Rupture, Representation, and the Refashioning of Identity in Drama from the North of Ireland, 1969-1994 (review)

.Reviews135 Bernard McKenna. Rupture, Representation, and the Refashioning of Identity in Drama from the North of Ireland, 1969-1994. Contributions in Drama and Theatre Studies, No. 102. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2003. Pp. 207. $66.95. Bernard McKenna's study ofNorthern Irish drama produced during a twentyfive -year period that coincides with the most intensive phase ofthe contemporaryTroubles takes as its starting point the premise that a valid comparison can be drawn between an individual's encounter with traumatic stress, or "overwhelming experience," and a people's endurance ofpolitical violence. His book is organized according to precepts of "trauma theory" laid out by observers from the field of psychology. McKenna explicates the title of his book in his introduction: Clinical research indicates that traumatized individuals come to terms with violence in three general ways. (1) Rupture occurs after initial exposure to violence; the main factors that inform identity are destroyed. (2) Masks come into play when individuals exposed to trauma make an effort to shield themselves from trauma.Victims will construct insularidentities drawn from societal cues, but those identities do not fully integrate the traumatic structures into an individual's psychological character. (3) Ultimately, some individuals create a fully integrated identity. These individuals are able to integrate traumatic structures into their identity and to come to terms with subsequent contingencies. (1) As he emphasizes, "recovery from violence must not vest itself in forgetting traumatic rupture" (4).At the same time, according to Bessel Van der Kolk and Alexander McFarlane, McKenna's main psychological authorities, "merely uncovering memories is not enough; they need to be modified and transformed (i.e. placed in their proper context and restructured in a personally meaningful way). Thus, in therapy, memory paradoxically needs to become an act of creation rather than a static recording of events" (8). This is where drama comes in, as McKenna suggests that playwrights in the North of Ireland can do for communities some ofthe work ofcreative remembering that traumatized individuals must do on their own. After his introduction and a chapter laying out the theoretical frameworks that he will be drawing on in his study, McKenna takes up "rupture," "representation ," and "refashioning" in turn in the next three chapters, concluding with a brief final chapter that places dramatic production in the context of other arts in the North. Each of his three focus points includes six concepts associated with it by trauma researchers. "Rupture," for example, manifests itselfin six"symptoms": distancing (construction ofa self-protective fantasylife), 136Comparative Drama anxiety, guilt, loneliness and vulnerability, loss of self-control (a yielding of responsibility for one's actions to external forces), and disorientation (a weakened ability to reason and connect)."Representation," or what McKenna terms "the failed attempt to reconstruct identity" (2), provokes six unfortunate results: intrusion of traumatic recollections, compulsive re-exposure to trauma, emotional numbing, lessened ability to adapt to stress, susceptibility to distraction, and altered identity. Finally, successful "reconstruction" that synthesizes the traumatic experience into an individual's personality typically has six components : education, identifying feelings,"deconditioning" traumatic memories and responses,restructuring"traumatic personal schemes,"re-establishingsocial connections ,and accumulating"restitutive emotionalexperiences" (3).McKennahas found Northern Irish plays to illustrate each ofthese phenomena, and the bulk ofthe book consists ofhis readings ofthem in light ofthis psychological framework . The entire schema is set out in the first three pages, and, ifthe result reads at times like scholarship by numbers, at least it has the advantage ofbeing clear and easy to follow. This might seem more than enough for one study, but McKenna blurs the edges of his outline by introducing two other frames of reference. The first is historical. The primal Northern Irish trauma, he insists in various ways, is not the sectarian violence between Protestants and Catholics that re-emerged there in the late 1960s, but the colonization of Ireland by England. As he puts it, Essentially, the colonial projection of the colonized territory traumatically and violently shatters the coherent whole of that territory so that even the inhabitants ofthe colonized space can no longer see themselves as anything but disorganized objects of the colonizing mind; no longer do the colonized have the associations with their former culture and history that characterized...