The narrative mechanics of transmission in Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart (2012): hostile environments vs. readerly reflexes

Abstract

In Donal Ryan’s 2012 novel The Spinning Heart, a great amount of contextual, diegetic and stylistic elements points to an utter failure of communication and, above all, of transmission. The story unfolds in an Ireland that bears the very recent economic scars of the end of the Celtic Tiger period, and whose citizens appear disconnected from their culture, dreams and fellow Irishmen and women. For the characters, this leaves a void that is gradually filled by tensions, secrets and hostility. For the reader confronted with such a text, developing sympathy for these characters quickly emerges as a challenge, all the more so as this short 155-page novel is divided into twenty chapters, each corresponding to a different narrator telling their story in the first person, making it difficult for the reader to get in-depth knowledge of any of them. Understanding the text is made all the more complicated by the frequent – and often contradictory – echoes between the twenty chapters, forcing the reader to constantly make inferences and to make their way through this novel on their own since no uniting, all-encompassing narrative voice emerges to guide them in their perception of the story.This paper analyses how, in The Spinning Heart, the stylistic choices draw on readers’ reflexes to co-construct the narrative, while studying the effects this has on the interpretation of the novel, the diegesis of which features transmission as a key theme.It first focuses on the many ways in which transmission is done wrong and has gone wrong plot-wise, before analysing the narrative choices which complicate the transmission of information and feeling to the reader; at last, it challenges the idea that transmission is completely absent from the novel, by focusing on the micro-scale of the characters’ singular voices and by paying close attention to the role of the reader.