Drawing on history, art, literature, psychology, and medicine,
Morris (Alexander Pope: The Genius of Sense, 1984) offers an
extended commentary, profusely documented and illustrated, on the
nature, function, and various meanings of pain in Western culture.
Considering pain as both a "biological fact" and "an experience in
search of an interpretation," Morris interprets the psychic,
spiritual, and physical experiences of pain and the symbolic,
metaphoric, and symptomatic expressions of it from Plato to Joyce
Carol Oates, Freud to Norman Cousins, Job to de Sade. The invention
of ether in 1846 altered the meaning of pain but did not eradicate
it, and to medical science most pain remains a mystery: chronic
pain, hysteria, numbness (which is more dangerous than pain),
redemptive or religious pain, visionary or revolutionary pain,
edifying pain, tragic pain ("we no longer recognize" it), and comic
pain (the best discussion in the book, though its relation to pain
is tenuous). Morris surveys the creative uses of pain by artists,
the instructive uses of pain by satirists, the erotic uses of pain
by sadomasochists, the political uses of pain as torture, and the
aesthetic uses of pain in the sentimental, melancholy, and sublime
styles of Romantic writers who associated beauty with loss,
suffering, and death. He concludes with a lyrical celebration of
"The Future of Pain": "We must begin to proliferate its meanings."
Such a statement reflects the major problems of the book: the
exhortative tone, the use of the implicative "we" in place of sound
argument, and the very proliferation of meanings so that pain
becomes an abstraction, resembling pleasure, detached from the
causes - anguish, deprivation, discomfort - however spiritual or
mental in origin, that healthy people instinctively avoid and that
most philosophers, long before Bentham, believed to be a threat to
organized society and civilization. Without ideology, it is still
an interesting but poorly organized book and no substitute for
Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain (1986). (Kirkus Reviews)
This is a book about the meanings we make out of pain. The greatest
surprise I encountered in discussing this topic over the past ten
years was the consistency with which I was asked a single unvarying
question: Are you writing about physical pain or mental pain? The
overwhelming consistency of this response convinces me that modern
culture rests upon and underlying belief so strong that it grips us
with the force of a founding myth. Call it the Myth of Two Pains.
We live in an era when many people believe--as a basic, unexamined
foundation of thought--that pain comes divided into separate types:
physical and mental. These two types of pain, so the myth goes, are
as different as land and sea. You feel physical pain if your arm
breaks, and you feel mental pain if your heart breaks. Between
these two different events we seem to imagine a gulf so wide and
deep that it might as well be filled by a sea that is impossible to
navigate.
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