Dealing with trauma in Contemporary Irish fiction: Seamus Deane, Anne Enright and Colum McCann

After highlighting the complexities of the concepts of “Ireland”, “narrative” and “trauma” we find that a too close relation between family, religion and politics is at the heart of trauma. Narrative is its opposite, as it can release the protagonists from their obsession. After giving a survey of trauma novels in contemporary Irish novels since 1990 we look more closely at two masterworks, Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark (1996) and Anne Enright’s The Gathering (2007). The fact that Deane’s strongly autobiographical trauma novel really is a “Portrait of the Artist as a Child” shows interesting differences with Joyce’s paradigm. While the young writer learns to read the languages of his grandfather, mother and father, it is the last one who shows him how (oral) literature may function as a therapy. In Enright’s novel too the narrator benefits from her “scriptotherapy”, which is fed mainly by mental constructs borrowed from Catholic theology. It is interesting to observe that, while it was Catholic moral which caused the trauma, it is the basic Catholic concepts of original sin, forgiveness, grace and resurrection which liberate the narrator from her obsessions and restore her to life – a life, however, in which the protagonist refuses a traditional Irish motherhood and goes for a new model. Though both novels differ vastly in time period, setting and treatment, both depend strongly on scriptotherapy to be able to move from an invasive kind of empathy to ‘‘empathetic unsettlement’’, which leads them to a deeper respect for the Otherness of their familiars. Finally, we look at the contrasting case of McCann’s protagonists who use ritual and life itself rather than writing as a therapy to heal. We briefly compare different forms of aesthetics in life in different texts (one novel, one short story) by McCannstatus: publishe