Past, Secrecy and Absence in Eavan Boland’s The Historians

Authors

  • Pilar Villar-Argáiz University of Granada

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.37389/abei.v23i2.197753

Keywords:

Past, Present, Secrets, Eavan Boland, The Historians

Abstract

This paper draws on Eavan Boland’s final volume of poetry, The Historians, published posthumously in October 2020. By examining in detail some poems taken from her first sequence in the collection, I will investigate how Boland returns to previous concerns in her work, particularly the tensions between revelation and concealment, veiling and unveiling, a transparent history and an obscure past. As I intend to show, when imagining the past, Boland incorporates constant ruptures and interruptions, revealing that there are details in her act of poetic reimagination which resist being incorporated into a lineal, continuous narrative. In order to study this aspect, I will rely on prominent scholars such as Abbott (2013), Brooks (1992), Calinescu (1994), and Attridge (2021), who have examined the role that mystery, secrets and the unknowable play in the construction of narrative sequences. In particular, I will examine various formal techniques employed by Boland: 1) the deliberate use of plain, non-ornamental diction, and short verse lines, highlighting even further the presence of absence; 2) her disruption of lineal narratives by the widening and narrowing of poetic perspective and scope, and 3) her delayed disclosure of ‘secrets’. By means of all these formal, stylistic devices, Boland shows that secrecy is an intrinsic quality of the past.

Author Biography

  • Pilar Villar-Argáiz, University of Granada

    Pilar Villar-Argáiz is a senior lecturer of British and Irish Literatures in the Department of English at the University of Granada and the General Editor of the major series “Studies in Irish Literature, Cinema and Culture” in Edward Everett Root Publishers. She is the author of the books Eavan Boland’s Evolution as an Irish Woman Poet: An Outsider within an Outsider’s Culture (Edwin Mellen Press, 2007) and The Poetry of Eavan Boland: A Postcolonial Reading (Academica Press, 2008). She has published extensively on contemporary Irish poetry and fiction, in relation to questions of gender, race, migration and interculturality. Her edited collections include Literary Visions of Multicultural Ireland: The Immigrant in Contemporary Irish Literature (Manchester University Press, 2014), Irishness on the Margins: Minority and Dissident Identities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Secrecy and Community in 21st-Century Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2021), the special issue of Irish Studies Review (entitled “Irish Multiculturalism in Crisis”, co-edited with Jason King, 2015), and the special issue of Nordic Irish Studies (entitled “Discourses of Inclusion and Exclusion: Artistic Renderings of Marginal Identities in Ireland”, 2016). Villar-Argáiz is currently the Chairperson of AEDEI (the Spanish Association for Irish Studies) and Member of the Executive Board of EFACIS (the European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies).  

References

Abbott, H. Porter. Real Mysteries: Narrative and the Unknowable. Columbus: Ohio University Press. 2013.

Attridge, Derek. The Singularity of Literature. London: Routledge, 2004.

Attridge, Derek. “Secrecy and Community in Ergodic Texts: Derrida, Ali Smith and the experience of form”. Secrecy and Community in Twentieth-Century Fiction. Eds. María J. López and Pilar Villar Argáiz. New York: Bloomsbury, 2021. 23-35.

Allen‐Randolph, Jody. Eavan Boland. Lanham, Maryland: Bucknell University Press, 2014.

Allen-Randolph, Jody. “Remembering Eavan”. Poetry Ireland Review 131 (2020). Ed. Colette Bryce. 67–71.

Allen-Randolph, Jody. “‘If No one Wanted to Remember: Margaret Kelley and the Lost Battalion”. Edited by Tina O’Toole, Gillian McIntosh and Muireann O’Cinneide. Women Writing War: Ireland 1880-1922. University College Dublin, 2006. PAGES?

Barthes, Roland. S-Z, translated by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974 (1970).

Boland, Eavan. The Historians. Manchester: Carcanet, 2020.

Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot. Design and Intention in Narrative. Harvard University Press, 1992.

Calinescu, Matei. Rereading For the Secret. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

Calinescu, Matei. “Secrecy in Fiction: Textual and Intertextual Secrets in Hawthorne and Updike”. Poetics Today 15.3 (1994): 443–465.

Cohen, Nan. “A Sense of Location and an Act of Leave-Taking”. Poetry Northwest, 5 October, 2020. https://www.poetrynw.org/a-sense-of-location-and-an-act-of-leave-taking/?fbclid=IwAR1LMa03kvUrvvmCdV0FltBwctLhJzPb9-v8jJhcVEOkQTda4A548rnZn0Q Accessed April 6 2021.

Derrida, Jacques. “Passions: An Oblique Offering”, In David Wood, John P. Leavy and Ian McLeod (trans), Thomas Dutoi (ed.). On the Name. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. 3–31.

Derrida, Jacques. The Gift of Death (Second Edition) and Literature in Secret. Translated by David Wills. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2008.

Dorgan, Theo. “Her Dance with History. Review: The Historians by Eavan Boland”. Dublin Review of Books. October 1, 2020. https://www.drb.ie/essays/her-dance-with-history Accessed April 5 2021.

Eco, Umberto. Interpretation and OverInterpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Kermode, Frank. “Secrets and Narrative Sequence”. Critical Inquiry 7.1 (1980): 83-101.

López, María J. “Secrecy and Community in Twenty-First Fiction”. Secrecy and Community in Twentieth-Century Fiction. Eds. María J. López and Pilar Villar Argáiz. New York: Bloomsbury, 2021. 1-19.

Meehan, Paula. “The Historians: Paula Meehan on Eavan Boland’s new collection”. RTÉ Arena. November 6, 2020. https://www.rte.ie/culture/2020/1104/1175961-the-historians-paula-meehan-on-eavan-bolands-new-collection/?fbclid=IwAR1dhkrO2c0cC6P5EYG9XqsDyH-IB8zALSmuckq5q3FMe-4VuIt93iiqk8E Accessed April 6, 2021.

McAuliffe, John; Jody Randolf and Micheal Schmidt. Eavan Boland: The Historians: Carcanet Online Book Launch. November 11th 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6nzLk9ymmo Accessed on 5 April 2020.

Miller, J. Hillis. Others. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Miller, J. Hillis. On Literature. London: Routledge, 2002.

Taylor-Collins, Nicholas. “Review: The Historians by Eavan Boland”. New Critique: A Journal of Critical and Creative Writing (October 2020). https://newcritique.co.uk/2020/10/22/review-the-historians-by-eavan-boland-nicholas-taylor-collins/ Accessed April 5, 2021.

De Groot, Helena with Paula Meehan, and Jody Allen-Randolph. “Heroes History Forgets”, Poetry off the Shelf, Poetry Foundation. August 25, 2020. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/podcasts/154153/heroes-history-forgets Accessed April 6, 2021

Villar Argáiz, Pilar. Eavan Boland’s Evolution as an Irish Woman Poet: An Outsider Within an Outsider’s Culture. Lewiston, Queenston, Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2007.

Downloads

Published

2021-05-23

How to Cite

Villar-Argáiz, P. (2021). Past, Secrecy and Absence in Eavan Boland’s The Historians. ABEI Journal, 23(2), 69-87. https://doi.org/10.37389/abei.v23i2.197753