Études Irlandaises, 36-1 | 2011, « Trauma Et Mémoire En Irlande » [En Ligne], Mis En Ligne Le 10 Février 2012, Consulté Le 22 Septembre 2020

Études irlandaises 36-1 | 2011 Trauma et mémoire en Irlande Perspectives on Trauma in Irish History, Literature and Culture Anne Goarzin (dir.) Édition électronique URL : http://journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/2115 DOI : 10.4000/etudesirlandaises.2115 ISSN : 2259-8863 Éditeur Presses universitaires de Caen Édition imprimée Date de publication : 30 juin 2011 ISBN : 978-2-7535-1348-8 ISSN : 0183-973X Référence électronique Anne Goarzin (dir.), Études irlandaises, 36-1 | 2011, « Trauma et mémoire en Irlande » [En ligne], mis en ligne le 10 février 2012, consulté le 22 septembre 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ etudesirlandaises/2115 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/etudesirlandaises.2115 Ce document a été généré automatiquement le 22 septembre 2020. Études irlandaises est mise à disposition selon les termes de la Licence Creative Commons Attribution - Pas d’Utilisation Commerciale - Partage dans les Mêmes Conditions 4.0 International. 1 SOMMAIRE Articulating Trauma Anne Goarzin Histoire et culture : mémoire et commémoration Politics, Policy and History: History Teaching in Irish Secondary Schools 1922-1970 John O’Callaghan Travellers and Communal Identity: Memory, Trauma and the Trope of Cultural Disappearance Mícheál Ó Haodha Black Habits and White Collars: Representations of the Irish Industrial Schools Peter Guy The Collective European Memory of 1968: The Case of Northern Ireland Chris Reynolds Vérité et justice comme remèdes au trauma : Bloody Sunday et l’enquête Saville Charlotte Barcat Violence et guerre dans la littérature irlandaise “Snared by Words”: Trauma and the Shoah in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian Shane Alcobia-Murphy Le long cheminement de la mémoire collective irlandaise : A Long Long Way de Sebastian Barry (2005) Sylvie Mikowski Exorcising Trauma: Uncanny Modernity and the Anglo-Irish War in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September (1929) Edwina Keown Trauma et hantise de soi dans The Mai et By the Bog of Cats de Marina Carr Hélène Lecossois Bibliographie Bibliographie Comptes rendus de lecture Here Comes The Night Marion Naugrette-Fournier Études irlandaises, 36-1 | 2011 2 A Fool’s Errand Marion Naugrette-Fournier Un Poète dans la tourmente Jacqueline Genet Territoires de l’étrange dans la littérature irlandaise au xxe siècle Mark Fitzpatrick Out of the Earth Sylvie Mikowski The Politics of Irish Writing Anne Goarzin Keeping Faith with the Past in Gaelic Prose 1940-1951 Clíona Ní Ríordáin Lectures d’un texte étoilé Sylvie Mikowski The Methuen Drama Anthology of Irish Plays Virginie Privas Cinema on the Periphery Estelle Epinoux After the Flood Annick Cizel Architects of the Resurrection Julien Guillaumond Bertram Windle Clíona Ní Ríordáin Irish Women and Street Politics Nathalie Sebbane Flown The Nest Nathalie Sebbane Ireland Philippe Cauvet Ship of Fools Vanessa Boullet Études irlandaises, 36-1 | 2011 3 Articulating Trauma Anne Goarzin Trauma and Trauma Theory 1 Trauma may be defined as an original inner catastrophe, as an experience of excess which overwhelms the subject symbolically and/or physically and is not accessible to him. This “radical and shocking interruption of the universe, but not its total destruction1” means that the pain experienced by the subject is forcefully relocated into the subconscious. As Geoffrey Hartman puts it: “The knowledge of trauma… is composed of two contradictory elements. One is the traumatic event, registered rather than experienced. It seems to have bypassed perception and consciousness, and falls directly into the psyche. The other is a kind of memory of the event, in the form of a perpetual troping of it by the bypassed or severely split (dissociated) psyche2.” This involves the disjunction and the forever belated, incomplete understanding of the event, as Roger Luckhurst argues in his recent comprehensive treatment of The Trauma Question3, thus fostering Cathy Caruth’s designation of trauma as a crisis of representation, of history and truth, and of narrative time4. 2 “What is the relevance of trauma theory for reading, or practical criticism5?” Hartman aptly asks. His answer is that, while trauma theory provides no definitive answers, “it stays longer in the negative and allows disturbances of language and mind the quality we give to literature6”. Literature is indeed one way to express whatever kind of memory the traumatic event allows: it appears in the form of perpetual troping of it by the psyche, and is best phrased through figurative language7. As the subject struggles within his mental cage, the ineffable memories seek a way out and may take the guise of seemingly inexplicable and compulsive behaviours (the compulsion to repeat), as trauma calls for a silence filled with hauntings. The central dialectic of psychological trauma is “the conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud8” to take up Judith Herman’s phrasing. 3 The need to revisit events and “proclaim them aloud” is also exemplified by the writings of social historians. While they might not stand out as victims or witnesses, their determination to look back on previously ill-defined or deliberately overlooked Études irlandaises, 36-1 | 2011 4 events or chronically violent conditions in the history of a nation is central to criticism, in that it makes sense of the recurring trauma of past traumatizing violent histories (which in the case of Ireland include colonial invasion, war, terrorism, revolution, etc.). This volume seeks to address some of the narratives that “ghost” Irish history and culture (about the Travellers, the victims of child abuse or previously unquestioned interpretations of 1968 in Northern Ireland, for example). It also provides an insight into how literature perceives, deals with or memorizes inner or collective trauma. The Modalities of Traumatic Experience 4 In the case of a traumatic event, the subject’s defences are radically called into question. There is also an overwhelming side to traumatic experience, in that it questions the usual systems of care and control, or connection and meaning experienced by the individual. Trauma is thus ambivalent on the individual level, as an experience of excess that can only be manifested in the lack of a meaningful structure or form to express this extreme, unbearable moment the self goes through. Trauma is a death of the subject, Gabriele Schwab says, indicating that “trauma kills the pulsing of desire, the embodied self. Trauma attacks and sometimes kills language9”. The traumatised subject is bound to live as the living dead, as someone who struggles to “disentangle the self from the dead bodies they are trying to hide10” – “Atrocities refuse to be buried”, as Judith Herman states in her landmark study Trauma and Recovery (1992)11. 5 The traumatic experience also affects the ability of its victim to deal with his environment serenely (i.e. linearly), and one may note the following manifestations of mental or physical disruption among potential symptoms12: hyperarousal (persistent expectation of danger, startled reaction and hyperalertness); intrusion (during which the traumatic events are relived “as if they were occurring in the present”); constriction (numbing, withdrawal, indifference, acute passivity or surrender). Robinett follows neurobiologist Van der Kolk’s view that people who undergo trauma experience “‘speechless terror… the experience cannot be organized on a linguistic level’ and thus becomes not only inaccessible but also irrepresentable13”. Because by nature, trauma is registered and not experienced, it resurfaces in many different ways. In terms of Lacanian psychoanalysis, the overwhelming nature of trauma corresponds to the encounter with the Real: “Trauma is caused by the subject’s close encounter with what Lacan calls the ‘Real’ – a situation or an event that exceeds the symbolic order and therefore cannot gain any meaning in the subject’s symbolic framework. Something in this encounter bypasses the cognitive mental apparatus and is experienced by the subject as excess. This […] excess is doomed to return as a traumatic symptom and to haunt the subject in a compulsory manner14”. 6 In his thorough study of the modalities of traumatic experience, Goldberg also points out its specific, repetitive and belated temporal structure which fails to fit in the more comfortable linear temporality of the narrative: in a way, one may also say that trauma theory thus engages one with the “real” world that is outside the symbolic order of academia and into darker areas of perception and knowledge. Études irlandaises, 36-1 | 2011 5 Trauma Studies: A Genealogy 7 Roger Luckhurst vividly shows that the concept of trauma emerged with modernity and matched its “intrinsic ambivalences: progress and ruin, liberation and constraint, individualisation and massification… perhaps best concretized by technology15”. These “ambivalences” can be traced “as an effect of the rise, in the nineteenth century, of the technological and statistical society that can generate, multiply and quantify the ‘shocks’ of modern life16”. In the wake of these shocks17 a series of specialised approaches including law, psychiatry and industrialized warfare” emerged, all of which marked the irruption of temporal dislocation and loss of memory in the Western psyche. 8 Herman’s insight into trauma is related to her involvement in the women’s movement in the 1970s: she set out “to speak out against the denial of women’s experiences in [her] own profession [as a psychiatric resident] and testify to what I had witnessed18”. Within two decades, the work initiated with victims of sexual and domestic violence came to take in other traumatic experiences, such as those of the war veterans or those of the victims of political terror. In his thorough chapter which explores “The genealogy of a concept”, Luckhurst follows in the footsteps of Judith Herman, stressing that the history of trauma itself is marked by “periodic amnesia19” that is, by a tendency to obliterate and then rediscover lines of inquiry intro trauma. This is markedly true of Ireland, where centenary commemorations (of the Famine, of Easter 1916, of the Great War) have led to a renewed interest in events that had become anathema.

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