The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World

393 Pages·1987·15.41 MB·English

by  Elaine Scarry

The Body in Pain
THE MAKING AND UNMAKING
OF THE WORLD
Elaine Scarry
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York Oxford
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York Toronto.
Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi
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and associated companies in
Beirut Berlin Ibadan Nicosia
Copyright © 1985 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
First published in 1985 by Oxford University Press, Inc.,
108 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-13 978-0-19-503601-5
ISBN 0-19-503601-8
ISBN-13 978-0-19-504996-1 (pbk.)
ISBN 0-19-504996-9 (pbk.)
29 28 27 26 25
Printed, in the United States of America
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
TIHE WORK for this book has been sustained by the generosity of many insti­
tutions 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to the published and unpublished materials in their research department, for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 Pennsyrvama 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 This­
tle—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 l learned a great
deal. A 1979-81 grant from the National Humanities Center provided an un­
interrupted year of writing, as well as the intellectual camaraderie of a large
VI ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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 por­
tions. 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, pa­
tiently 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 per­
mission to use Gericault's Etude de Gericault d'apres Eugene Delacroix 1818-
19 from its owner, a private collector in Switzerland. My thanks also to Michael
Fried, who first showed me Gericault'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
Acknowledgments vn
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 3
Part One: Unmaking
Chapter 1 The Structure of Torture: The Conversion of Real Pain into
the Fiction of Power 27
Chapter 2 The Structure of War: The Juxtaposition of Injured Bodies and
Unanchored Issues 60
Part Two: Making
Chapter 3 Pain and Imagining 161
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 181
Chapter 5 The Interior Structure of the Artifact 278
Notes 327
Index 373

The Body in Pain