The Claim of Fact "Elaine Scarry in her Book The Body in Pain" - Literary Analysis Essay

Introduction

Elaine makes many claims about the unsharability or the inexpressibility of physical pain. She says that pain comes unsharably into our midst and at times, it is very difficult to express physical pain. Pain is described as an aspect of war, torture, and other explicitly political acts. It is a remarkably complex process and it defines the reality. It is a defense mechanism that alerts people to an injury allowing them to protect their bodies and not to damage themselves any further (Van Ommen et al. 334). For most people in pain, there is no reality besides pain. I disagree with Scarry's idea that it is always difficult to express physical pain and that human beings have no language for the body in pain. Physical pain itself has a voice.

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Pain can be expressed in various ways depending on the culture expressing it. Once human beings look at how the pain is expressed, they are likely to find themselves dealing with a public or a political situation. Scarry believes that the physical pain inflicted in the process of torture is a method of destroying. In fact, according to her, torture is meant to deconstruct the language and world of the victim (Scarry 10). In torture, the reality of the victim is reduced to an awareness of pain while the world of the torturer remains fully present. Normally, the expression of pain is represented by changes in facial expression. Pain behaviors are communicative. However, certain behaviors that communicate pain such as facial expressions are specifically adapted for social communication (Van Ommen et al. 334). Certain cultures in Mediterranean and Middle East encourage the expression of pain. Others suppress it and this is the main reason why kids from some cultures behave bravely. In contemporary Anglo-European culture, people tend to express pain by sharing it with others. This culture tries to convince us that the experience of pain is decisively modified or shaped by the individual human minds and that pain is nothing but an aspect of the disease and therefore, a medical problem.

The pain only exists in human experiences. Scarry underplays the historical and socio-cultural nature of pain in the sense that her exploration of pain as unmasking specifically in war and torture is not in line with the doctrines of most cultures around the world. In many societies, torture is not just wrong, it is a taboo and it reveals a lot about those who enforce it and those who violate it. Taboo reflects the overall value system of the community (Van Ommen et al. 335). In torture, the normal relation between body and voice is deconstructed and replaced by verbal assertions. The blood of an individual is the ultimate measure of moral concern and ethical consideration.

Though it has a cause, pain has no object. The body in anguish merely aches. Pain is the foundation of human creativity and most gifted people find it necessary to make certain items in an effort to respond to bodily suffering. "It is isolating because it cannot be shared with others. Furthermore, it is elusive and evades the constraints of language" (Scarry 29). Physical pain actively destroys language and it forces an individual to revert back to a pre-linguistic state. Pain as a state of consciousness has no referential content in the sense that it tends to resist objectification in language.

Pain is recognized as part of human experience and people always tend to assume that communication about pain will continuously cross cultural boundaries. In this regard, individuals in pain are subject to the ways their cultures have trained them to express pain (Van Ommen et al. 336). Scarry believes that imagination and pain are counterparts and that they together provide a framing identity of a human being. According to her, pain is indescribable in language and those who go through emotional or physical pain cannot talk about it but rather express their feelings. As much as human beings have the ability to express themselves through language, material works, and artifacts, they also have the ability to foster meaningful and just lives.

Conclusion

Scarry believes that pain is a state of being whole without objects (Scarry 39). However, this is not the subject of pain itself and the focus should be on the lack of sensation and numbness. If to feel pain is to be human, what really happens when an individual loses the ability to feel pain? In such a case, can pain escape language and numbness? In modern times, the claim that intense suffering is beyond words is a major theme. At times, it is very difficult to explain painful sensations in words to other people (Van Ommen et al. 339). Normally, the body in pain seeks solitude and silence instead of words. Distressing bodily states are resistant to easy communication and those who experience acute pain do not possess another state in which they can bear witness to their sufferings. In most cases, pain alienates sufferers from themselves in the sense that there is always a disconnection between the body-in-pain and an individual experiencing the pain.

Works Cited

Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford University Press, USA, 1985.

Van Ommen, Clifford, John Cromby, and Jeffery Yen. "The Contemporary Making and Unmaking of Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain." (2016): 333-342.