuing legacies of the Romantic period.

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'The Half-Sure Legislator': Romantic Legacies in the Writing of Derek Mahon and Tom Paulin

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