In her essay ëThe Woman, The Place, The Poetí (1991) Boland
notices the evasion of a space for oneself in history: ëthere is the place
that happened and the place that happened to you [Ö] we live not in
one or the other but at the point of intersection.í^35 Boland imagines
getting to ëa sort of interior momentí which is a liminal moment
between universal and individual spaces, public and private realms. In
doing this, Boland spatializes time as ëthe place that happenedí. Like
Kristeva, she imagines a time-space that attempts to move between the
narratives of mythological, official or national versions of History. By
implication, this inbetween realm would constitute a supplementary at
the margins of official histories and places, moving towards ërealí
time and ërealí space. Boland argues in a way that is reminiscent of
Benjamin when he imagines the temporal as a tasting of the violent
and random event: ëa sense of place can happen at the very borders of
myth and history. In myth there are the healing repetitions, the
technology of propitiation. In history there is the consciousness of a
violent and random event. In the zone between them something
happens.í^36 What is odd about this statement is the way Bolandís
prose attempts to chart an inbetween space that is by implication
unchartable. Once again, this connects her loosely with Kristevaís
notion of ëwomenís timeí as she looks to the thetic border between the
Symbolic and semiotic. Boland seeks to move towards another space
and time; a place that is between myth and the historical, but she
cannot quite get to it.
Linked with moves towards indeterminacy and a peripheral sense
of place/time at the borders of circumscribed reality is the notion that
female identities are, in Smythís terms, ëirreducibleí. Meaney draws
on the work of Luce Irigaray as she demands the ërecognition of an
irreducible identity, without equal in the opposite sex and, as such,
exploded, plural, fluid, in a certain way non-identical, this feminism
situates itself outside the linear time of identities.í^37 Perhaps Irigaray
35 Eavan Boland, ëThe Woman, The Place, The Poetí, Poetry Nation Review,
Vol.17, No.3, JanñFeb 1991, pp.35ñ40.
36 Ibid., p.39.
37 Meaney, ëMyth, History and the Politics of Subjectivityí, p.147. Luce Irigaray,
This Sex Which Is Not One, trans., Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke
(Cornell: University Press, 1985), p.76. Following Margaret Whitfordís