language.^17 The Dickinsonesque dashes in Bolandís text suggest a
silence being alluded to within the poem. The hyphens signal an
absent meaning, the over-spilling of language and identity, rather than
the containment of mother, daughter and nation within the repre-
sentation of past narratives. The fear remains that ëin the time we
haveí myth will always be there to wound us.
It is therefore not surprising that something ironic happens when
Boland attempts to inscribe a womanís sense of ënow timeí in the
form of the present moment into her writing. As soon as her present is
written in the poem it becomes a past moment, a memory and an
attempt to make that ëpresentí live in art. As Boland tries to work
against monumental and immortal versions of identity and time, she
becomes trapped within the logic of representation. Bolandís idea of a
ënow timeí that can be scripted into the poem as more representative
of female experience is in danger of becoming as untemporal as any
other representation. Once the moment of a womanís experience is
inscribed within the aesthetic space of the poem it risks becoming a
frozen trope rather than living and breathing. Bolandís poem attempts
to record change and in so doing she freezes the moment. For Boland,
the present moment that she attempts to inscribe becomes a dis-
appearing middle in relation to the past and the future. Whereas her
voice has a beginning and an end that can die away into silence, her
pen makes words more immortal and monumental. The aesthetic or
scripted space risks delimiting experience and, in Bolandís case,
containing ëfemale experience.í It is as if the Symbolic space cannot
be touched by Kristevaís notion of a semiotic ëwomenís timeí with
which to subvert the Symbolic and the monoliths of a patriarchal
History.
In his ëTheses on the Philosophy of Historyí (1970), Benjamin
suggests that a ëhistorical materialistí must arrest ëthe continuum of
historyí so as to create a differential ëhistorical consciousness.í In
order to do this the ëhistorical materialistí must to ëbe man enough to
blast open the continuum of history.í^18 In spite of the macho imagery,
Benjaminís argument is interesting when he argues that in order to
17 Cora Kaplan, ëLanguage and Genderí (1986), Literature in the Modern World,
ed., Dennis Walder (Oxford: Open University Press, 1990), pp.313ñ15.
18 Benjamin, p.254.