The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Scarry, 1987)

The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Scarry, 1987)

Elaine Scarry

Part philosophical meditation, part cultural critique, The Body in Pain is a profoundly original study that has already stirred excitement in a wide range of intellectual circles. The book is an analysis of physical suffering and its relation to the numerous vocabularies and cultural forces--literary, political, philosophical, medical, religious--that confront it.

Elaine Scarry bases her study on a wide range of sources: literature and art, medical case histories, documents on torture compiled by Amnesty International, legal transcripts of personal injury trials, and military and strategic writings by such figures as Clausewitz, Churchill, Liddell Hart, and Kissinger, She weaves these into her discussion with an eloquence, humanity, and insight that recall the writings of Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Scarry begins with the fact of pain's inexpressibility. Not only is physical pain enormously difficult to describe in words--confronted with it, Virginia Woolf once noted, "language runs dry"--it also actively destroys language, reducing sufferers in the most extreme instances to an inarticulate state of cries and moans. Scarry analyzes the political ramifications of deliberately inflicted pain, specifically in the cases of torture and warfare, and shows how to be fictive. From these actions of "unmaking" Scarry turns finally to the actions of "making"--the examples of artistic and cultural creation that work against pain and the debased uses that are made of it. Challenging and inventive, The Body in Pain is landmark work that promises to spark widespread debate.

p.162 While pain is a state remarkable for being wholly without objects, the imagination is remarkable for being the only state that is wholly its objects... the only evidence that one is "imagining" is that imaginary objects appear in the mind... it is impossible to imagine without imagining something.

p.165 pain and imagining are the "framing events" within whose boundaries all other perceptual, somatic, and emotional events occur; thus, between the two extremes can be mapped the whole terrain of the human psyche.

p.175 Thus the object, whether weapon or tool, is a lever across which a comparatively small change in the body at one end is amplified into a very large change in the object, animate or inanimate, at the other end.

p.307 In the attempt to understand making, attention cannot stop at the object (the coat, the poem), for the object is only a fulcrum or lever across which the force of creation moves back onto the human site and remakes the makers.

p.310 Thus the artifact is in this section called a "lever" or "fulcrum" in order to underscore that it is itself only a midpoint in a total action: the act of human creating includes both the creating of the object and the object's recreating of the human being, and it is only because of the second that the first is undertaken

p.323 The solitary artifact has been described here as a "lever" because it is only the midpoint in the total arc of action, and because the second half of that arcing is ordinarily vastly in excess of the first half. It is this total, self-amplifying arc of action, rather than the discrete object, that the human maker makes: the made object is simply the made-locus across which the power of creation is magnified and redirected back onto its human agents who are now caught up in the cascade of self-revision they have themselves authored.

p.323 First, the imagination is large-spirited or, at least, has an inherent, incontrovertible tendency toward excess, amplitude, and abundance.

p.324 The object-as-lever also exposes a second attribute of the imagination, its nonimmunity from its own action. The imagination's object is not simply to alter the external world, or to alter the human being in his or her full array of capacities and needs, but also and more specifically, to alter the power of alteration itself, to act on and continually revise the nature of creating.