ëI was a voiceí with the effect of taking a distance from her utterance
and ceasing the misrepresentation of herself.
When Meaney says that Boland works within a male tradition
she recognizes how such a tradition is bound to the time of the nation-
state. This time is founded on pedagogy and death-in-life, since the
need to compose identity in relation to History or a national narrative,
results in self-erasure or misrepresentation. It is problematic when
Boland seeks to de-objectify the positioning of the feminine within the
Symbolic since her poetry implicitly acknowledges that the aesthetic
space of the poem is a place of ëobject lessonsí where time and
identity are constantly misrepresented. In this way, Bolandís title
ëOutside Historyí becomes a wry parody of the inability of the female
artist (or any artist) to get beyond representation to the ërealí.
As she moves into non-presence, displacement and discom-
posure, the speaker at the end of ëAnna Liffeyí provides a critical and
deracinated dispositioning in relation to the limitations of aesthetic
space and time:
In the end
It will not matter
That I was a woman. I am sure of it.
The body is a source. Nothing more.
There is a time for it. There is certainty
About the way it seeks its own dissolution.
Consider rivers.
They are always en route to
Their own nothingness. From the first moment
They are going home.At the end of Station Island (1984) Heaney resurrected the figure of
Joyce who implored the poet pilgrim to ëKeep at a tangentí and to
ëswim outí on his own.^51 Likewise, Bolandís representation of identity
is less grounded or limited as the identity of ëAnna Liffeyí is imagined
ëenrouteí to its ëown nothingnessí. ëAnna Liffeyí provides us with a
pattern that can be applied to the other poems under discussion: first,
Boland critiques the monumental and static representation of the Irish
woman as she is immortalized and objectified in art; second, she
reimagines an alternative and more authentic female experience which
51 Seamus Heaney, ëStation Islandí, Station Island (London: Faber,1984), p.94.