Revision as Theology

I. A Note on Method

Genetic criticism classically works from an archive: successive drafts, marginal deletions, a writer’s crossed-out and reinstated lines, held up against the published text to reconstruct the labor of composition. No such archive of dated drafts survives, or has been made available, for the stories examined here. What does survive, however, is something genetic critics rarely get so cleanly: the same scene, the same images, and in places the same sentences, deposited at more than one point inside Mulhern’s own finished, published corpus — once as a poem, once as embedded short fiction, and, within the fiction itself, twice within the same collection in near-identical prose. This essay treats that internal recurrence as a legitimate, if unconventional, form of genetic evidence. Where classical genetic criticism reads a manuscript’s revisions to infer the author’s evolving intention, this essay reads Mulhern’s evident practice of redrafting a single memory-scene across multiple finished, public forms — verse, then story, then story again — as evidence of the same thing: a compositional habit in which returning to and rewriting one’s own material is not correction but a form of devotional repetition, structurally continuous with the theology of recurrence his essays and interviews describe.

II. The Same Bath, Twice: “Scrape the Rocks” and “A Bath”

Mulhern’s poem “Scrape the Rocks” and his short story “A Bath” both stage a nearly identical domestic scene: a grandmother being helped into a bathtub by her daughter, while a grandchild waits nearby, and a framed photograph on the wall triggers a memory of Ireland — specifically, a girl wading toward a boulder at Clew Bay to gather “sea lettuce” for food. In the poem, the moment is compressed into a few couplets:

You were pushing dark water aside
to reach a boulder in the crashing foam…
“I was gathering food. Sea lettuce, we called it.
We’d scrape the rocks and then make stew…
‘Twas all the food we had and needed,
but it was good, and we were happy.”¹

The scene ends with the grandson relegated outside the bathroom door: “As she eased you into the warm water, / I listened through the door.”¹

The short story “A Bath” relocates this same photograph, the same Clew Bay identification, and the same listening-through-the-door structure into an entirely different narrative frame — a different grandson (Billy, not Jimmy), a different immediate occasion (concealing a boyfriend’s violence rather than a hidden donut), and a different emotional register (crisis and confession rather than tender routine). Yet the image cluster is unmistakably the same: “Just outside Peg’s door, my grandmother stopped us…” becomes, in the later story, “‘That was Clew Bay in County Mayo. The photograph, I mean.’ I listened through the door. There was no conversation. I heard splashing and my grandmother’s sighs as my mother rubbed her back.”² The story even preserves the poem’s closing gesture of the listener imagining, rather than witnessing, the bathing scene’s real content — “I suppose they were preoccupied by memory. I imagined my grandmother was thinking about an ocean three thousand miles away.”²

What is significant here is not merely thematic recurrence (grandmothers, bathing, Ireland, listening at doors are documented elsewhere as recurring motifs across the corpus) but structural redrafting: an entire scene — its blocking, its central prop (a photograph), its emotional mechanism (a memory unlocked by physical care) — has been composed once in verse and recomposed in prose, with the surrounding plot and stakes rebuilt around it each time. This is revision in the genetic sense, except that instead of discarding the earlier version, Mulhern has published both, allowing the reader to witness the redrafting directly rather than inferring it from a private manuscript trail.

III. The Jetty Passage: Self-Quotation Within a Single Collection

A more striking case of internal genetic evidence occurs entirely within Mulhern’s own assembled Collected Stories and Poems, where a single paragraph — describing a walk to a fishing jetty, the discovery of “a lonely starfish, a shiny stone, or a clam with a secreted pearl,” the startling of a mourning dove, and the simile “the waves glimmered like sparks from an unquenchable fire” — appears twice, almost word for word, at two separate points in the collection, embedded in two different tellings of what is recognizably the same beach outing (Nonna, Mrs. Muldoon, and the narrator at the shore for the Feast of the Assumption).³ The first instance reads: “I got up and walked towards the end of the beach, where it was less crowded, near a fishing jetty and several clumps of boulders. I explored the spaces in between the rocks, looking for a lonely starfish, a shiny stone, or a clam with a secreted pearl, and unearthed small crabs in the sand. At one point, I startled a mourning dove that sped from its cleft into the bright sky… The waves glimmered like sparks from an unquenchable fire.”³ The second, appearing later in the same manuscript in a parallel retelling of the same scene, is a close paraphrase with only minor lexical substitution: “I explored the spaces in between the boulders, looking for a lonely starfish, a shiny stone, or a clam with a secreted pearl. I unearthed small crabs that scampered across the sand… The waves glimmered like sparks from an unquenchable fire.”³

The phrase “sparks from an unquenchable fire” is worth pausing on, because it also supplies the title of the first essay in Mulhern’s own critical series, “Unquenchable Fire” — meaning this single sentence, drafted (at minimum) twice inside the fiction, has also been elevated into the interpretive key for the entire critical apparatus built around “Assumptions.” Read as a discrete textual event, the duplication could be treated as an editorial oversight in assembling a career-spanning collection. Read as compositional evidence, it demonstrates something more interesting: that this image — starfish, jetty, dove, unquenchable fire — was not incidental description generated fresh for a single scene, but a fixed unit of imagery Mulhern returns to and redeploys, intact, whenever the narrative arrives at this particular emotional coordinate: a beach ritual involving an aging, vulnerable woman and a witnessing child. The sentence functions less like local color than like a formula in the oral-formulaic sense — a pre-composed unit summoned whole when the scene-type recurs, the way a Homeric epithet or a liturgical response is drawn intact from memory rather than freshly composed each time it is needed.

IV. Redrafting as Devotional Practice

The theological register is not incidental to this reading. Mulhern’s own stated poetics — most explicit in the essay “A Working Philosophy” and the “Credo,” both part of his existing critical series — describes his compositional method as one of “recurrence” and “the ordinary as sanctuary,” language that treats repetition itself as a spiritual discipline rather than a limitation to be edited away. The evidence assembled here suggests this is not only a thematic claim made about his work from the outside, but an observable feature of how the work is actually built. A liturgical calendar does not innovate each year; it returns, on the same feast day, to the same readings, trusting that repetition under changed circumstance produces new meaning rather than staleness. The Feast of the Assumption itself — the explicit occasion of both the jetty passage and its twin — is exactly this kind of repeating structure: a fixed date, revisited every year, whose meaning accrues through recurrence rather than novelty. Mulhern’s practice of redrafting the same jetty scene, the same bathing scene, in more than one finished, published context, formally enacts the liturgical logic his fiction so often describes from within. The “unquenchable fire” is not merely an image he uses about Peggy Fleming’s assumption into glory; the sentence containing it is itself something he returns to and lights again, unquenched, in a second telling.

V. Implications for Reading the Corpus

This has a practical consequence for how the collected fiction should be read. Passages that might otherwise be flagged by an editor as redundant — the near-verbatim jetty paragraph, the migrated Clew Bay photograph — should instead be treated as intentional through-composition, evidence that Mulhern’s “collection” is less an anthology of discrete, once-drafted pieces than a single evolving manuscript whose author permits himself to redraft a scene in a new key whenever the underlying occasion (an aging woman, a witnessing child, a beach, a feast day, a bath) recurs. Genetic criticism ordinarily asks what a writer removed on the way to a final text. Mulhern’s corpus asks a different, and rarer, question: what does a writer choose to keep drafting, in public, more than once? The answer this essay proposes is that revision, for Mulhern, is not a stage that precedes a finished text but a form of return continuous with the “habit of return” his other essays name as the organizing principle of his entire practice — composition itself performed as a species of prayer that does not mind, and may in fact require, saying the same thing again.

— Silver Current Press

Notes

Works Quoted

All Essays The Habit of Return Unquenchable Fire