Sam Ludwig

Professor James Dawes

Capstone Final Draft
28 December 2014

Language, Literature, and Suffering

I.

Introduction

The notion of the suffering of the human body, of visceral pain

and physical torment has long plagued the descriptive agency of the
witness and the sufferer alike. Of course, pain is an inseparable facet of
the human condition, a sensation that subjects its rule over all living
beings an equalizer that cares not for cognizance, agency, or ability.
However, the interpretation of pain and the actual description of
suffering or violence presents a significant issue in both the real world
and literary sphere. When one creates a piece of human rights
literature or journalism in reference to torture or suffering, the
expression of these instances is one which seeks to inspire empathy
without trivializing or bleaching a moral response, as well as
articulating experiences that are far beyond those of the base

audience. While pain may be universal, the suffering of the torture

victim is not, creating a complex climate within which conveying the
gravity of the sufferer in an authentic manner becomes exceedingly
difficult, if not functionally impossible.
One of the most important facets of torture is the unmaking of
both body and space; this is to say that a significant portion of the
horror associated with the infliction of bodily violence is the removal of
safety from a given space. The spaces whether a hospital, a
bedroom, or any other number of spaces and objects whether a
chair, or life-sustaining water that are so often associated with safety
are inverted by the torturer. The chair holds one within a stress
position, water simulates drowning; the life-saving tools of a hospital
become instruments of unimaginable pain, and the bed becomes a
filthy, vermin-riddled place of imprisonment. How, then, are authors to
convey accurately the nature of torture, when the spaces where it is
perpetrated and the objects with which it is inflicted are so strongly
solidified in human consciousness as places of untainted security? To
fully invert these spaces and objects within the consciousness of the
individual in the same manner as one who has been tortured by them
seems insurmountable, save for the visitation of the same traumas on
the witness.

This text will attempt to delve further into the issues of the
portrayal of torture within the province of the victim, (the issue of
depicting the conscious inversion of space and agency a torture victim
experiences) as well as the problems with the language of pain and its
fundamental inexpressibility, in an attempt to explicate the problems
faced by those who wish to express in an authentic manner the
violence and suffering visited on others, often within the sphere of
ethnic and political torture.
II.

Literature & Violence

To write a description of someone elses pain requires the writer

to place themselves not only in the position of the sufferer a bizarrely

abstract concept but to use language to convey a pain that they, and
more than likely their audience as well, has never experienced. This
creates a major issue in human rights literature and nonfiction,
especially since the concern of this type of writing is to accurately
portray violations of human rights and bodies, as well as to inspire
some form of concern or empathy in the reader. Often the goal of these
writings is to produce strong emotion, but when analyzing instances of
violence, much as Susan Sontag does in Regarding the Pain of Others,
it is important to note the distinction between strong emotion and
understanding. She observes that focusing on whether or not an
image, film, or manuscript invokes strong emotion whether horror,

sympathy, or any other visceral response avoids the more important

issue of understanding, which Sontag considers to be the catalyst for
action (Sontag, 19-22). To feel strongly about a piece of work,
especially one that pertains to the issue of human rights does not
constitute understanding or empathy, especially in reference to
instances of violence and torture, and so it seems that artistic or
journalistic work serves a purpose other than the inspiration of
empathy or understanding; because torture and violence in the
extreme are linguistically inexpressible in a manner which allows the
witness to comprehend fully the experience of the sufferer, it follows
that the expression of violence in human rights literature serves much
the same purpose that it does to an oppressive political regime the
objective being to underscore a given message. Of course, in the
politically tyrannical sphere, this message is enforced through violence
on others, evoking the strong emotions of fear that Sontag references,
generally to advance an agenda of subjugation and control. In the
literary sphere, especially among works that deal with human rights
issues, this is clearly not the case. The message of human rights
literature seems to be primarily concerned not with the creation of an
empathetic understanding, but rather with the inspiration of emotion in
the sense of the regime. Literature, much more so than journalistic or
nonfiction enterprise Adam Johnsons The Orphan Masters Son,

which details (often in a seemingly too-lighthearted manner) the

experiences of one raised in a North Korean concentration camp, or
Edwige Danticats The Farming of Bones, which relates the tale of a
pair of lovers caught up in the 1937 Haitian Parsley Massacre does
not seek to unequivocally present facts or objectively recount news.
Rather, these texts work in much the way that Susan Sontag views
photographic instances of violence; a means of making real (or
more real) matters that the privileged and the merely safe might
prefer to ignore (Sontag, 7).
A significant example of this abstraction of pain can be found
within the title story in Thomas Glaves The Torturers Wife, where the
expression of an unnamed womans thoughts (upon discovering her
husband participated in the torture and death of political prisoners)
makes up a significant portion of the text. The instances of violence in
this short piece occur wholly within a sphere of dreamlike visualization.
Of course, this presents a problem in the case of objective presentation
of the suffering of others, but here, this is not the goal. Elaine Scarry
writes:
Because the person in pain is so ordinarily bereft of the
resources of speech, it is not surprising that the language for
pain should be brought into being by those who are not
themselves in pain but who speak on behalf of those who are.
Though there are very great impediments to expressing
anothers sentient distress, so there are also very great reasons
why one might want to do so (Scarry, 6).

Applied to the text, this provides a striking example a possible purpose

within human rights literature; the presentation of violence visited on
others through a bystander who could be described as guiltless (or,
at very least, a character that inspires empathy), especially when this
presentation exists within the fields of imagination and dream,
connects to the reader on a level that would be unattainable if one
attempted to use the meager amount of language available for the
expression of pain. The weight of imagined (yet all too real) violence
being visited on others inspires guilt in the woman, opening a space for
empathy within the reader. The descriptions of violence that appear
within these sections are almost solely images of bodies post-mortem,
with no real humanity attached to them, But now here is all that any
of those who remain remain amidst occasional rainfalls of severed
hands and other parts, including tattered vaginas are willing to
commit to memory (Glave, 72). It is not with ease that one can
associate the severed remnants of a physical body with the human
being who once existed as a friend, or neighbor; to see the severed
limb of another or a broken body is not to be shocked by the loss of
life, nor to think of the very human traits which the body once held, but
rather to separate the notion of humanity from the object: the
response is one of revulsion at viscera and destruction, and so we lose

the dual function of body as object and person. So we see the failings
of the translation of violence we do not respond to the process which
resulted in the unmaking of the individual, but simply to the parts,
never thinking about the sum.
Tangential to this, Scarry notes a duality within the functions of
the body as it relates to the material object, stating If one compares
the living human body with the altered surrogate residing in the
material artifact, one can say that the second almost always has the
advantage over the first. Within the sphere of human rights literature,
this raises an interesting point about the visitation of violence on
bodies; after such a long period of time, in a world where human
physiology is constantly modified by the addition of the external object
(the examples of the scythe and pencil are given, among others), the
association of object and physiology have merged, and in conscious
effect, The natural hand (burnable, breakable, small, and silent)
becomes the artifact-hand (unburnable, unbreakable, large, and
endlessly vocal). In the context of the literature and language of
violence, as well as the unconscious association of humankind between
the natural and artifact, the body has become a collection of objects,
and the encounter of a separated body is reduced to an object that
does not represent violence, but is simply the byproduct of violence.
Shock and revulsion do not inspire empathy save for the direct physical

encounter with the object of revulsion, an example of the difficulty or

portraying any violent or torturous event, and the inability through
language to present these events in a manner that creates a deeper
level of understanding, both of pain and circumstance (Scarry, 256-7).
Glaves story also finds itself concerned with the performance of
acts of violence; near the beginning of the dream-like sequence, there
is a passage about the woman concerning the murder of her husband,
committed in a far-removed state:
She sees that woman who so incredibly resembles her raise a
hand, that hand holding that long, sharp, shining thing, and
plunge it into Him, Once. Twice. Three times. Then her ears hear
that noise. A gurgled cry. She sees: those arms, flailing. Grasping,
uselessly, the air (Glave, 66).

The passage continues in this manner for the rest of the page and
much of the next, detailing the physical act of, as well as the physical
response to murder:
[S]he watches the woman again plunge the thing into Him. Plunge
it. Twist it. Pull it out. Plunge it again she watches the woman look
down at Him as she feels herself looking down at Him. Then, when
he woman turns away, back into the shadows, she feels herself do
the same. But she has not forgotten the voices outside that
continue to call (Glave, 66-7).

The pure abstractness of this sequence (the woman watching

herself commit this act of violence) is quite striking, but the description
of agony, of coughing, spitting, and stabbing, seems far too removed

for the reader to be wholly invested in the understanding of the

fundamental brutality of this scene. In many ways, it reads more as a
classic Hollywood drama, or even a slasher; the entranced woman
visiting revenge upon the man that has done her and so many others
wrong much in the vein of the rape-and-revenge trope. However,
what separates Glaves portrayal from this Hollywoodized standard is
the earlier creation of the woman as empathetic vessel. The reader
follows her suffering, her agony over the unimaginable acts that have
been visited; she is not a means to a gratuitous end, but rather one
who represents the logical extreme of the victim of violence and
torture. Though never really physically tortured or abused, years under
the looming specter of violence brought upon others has pushed the
woman to her psychological limit, unable to be a bystander any longer.
It is in this where Glave is at his most effective; rather than make the
attempt to express fully the pain of others, he simply demonstrates the
effect on one who is comparatively uninvolved, a sympathetic
character that allows the reader to connect wholly to the issues of
torture within, describing the violence from a far-removed position
where the issue of human pain and suffering can be indirectly
addressed.
Furthering the notion that human rights literature seeks to inspire
emotion less so than a pure empathy for those who have experienced

torture, Susan Sontag also makes a series of claims about the nature of
wartime and violence-oriented photography:
Photographs objectify: they turn an event or person into something
that can be possessed they are prized as a relatively transparent
account of reality. Often something looks, or is felt to look better in
a photography Beautifying is one classic operation of the camera,
and it tends to bleach out a moral response to what is shown... For
photographs to accuse, and possibly to alter conduct, they must
shock (Sontag, 81).

It seems that within the vein of human rights and torture, this idea is
applicable to the vast majority of the media produced, not just the
singular facet of photography. In day to day life, the idea of change
through shock is a relatively frequently used method to change
behavior even outside of an oppressive political regime or an anti-war
rally. The use of images of diseased organs, of stillborn children and
bloody mouths are used worldwide on the packaging of cigarettes to
deter smoking. A relatively modern conception, the deployment of
these packs of cigarettes, with shocking, uncensored images have
been shown to decrease the smoking rate of Canadian men and
women aged 15-24 by a margin of 18% just three years after
implementation (White, 1565-66). Though this seems far removed from
the notion of shock within the space of literary endeavor, it is a strong
example of the influence of shock in a sociopolitical space, and when
coupled with the increasing availability of information about the

dangers of cigarettes, shock clearly is a catalyst for real-world change.

To view blackened lungs or a diseased mouth is to view them in a
manner much the same as one would view the hand as referenced
earlier in Scarry. The body-artifact association allows the potential
smoker to view these organs not as a vessel of empathy for the
sufferer, but in an inward manner, one which suggests, through the
usage of shocking imagery, that the particular course of action (in this
case, smoking) will lead to their own suffering or eventual demise. This
function is only narrowly removed from that of shock within human
rights literature because the ability to represent torture and pain is so
significantly limited, it becomes necessary to create an emotional
space that allows the viewer to insert themselves and to experience an
essentially unqualifiable experience in an associative manner.
To the human rights author, authentic portrayal of violence or the
pure suffering of others is a doomed endeavor. The unfathomability of
a state of existence where pain is the only sensory experience escapes
the written word as well as cinematic and photographic endeavor for
several reasons. Among these, we find the cognitive disconnect
between the sufferer and the witness; just as the torturer is reduced to
a vessel of pure infliction and the victim to a vessel solely of pain, so
too does the witness become a vessel of pure external observation,
unable to integrate themselves with the space of pain experienced by

the victim of torture, due to the fundamental fact that the cognitive
experience of the victim is inexpressible. The human rights author
must instead resort to the creation of a removed sympathetic space, a
place where the reader can find themselves associated with one
outside the scope of violence, creating emotion and shock to allow the
reader to indirectly associate with concepts and emotions that would
otherwise be ungraspable, inspiring an empathy that does not
understand the suffering of the torture victim, but allows instead a
strong association with the emotions of those who have borne witness,
as well as the rejoining of the notion of humanity and body-as-object.

III.

The Problem of Language

When one hears about another persons physical pain, the events
happening within the interior of that persons body may seem to
have the remote character of some deep subterranean fact,
belonging to an invisible geography that, however portentous, has
no reality because it has not yet manifested itself on the visible
surface of the earth (Scarry, 4).

For one who is in extreme pain, language completely fails. This is

to say that in the action of experiencing bodily torture, a given
individual begins to gradually lose the ability to describe their
experience, just as the suffering becomes more extreme, a given
witness gradually loses the ability to empathize with the sufferer. Of

course, the notion of one who is in such extreme pain that their
linguistic ability is significantly or completely impaired makes up a very
small portion of the spectrum of possible pain (specifically one
extreme), but it is not only in instances of severe torture and bodily
pain where language falls short of a true empirical description of pain.
The individual experience of pain is wholly interior, but differs from
other emotional and physical experiences in that it is impossible for
one share with others in a manner that inspires a reciprocation of
feeling. Love, hunger, ire these interior states, just as all others, are
those which have objects; one loves this, hungers for that, ire is
inspired by those. However, pain, while it may be inflicted by an
external object or force, is an entirely internal sensation; one does not
feel pain for this or that, one simply experiences pain. Scarry
continues:
Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its
unsharability and ensures this unsharability through its
resistance to language Physical 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 being makes before language is learned (Scarry, 4).

For one who stubs a toe, or breaks an arm, the immediate response is
not simply a cold calculation of the facets of the pain, much as it would
be with an emotional pain (I am sad because, etc.); more often than
not, it is a groan, or a shout, perhaps a torrent of obscenities. There is

no cataloging action when it comes to the description of ones internal

pain for the man who has fallen from a ladder, it simply hurts
there is no taxonomy for pain, a problem that, as we have seen
previously, is often faced in the field of human rights literature.
Often, in practice in modern hospitals, or in the emergency
medical field, one who is in great pain will often be asked to assign a
number between one and ten to their specific pains. This is, of course,
because severe pain is a purely subjective and uncommunicable
experience, simply because it is a relatively unique occurrence. Very
little of human language is concerned with the quantifying of pain,
especially in cases of torture and of severe violence; Cathy Caruth sees
this as a reflection of human consciousness as a whole if the
experience of torture or extreme pain were to be visited on more than
the relatively miniscule percentage of those who have had these
experiences, the descriptions of pain available would likely be radically
more accurate and varied (Caruth, 96-104). It is through similar and
shared experiences that humans develop the ability to empathize or
understand on more than a cursory level, but the subjectivity and
distinctiveness of the personal experience of pain strongly inhibit the
formation of an accurate manner in which pain and trauma can be
shared. To quote Virginia Woolf, English, which can express the
thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear has no words for the shiver

or headache The merest schoolgirl when she falls in love has

Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her, but let a sufferer try to
describe a pain in in his head to a doctor and at once the language
runs dry (Woolf, 194). For one to truly understand pain, language is
ineffective as a tool. What occurs within the internal structure of the
body defies description, though to the sufferer, pain reduces their
reality to the point where reality becomes the awareness of pain, and
nothing more.
Authors frequently fall victim to this inexpressibility, such as
Thomas Glave (The Torturers Wife), or Adam Johnson (The Orphan
Masters Son), who often refer to a net group of words when describing
acts of violence; to the sufferer their pain is sharp, stabbing,
gnawing, burning, dull words that invoke the imagery of the
instruments that inflict pain. When observing the pain of one through
text, however, whether as an omniscient narrator or observer within
the story, the words become much more abstract, focused not on the
infliction of violence but call forth a strange fascination with the
breaking down of bodies. In Edwidge Danticats The Farming of Bones,
the protagonist Annabelle witnesses an amputation occurring next to
her, a woman writhing in pain that defies her own ability to produce
language. However, here the text is not concerned with the pains of
the sufferer. We see the womans pain through Annabelles eyes, a

spectator, and the language quickly becomes more abstract,

concerned with the strange beauty of violence, rather than the
suffering of the human body. The woman gyrates, her leg dangling
daintily by a fragile bend of the right knee (Danticat, 206). These are
not the words of one being amputated with limited anesthetic, but
rather the words of a disassociated witness, an abstraction of the
fundamentally incommunicable pain of the other. The woman being
operated on does not produce sound in this scene, save a soft
mumbling to herself, a sign of the stripping of her linguistic ability. It
seems, that to avoid the cognitive dissonance of witnessing a body in
pain and not assisting in alleviating it, one must remove themselves
from the classical language of pain, and instead turn to the abstract.

IV.

Conclusion
In the discussion of a topic that is as abstract as the conveyance internal agony,

the expressive difficulty lies in the fundamental inexpressibility of the subject. Within this
sphere, human rights authors (with the goal of raising awareness about issues as well as
bringing about the cessation of injustice) rely wholly on their ability to communicate the
urgency of a body in pain; to bring together the dissonance between human and body-asobject in order to create a space where emotion and empathy can be generated. Of course,
when plagued by the limited vocabulary for pain that exists not only in English but in all

language, this becomes a monumental task. To change the very structure of language
within human consciousness is obviously a fruitless endeavor, and so the problem
becomes the generation of a textual place in which the viewer can feel not feel as the
victim feels, but feel for the victim. The duty of the human rights author is to give voice
to that which is unable to be vocalized; not to speak for, but to speak on behalf.

Works Cited
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1996. Print.
Danticat, Edwidge. The Farming of Bones: A Novel. New York, NY: Soho Press, 1998.
Print.
Glave, Thomas. The Torturer's Wife. San Francisco, Calif: City Lights, 2008. Print.
Marks, Jonathan H. "The Logic and Language of Torture." CLCWeb: Comparative
Literature and Culture 9.1 (2007). <http://dx.doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.1022>

Nelson, Maggie. The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2011.
Print.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1985. Print.
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador, 2003. Print.
White, Victoria, Bernice Webster, and Melanie Wakefield. "Do Graphic Health Warning
Labels Have an Impact on Adolescents Smoking-related Beliefs and
Behaviours?" Addiction, 103 (2008): 1562-71. Centre for Behavioral Research.
Print.
Woolf, Virginia. Collected Essays, IV. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967. Print.