The Body in Pain Read online

  The Body in Pain

  The Body in Pain

  THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF THE WORLD

  Elaine Scarry

  Oxford University Press

  Oxford New York Toronto

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  Copyright © 1985 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

  First published in 1985 by Oxford University Press, Inc.,

  198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016-4314

  First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1987

  Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Scarry, Elaine.

  The body in pain.

  Includes index.

  1. Pain. 2. War. 3. Torture.

  I. Title.

  BJ1409.S35 1985 128 85-15585

  ISBN-13 978-0-19-504996-1

  29 28 27

  Printed in the United States of America

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THE WORK for this book has been sustained by the generosity of many institutions and people, and I wish to thank them here.

  A 1977 NEH Summer Grant and a 1977–78 fellowship from the Institute for Human Values in Medicine made possible the initial research into the aesthetic, medical, and political literatures, and funded travel both to the International Secretariat of Amnesty International in London and to McGill University in Montreal. To Amnesty International I am deeply grateful for allowing me access to the published and unpublished materials in their research department, for granting me permission to quote from those materials, and for their day-by-day assistance during the weeks when I worked in their midst; their generosity was as unfailing as it was unsurprising. I would also like to thank Dr. Ronald Melzack of McGill University for both the substance and spirit of his conversation during the summer of 1977, as well as for his advice at several later moments.

  Attention to the legal contexts of pain first became possible when a 1979 University of Pennsylvania Summer Grant enabled me to devote an extended period to reading the trial transcripts of personal injury cases. Because such transcripts are not publically available, I am indebted to two Philadelphia firms—LaBrum and Doak; and Beasley, Hewson, Casey, Colleran, Erbstein, and Thistle—for their hospitality throughout those months. I was able in the summer of 1980 to return to the problems posed by the legal materials, thanks to the research provisions that Harvard Law School so generously extends to its Visiting Scholars.

  I am fortunate to have been part of two working groups that brought together people from the humanities, social sciences, medicine, and law. From 1979–81, the Research Group on Suffering at the Hastings Center (Institute of Society, Ethics and Life Sciences) met periodically to discuss both theoretical and practical problems of healing; from all the participants in this seminar 1 learned a great deal. A 1979–81 grant from the National Humanities Center provided an uninterrupted year of writing, as well as the intellectual camaraderie of a large group of people. My thanks to Jan Paxton, Madolene Stone, Dick Eaton, Hal Berman, and many others for their lively ideas, friendship, and laughter; to librarian Alan Tuttle for his research assistance; to Quentin Anderson, Joe Beatty, and Emory Elliott for their tough-minded and provocative readings of the first chapter, and to moral philosopher David Falk for his reading of several chapters and for many hours of fruitful discussion, both in that year and the years that followed.

  By one path or another, sections of the manuscript reached many people, some whom I knew personally and others whom I did not. Their readings were often scrupulous and imaginative; and the quality of their comments helped to create the intellectual pressure necessary to complete the as yet unwritten portions. Catherine Gallagher, Elizabeth Hardwick, Steven Marcus, Joseph Scarry, and Stephen Toulmin all played a larger part in the final writing of the book than they themselves perhaps realize.

  A 1982–83 University of Pennsylvania sabbatical leave and a 1983 University of Pennsylvania Research Council grant for manuscript preparation made possible the final stages of work on the book. The continual re-emergence of the name “University of Pennsylvania” accurately suggests the ongoing support provided by my colleagues both in English and other fields. Research leaves were taken during the chairmanships of Stuart Curran and Robert Lucid; to them, as well as to Daniel Hoffman, Roland Frye, Elizabeth Flower, and Jean Alter, my special thanks for their encouragement and assistance. The opportunity to present parts of the manuscript at Penn, as well as at Berkeley, Cornell, and the Hastings Center, was of great value to me.

  One of the subjects of this book is the passage of what is only imagined into a material form, and the book has enacted its own content by itself gradually acquiring a material form. Many people at Oxford participated in the physical construction of this book; I am especially fortunate to have had William Sisler as editor and Rosemary Wellner as manuscript editor. At the moment when this book was first passing into typescript, Barbara Schulman devoted many generous hours to proofreading. Eva Scarry has read the manuscript at every stage, patiently tracing the vagaries of handwriting into type, type into proof, and proof into print, as though it were a pleasure to do so, even where the subject matter most distressed or the arguments disturbed. I am grateful to have received permission to use Géricault’s Etude de Géricault d’après Eugène Delacroix 1818–19 from its owner, a private collector in Switzerland. My thanks also to Michael Fried, who first showed me Géricault’s extraordinary drawings from the Raft of the Medusa period.

  The steady support of several people throughout the long writing of this book has been decisive. Dr. Eric Cassell’s responses to the manuscript have been as important to me as his own writings on behalf of his patients have been inspiring. Jack Davis has entered into the book’s arguments with the unsparing intellectual rigor familiar to all who know him. Allen Grossman’s knowledge, moral fervor, and capacity for intellectual friendship are perhaps not unlimited, but he has made it difficult to identify the limits.

  Work on this project, as on any project, has often seemed lonely and long. The people listed in these pages have conspired to assure that whenever I looked up from that work I would find a sturdy and bountiful world. No one has done more to construct that bounty than Philip Fisher, who seemed to have built a new desk each time I began a new chapter, and in this and many other ways created the surface on which the work could be done. For his unceasing habits of argument and invention, for the pressure of his belief and the energy of his disbelief, my deep thanks.

  Philadelphia

  E.S.

  June 1985

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Part One: Unmaking

  Chapter 1 The Structure of Torture: The Conversion of Real Pain into the Fiction of Power

  Chapter 2 The Structure of War: The Juxtaposition of Injured Bodies and Unanchored Issues

  Part Two: Making

  Chapter 3 Pain and Imagining

  Chapter 4 The Structure of Belief and Its Modulation into Material Making: Body and Voice in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures and the Writings of Marx

  Chapter 5 The Interior Structure of the Artifact

  Notes

  Index

  The Body in Pain

  INTRODUCTION br />
  ALTHOUGH this book has only a single subject, that subject can itself be divided into three different subjects: first, the difficulty of expressing physical pain; second, the political and perceptual complications that arise as a result of that difficulty; and third, the nature of both material and verbal expressibility or, more simply, the nature of human creation.

  It might be best to picture these three subjects as three concentric circles, for when we enter into the innermost space of the first, we quickly discover that we are (whether or not this is what we intended) already standing within the wider circumference of the second, and no sooner do we make that discovery than we learn we have all along been standing in the midst of the third. To be at the center of any one of them is to be, simultaneously, at the center of all three.

  Physical pain has no voice, but when it at last finds a voice, it begins to tell a story, and the story that it tells is about the inseparability of these three subjects, their embeddedness in one another. Although it is the task of this book to record that story—and hence to make visible the larger structures of entailment—it may be useful here at the opening to speak briefly of each subject in isolation.

  The Inexpressibility of Physical Pain

  When one hears about another person’s physical pain, the events happening within the interior of that person’s body may seem to have the remote character of some deep subterranean fact, belonging to an invisible geography that, however portentous, has no reality because it has not yet manifested itself on the visible surface of the earth. Or alternatively, it may seem as distant as the interstellar events referred to by scientists who speak to us mysteriously of not yet detectable intergalactic screams1 or of “very distant Seyfert galaxies, a class of objects within which violent events of unknown nature occur from time to time.”2

  Vaguely alarming yet unreal, laden with consequence yet evaporating before the mind because not available to sensory confirmation, unseeable classes of objects such as subterranean plates, Seyfert galaxies, and the pains occurring in other people’s bodies flicker before the mind, then disappear.

  Physical pain happens, of course, not several miles below our feet or many miles above our heads but within the bodies of persons who inhabit the world through which we each day make our way, and who may at any moment be separated from us by only a space of several inches. The very temptation to invoke analogies to remote cosmologies (and there is a long tradition of such analogies) is itself a sign of pain’s triumph, for it achieves its aversiveness in part by bringing about, even within the radius of several feet, this absolute split between one’s sense of one’s own reality and the reality of other persons.

  Thus when one speaks about “one’s own physical pain” and about “another person’s physical pain,” one might almost appear to be speaking about two wholly distinct orders of events. For the person whose pain it is, it is “effortlessly” grasped (that is, even with the most heroic effort it cannot not be grasped); while for the person outside the sufferer’s body, what is “effortless” is not grasping it (it is easy to remain wholly unaware of its existence; even with effort, one may remain in doubt about its existence or may retain the astonishing freedom of denying its existence; and, finally, if with the best effort of sustained attention one successfully apprehends it, the aversiveness of the “it” one apprehends will only be a shadowy fraction of the actual “it”). So, for the person in pain, so incontestably and unnegotiably present is it that “having pain” may come to be thought of as the most vibrant example of what it is to “have certainty,” while for the other person it is so elusive that “hearing about pain” may exist as the primary model of what it is “to have doubt.” Thus pain comes unsharably into our midst as at once that which cannot be denied and that which cannot be confirmed.

  Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language. “English,” writes Virginia Woolf, “which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear has no words for the shiver or the headache. . . . The merest schoolgirl when she falls in love has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her, but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.”3 True of the headache, Woolf’s account is of course more radically true of the severe and prolonged pain that may accompany cancer or burns or phantom limb or stroke, as well as of the severe and prolonged pain that may occur unaccompanied by any nameable disease. Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned.

  Though Woolf frames her observation in terms of one particular language, the essential problem she describes, not limited to English, is characteristic of all languages. This is not to say that one encounters no variations in the expressibility of pain as one moves across different languages. The existence of culturally stipulated responses to pain—for example, the tendency of one population to vocalize cries; the tendency of another to suppress them—is well documented in anthropological research. So, too, a particular constellation of sounds or words that make it possible to register alterations in the felt-experience of pain in one language may have no equivalent in a second language: thus Sophocles’s agonized Philoctetes utters a cascade of changing cries and shrieks that in the original Greek are accommodated by an array of formal words (some of them twelve syllables long), but that at least one translator found could only be rendered in English by the uniform syllable “Ah” followed by variations in punctuation (Ah! Ah!!!!). But even if one were to enumerate many additional examples, such cultural differences, taken collectively, would themselves constitute only a very narrow margin of variation and would thus in the end work to expose and confirm the universal sameness of the central problem, a problem that originates much less in the inflexibility of any one language or in the shyness of any one culture than in the utter rigidity of pain itself: its resistance to language is not simply one of its incidental or accidental attributes but is essential to what it is.

  Why pain should so centrally entail, require, this shattering of language will only gradually become apparent over the course of many pages; but an approximation of the explanation may be partially apprehended by noticing the exceptional character of pain when compared to all our other interior states. Contemporary philosophers have habituated us to the recognition that our interior states of consciousness are regularly accompanied by objects in the external world, that we do not simply “have feelings” but have feelings for somebody or something, that love is love of x, fear is fear of y, ambivalence is ambivalence about z. If one were to move through all the emotional, perceptual, and somatic states that take an object—hatred for, seeing of, beinglhungry for—the list would become a very long one and, though it would alternate between states we are thankful for and those we dislike, it would be throughout its entirety a consistent affirmation of the human being’s capacity to move out beyond the boundaries of his or her own body into the external, sharable world.4 This list and its implicit affirmation would, however, be suddenly interrupted when, moving through the human interior, one at last reached physical pain, for physical pain—unlike any other state of consciousness—has no referential content. It is not of or for anything. It is precisely because it takes no object that it, more than any other phenomenon, resists objectification in language.

  Often, a state of consciousness other than pain will, if deprived of its object, begin to approach the neighborhood of physical pain; conversely, when physical pain is transformed into an objectified state, it (or at least some of its aversiveness) is eliminated. A great deal, then, is at stake in the attempt to invent linguistic structures that will reach and accommodate this area of experience normally so inaccessible to language; the human attempt to reverse the de-objectifying work of pain by forcing pain itself into avenues of objectification is a project laden with pract
ical and ethical consequence.

  Who are the authors of this attempted reversal, the creators or near-creators of a language for pain? Because the words of five different groups of women and men have been regularly consulted in the preliminary thinking for this book, it mil be helpful to name them here, though they together constitute only a very partial list of all those who have entered into the long history of this struggle.

  First, of course, are individuals who have themselves been in great pain and whose words are later available either because they themselves remember them, because a friend remembers them, or because they have been recorded and memorialized in, for example, a written case history. Though the total number of words may be meager, though they may be hurled into the air unattached to any framing sentence, something can be learned from these verbal fragments not only about pain but about the human capacity for word-making. To witness the moment when pain causes a reversion to the pre-language of cries and groans is to witness the destruction of language; but conversely, to be present when a person moves up out of that pre-language and projects the facts of sentience into speech is almost to have been permitted to be present at the birth of language itself.

  Because the person in pain is ordinarily so bereft of the resources of speech, it is not surprising that the language for pain should sometimes be brought into being by those who are not themselves in pain but who speak on behalf of those who are. Though there are very great impediments to expressing another’s sentient distress, so are there also very great reasons why one might want to do so, and thus there come to be avenues by which this most radically private of experiences begins to enter the realm of public discourse. Here are four such avenues.