Recording the Unpoetic: Eavan Boland's Silences

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In 'Dumbness and Eloquence: A Note on English as We Write it in Ireland', Seamus Deane argues that 'Irish writing in the English language' has been, and still is, 'obsessed with the problems involved in the idea of representation', how to record in a creditable way an Irish community or communities that are supposed to have always been misrepresented. (1) The English language seems to be 'ultimately insufficient for the purpose[s] of representation': whereas it provides a '[m]etropolitan sophistication and eloquence', there is also a native aspect, an 'index of authentic feeling', which is left inarticulate. Using psychoanalytic terminology, Deane contends that the automatic 'acquisition of language' that all human beings experience differs from the process of learning 'a new language'. (2) For the colonized Irish, the acquisition of the English language leaves a vacuum that is impossible to verbalize: what he calls 'the language of the unconscious'. (3)

This endeavour to speak 'the language of the unconscious', to express 'an index of authentic feeling' as an Irish woman poet, is observed in Eavan Boland's work, because she is constantly attempting to find a proper language by means of which to articulate Ireland's past and her own contemporary reality. In Object Lessons, Boland records how, when returning to Ireland after a long exile at the age of fourteen, she was tormented by a feeling of inadequacy as regards language and ownership:

   Language. At first this was what I lacked. Not just the historic
   speech of the country. I lacked that too, but so did others. This
   was a deeper loss; I returned to find that my vocabulary of
   belonging was missing. The street names, the meeting names--it was
   not just that I did not know them. It was something more. I had
   never known them. I had lost not only a place but the past that
   goes with it, the clues from which to construct a present self. (4)

As we observe in this quotation, Boland describes herself as a young child profoundly marked by a sense of what is called 'linguistic displacement' or 'deterritorialization', concepts that, as Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin, and David Lloyd explain, involve a disjunction between place and language. (5) As a more mature poet, Boland continues to feel a sense of linguistic dislocation. One of the problems she identifies within Irish poetry is 'the odd and abrasive disjunctions between the Irish reality and the Irish poem'. (6) This disjunction between language and reality, between the sayable (the poetic) and the unsayable (the unpoetic), is well explained in an interview with Consalvo:

   In Ireland we've always had this terrible gap between rhetoric and
   reality. In the void between those two things some of the worst
   parts of our history have happened. The reality is that people have
   been wounded, murdered, degraded in this so-called freedom
   struggle. But the rhetoric grinds on relentlessly. It says that we
   are one nation, one territory. That we need to get the British out
   and resume the purity of Irish nationhood. (7)

Boland's attempt to get to 'the void between those two things', language and reality, is, as we will see, not an easy project. Deane has argued that in Ireland, 'the language of the real' is the Irish language, but that this language, especially for Irish writers with no knowledge of Gaelic, only 'emerges as silence', 'dumbness', and 'aphasia'. (8) The English language is, for these writers, the only 'language of the possible', but, as it stands in opposition to 'the real' (the reality conveyed in the native language), the English language is an 'index of hypocrisy [and] moral vacuity'. (9) Boland's inability to express herself within poetic language can be interpreted from this postcolonial perspective. Boland's silences, like those of her peers, can certainly be seen as a response to her own wish to express herself in the Irish language, her native tongue. (10) Nevertheless, Boland's situation as an Irish woman poet is more complex than that of male writers. As an Irish woman, Boland has been doubly silenced: whatever the language used, whether Gaelic or English, there is a further vacuum, a silence inscribed within the very nacre of poetic language itself. As Boland asserts, national literature has not only simplified women as emblems but it has deprived them of a past, and therefore, it has 'silence[d]' them. (11) In this sense, Boland's project is to break women's silences, to search for a poetic language that records women's reality in a more truthful way. Her concern is, as she asserts, to recover what the Irish poem has not grasped, that which has always been excluded. (12)

Boland's objective to articulate what has usually been unrecorded in Irish poetry is linked to Julia Kristeva's insistence on inserting the 'semiotic' within the 'symbolic' realm of the poem. In 'Revolution in Poetic Language', Kristeva discusses how poetic discourse constantly crosses the 'thetic' border between the symbolic linguistic realm and a semiotic unarticulated realm. (13) For Kristeva, the semiotic is the 'feminine' and 'enigmatic', that realm indifferent to language and 'irreducible to its intelligible verbal translation'. (14) In contrast to the symbolic, the semiotic is prior to language and therefore, is not cognitive. (15) On the other hand, the symbolic is used by Kristeva to refer to the paternal zone, an Oedipalized system regulated by the Law of the Father and 'established through the objective constraints of biological (including sexual) differences and concrete, historical family structures'. (16) Whereas the semiotic maternal realm is unrepresentable, the symbolic phallic realm is always articulated. (17)

Kristeva's main thesis is that, in poetry, the semiotic surpasses its boundaries and disrupts the symbolic realm. (18) By transgressing the boundaries of the symbolic order, the poet is able to articulate what is usually unspoken. It is here that Kristeva locates resistance to the conventional (and symbolic) patriarchal culture through which we experience the world. According to this critic, one of the ways by which these marginal and repressed aspects of language surface in poetry is by 'subversion', which implies the presence of an unfixed, volatile, and subversive writing subject, which Kristeva calls 'the subject in process'. (19) This writer subverts the symbolic by means of 'contradictions, meaninglessness, disruption, silences, and absences'. (20)

This unfixed, volatile, and subversive writing subject, and these silences, contradictions, and absences that Kristeva mentions surface in Eavan Boland's poetry. (21) As early as Night Feed, we start to perceive in poems such as 'The Muse Mother', Boland's need to find another language which can express more truthfully women's ordinary world. (22) The 'symbolic' language seems to be insufficient for the poet's purpose of describing, in this case, mother-daughter relationships. The narrator is suddenly captured by the mother's gesture of wiping her child's face and taking him to her lap. Drawn to this 'vision', Boland attempts to create a poetic place that can shelter this scene:

   If I could only decline her--
   lost noun
   out of context,
   stray figure of speech--
   from this rainy street

   again to her roots,
   she might teach me
   a new language
   to be a sibyl

   able to sing the past
   in pure …