This volume elucidates the ways the pained and suffering body has been registered and mobilised in specifically Irish contexts across more than 400 years of literature and culture. The expansive historical landscape of this collection is populated by wounded, torn and broken bodies; bodies damaged by war, by political and sexual violence, and by economic and social marginalisation; bodies ravaged by starvation and illness and destroyed by grief and death. Conversely, that same landscape features individuals and communities reconstituted and affirmed by experiences of pain: marshalling their afflictions into wider symbolic narratives (religious, political, social), suffering becomes emblematic of fuller subjecthood. There is no singular approach to what pain means: the material addressed here covers diverse cultural forms produced in response to different historical circumstances in terms that confirm our understanding of how painâwhether endured or inflicted, witnessed or remediatedâis culturally coded. It is as open to ongoing redefinition as the Ireland that features in all of the essays gathered here. What unites these bodies in pain is that in one way or another all express or attempt to express their suffering, and that that suffering reflects and refracts diverse Irish experiences and subjectivities. Each chapter critically attends to pain and suffering and analyses its signifying power. Cumulatively, these essays underscore the persistent and pervasive presence of pain in the constitution of self and wider communities of belonging in Ireland as elsewhere. A shared concern is summarised by Patricia Palmer in this volumeâs second chapter in a deft renewal and reversal of Fredric Jamesonâs dictum âhistory is what hurtsâ: she suggests instead, as does so much of the work in this collection, that âhurts make historyâ.
This collection offers new paradigms for understanding Irelandâs literary and cultural history. We see it as a contribution to the ongoing development internationally of affective historiographies and genealogies of literature and culture, accounts that are increasingly attentive to what Marianne Hirsch terms in another context, the ârepertoire of embodied knowledgeâ. 1 The Body in Pain provides a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches to the analysis of how the body produces meaning, as befits a collection that covers historical and art forms from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century, and that deals with experiential suffering and literary and other cultural representations of such suffering, with both actual bodies and metaphorical bodies. Contributors address the complications that follow the narrativisation or witnessing of real instances of horrific pain, those expressive acts that turn bodies into potent symbolic tropes. Their work also draws attention to the ways that suffering metaphorical bodies testify to systemic and structural political violence, violence that is often framed as intersectional, posited on asymmetrical relations of power based on class, gender, religious background, or ethnic allegiances. The different forms of bodily pain attested to in these chapters draw naturally on a variety of disciplinary approaches including the historical, sociological, psychoanalytical, philosophical, and critical cultural. The âbody in painâ is thus an inclusive and elastic signifier, rather than a single overarching model for the analysis of suffering.
In her field-defining publication, The Body In Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985), Elaine Scarry, whose work clearly influences this volume, questioned the signifying capacity of pain. Attending critically to ways in which the infliction of pain destroys subjectivity she questions the motivation of remediations or representations of suffering bodies in literary or other cultural works: such efforts always turned pain into something else, she suggests, and use it for other ends, evacuating it of its distinctiveness. Pain, she argues, cannot be worded: âphysical 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 makes before language is learnedâ. 2 More recently, Rob Boddice, in Pain and Emotion in Modern History (2014), has suggested that Scarryâs work âunderstated human capacities for articulating their suffering on the one hand and implicitly overstated human capacities for articulating all other emotions on the otherâ. 3 Challenging both the idea that pain exists outside of, or prior to, language, and that it cannot be communicated, he explains:
There is an always unresolvable tension at both an individual and wider cultural-historical level, we suggest in this volume, between the physical experience of pain and the critical analysis of that pain; between the articulation of pain, its communicative potential and its remediation. As the work gathered here suggests, however, the grammar by which we âfigure outâ pain is part of a shifting and dynamic politics of emotions. This is not to underestimate how painful emotions are primarily experienced and expressed in the body, physically, from pounding heartbeats to clenched fists to tears and suppurating wounds. Many of these sensations are similar whether the primary cause of pain is bodily trauma or emotional shock. Furthermore, whether it is experienced directly or indirectlyâthat is, whether it is first felt on oneâs own body or on the body of anotherâpain is a thoroughly embodied, multisensory experience. The eyes might see the bright red of fresh blood, the nose might smell its metallic odour, the mouth and tongue might taste the saltiness of sweat and tears, and the ears might hear the crack of bones breaking, screaming, or other wordless expressions of pain, even deathly silence. The words that describe or the images that represent that multi-sensory experience of pain might indeed be hopelessly inadequate, yet they do attempt to âfigure outâ or put into figurative shape the affective experience of pain.As we translate bodily experience into words, grimaces and artâas we make metaphors of our inner experiencesâwe literally âfigure outâ what we feel. These figures may lack definition, but they are no less evocative for that. And just as I âfigure outâ how I feel, so my witness reads my figures, checks them against her own and, to some degree, understands. 4
Bodies Matter
Refusing the notion then that pain is inexpressible or that it is transparent, in this volume we attend to the many ways that bodies communicate their pain, reach for signification, insist on or are subject to a particular type of structuration. The material addressed testifies to a movement beyond the paralysing question that long dominated studies of literature and trauma: the paradox of representing the unrepresentable, or what Roger Luckhurst usefully described as the ânarrative/anti-narrative tension at the core of traumaâ. 5 While not ignoring or oversimplifying the representational challenges that pertain to articulating, performing or visualising the body in pain, our contributors incorporate that challenge into a wider discussion of the ethics and politics of mobilising the body in pain in specific and transhistorical contexts, and the ethics and politics of witnessing such intimate suffering. 6
Our choice of âpainâ over trauma raises the implicit question of whether trauma is a useful term, particularly in the context of the diversification of trauma studies beyond traditional and often prescriptive psychoanalytical models and an increasing openness among scholars to testing its own genealogies and terms of debate. 7 âTraumaâ is a word that many of the contributors to this collection assiduously avoid; some are deeply ambivalent about the appropriateness of applying a concept that has its origins in late nineteenth-century psychoanalysis to the earlier materials analysed here. This collection moves purposefully from the problematics of representing the traumatised body that so preoccupied trauma studies from the 1980s and early 1990s, and instead concentrates on the potential and the politics of the affective. Having said that, trauma remains a resonant term, deployed subtly and consciously by other contributors, particularly in essays concerned with psychoanalytic approaches to healing pain.
Intergenerational trauma and psychological haunting have been used as critical paradigms in particular in accounts of the Great Famine and the Northern Irish conflict for some years now. 8 Irish studies scholars, like those in various fields of critical studies internationally, have more recently demonstrated how trauma and memory modes together usefully illuminate narratives that register the ways in which past sufferings persist in structural and affective relations in social and political life. 9 This combination of trauma and memory, however, while often revealing, runs the risk of over-concentration on particular crisis episodes of Irish history, and most especially modern Irish history. Though some of the work in this volume concentrates on âcrisisâ episodes, such as the Elizabethan conquest or the War of Independence, the focus is not on an Ireland constituted post-Famine, nor on privileging particular episodes in the narratives of nationhood. The divergent readings of such crises and the repeated emphasis on the malleability of memory narratives of pain advanced here offer more plural histories constituted out of a wider range of hurts, and include embedded structural violence. Particular attention is paid to the politics of emotion in the various conceptualisations and representations of the traumatic (both historical-structural and catastrophic), that are analysed in these pages as well as to the need to incorporate affective historiography into wider considerations of aspects of political, social and cultural life that form part of the public sphere. The extended historical reach of this volume suggests the memory of pain as one way of understanding a tradition within Irish culture (with all of its inconsistencies), a tradition of constructing and narrativising the past in ways that acknowledge trauma (physical and psychological) while also accommodating other reactions to pain, such as creativity, political economy, and resilience. The body in pain can be subject as well as object, an example of the strength of the survivor, as well as the loss of the victim, the target of power and the expression of power in its endurance. The collective effect of this volume registers both ruptures and continuities in ways the body in pain has been mobilised in Irish history and culture across more than 400 years, clearly indicating not only the dynamic, relational, and contingent effects of encounters with the body in pain, but also the opposite: the persistent reach for mythologising tropes of cultural and political memory.
All the essays in the volume address different aspects of the temporal and cultural shaping of the body in pain in Irish literature and culture, illustrating the defining effects of factors such as gender, age, class, and models of national and religious identity, which are presented or available in different ways at specific historical junctures. The phrase âBody in Painâ designates a particular temporality, a continuous present of ongoing suffering, which also invokes a precise spatiality: the delimited surfaces and boundaries of an individual physical being. Attention to the localised, singular, and unique body in pain, however, is rare; surprisingly, it might be thought, when the bodily suffering is so personal, so intimate. Suffering, however, will remain obdurately mute and, in practical terms, invisible or unheard, unless mediated or narrativised, witnessed, and translated, marshalled into a wider temporal and spatial frame, outside and beyond itself. So much more common, then, and inherent in aesthetic reproductions in particular, is the mobilisation of the body in pain as representative. Core preoccupations of this collection are the acts of mediation and remediation that extend the temporal and spatial boundaries of the body in pain into broader representational resonance. If the body in pain is to communicate across time and space through various genres, it must retain affective potency, that capacity to provoke feeling, of whatever kind. Remediation strategies mean that the original audience to the painful event is hugely expanded into a secondary or tertiary audience. This is true both for actual events, such as the 1798 Rebellion, and imagined events; for retrospective reconstructions of inflicted pain or the registration of the ongoingness of suffering. Audiences may further remediate the original narrative of pain by retelling or reusing it for their own purposes. The flip side of remediation is forgetting, which we see here as another of the multiple ways in which pain is not only socially and culturally constructed but is also often put to particularised political uses, whether through commemorative emphasis on remembering only certain events, in a particular way, purposeful âforgettingâ, or instructive silencing.
Time and form are the crucial factors in the case of directive remembering or forgetting. The articulation of physical or mental distress encompasses the dual act of coming to terms for pain (that narrativisation, however approximate) and coming to terms with pain (the release, however partial or transient, that comes with putting words on feelings that give it shape and meaning, however temporarily). Neither âtermsâ necessarily implies resolution or catharsis or the erasure of what might be viewed as the desperate meaninglessness of individual human anguish, but as Griselda Pollock observes, the representation of traumatic suffering inevitably involves a structuring of response that amplifies the somatic experience, however provisional, diffused, or unstable that articulation, whether in image, word, or other forms of representation. 10 There is what Pollock calls in a suggestive phrase, the ârelief of significationâ that follows such structuration, relief in the turn from feeling to saying/showing and relief in the expectation that such articulation âsignifiesâ or means something, evenâespecially, as this collection suggestsâwhen that meaning is interpreted variously depending on to whom the suffering is directed or when and where it is received. 11
Witnessing Pain
The confidence that the articulation of inner feelings or private suffering will meet with some external understanding, recognition or reciprocity, the sens...