Hurt and Pain

Literature and the Suffering Body

Susannah B. Mintz

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781474245425
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780567558459
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Hurt and Pain: Literature and the Suffering Body examines the strategies authors have used to portray bodies in pain, drawing on a diverse range of literary texts from the seventeenth century to the present day. Susannah B. Mintz provides readings of canonical writers including John Donne, Emily Dickinson, and Samuel Beckett, alongside contemporary writers such as Ana Castillo and Margaret Edson, focusing on how pain is shaped according to the conventions-and also experiments-of genre: poetry, memoir, drama, and fiction. With insights from disability theory and recent studies of the language of pain, Mintz delivers an important corrective to our most basic fears of physical suffering, revealing through literature that pain can be a source of connection, compassion, artistry, and knowledge. Not only an important investigation of authors' formal and rhetorical choices, Hurt and Pain reveals how capturing pain in literature can become a fundamental component of crafting human experience.

1

The Poetry of Pain

Hurting Made Lyrical

I know that loneliness can produce bolts of hot pain, a pain which, if it stays hot enough for long enough, can begin to simulate, or to provoke—take your pick—an apprehension of the divine.

—Maggie Nelson, Bluets (2)

We need the poets to imagine for us. . . . Indeed it is to the poets that we turn. Illness makes us disinclined for the long campaigns that prose exacts. . . . In illness words seem to possess a mystic quality. . . . [I]n illness, with the police off duty, we creep beneath some obscure poems by Mallarmé or Donne, some phrase in Latin or Greek, and the words give out their scent and distil their flavour . . .

—Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill (19–21)

“Each man’s pain is a norm,” writes Vassar Miller in a poem entitled “The Common Core,” that “[n]o one can prove and no one refute” (2–3). Such lines might seem to anticipate the claim now famously asserted in Elaine Scarry’s 1985 The Body in Pain, that “[t]o have pain is to have certainty; to hear about pain is to have doubt” (13). “The Common Core” presents “[e]ach man’s sorrow” as “an absolute” (1, 6), seeming to invoke a common notion of pain as isolate and unknowable, defying intentions to verbalize it. But Miller, who had cerebral palsy and writes of mourning “for [her] limbs” (9), suggests a subtly but crucially distinct attitude about how pain might be both felt and articulated. The poem’s ultimate contention is that any individual pain, no matter what its particular cause or intensity, shares with others its origin in “the heart’s center” (16), in basic human mortality (for the deeply religious Miller, “[t]hat common core of the Cross” [17])—and, at the same time, is subject to the individual’s own interpretation of it. “No man’s sickness has a synonym” (12), she insists, not because pain destroys language but because it is identified according to each person’s experience of it; sorrow, pain, sickness, and disease are “self-defined” (11).

The assertions of “The Common Core” work two ways, for Miller also seems to be critiquing a competitive impulse whereby we quibble over “[w]ho mourns with reason” and “who over whims” (10). We take our suffering to be the standard according to which all others are to be measured; we brook no comparison, no denial or analogy, where our own pain is concerned. In this sense the perceived “absolute” quality of each person’s pain and sorrow has a hierarchizing capacity, even a dangerous one, if in the effort to determine “[w]hich one’s deadlier” (14) we tend to minimize or ignore the anguish of others. What is at stake here is the reality of pain as both a privately interpreted and emphatically social event. Any given pain has its common core in the flesh, but also in the words by which we name it—as “fire” or “burning” (13, 18), for instance—and in the intersubjective connections by which we might together lessen our reasons to “weep” (9). The repetition in the poem of “[e]ach man’s” (1, 2, 6) and “[n]o man’s” (7, 8, 12) at the start of several lines enforces that larger tension between singularity and commonness. We react to pain best, the poem suggests, when we remember that it is a shared condition of human existence we will inevitably construe according to unique convergences of physiology, psychology, history, and place.

A strict formalist, Miller harnesses all that potentially proliferating pain in the mechanics of rhyme and meter. The schematics of “The Common Core” are simple, with just two rhymes in each of three sestets and a predominant four-beat line. The first and last lines of each stanza end on the same word: first “absolute,” then “synonym,” and finally “burning.” Such stresses are at the “core” of the poem’s exhibition of pain. Literal formality reins pain in, keeps the multiplying of pain, our contest for the grandest version of it, in check. In this sense, the poem’s regularity has a quelling effect on the narration and assessment of pain; the various questions (“[w]hich is the blacker” [4], “[w]hich blows fiercer” [5], “[w]hich one’s deadlier?” [14]) take on a sardonic edge as the speaker comes to the conclusion that, no matter how we rank our various pains, “[y]ou die” and so do “I” (18). But those questions seem nervous, too, erupting at the center of stanzas as if no amount of rhetorical control entirely dispels an impulse to quantify by way of making sense. Stanzas seem held in a delicate balance, urgent inquiry—which is worse?—against the modifying influence of sound repetition and rhythm. At the same time, the poem’s form mimics the “still and unturning” (16) nature of the heart that the speaker locates on the other side of pointless “discerning” (15). Rhymes and repetitions guarantee return; what might seem a static or sterile result of pain on poetry becomes here a quiet affirmation of ongoingness and, paradoxically, irrelevance. It is the project of distinguishing ourselves by over-valuing pain that the poem undercuts, finally, rather than the need to say what hurts.

Miller presents pain in “The Common Core” in terms of concrete instances of it, experienced by individuals with complex relationships to systems of meaning and to language. As an early advocate for disability rights, she writes with a keen awareness of how the forms and functions of bodies are embedded in cultural norms, in the very types of social arrangements that might deem some pain “reason[able]” and other pain mere “whims.” As a poet, she capitalizes on what Mutlu Konuk Blasing has called the “temporalizing in-coherence” of lyrical language (108) to create a subject whose relationship to pain is not one of stabilizing “definitions and names” (134) but one that recognizes both the mutable nature of pain as it circulates through bodies in social environments and the possessiveness that might motivate the corralling of pain in words. The point, again, is not that we shouldn’t—or can’t—communicate the discomforts of sickness or impairment. Miller turns to a genre that “formally hosts bodily language,” as Blasing writes, “just as it hosts referential language” (102). Poetry is somatic as it is also symbolic, materializing the “affectively charged, bodily produced” elements of language (96) within formal structures that invoke what Blasing argues is an always-already textualized experience of physical being. This suggests that poems might be read as representations and enactments of pain, or in Wittgenstein’s terms, not descriptions but verbal equivalents of a cry of pain.¹ Lyric in particular offers the writer a mode of articulation in which pain might be at once discursively legible and set free from expectation about what it is supposed to mean.

In poetry, then, where juxtaposition and image, sound texture and rhythm hold sway, where metaphors create new meaning and line breaks disrupt our expectation of grammatical or logical consequence, pain may be disconnected from the causal narratives we rely on for a sense of order and control. Given lyric poetry’s historical entanglement with deferrals of desire and the throes of love and longing, poetic pain often mediates or paradoxically alleviates struggles between self and other; pain may stand in for that other, drawn into an intensified space of thought and feeling in which a speaker engages pain to work through doubts about legitimacy and self-worth. Some speakers become pain (or pain relief) altogether, devising a persona that shapes pain according to the self’s own contours, not simply to minimize pain but also to acknowledge pain’s constitutive role in subjectivity. Pain can emerge in surprising guises, the subject of a poetic inquiry that particulates pain to refashion it from isolated body parts or the clash of tropes and associations. Such work presents the disturbance of pain in two ways: pain may be the disrupter of coherent experience or identity, but it is also interrogated, its status as a self-evident, inherently negative phenomenon disturbed. “The Common Core,” for example, assumes the legitimacy of pain—endorsing the idea that “pain is whatever the experiencing person says it is, existing whenever he says it does”²—but also locates in pain the origins of intellect and artistry, if not also an ecstatic redemption.

Like Miller’s figures, who weep for “love” and for “limbs” (9), the poets to be considered in this chapter hurt in ways that are always at once physical and emotional, and the pain they recount is never (if ever) obviously repugnant or self-erasing. I might instead describe the effect as egotistical pain, by which I mean that pain makes selfhood happen, solidifies the connections whereby we know who we are, and more ironically that many poets defy social restrictions against naming pain. From John Donne and Emily Dickinson, masters of despair, to contemporary poets of disability and illness, pain is alternately an inevitable, terrible, productive, even desirable aspect of living; writing about pain in the compact spaces of poetry becomes a form of negotiation with a sense of self that is always in flux because the meaning of pain is itself unstable. Dickinson wrote that the poet “Distills amazing sense / From ordinary Meanings” (#448), a definition of her own enterprise that seems apt for each of the writers below, in that poetry has the capacity to pull from conventional attitudes toward pain an awe that is sensory as much as intellectual. Pain has been called a limit experience, but we understand such a phrase colloquially to imply an uncomfortable intensity, a threshold beyond which continuity of self can hardly be imagined. The various formulations of pain we will encounter here, however, come to different conclusions. In intense relation to their bodies and in heightened verbal terms, poets of pain witness the depth of feeling they are capable of, how many varieties of pain there are, what pain can impel the mind to construct, and how pain can initiate profound interrelational contact. The mystery of pain is not to be domesticated or feared—it is rather the wild terrain on which lyricism thrives.

I begin with Donne and Dickinson because certain broad similarities establish the groundwork for later poets, while their differences reveal historical changes that will matter to the project of dismantling a uniformly biomedical, socially shunned pain. Seventeenth-century England and nineteenth-century America were watershed eras in medical discovery, and they had distinct notions of what pain “is” and how people ought to react to it. The early modern body was an unfamiliarly visible and newly mapped one, flayed open by Vesalius’s mapping of the nerve system, William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood, and the new science of anatomy. Many scholars have linked Donne’s lyric dissections of bodies to such shifts; the parade of bones, muscles, sinews, veins, nerves, hearts, and tongues suggests an anatomist’s fascination for interior depths. Writing from illness and spiritual crisis—which were for Donne inextricably related events—the poet-priest also invokes a philosophy of correspondence between individual and state whereby the body was at once a land conquerable by exploration and a source of potential treason against the controlling powers. In poems as well as his prose Devotions, composed in 1623 during a period of serious illness, Donne figures his body as both under siege by external forces and the perpetrator of a terrible betrayal. “I am surprised with a sudden change,” he writes, “and alteration to worse, and can impute it no cause” (7).

The body was capable of alarming activity all on its own, apparently beyond the control of the conscious self. At the same time, body and soul were so thoroughly involved that physical unpredictability was for Donne a measure of his soul’s potential inconstancy; one had to be vigilant about bodily signs. But pain and wreckage were not simply to be feared. Donne sought them, too, for precisely the same entanglement of corporeal and spiritual states. The masochistic streak in Donne’s Holy Sonnets has been read theologically as embodying in the most violent but perhaps also literal of ways a desire for union with Christ so profound as to become meditative, then poetic, identification: the physical pains of the penitent are Christ’s on the Cross. Donne’s poetic requests to be hurt by Christ have also been understood in eroticized terms. Wounds are sites and signs of an impassioned joining that blurs distinctions between human and divine, masculine and feminized bodies; pain signifies intimacy with as much as distance from.³ I will argue something similar for the operations of pain in several of Donne’s secular poems, where bodily pain eludes the tempting interpretation of clichéd sentiment or irony to become a more substantive component of love. Pain is the mark of touch; the body’s very condition as suffering proves the success of a desired maneuvering—whether by speaker or mistress. Such engagements with pain go beyond mere mortification of the flesh or romantic scars to that uniquely clamorous, tactile, intensified space in which Donne played out his dramas of longing and fear.

By the end of the seventeenth century, new metaphors about bodies and pain, indicating paradigmatic change, had taken hold. As both state and universe were conceptualized in increasingly mechanical terms, “All things . . . joined together, as in a clock”⁴ and presided over by a watchmaker-God, so too was the body figured as “an Engine” or machine⁵ whose failures could be repaired by medical expertise. In simple terms, twenty-first-century biomedicine continues to approach bodies in pain this way, as mechanical devices that have broken down and need to be “repaired . . . by Doctor Fix-It” or electrical systems that have “short circuit[ed], a fuse box on the fritz” (Burns et al., 18). Dickinson’s lyric pain emerges from a moment when electricity provided a degree of access to the body’s interior that Donne’s lyric anatomists could hardly have imagined, and Dickinson in her unexpectedly fearless way seems to stride right up to that dangerous and misunderstood force “With Insulators—and a Glove” (#630).⁶ Still, Dickinson maintains that connection between harrowing physical sensation and psychological or spiritual torment that so animates the work of Donne—and, like her poetic forebear, also styles pain as a consolidator rather than annihilator of selfhood. And because Dickinson seems as interested in capturing pain’s many manifestations—in writing about how pain can be written—as she is in writing her way out of it, she too, like Donne, presents pain as an essential component of the artist’s medium.

If nineteenth-century pain was a largely mechanistic one, it also became anesthetized. Describing this century of “Great Discoveries,” Roselyne Rey recounts the shift in thinking that occurred among physicians regarding the different circumstances of pain and spirited debates over the benefits and perceived dangers of alleviating it. Opium for chronic pain, for example, had become “the norm” in the eighteenth century (125), but even half a century later “it was a very different story for surgical pain, as if two separate logics held sway depending on the situation” (141). Rey suggests that doctors and surgeons were slow to relinquish the belief, dominant in the eighteenth century, that pain was both an inevitable corollary of cure (amputation for gangrene, for example, or resetting a dislocated joint) and a mechanism for stimulating the vital energy that was thought to animate body and consciousness alike. Exemplifying this notion of the “usefulness” of pain, French surgeon Marc-Antoine Petit wrote in 1799 that pain “gives new strength to the principle of life” (qtd. in Rey, 130). Just a decade later, Dominique Jean Larrey⁷ claimed to operate as quickly as possible to lessen rather than excite the patient’s discomfort. By the 1840s, amid ongoing debates about the efficacy and duration of ether’s effects, surgical speed was no longer needed, as physicians in Europe and the United States routinely performed extractions and delivered babies with the use of anesthesia. As research into the causes and modalities of pain developed, so too did its palliatives, from morphine to electrotherapy to hypnosis.

Rey notes that for the surgeon unaccustomed to operating in the “hitherto unknown silence” (156) of an anesthetized patient, the absence of pain-induced cries and convulsions necessitated an unfamiliar reliance on his own knowledge; no longer was the surgeon interacting with a subject aware of sensation. Diminished pain—better for patients, safer for surgeons, to be sure—thus correlated with the amplifying of doctors’ power over their patients’ bodies. To an extent, this coincided with an attitude toward the body that differentiated between its symptoms and the self that resided therein. Though Donne often experienced his body as an untrustworthy stranger, he nonetheless was that body more than he inhabited it. By Dickinson’s day, doctors and scientists were isolating pain as something that could be controlled and/or eradicated, no longer viewing pain as integral to the success of a surgery or to the healing of wound or disease. Separating pain from person might facilitate the demystifying of corporeal events—uncoupling symptom from sin, for example—but it also feeds into an idea that pain interrupts the individual’s “real” or proper experience, a conception that, in pathologizing pain, grants control of it to the medical expert. In nineteenth-century America, the discourse of pain generated by such renowned physicians as Silas Weir Mitchell, George Beard, and Oliver Wendell Holmes gave doctors what Mitchell called, in 1896, a “Godlike will” over the power of pain (see Morris, 64–5).

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Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Shaping Pain
• 1 The Poetry of Pain: Hurting Made Lyrical
• 2 Our Stories, Our Pain: Autobiographical Utterances
• 3 The Drama of Pain: Plays and Performance Art
• 4 The Path of Pain: On Narration and Plot
• 5 Bystander Pain: On Witnessing and Touch
• References
• Index
• Copyright