J. M. Synge and Cultural Trauma

Abstract

What constitutes the “after” of terror? Is not terror precisely that which shatters any sense of chronology and linearity? If one takes terror as a traumatic experience which stupefies the subject and plunges him or her in a state of mental numbness, leaving his or her psyche fixated indefinitely on the traumatic event, the very possibility of an after is indeed put into question. Terror as trauma requires a rethinking of temporal categories such as precedence or posteriority. This article strives to demonstrate how the terror of the Irish Famine resonates in the writings of J. M. Synge (1871‑1909) and how Synge found in the theatre a medium fit to give an aesthetic expression to collective and cultural trauma. It argues that what made theatre especially appropriate for his purpose is the possibility it allows to treat time in a radically unconventional manner.