Title: Witnessing History: Trauma Narratives in The Secret Scripture

Abstract: Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture is based on the traumatic memory of Rosanne McNulty, a centenarian woman who has been incarcerated in a lunatic asylum for most of her lifetime, delivering the vicissitudes of the century-long history of Ireland with a lyric and elegiac tone. The exclusion of Protestants, discriminationagainstwomen and distortion of human ethics are vividly captured, each of which is like a bleeding scar inscribed in the Irish collective memory. This paper explores the novel’s trauma narratives and the itsmultilayered historical representations. First of all, Rosanne’s first-person retrospective narration justifies exemplifiesthe performance of trauma. As a unique form of memory, her testimony proves evincesthe fragmentation of personal and national history, illustrating the social ills in ofthe post-independence Ireland. Secondly, the unreliable narration, in terms ofwith its emphasis on oblivion and surrealistic fantasies, smoothes and replaces the violence in ofreality, which reflects the protagonist’s evasion of trauma. An undercurrent of traumatic memories constantly challenges the authority of official historical records. Thirdly, the collective narratives under the perspective of intertextuality suggest the possibility of working through the trauma. Through constructing the witnessing community inside and outside the text, the author makes the voices of the marginalized heard, unearthing the silent histories obscured by the hegemony of dominating discourses of the Irish Free State, so as to foster an examination and recovery of historical traumaat both individual and collective levels. In the multifaceted narrative interaction, Barry creatively incorporates the individual’s memory of past events into the social consciousness, reflecting the rethinking of history and identity of by the contemporary Irish writers.

Keywords: The Secret Scripture, trauma narratives, first-person retrospective narrative, unreliable narration, witnessing community

Author: Luchen Wang, Ph.D candidate, College of Foreign Languages and Cultures, Xiamen University, Xiamen, Fujian, China.