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Writing Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 19/11/2021, SPi
OXFORD STUDIES IN AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY
Gordon Hutner, Series Editor
After Critique
Mitchum Huehls
Unscripted America
Sarah Rivett
Forms of Dictatorship
Jennifer Harford Vargas
Anxieties of Experience
Jeffrey Lawrence
White Writers, Race Matters
Gregory S. Jay
The Civil War Dead and
American Modernity
Ian Finseth
The Puritan Cosmopolis
Nan Goodman
Realist Poetics in American
Culture, –
Elizabeth Renker
The Center of the World
June Howard
History, Abolition, and the
Ever-Present Now in
Antebellum American Writing
Jeffrey Insko
Not Quite Hope and Other
Political Emotions in the
Gilded Age
Nathan Wolff
Transoceanic America
Michelle Burnham
Genre and White Supremacy
in the Postemancipation
United States
Travis M. Foster
Modern Sentimentalism
Lisa Mendelman
Speculative Fictions
Elizabeth Hewitt
Transamerican Sentimentalism
and Nineteenth-Century
US Literary History
Maria A. Windell
Jewish American Writing
and World Literature
Saul Noam Zaritt
The Archive of Fear
Christina Zwarg
Violentologies
B. V. Olguin
Transgression and Redemption
in American Fiction
Thomas J. Ferraro
The Latino Continuum and the
Nineteenth-Century Americas
Carmen E. Lamas
Time and Antiquity in
American Empire
Mark Storey
Literary Neurophysiology
Randall Knoper
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 19/11/2021, SPi

Writing Pain in the

Nineteenth-Century
United States

THOMAS CONSTANTINESCO

1
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 19/11/2021, SPi

3
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 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 3/12/2021, SPi

C O N TE N T S

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 
. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Economy of Pain 
. Willing Pain in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the
Life of a Slave Girl 
. Emily Dickinson and the “High Prerogative” of Pain 
. Henry James, Invisible Wounds, and the Civil War 
. The Pedagogy of Pain in Elizabeth Stuart
Phelps’s The Gates Ajar 
. Pain, Will, and Writing in the Diary of Alice James 
Coda 

Endnotes 
Works Cited 
Index 
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I finalized the manuscript of Writing Pain in the spring of , one

year into the COVID- pandemic. Amidst social distancing and the
hardships of lockdown life, I was regularly reminded how much schol-
arship is not a solitary, but a collective adventure. This book benefited
indeed from many conversations and insights, from its inchoate begin-
ning at Université de Paris (then Université Paris Diderot) to its
completion at the University of Oxford, and it is a great pleasure to
acknowledge here the help I received throughout, in so many forms.
At Université de Paris, I have been privileged to count Catherine
Bernard, Antoine Cazé, Mathieu Duplay, Michel Imbert, Cécile Rou-
deau, and Sophie Vasset as my colleagues and friends in the English
Department and at the LARCA research team. Our discussions shaped
my understanding of American literature and literary theory in more
ways than I can say. The late François Brunet was an early supporter of
this project and I miss his towering presence in the hallways of the
Olympe de Gouges building. By asking me to speak about Alice and
William James on several occasions, my colleagues in the French
Department, Paule Petitier and Stéphanie Smadja, played no small
part in kickstarting my thinking about pain and literature. At Oxford,
Lloyd Pratt, Nick Gaskill, Katie Murphy, and Noël Sugimura welcomed
me graciously and provided enthusiastic support. Before that, the
friendship of Richard Scholar, Ita Mac Carthy, John Scholar, Francesco
Manzini, Michaël Abécassis, and Sophie Loyer made me feel at home
away from home in “the city of dreaming spires.” As this book goes to
press, I begin my tenure as Professor of American Literature at Sor-
bonne Université: here is to new scholarly adventures.
I could not have started, let alone completed, Writing Pain without
time and funding provided by the Institut universitaire de France,
where I was a Junior Fellow between  and , and by the
Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions program of the European Union’s
Horizon  research and innovation program under grant agreement
No. , through which I was awarded a Research Fellowship at
Oxford between  and . I also held Visiting Fellowships at Oriel
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 19/11/2021, SPi

viii | 

College, Oxford, in  and –. I am very grateful to the

Governing Body and to the former and current Provosts of Oriel, Moira
Wallace and Lord Neil Mendoza, for making it possible. Thanks also to
Rebecca Bricklebank for welcoming me to College life.
I was fortunate to deliver work in progress from this project in
seminars at the École normale supérieure, the University of Heidelberg,
Sapienza University of Rome, University College London, Sorbonne
Université, the University of Toulouse, Cambridge University, the Uni-
versity of Sussex, and the University of Oxford, as well as in conferences
of the French Association for American Studies, the British Association
of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, and the American Studies Associ-
ation. I am deeply appreciative for the valuable feedback I received on
every occasion. Special thanks are due to Günter Leypoldt, Tim Sommer,
Giorgio Mariani, Linda Freedman, Kristen Treen, Vanessa Cook, Christy
Wensley, Ed Sugden, Édouard Marsoin, Emilia Le Seven, Thomas Du-
toit, Marc Amfreville, Nathalie Cochoy, Ada Savin, Laure de Nervaux,
Tom Wright, Jamie Fenton, Mark Storey, Paul Hurh, Sari Altschuler,
Erica Fretwell, Shari Goldberg, Carolyn Roberts, and Jonathan Schroe-
der. For encouragement and inspiration along the way, thanks to Richard
Anker, Jean-Marie Fournier, Laurent Folliot, Isabelle Gadoin, Vanessa
Guignery, Charles-Édouard Levillain, Peter Lurie, Bruno Monfort, Fran-
çois Specq, Antoine Traisnel, and Joseph Urbas.
Catherine Bernard, Erica Fretwell, Shari Goldberg, Michael Jonik,
Caroline Levander, Chad Luck, Nicholas Manning, David
M. Robinson, Russell Sbriglia, John Scholar, and Richard Scholar
generously read drafts of various chapters. Their sharp comments
helped strengthen my arguments in many ways. Mathieu Duplay
agreed to supervise my Habilitation à diriger des recherches in ,
for which I wrote an early draft of this book, while Marc Amfreville,
Elizabeth Duquette, Ronan Ludot-Vlasak, Lloyd Pratt, and Cécile Rou-
deau also sat on the evaluation committee. Writing Pain was rewritten
and augmented in light of their exacting assessment and thoughtful
suggestions. Their amazing responses to the project went a long way
toward making this book what it is.
In the winter of , I was fortunate to conduct a graduate seminar
on “Bodies in Pain and Suffering Minds” at Oxford as part of the MSt.
Program in English and American Literature, where many of my ideas
were once again challenged and refined in a series of generative
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 | ix

conversations. Thanks to Talise Beveridge, Tallulah Griffith, Megan

Griffiths, Brandon Johnson, Caroline Koktvedgaard, Chess Law,
Sammy Moriarty, and Michael Pusic for their enthusiasm, their passion
for literature, and their commitment to critical thinking.
I could not have hoped for a better editor than Gordon Hutner. From
his encouragements to submit a prospectus to his expert handling of
the review process, down to his meticulous edits on the manuscript, he
showed me the way. I am humbled by his continued trust in this
project. The anonymous reviewers went above and beyond to engage
with my work. They helped me see more clearly where the book’s
argument lay, while suggesting astute ways hopefully to make it visible
to others too. Katerina Pavlidis and Ben Wheadon were of invaluable
help when it came to preparing the final version of the manuscript,
checking citations and tracking down references with impressive rigor
and efficacy. At Oxford University Press, Katie Bishop and Aimee
Wright expertly steered the book through.
Agnès Derail not only read multiple drafts of this book: she has been
a teacher, mentor, and dear friend for twenty years now. My greatest
debt is to her. I wish I could express the depth and breadth of my
gratitude.
Anne-Sophie keeps reminding me that “life is not dialectics.” Mila
and Lucy keep me on my toes. This book is for them.
*
Portions of the Introduction are derived in part from “ ‘I must calculate
over again’: Measures of Pain in Melville,” published in Textual Practice
(), copyright © Taylor & Francis, available online: http:www.
tandfonline.com/./X... I thank the pub-
lisher for allowing me to use this material.
I am also grateful to Harvard University Press for permission to
reproduce material from The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition,
edited by Ralph W. Franklin, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, Copyright © ,  by the President and
Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © ,  by the President
and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © renewed ,  by the
President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © , , ,
, , , , , ,  by Martha Dickinson Bianchi.
Copyright © , , , ,  by Mary L. Hampson.
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Introduction

n “The Case of George Dedlow” (), physician and writer Silas

I Weir Mitchell confronted readers of the Atlantic Monthly with a
harrowing tale of suffering and dismemberment, in which he produced
one of the first literary explorations of the phenomenon of phantom
limb pain. Set during the Civil War, the story takes the form of
Dedlow’s retrospective account of his many injuries in battle, which
result eventually in the amputation of all of his four limbs, and of his
return to civilian life an agonizing and “useless torso.”1 In the early
pages of the narrative, upon looking at his first severed member,
Dedlow exclaims, “There is the pain and here am I. How queer!”2
The conspicuous definite article—“the pain”—emphasizes the oppos-
itional structure of the sentence (“There . . . here”). It points to the gap
between Dedlow’s person and a pain which is both objectified and
exteriorized and which he cannot identify as his own, except in the
“queer” form of dissociation and misrecognition. Pain is further pro-
jected into a body part with which the character and narrator has no
physical relation anymore, as “the arm [now] . . . lay on the floor,” yet
which he continues to be able to designate, and even experience, as the
site of pain and with which he therefore remains somehow connected.3
Pain is thus registered neither as purely somatic nor as exclusively
psychological, but instead indexes the inextricability of body and
mind in the attempt to apprehend it. Inhabiting a “strange subject
position” defined by self-estrangement, Dedlow joins the chorus of
literary voices that Writing Pain is concerned with and for whom
pain is both “something that is not self-evidently one’s own” and
something that, circulating in and out of persons, unsettles the coord-
inates of experience itself.4

Writing Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States. Thomas Constantinesco, Oxford University Press.
© Thomas Constantinesco 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192855596.003.0001
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 19/11/2021, SPi

 |     - 

Early readers of Mitchell’s story found it so believable that some

decided immediately to start a collection for Dedlow. Rather than
suggesting the gullibility of postbellum American readers, I take this
anecdote, and the particular story it is attached to, to reveal the
paradoxical centrality of pain in the nineteenth-century United States,
at once ubiquitously familiar and yet strangely ungraspable. Toward
the end of the century, two antithetical accounts of pain provide
another version of this paradox. On the one hand, philosopher Charles
Sanders Peirce reportedly defined the nineteenth century as the “Age of
Pain.”5 He was referring, or so the story goes, to the alarming increase
in the number of nervous breakdowns and suicides in the s and
s. Behind the veneer of progress and the injunction to individual
happiness, the Gilded Age produced many casualties indeed, across
lines of race, gender, and class. Yet Peirce’s apocryphal phrase equally
applies to the earlier part of the nineteenth century, before the Civil
War but also before the discovery of aspirin in  and the invention
of anesthesia in , when pain was a ubiquitous experience of
everyday life in ways it no longer is today—at least for many.6 On the
other hand, however, as scientific and technological progress made pain
relief more readily available, the nature of pain, as well as its function in
life, remained a source of intense debates and controversies, leading
Peirce’s fellow pragmatist, William James, to declare in  that “the
physiology of pain is still an enigma.”7 Writing Pain investigates the
tension between the ubiquity of pain and its enigma by looking at how a
series of American literary writers grappled with it across the nine-
teenth century.
This tension has been articulated anew by contemporary theorists as
an opposition between the evidence of pain for the sufferer and its
opacity to others. “To have pain is to have certainty,” Elaine Scarry
writes in The Body in Pain; “to hear about pain is to have doubt.”8 The
gap between the tangibility of pain for the self-in-pain and its unver-
ifiability for the observer is the fundamental problem of pain, which
denies a common ground between self and other and prohibits the
expression of pain. This led Scarry to formulate the crucial insight—to
which I return below—that pain “actively destroys” language.9 The
much-deserved fortune of The Body in Pain in the field of pain studies
and beyond has prompted many of Scarry’s epigones, however, to
downplay another of her key insights, namely, that the very recognition
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of the inadequacy of language to express pain is what makes the effort

toward verbalization an ethical and political imperative.10 In this sense,
acknowledging the defectiveness of language does not profess failure, so
much as it demands further elaboration and fuels the work of literature,
as the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Jacobs, Emily Dick-
inson, Henry James, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Alice James, to which
I devote the following chapters, eloquently reveal.
To put it differently, and as I will argue throughout Writing Pain, if
pain is evidently destructive, it is also generative. It generates in par-
ticular language, subjectivities, and collectivities, albeit in ways that are
often paradoxical. This is both a methodological and a theoretical
claim, one that centers on the forms that pain produces and whereby
it is figured, recognized, and circulated, however problematically. At
the level of method, I bring a formalist approach to literary texts to bear
on the significance of pain in order to link formalism with individual
and social formations. The figuration of pain on the page, I contend,
entails the simultaneous configuration of self and world. Such a granu-
lar approach, which seeks to inhabit the texture of the works it closely
reads, enables us to consider literary engagements with pain, not
merely as illustrating experiences of pain or reflecting cultural attitudes
and discourses toward pain, but as a way of theorizing pain, and thus
conceives of literary writing as its own form of theory.
Common to my readings of Emerson, Jacobs, Dickinson, Phelps, and
the James siblings, therefore, is a sustained attention to the forms
through which pain is given shape and which it shapes in turn, that
is, to the entanglement between the literary aesthetics, the philosophical
conceptualizations, and the individual and social arrangements that the
work of forms brings about. “After great pain, a formal feeling comes –”
Dickinson famously wrote (F).11 Dickinson’s “formal feeling”
speaks both to the world’s “stiff” and “ceremonious” order of pain
that her poem depicts and to its own formal patterns of compression
and repetition, insofar as the individual and social forms that the
feeling of pain produces are inseparable from the aesthetic experience
generated by the lyric form itself. The form of the feeling, then, is also
the feeling of form. From this perspective, literary representations of
pain in nineteenth-century American writings provide a vantage to
think about what Caroline Levine has called “the affordances of
form,” specifically a vantage to think about “the mutually shaping
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potentialities” as well as the “limitations” of the forms we write, read,

and live by.12
The particular affordances of the forms of pain in the literature of the
nineteenth-century United States will come into view in the following
pages through a series of close readings. Close reading names, in
the words of Peter Coviello, the practice of “[dilating] on the peculiarities
of idiom, figure, syntax and diction . . . extensively . . . and . . . unhurriedly”
or, in those of Elizabeth Freeman, “the decision to unfold, slowly, a small
number of . . . texts rather than amass a weighty archive . . . and to treat
these texts and their formal work as theories of their own.”13 On this
account, close reading is also slow reading and becomes a performance of
what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick called, building on Silvan Tomkins, “weak
theory,” whereby “local theories and nonce taxonomies” may emerge from
and as the very texture of the works.14 For Coviello and Freeman, however,
close reading is also “a way into history,” so that the theoretical import of
literary forms is equally historiographic.15 To the extent that Writing Pain
engages with the history of pain in the nineteenth-century United States as
much as with its philosophy, it too is committed to close reading as a way
of doing both theory and history.
In this sense, my understanding of the work of forms both draws on,
and differs from, Michael Snediker’s deployment of “figuration” as a
product of, and a way to approach, chronic pain. In Contingent Figure,
Snediker purposefully abstracts Melville’s, but also Dickinson’s and
Henry James’s language of pain from the history of pain’s ethical,
social, and political uses in the nineteenth century to propose an
exacting elaboration of the literary figurations of chronic pain, at the
junction of queer theory and disability studies.16 His emphasis on
figuration aims to challenge the way disability studies often approaches
chronic pain by focusing on how characters in pain are supposedly able
to articulate their pain “from the vantage of . . . a coherent self,” thereby
serving as mirrors in which we may recognize the lineaments of our
own pain.17 Disputing the correspondence between characters and
persons, Snediker directs critical attention away from characters, plot,
and narrative and toward the surface of writing as the site where pain is
both “given and withheld” and where it can be, like Moby Dick on the
surface of the sea, intermittently sighted.18 This further leads him to
contest the equivalence between tropes, such as metaphor and allegory,
and figuration. Where tropes rely on a dynamic of conversion between
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tenor and vehicle, figuration “unfolds without the promise of—without

the notarizing need for—vehicular complement.”19 While I agree that
the work of literary figuration exceeds the realm of tropology, generat-
ing a paradoxical mimesis that does not aim at capturing or converting
its object but follows instead the rhythm and the form of its singular
allure, Writing Pain remains committed to tracing the ways in which
literary texts from the nineteenth-century United States often begin by
producing tropologies of pain. It is through these tropologies that writers
like Emerson, Jacobs, Dickinson, Henry James, Phelps, and Alice James
engage with the dominant paradigm, the dominant literary and social
form, for understanding pain in that period: sentimentalism—if ultim-
ately to veer away from it. It is in this sense that I take the formal work
that their texts perform to be both theoretical and historical.
From the work that literary writing performs, I argue, one key form
emerges: that of an economy, through which pain circulates both
within and between persons, even as it problematizes the very binar-
isms that its articulation customarily mobilizes—between loss and gain,
body and mind, matter and spirit, self and other, the individual and the
collective, the particular and the general. Considering the work of
writerly forms reveals indeed how pain swings in the literature of the
nineteenth-century United States between generalizations that would
transform it into something else and particularizations that are marked
by discourses of difference—how it swings, that is, and to borrow
Snediker’s vocabulary, between tropes and figurations. By reckoning
repeatedly with the tension between generalized appropriations and
particularized expressions, the different texts I read mount a cumula-
tive challenge to sentimentalism and its allegorical logic of martyrdom,
which promises to reward and redeem pain. In doing so, and to give a
preliminary run-through of the chapters that make up Writing Pain,
Emerson, Jacobs, Dickinson, Henry James, Phelps, and Alice James
fashion, each in their own way, an economy of pain whereby selfhood
and sociality are figured and reconfigured. Seeking to sublimate mater-
ial pain into spiritual ecstasy, Emerson’s philosophy of “compensation”
delineates a model for the conversion of pain into gain which—though
problematic on its own terms—remains unavailable to Jacobs, for
whom pain of body and mind is integral both to the economy of slavery
she denounces and to the Black agency she seeks to reclaim. Dickinson
further exposes as illusory the teleological structure of Emersonian
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 |     - 

Transcendentalism, delineating instead an economy of recursiveness

that figures the chronicity of pain and belies the discourse of sacrifice
that Unionist propaganda advertised during the Civil War. Henry
James and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, for their part, take up Dickinson’s
critique of martyrdom as they grapple with the demands of sentimen-
talism and explore the concurrent economies of affects and desires in
which pain was implicated in the immediate aftermath of the war. At
the end of the century, Alice James positions her experience of pain
within the family economy of suffering through a practice of quotation
and subversion, whereby she seeks to recover her pain from sentimen-
tal appropriations. In the complexity of their figurative, speculative,
and material effects, these various literary economies help to articulate
pain at the crossroads of individual and social formation and as a
function of the interplay of will, possession, negation, and desire—a
nexus of notions that is central to the project of Writing Pain and to the
ways in which nineteenth-century United States literature responds to
the central problem of pain’s inexpressibility and destructiveness. The
next section of this Introduction further elaborates the centrality of
pain’s inexpressibility and destructiveness in order to position Writing
Pain’s methodological and theoretical intervention within the field of
pain studies. I then sketch out the main transformations of the US’
culture of pain in the nineteenth century, before providing an overview
of the book’s structure and claims.

Writing Pain
The inexpressibility of pain is a well-known assumption, and it is at the
core of several influential models for theorizing pain, including Scarry’s
groundbreaking The Body in Pain (). Her study remains indeed
pivotal to the field of pain studies in a large part because it argues for
the fundamental incommunicability and destructiveness of pain. Scarry
followed in the footsteps of Virginia Woolf who famously claimed that
“English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of
Lear, has no words for the shiver or the headache. . . . The merest
schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare and Keats to speak
her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a
doctor and language at once runs dry.”20 Notwithstanding the fact that
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 19/11/2021, SPi

 | 

Woolf limited her argument to cases of illness and framed her discus-
sion of pain through the possibility of doctor-patient communication,
Scarry concludes from this and other examples that “physical pain does
not simply resist language but actively destroys it,” thus unmaking the
sufferer’s world and separating them from others through an experi-
ence which “cannot be denied” and yet “cannot be confirmed” because
it cannot be articulated.21 This tension between certainty and doubt,
between the absolute evidence of my own pain and the impossibility for
others to access it, is at the heart of the epistemology of destructive
pain.22 The notion of pain’s unshareability echoes Henry James’s
description, in “The Beast in the Jungle” (), of May Bartram’s
“chamber of pain,” which remains “rigidly guarded” and “almost
wholly forbidden” to John Marcher.23 Yet James’s oxymoronic
phrase—“almost wholly forbidden”—discreetly belies the model of
intransitivity it seems to put forward, just as Woolf ’s language of
preterition suggests that pain is not simply antithetical to language,
but that its catachrestic power of figuration may on the contrary open a
way for the sufferer to “coin words himself” in order to convey his
intimate experience of suffering.24
Much like Woolf and James, Dickinson’s poetics of pain, which
I turn to in Chapter , investigates and enacts the possibility to chal-
lenge through literature what she called “the Impotence to Tell” in the
face of overwhelming pain (F). In one of her most often quoted pain
poems, she wrote:

There is a pain – so utter –

It swallows substance up –
Then covers the Abyss with Trance –
So Memory can step
Around – across – opon it –
As One within a Swoon –
Goes safely– where an open eye –
Would drop Him – Bone by Bone –
(F)

While pain opens an “Abyss” that threatens to engulf everything

including the suffering subject, the poem is there to testify to that
destructive experience, intimating that the lyric voice somehow man-
aged to survive it. However absolute (“so utter”), pain generates an
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 19/11/2021, SPi

 |     - 

obligation to articulate it and we may hear, behind the adjectival

qualifier and through Dickinson’s equivocal use of the dash—“there is
a pain – so utter”—an imperative command to speak: “there is a pain:
so, utter!” The poem develops from this initial tension between the
silencing power of total pain and the necessity to tell, between
the emptying out of poetic “substance” and the filling of the poem by
the lyric voice. Although disjointed by the shattering force of pain,
poetic utterance remains possible and even ethically binding, even if it
be mere stammer, as suggested by the literal splitting of “utter” and
“Trance” a few lines apart. The poem thus instances the power of
resistance of language, self, and world to the harrowing experience
of excruciating pain. More fundamentally, it also performs pain itself
through its unhinged syntax, hesitant grammar, and stammering lan-
guage. Pain is evidenced in the unsettling of form and meaning that
simultaneously shapes and undoes Dickinson’s lyric. However dis-
jointed or disarticulated, the cry of pain (utter/Trance) resonates in
the poem and through the reader’s body. Pain is literally re-presented—
presented and presenced anew—as what brings poetic utterance to the
limit of articulation, constructing a language of “Trance” which cannot
be translated otherwise than as the tautologic stutter of pain. Pain is not
so much adverse to language, then, as generative of poetic figuration,
even if the figures it produces may never be fully translated into—
converted as or recuperated through—intelligible idiom. Following
Dickinson’s example, Writing Pain departs from theoretical models
that posit pain as incommunicable and views the body and the mind
in pain as “site[s] not of language erosion but of language generation,”
even though the language that pain generates remains unstable and
keeps eluding our grasp, as it thinks its object—pain—in forms that
unsettle the critical and conceptual categories with which we hope to
apprehend it.25
Foremost among these categories is the alleged difference between
physical pain and psychological suffering—what David B. Morris
referred to as the “Myth of Two Pains.”26 In Scarry’s iteration of this
difference, physical pain supposedly shatters language, while psycho-
logical suffering would be the very stuff of literature. On this account,
both experiences would operate under “different ontologies, phenomen-
ologies, and attendant ethical obligations.”27 Building on the opposed
conviction, already current in the nineteenth century, that the body in
 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 19/11/2021, SPi

 | 

pain and the suffering mind are not separate but intersect and overlap,
Writing Pain weaves together somatic and emotional experiences of
pain. The close readings that drive the analysis reveal in particular how
the language of corporeality is often called upon to articulate the experi-
ence of pain, even when that pain is believed to originate in the mind and
leaves no visible scars on the body. This premise supposes to gather
under the single umbrella term of “pain” experiences that might other-
wise be considered distinct phenomena. In effect, Writing Pain includes
discussions of sharp pain resulting from physical injury, blank psycho-
logical suffering caused by grief or wartime trauma, temporary and
durational pain with either psychological or physical etiologies or both,
along with the pain of others as well as lived pain. While it is possible to
sketch out an anatomy of the main modalities and amplitudes of pain
that each chapter engages with—grief for Emerson but also for Phelps,
sexual violation and the pain of enslavement for Jacobs, “great pain” for
Dickinson, traumatic wounds for Henry James, chronic pain for Alice
James—I am more interested in the ways in which, in every instance,
particular kinds of pain are figured through, or in contradistinction with,
other kinds of pain, making them inextricable from one another. “Pain,”
such as it emerges from this inquiry, traffics between a range of modes
and orders, and blurs the very distinctions that it draws on for its
articulation.
Considering how pain is often imagined through other pains high-
lights from another angle the vexed issue of its writing and this book’s
central concern. More precisely, it foregrounds what I would describe
as the double bind of analogy. While analogical writing may prove
inevitable as a mode of apprehending pain, it nevertheless consistently
misses its target, as the form of analogy eventually emphasizes the
unsurpassable difference between the terms it seeks to bring together.
This is true of the various analogies, allegories, metonymies, and
metaphors customarily mobilized to approach pain, whether these
tropes endeavor to frame psychological trauma in the language of
bodily wound or the injured body politic through the exemplar of the
individual body in pain. Yet, however flawed, these “analogical deriv-
ations” between body and mind and between the one and the many are
enabled by a series of tropings or displacements, so that the experience
of pain is enmeshed from the start with its catachrestic figuration as a
performance of difference rather than identity.28 From this perspective,
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
azzal, hogy hova ül, szépen letelepedett a búbos kemence mellé s
mondá halkan, csendesen:
– Búcsuzni jöttem tőled, Bűbájos fiam, s búcsuzz el te is
mindentől, ami eddig hozzám kötött, mert ime, teljesült a
kivánságod, egészen földi ember lettél.
Bűbájos a Nagy Bűbájos térdére hajtotta a fejét, s szomorúan
mondta:
– Nem sajnálom a varázspálcámat, amely máris elvesztette
varázserejét, mert hiába legyintgettem vele a fölöttem keringő felhők
felé, egy sem szállt le közülök, hogy hazahozzon. A
varázstudományomat sem sajnálom, mert amiért epekedtem,
vágyakodtam, a hétszer szép királykisasszony szivét megkaptam.
Csupán egyet sajnálok, oh, nagy mesterem, hogy téged többé nem
láthatlak és nem hálálhatom meg irántam való nagy jóságodat.
A Nagy Bűbájos megsimogatta Bűbájos aranyszőke fejét s
mondá:
– Ne búsulj ezért, fiam. Igaz, hogy te nem láthatsz soha többé
engem, de én láttatlanul, varázsköpenyegemben gyakran ellátogatok
hozzád, hogy lássam a te boldogságodat. Mielőtt azonban örök
búcsut vennék tőled, olyan palotát akarok idevarázsolni néked,
amilyen palotája nincs Mirkó királynak, s nincs egyetlen egy
királynak e föld kerekén.
Többet nem szólt a Nagy Bűbájos, csak nagy tenyerével lezárta
Szikrának is, Bűbájosnak is a szemét, ezek mély álomba
szenderültek, ő meg felemelkedett, varázspálcáját megforgatta
maga körül s közben halkan ezt mormogta:
– Kis manók, kis és nagy bűbájosok, bölcsek és varázslók, mind
ahányan vagytok, induljatok, egyszeribe itt legyetek, Földi ember és
Hegyi tündér fiának palotát építsetek.
Abban a szempillantásban megtelt a kert apró manókkal,
pápaszemes varázslókkal, bűbájosokkal, ezek mind alázatosan
meghajoltak a Nagy Bűbájos előtt, aztán gyorsan munkába fogtak,
dolgoztak éjjel-nappal s mire az első tavaszi napsugár a fák ágai
közt beszürődött a rengeteg erdőbe, hatalmas nagy palota állt a kis
házikó helyén, amelynek gyémánt volt az ablaka, ajtaja, arany a
födele s volt a palotától messze ezüst istálló, ezüst istállóban száz
meg száz ezüst és aranyszőrű paripa. Amikor mindennel készen
voltak a varázslók és bűbájosok, a Nagy Bűbájos tenyerét ismét
szép gyengén rátette Bűbájos és Szikra szemére s azok azt sem
tudták, mit szóljanak a nagy csudálkozástól: káprázott a szemük a
szertelen ragyogástól, csak szüntelen dörzsölték a szemüket, nem
akartak hinni, azt hitték, álom amit látnak. Végre nagy nehezen
magához tért Bűbájos:
– Nézd, nézd, Szikra, nézz ki az ablakon, már tavaszodik. Hej, de
sokáig aludtunk ezen az arany pádimentumon!
– No, ezt igazi ügyesen megcsinálta az öreg, – kacagott Szikra,
aztán karon fogta a gazdáját, úgy mentek szobáról-szobára. Reggel
kezdték a sétát, estig mindig mentek s mégsem tudták végig járni,
annyi szoba volt a palotában.
No, de most már nem is volt maradása otthon Bűbájosnak.
Kiválasztotta a legszebb paripát s sebes szélnél sebesebben, még a
gondolatnál is sebesebben vágtatott el Mirkó király palotájába. Hát
éppen ideje volt, mert a csudafának már kinyilt az ezer virága, itt volt
a tavasz teljes pompájában, s a királykisasszony már kisirta mind a
két szemét, napok óta a torony ablakából leste, várta, mikor jön a
vőlegénye. Retek sem csinált egyebet, folyton leste egy másik
torony ablakából Bűbájost, egyszer aztán lelkendezve szaladt a
királykisasszonyhoz:
– Hagyma legyek, ha nem jön a vőlegényed, szép
királykisasszony! Vége legyen a sirásodnak!
Hiszen, vége is lett, hogyne lett volna. Nosza mindjárt munkának
látott az udvar népe, gyönyörűen feldiszítették a kertet, hogy a
csudafa aljában tartsák meg az esküvőt. Bezzeg, hogy meghivták a
Tündérkirálynőt az esküvőre, meg a szomszéd királyokat is, csak
egyedül a Méz király meghivójával történt valami baj, mert úgy
látom, mint ma, hogy ő nem volt ott a vendégek között.
 Amikor Bűbájos és a királykisasszony elmondták a holtomiglant
és holtodiglant, az ezer meg ezer gyertya lobogó lángjából felszállt
egy csudálatos szép füstmadár, sokáig ott lebegett a fiatal pár feje
fölött, aztán lassan, csendesen eltünt a fellegek között. Bűbájos
hosszan, sokáig könnyes szemmel bámult a madár után, mert csak
ő tudta egyedül, hogy a Nagy Bűbájos volt ez a gyönyörű madár, aki
azért jött el madár képében, hogy láthassa őt esküvője napján.
Hét nap s hét éjjel tartott a lakodalom, én is ott voltam, egyet
nagyot táncoltam, aztán hazaszaladtam, hogy nektek ezt a mesét
elmondjam.
VÉGE.
 Tartalom.

Mirkó király és a Bűbájos 3

A Nagy Bűbájos 13
Tündérországban 26
Szikra 33
Az öreg meg az ifju csudafa 47
Föld szelleme 61
Csengő-Visszhang 75
Vége jó, minden jó 89
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