TIME ASPECT
Dorothy Abrona McCrae
is the “persona” created by Judy Malloy. All the lines are taken from
apparently autobiographical “story” written by this “persona”.
The hypertext form evidences a lack of linear
or sequential movement or progression. There are no logical connections. I have
numbered the eight sections of the poem. The treatment of time is amorphous,
the lines can be shuffled like a pack of cards and still retain the same
meaning, because each group is individual and separate and they communicate
thoughts similar to the French novelistic idea of the “stream of consciousness”.
“Time” jumps from the past to the present and back again.
Knowing nothing of background, nevertheless the
text gives flashes of information in time. Moving from the “now” of the present
day, this old married (widowed) “persona” thinks of her life, sparking
suppositions on the part of the reader about her state of mind at various
stages of her life, her emotions and reactions.
Even without any extant time reference, it is
clear that she was the young mistress of a painter/mentor. She has felt that
her work has been unappreciated till recently. She has been furious and frustrated, she feels old and burnt out. She keeps works
still, so they must have significance for her. The wife of her lover was a
Kennedy=clone in a 40’s rich white county of class. I feel bitterness,
rejection, loneliness, her strength of character and determination.
The lines can be read in any order and with the
information from the monograph I interpret that this old lady has an emphatic
sense of her own identity (section one).
Long-widowed, she keeps her husband’s name. Using the metaphor of a painting,
she mixes past and present as if shown on a moving canvas (section two). There is
no mention of the future.
Her youth was spent in an idyllic, country
setting, not poor (section
three). There is no syntactical connection onto “for a now long dead”
painter (section four),
nor feeling or nostalgia for him. Irony as she is famous now
and he is forgotten. Incorporate the lines on his wife (section eight) to
visualize a complete mental picture of a period of time in the
Jump to the present,
go back in the poem (section
five). Fluid, double memories of early drawings, put away under her bed, of
when she was Lewis’s student. He is never named in the poem, like a historical
character, irrelevant to her present. Now students write about her. Is she proud
of that? Some reactions are secret (section seven).
“Outlived my time” (section six). She has
lived too long. Is she bitter? Recognition has arrived, and fame, but she has
spent a long time, in real terms, in obscurity, creative but ignored. Years of frustration
that provoke anger.
A journalist calls about an exhibition. She is
not in it (section five).
Rage, swearing, shouting…There is ironic humour about her language, too strong
to appear in a newspaper, even in the present day. Suppressed anger at having
been ignored for most of her lifetime, released over the phone.
Judy Malloy’s imagery of time covers a period
of 80 years, according to her persona, whose biographical details are revealed
in the monograph. With that, this is not a difficult poem to interpret. It is
accessible with simple language full of rich possibilities of interpretation. “Time”
too is a persona, revealing a life of emotions which go beyond the simple
words.
Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés
López
© Aranzazu Estruch Ripoll
aesri2@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València
Press
Creada: 5/12/2008