The Representation of trauma in

Sebastian Barry's (latest) novels

 Irish history as the source of
traumatic experiences (context)
● Colonial experience
● Mass starvation, disease, emigration → Great
Famine (1845-1852)
● Dublin Lockout (1913)
● Easter Rising (1916)

A history of violence, conflicts, fragmentation, discontinuity, as an open-ended

text → official narratives, historiography → alternatives, re-interpretation →
national self examination (novelists, dramatists) → reconciliation with the past
 Irish history as the source of
traumatic experiences (context)
● Colonial experience
● Mass starvation, disease, emigration → Great
Famine (1845-1852)
● Dublin Lockout (1913)
● Easter Rising (1916)

A history of violence, conflicts, fragmentation, discontinuity, as an open-ended

text → official narratives, historiography → alternatives, re-interpretation →
national self examination (novelists, dramatists) → reconciliation with the past
 Barry's characters
I
● Ethical notion that people are not completely
responsible for what they do (victims of history,
but also perpetrators due to their political
affiliations).
● Individual and collective traumas influence
ethical systems.
● Focus on misfits and outsiders whose tragic
conflicts are caused by loyalty once true but
rendered ugly by the political changes.
vv
 Trauma
A traumatic event can be defined as a painful occurrence, but so intense that it
exceeds our capacities to experience it in the usual ways. It disrupts time and
history, breaks through the categories we use to take in the world, and seems to
be registered in our memories in forms that are unlike those used to register
conventional experience. This atypical memory is sometimes called traumatic
memory to differentiate it from our usual narrative memory. (Leys, 2000, p.2).

The reception of a traumatic event always implies a temporal dislocation since it

ruptures the narrative continuity between past and present: that is, at the
moment when it occurs, the traumatic event is not actually experienced by the
subject. The horror of trauma is such that the mind is split or dissociated: [the
mind] cannot register the wound to the psyche because the ordinary
mechanisms of awareness and cognition are destroyed. As a result, the victim is
unable to recollect and integrate the hurtful experience in normal
consciousness; instead, she is haunted or possessed by intrusive traumatic
memories. The experience of the trauma, fixed or frozen in time, refuses to be
represented as past, but is perpetually re-experienced in a painful, dissociated,
traumatic present (idem).
 Barry's representation of trauma in
his novels
● Interested in the processes of mental distress
caused by traumatic experiences
(schizophrenia of colonized subject, paranoia of
the perpetrator, dementia, bizarre visions and
haunting memories) → imagination of a
traumatized mind infiltrates memory and
transforms personal and historical data
● Poetic style
● Lyricism and impressionism → humanism
 The Secret Scripture (2008)
● Testimony of a traumatised old lady (unreliable
autobiography) ; analytical, scientific view of the
psychiatrist who has done some research on
Roseanne’s life; letters, official documents
The grief that does not age, that does not go away with time, like most griefs
and human matters. That is the grief that is always there, swinging a little in a
derelict house, my father, my father. (Barry 2008, 145).
Now I could write a little book on the nature of human silences, their uses and
occasions, but the silence that my father off ered to this speech was very
dreadful. It was a silence like a hole with a sucking wind in it. He blushed further,
which brought his face to crimson, like the victim of an attack. (Barry 2008, 101)
“I do remember terrible dark things, and loss, and noise, but it is like one of
those terrible dark pictures that hang in churches, God knows why, because you
cannot see a thing in them.” “Mrs. McNulty, that is a beautiful description of
traumatic memory.” (Barry, 2008, 168).