Inoperativity and Forgiveness in Paul Muldoon’s “Dirty Data”1

Abstract

A sequence of nineteen paginated sonnets that concludes One Thousand Things Worth Knowing, “Dirty Data” is, by Muldoon’s own admission, “a kind of wild poem that attempts to draw together certain far-flung ideas” (Rutkin 20). These disparate ideas include events from Lew Wallace’s biography and allusions to his novel Ben-Hur as well as its celebrated 1959 adaptation, all of which are metamorphosed into the story of an Irishman Ben Houlihane, whose life intertwines with Bloody Sunday and Winston Churchill’s funeral. It is by interweaving those narratives that the poem addresses what Muldoon calls “political occurrences” (Rutkin 20), elegizing the Irish, Native Americans, and Jews, a transnational grouping that the poem casts into what Giorgio Agamben calls the state of exception. By focusing its mournful song on representatives of those oppressed peoples, “Dirty Data” seeks to oppose and undermine the logic of oppression embodied by the empires from ancient Rome, through Britain all the way to the United States. In what follows, I first discuss Agamben’s theorization of the notions of sovereign oppression and state of exception in the context of his remarks about language and poetry, particularly elegy. It is through this optics that the elusiveness and formal complexity of Muldoon’s poem reveal themselves as parts of a radically political gesture that aims to challenge the spread of coercive logic, as it also articulates a message of nonsectarian forgiveness. Although Agamben discusses elegy infrequently, it is striking that the entire Homo Sacer series can be read as an elegy for bare life, written as it is “in a tragic situation . . . affected by an irreversible historical necessity” (Frost 1). The immediate sources for Agamben’s understanding of bare life are Aristotle, Walter Benjamin’s essay “Critique of Violence,” and Michel Foucault’s 1975/1976 lectures published as The Society Must Be Defended, in which he argues that inclusion of the body in the public sphere regulated by the state marks the advent of biopolitics understood as nondisciplinary exercise of power (Foucault 242). Agamben continues this investigation of power, focusing specifically on how a path to the implementation of the state of exception has been inscribed in the logic of Western jurisprudence since