The Personal Experience of Systemic Violence, Social Stigma and Structural Vulnerability in The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan

Abstract

This article aims at examining how systemic violence is connected with social stigma and structural vulnerability in the social novel The Spinning Heart, which was published by the Irish writer Donal Ryan in 2012. This much lauded work describes the collapse of the Celtic Tiger and its devastating effects in a small rural town in Ireland from multiple viewpoints. Although there are twenty-one first-person narrators, one per chapter, Bobby Mahon stands out among them. In fact, the story of this construction foreman connects with the trajectories presented by the other characters. Through all of them, Ryan denounces the practices and procedures that powerful and privileged institutions, groups and individuals resort to in contemporary Ireland in order to assert control or authority over other less favoured members of society, thus fostering a climate of violence. Attention is drawn in this article to the nature of the patterns of aggression and hostility developed by the main characters in the novel but also to the adverse impact these unjust, oppressive and stigmatising patterns have on vulnerable subjects by burdening them physically, psychologically, culturally and financially. Michael Staudigl’s theories on systemic violence in Phenomenologies of Violence (2014), Imogen Tyler’s notions on social stigma in Stigma. The Machinery of Inequality (2020), Judith Butler’s ideas on structural vulnerability in Vulnerability in Resistance (2016) and Pierre Bourdieu’s views on patriarchy in Masculine Domination (2001) inform this work.