The Body in Pain

This is not a book I read quickly and I don’t think it’s supposed to be one. Scarry’s central claim, that pain has no referential content, it isn’t of or for anything the way fear is of a threat or love is for a person, sounds almost too simple stated plainly, and then she spends the rest of the book showing exactly how much weight that simple claim can carry. Torture, war, the Bible, Marx, all get pulled into the same argument about what happens when a person’s interior state resists being put into words at all.

I split this into small chunks to actually get through it, a chapter at a time with real gaps between, because it’s dense enough that reading it in longer sessions started to blur rather than build. That’s not a knock, some books are meant to be worked through rather than consumed, and this is one of them. The chapters on torture are the hardest to read, deliberately, Scarry is not interested in softening what she’s describing, and the later turn toward made objects and creation as the inverse of pain, something that moves toward language instead of away from it, recontextualizes everything that came before in a way I wasn’t expecting from a book that started so bleak.

I don’t fully buy every piece of the argument, there are places where the claim that pain is categorically indescribable feels stretched past what the examples actually support, but even where I disagreed I found myself thinking harder about why than I do with most nonfiction I finish and immediately shelve. Worth the month it took.