Martin Mcdonagh Objective Violence

Martin McDonagh is one of the most successful contemporary playwrights whose plays are mostly known for being extremely violent and their characters are either cruel agents of violence or its victims. The predominant concept in McDonagh's plays is the concept of extreme violence which figures out his plays amongst other contemporary playwrights. This concept is availed by McDonagh not only for the sake of amusement but more importantly for the psychological and social reasons which are investigated in this paper.

McDonagh uses the concept of violence to attack mainly the family institution which he believes is "the primary source of hatred and murder" in his plays (Garcia 67). He also invades the individuals, the society (especially Irish society)

and even the government recklessly and without hesitation. In the Pillowman, McDonagh targets the family and the government. The Pillowman, which is written in 2001, is a play full of violence and scenes of torture which aims to shock the audience.
The violence shown in McDonagh's plays is highly exaggerated and that is the essential proof of the audience shock. McDonagh, as a postmodern satirist, identifies a specific human behavior and exaggerates it in order to put an emphasis on man's destructive behaviors. Obviously, he does not use the violence just for the sake of amusement and fulfilling the audience need like those of traditional Senecan tragedies or Western movies.
There are lots of views for and against McDonagh's extreme usage of violence and severity in his plays. Many critics argue that he blames the hilarious situation of the modern man and questions the concepts of civilization and culture generally in the world and specifically in Ireland. Although McDonagh was born in South of London, his parents were both Irish and he as a child, has spent his vacations in Ireland; thus he thoroughly knowsthe Irish culture and stereotypes.
McDonagh's protagonists are antiheros. They are rebels but they are not successful and hero-like. They reach nothing because they search for nothing. McDonagh deliberately chooses ridiculous aims for the violence and savagery of his characters. In fact, his characters use violence for no good reason. "It seems that empty and bored people turn to violence because they have nothing else to do" (62). Garcia believes "McDonagh's characters are represented as emotionally and physically damaged individuals for whom verbal abuse, incidental cruelty, and casual violence seem to provide the only recourse to their empty lives" (30).McDonagh attacks sentimentalism and turns to hyperbolic violence but it is important to mention that beside physical violence, McDonagh calls attention to psychological, emotional, mental and lingual violence, as well and he treats violence as an internal aspect of human experience. This paper manifests four different types of violence in McDonagh's plays based on Slavoj Zizek views and his definitions for this concept.
Theoretical Framework
Slavoj Zizek, who is a well-known contemporary philosopher, categorizes the violence into two subsets: subjective violence and objective violence.

According to Zizek, subjective violence is the visible and tangible violence within the society and individuals, while objective violence is the cause of violence which remains invisible and unknown. Objective violence includes symbolic and systemic violence. Symbolic violence is inherited in language and systemic violence is inherited in the system of government.

Zizek elaborates on the violent and unexplainable bursts of violence within the societies as the results of the invisible violent oppression mechanisms or according to him what is called "systemic violence". According to Zizek, individuals who are continuously oppressed by the invisible systemic violence of the social system, react in the form of subjective violence. He suggests that as a reaction to the subjective violence that is the result of objective violence, “divine violence" occurs in the course of which “God himself has lost his neutrality and ‘fallen into’ the world, brutally intervening, and delivering justice. ‘Divine violence’ stands for such brutal intrusions of justice beyond law” (Zizek

178).
Slavoj Zizek suggests that there are two kinds of violence: “subjective violence is just the most visible portion of a triumvirate that also includes two objective kinds of violence” (Zizek1). One of the objective kinds of violence is referred to as “symbolic violence embodied in language and its forms, what Heidegger would call ‘or house of being’” (Zizek 1). Beside this kind of violence that operates through the imposition of a mechanism of meanings, there is also what Zizek calls “systemic violence” which he defines as “the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems” (Zizek 2).
[S]ubjective violence is experienced as such against the background of a non-violent zero level. It is seen as a perturbation of the ‘normal’ state of things. However, objective violence is precisely the violence inherent to this ‘normal’ state of things. Objective violence is invisible since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjectively violent. (Zizek2)
Zizek accordingly resembles the systemic violence to the “dark matter” of physics.

It is not a visible mechanism of violence, but it is known there it exists and operates it power upon the members of the society and Zizek suggests that “it has to be taken into account if one is to make a sense of what otherwise seem to be ‘irrational’ explosions of subjective violence” (Zizek 2). So it is the kind of violence that is internal to the social system that surrounds us and that works through the imposition of power relations, “relations of domination and exploitation, including the threat of violence” (Zizek 9). Zizek explains his point with Lacan’s concept of the Master-Signifier which maintains the symbolic system of meanings. This ever existing mechanism of discursive violence imposes the standards of normalcy, according to Zizek. He argues that the imposition of the “presupposed standard of what the ‘normal’ [...] situation is, [is] the highest form of violence” (Zizek64). So this is why language, which is supposed to be “the very medium of non-violence, of mutual recognition, involves unconditional violence”

(Zizek65)
In this paper, five layers of violence is examined based on Zizek's views: systemic violence, domestic violence, divine violence, fictional violence and symbolic violence.
Systemic Violence
The most prominent indication of the state violence in the play is definitely the subjective violence that Katurian and his brother, Michal, are exposed to throughout their inquest. From the first scene of the play, the audience see an artist who is being punished for his art in a totalitarian (dictator) state. The investigators make him confess to the felonies that he has not committed through physical and psychological torture. They arrest Katurian and take him to police interrogation room while blindfolded, and cruelly beat him for no reason that he is aware of. This violence is plainly stated by Katurian: