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

Rating:
Summary: Densely written but rewarding treatise
Review: Elaine Scarry's "The Body in Pain", an influential study on the relationship between pain, torture, warfare and creativity is a stunning achievement, from the standpoint of Marxism. I confess that I have not read the sections on the structure of warfare, but I was extremely impressed with the passages on torture. Scarry's central premise is that pain, a radically subjective, hence inexpressible and incommunicable experience, results, during the process of torture, in destroying, or deconstructing the victim's voice (his or her power of articulation) and by extension, the victim's world. It is the prisoner's pain, incommunicable because unsharable, which is denied by the torturer as pain but translated as the wholly illusory phenomenon of power, that of the torturer and the regime he represents. These parts of the book are expounded with considerable insight and sophistication, in dense and convoluted prose. The second part, dealing with how pain is converted to creativity, explains how the radical subjectivity and inexpressibility of the sufferer's pain is mitigated into the objective (hence sharable and communicable) activity of work, which is a self-imposed, milder and socially more profitable form of pain. This treatise is absolutely vital reading for any one who aspires to seriously dabble in literature, psychology or philosophy. A tour de force.

Rating:
Summary: Helpful in Working With Torture Victims
Review: I have worked with several individuals who suffered extreme physical torture sometime during their lives. Scarry's work helped me to understand the internal world of the sufferer in ways I would never have even begun to approach. Each one of these individuals lacked the language to discuss their experiences. What they were left with was inarticulatable images, physical sensations, emotions, profound helplessness and alienation. Scarry's book helped me find language to give to my patients -- language that helped to normalize their reaction to, and experience of inexplicable events. Her exploration of the abyss of human destruction is accomplished such original, humane, and thoughtful detail. Her book is an ingenius work of art.

Rating:
Summary: Necessary Read in Light of Current Events
Review: I was originally assigned to read this book for a course on performance art. I found it a particularily useful tool for understanding performances in which the artist causes himself or herself bodily pain.

However, after the recent WTC and Pentagon attacks, it began to haunt me once again -- in particular Scarry's central claim that "what is quite literally at stake in the body in pain is the making and unmaking of the world" (23). Her chapter "The Structure of War" is indispensible under the current circumstances. She argues that "The dispute that leads to war involves a process by which each side calls into question the legitimacy and thereby erodes the reality of the other country's issues, beliefs, ideas, self-conception. Dispute leads relentlessly to war not only because war is an extension and intensification of dispute but because it is a correction and reversal of it. That is, the injuring not only provides a means of choosing between disputants but also provides, by its massive opening of human bodies, a way of reconnecting the derealized and disembodied beliefs with the force and power of the material world" (128). This is such a compelling argument given the lack of a Palestinian state, and the terrorists' belief that Islam is threatened by Western beliefs and practices (i.e. calls its "reality" into question). However, it seems that terrorism shares qualities with nuclear war, which she argues has more in common with activities of torture. It becomes clear that terrorism inhabits a grey area (Scarry doesn't specifically discuss terrorism, and so the reader must extrapolate her argument).

Further, her chapters on "Making" are important. Structures such as the WTC, the Pentagon, and aircraft are more than just mere symbols of Western power -- they are a literally a projection of the live body (she relies heavily on Marx here). The book also brilliantly discusses issues of visibility and invisibility. These issues keep coming up in commentary on the attacks: the U.S. goverment repeatably states that some aspects of the war on terrorism will be "visible" and others "invisible." Additionally, some have argued that the attacks were designed specifically for vision and media presentation. We have to examine to what extent "visibility" and "truth" are conflated in American culture.

The one drawback of the book is that it was written in the 1980s, before the Gulf War and other events that have changed the "face of battle." Regardless, this controversial and insightful book is still much more than a starting point -- and it has been so helpful for me (emotionally and intellectually) as I try to grasp what these current events mean.

Rating:
Summary: Necessary Read in Light of Current Events
Review: The Body in Pain includes many interesting ideas and theories that could be made into engrossing analyses, yet Elaine Scarry manages to even make torture boring. Her frankly very intelligent observations would be much better suited to a 20 page scholarly essay than a 300 plus page repetitive rant that seems to care more about displaying her verbal acuity than proving a point, let alone attracting readers. I have counted the number of times she uses the word "sentient" and "sentience": some pages include these terms more than 8 times. One would think that an author so obviously bent on proving her intelligence would deign to consult a thesaurus. Perhaps "feeling" is too plebeian a term for her....

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating and Flawed
Review: The Body in Pain includes many interesting ideas and theories that could be made into engrossing analyses, yet Elaine Scarry manages to even make torture boring. Her frankly very intelligent observations would be much better suited to a 20 page scholarly essay than a 300 plus page repetitive rant that seems to care more about displaying her verbal acuity than proving a point, let alone attracting readers. I have counted the number of times she uses the word "sentient" and "sentience": some pages include these terms more than 8 times. One would think that an author so obviously bent on proving her intelligence would deign to consult a thesaurus. Perhaps "feeling" is too plebeian a term for her....

Rating:
Summary: Good but limited insights
Review: What an odd and wonderful book! It attempts to address three topics -- pain/torture, warfare, and creativity. On the subject of pain/torture it is remarkably acute. The description of what pain is and what it does to consciousness and life's enjoyment is terrific and, in my experience, unprecedented. Similarly, its description of torture and what torture means is stunning in its immediacy. However, when it goes from torture to warfare, the book goes off the rails. It is clear that Ms Scarry has a limited knowledge of warfare and a very limited understanding of what it means and how it is carried out. Warfare is usually a last resort and often involves activity by those who are free against those who are trying to create and perpetuate some form of slavery. (see the work of Victor Davis Hanson, e.g., The Soul of Battle.) This applies whether the war is conventional or nuclear. Her idea that taking the process of war to the civilian population is somehow a function of nuclear war is simply wrong. This approach to war is thousands of years old and, as Hanson points out, important and -- in some contexts -- virtuous. War is a horror, but it is better than slavery, torture, or conquest plus annihilation. Scarry doesn't address this. This book makes the experience of pain clear, but offers a wooly and uncertain explanation of war. Its Marxist approach to creativity is shallow and forgettable.