From Violence To Silence: Witnessing Trauma In Sarah Kane’s Plays

The work of Sarah Kane(1971-1999)undergoes a stylistic and thematic change.While her earlier plays Blasted and Cleansed directly present violence onstage,her later plays Crave and 4.48 Psychosis feature a more lyrical style and focus on mental landscape of the individual.Understanding this change can help grasp Kane’s writing as a whole,but existing literature provides little interpretation.Drawing on Shoshana Felman’s theory of testimony,this study reads Kane’s transformation as her exploration of trauma representation after encountering a crisis of witnessing trauma.Through close analyses of Kane’s techniques and themes in different stages of writing,this study illustrates how Kane’s work shifts from witnessing the traumatizing events to witnessing the impossibility of speaking trauma,probing into the ways her plays transmit traumatic emotions and express social concerns through personal sufferings.Kane’s early work,Blasted and Cleansed,testifies to traumatic events by directly showing violence.Characters in the plays demonstrate the impulse to prove what have happened,ranging from a soldier’s testimony of war crime to lovers’ promise when suffering from crucifying.To emphasize the existence of traumatic events,Kane uses graphically violent scenes to create a sense of being there,rejecting the habitual,journalistic way of reporting.For the British society,the major events of violence in the 1990 s were mostly in faraway countries.As the background hints at the Bosnian War and the concentration camp,Kane aims to provoke readers and audiences to ponder on the impact of violence and the island mentality of British society,encouraging a sense of responsibility to testify traumatic events,and embedding the redemptive possibility of future change in the endings of both plays.Yet,the failure to convey optimistic meanings intended by the author and the frustration in audience reception reveal the crises of witnessing trauma in Blasted and Cleansed: direct representation of the traumatic event restricts the comprehension of its significance.This disillusion of direct representation results in Kane’s changes towards fragmentary forms and bleak themes,with her focus shifting from the traumatizing event to the traumatized self.This transformation already exists in embryo in Blasted and Cleansed,and develops in the next play Crave which represents trauma in its broken traumatic memories and the situation of “no witness”,or,the disintegration of witnesses.Abandoning the presence of traumatic events and centering on internal landscape of the traumatized soul,Kane’s last play 4.48 Psychosis testifies not to the happening of traumatic events,but to the impossibility of speaking about trauma.Kane uses the absence of traumatic events to addresses the paradox of trauma,which is calling for articulation but unable to complete it.To achieve this end,silence,which is reflected in the loss of voice and blank memories,becomes her major technique to approach the traumatized self and the difficulty in articulation.In this mode of “testimony of muted witness”,Kane captures the paradoxical nature of trauma,turning the performing process itself into a traumatizing experience,engaging the audience in the public discussion triggered by personal sufferings,and questioning social norms that define sanity and result in alienation.