Brian Friel’s Explorations of Trauma: Volunteers (1975) and Living Quarters (1977)

Trauma is nothing new to Irish history. Invasion and colonization by a neighboring country, wholesale dispossession, the loss of a native language, widespread famine and mass emigration, a war for independence, Partition, civil war, and sectarian violence: a history that includes these and other traumatic events has understandably left its mark on Irish literature. In fact, recent history has been comparatively placid (at least outside the North) in terms of historical trauma. But the attention that Irish writers have paid to such trauma has intensified in recent decades. Pointing to the large number of “trauma novels” written from 1970 to 2000, Robert F. Garratt distinguishes them from “novels about trauma”:

The designation of ‘trauma novel’ identifies a work of fiction that treats as an important and central part of the story the struggle of a disturbed individual to discover, confront, and give voice to a vague yet threatening catastrophic past. As such it differs from “novels about trauma” that consider and develop traumatic experience as part of the background to a story.¹

In such works, traumatic experience is no longer merely alluded to or mentioned in passing but takes center stage. Decades of violence in Northern Ireland no doubt triggered this sudden interest, but this late emergence of “trauma novels” is itself part of the trauma effect, too. The “Troubles,” as Garratt remarks, bring out “a sense that history repeats itself (a central tenet of traumatic neurosis).”² Such lateness echoes the “belatedness” inherent in trauma itself: it “is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor.” In a sense, “trauma novels” are like the haunting, recurring nightmares that come only later, whose latency testifies to the fact that trauma cannot be addressed as it happens: it can only be written “in its delayed appearance.”³

Garratt was speaking of novels in particular, but his remarks could easily apply to short stories, poetry, and drama of the same period. For example, some of Mary Beckett’s short stories, many of Jennifer Johnston’s novels and plays, and certain of Seamus Heaney’s poems could fall into the category of trauma literature, as they explicitly deal with the traumatic effect of the “Troubles” and other political violence in Irish history. What is less obvious, and seldom examined, is the extent to which the playwright Brian Friel writes about trauma. Critics, such as Scott Boltwood and Anthony Roche, have brought invaluable insight into the politics of Friel’s plays, but they do not focus on the traumatic aspect of political violence. Two of Friel’s lesser-known plays, Volunteers (1975) and Living Quarters (1977), appear to be especially well-suited to be examined from the perspective of trauma studies. To follow Garratt’s distinction, these plays are “trauma plays” rather than “plays about trauma”: both plays emphasize “the traumatic voice or point of view . . . the action of the story line includes an individual’s attempts to recall and reshape some catastrophic event, and . . . the temporal setting compresses the present and the past.”⁴ Admittedly, Friel’s other plays, such as Freedom of the City (1973) and Faith Healer (1979), could also be readily analyzed as trauma studies. But these two early plays—neither of which has previously been counted as trauma literature, much less adequately considered from that perspective—actually illustrate the usefulness of this approach better. For one thing, neither is “about” any immediate or obvious political trauma.

Political violence—in the civil war, Bloody Friday, Bloody Sunday, the “Troubles,” and other elsewhere—has almost become the default feature of Irish trauma literature, but it is important to define “trauma,” as this will determine the scope and scale of the entire trauma discourse. This may, and often does, extend to cases beyond explicit political violence. Unsurprisingly, the concept of trauma itself is embattled. The description in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual—that the “person has experienced an event that is outside the range of [normal] human...