{"id":271,"date":"2014-03-31T10:22:28","date_gmt":"2014-03-31T10:22:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=271"},"modified":"2014-03-31T11:00:31","modified_gmt":"2014-03-31T11:00:31","slug":"five-questions-jeremy-davies-on-bodily-pain-in-romantic-literature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=271","title":{"rendered":"Five Questions: Jeremy Davies on Bodily Pain in Romantic Literature"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\"Jeremy<\/a><\/p>\n

Jeremy Davies is Lecturer in English at the University of Leeds<\/a>; prior to taking up this post in 2011, he studied and taught at Cambridge, Glasgow and Queen Mary.\u00a0 His research focuses principally on the intersections between Romantic poetry, medical thought, and ecology, and he has published essays and articles on Percy and Mary Shelley, Jeremy Bentham, and sustainability and nostalgia.\u00a0 Below, we discuss his first monograph, Bodily Pain in Romantic Literature<\/em>, recently published by Routledge.\u00a0 The first thirty pages of this fascinating\u00a0book can be viewed here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

1) How did you come to work on the history of bodily pain, and how did you select the four authors you concentrate on (Jeremy Bentham, the Marquis de Sade, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Percy Shelley)?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It probably goes back to the first time I opened Prometheus Unbound<\/em>.\u00a0 I remember being fascinated and a bit revolted by the monologue with which Shelley\u2019s drama begins.\u00a0 Prometheus describes in grisly detail the tortures to which he\u2019s being subjected, and welcomes them as a glorious empire over which he has dominion.\u00a0 I wasn\u2019t sure what to make of that rhetoric of martyrdom, and that puzzlement stayed with me in a productive way: the book ends with a reading of Prometheus Unbound<\/em>.<\/p>\n

When I was struggling to come up with a topic for a PhD thesis, pain occurred to me as a way of thinking about languages of the body in Romanticism.\u00a0 I soon realised that the Romantic period was the last one before the development of surgical anaesthesia, the most dramatic turn in the medical history of pain, and it all seemed to click into place.<\/p>\n

Shelley was there from the start, then, but the rest of the quartet all made their way in through different doors.\u00a0 Sade was a characteristically mind-expanding suggestion from my doctoral supervisor.\u00a0 The discussion of Bentham was one of those things that starts off as a passing sentence, which requires another sentence of explanation, and then expands into a chapter. \u00a0 The early years of my thesis were those of the debate sparked by the revelations of the US treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.\u00a0 Bentham\u2019s writings on torture were being invoked very seriously as supposed proof that \u2018Enlightenment values\u2019 were compatible with the strategic deployment of torture.\u00a0 It seemed worthwhile to scrutinise what he\u2019d had to say about inflicting bodily hurt more closely than others were doing.\u00a0 Coleridge came last.\u00a0 I\u2019d known for a long time that I was going to write about him, but I decided not to confront him in my thesis, and I got down to work on him only after coming to Leeds.\u00a0 In a funny way \u2013 but perhaps inevitably \u2013 the chapter centred on him became in some respects the one holding the book together.<\/p>\n

2) Were there other writers you considered but ultimately left out or reduced to cameo roles?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Intriguingly (to me) I\u2019ve just dug out a piece of paper on which, on 23 January 2006, I was scribbling disconnected ideas for possible PhD projects.\u00a0 \u2018Pain\u2019 is underlined, and a bunch of ideas follow. Prometheus Unbound<\/em> is there, but so too are Hyperion<\/em> and Lamia<\/em>.\u00a0 Keats isn\u2019t in the book; I suppose I was thinking of Hyperion in his palace, and Lamia\u2019s metamorphosis.\u00a0 Also on that first piece of paper are Thomas Lovell Beddoes and George Cannon, neither of whom got into the book in the end.<\/p>\n

Of the writers who play cameo roles, Adam Smith stands out as one who could have taken up a lot more room: his attitude to pain in The Theory of Moral Sentiments<\/em> is fascinatingly ambivalent.\u00a0 Southey is another, and Harriet Martineau\u2019s Life in the Sick-Room<\/em> is a compelling text but a bit late for my purposes.\u00a0 The book could have developed into a history of Romantic-period medical ideas about pain.\u00a0 In that case I\u2019d have said more about people like John Brown and Erasmus Darwin, and I might have been tempted back in time to deal with the extraordinary archive of consultation letters that passed between the Edinburgh physician William Cullen and his patients.\u00a0 But I didn\u2019t take that path.\u00a0 I did write about the fierce mid-eighteenth-century debate among medical theorists as to whether freshly dissected organs were capable of feeling pain, and about the key role played by pain in David Hartley\u2019s vibrationist theory of how the mind works.\u00a0 In both those cases, though, I\u2019m most interested in how the issues raised play out later on, in Romantic texts that have a less direct relationship with the history of medicine.<\/p>\n

3) What\u2019s so interesting about pain in the Romantic period?<\/strong><\/p>\n

For me, that mostly depends on which individual writer you\u2019re thinking about.\u00a0 There are some general factors, though.\u00a0 Surgical anaesthesia finally emerged in 1846, so the preceding couple of generations are the last ones on the far side of that transformative change.\u00a0 By then, the technology required for anaesthesia had been in place for decades or more (Humphry Davy suggested the possibility of nitrous oxide anaesthesia in 1800, for instance), but nobody had joined the dots.\u00a0 Historians of medicine have puzzled over the question of why that was so.\u00a0 This \u2018anaesthesia problem\u2019 makes the Romantic period a loaded site for thinking about attitudes to pain.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s Foucault\u2019s account of the development of clinical medicine after the French Revolution.\u00a0 He suggests that an epistemic shift is captured by a change in doctors\u2019 characteristic opening question to their patients: from asking them \u2018What is the matter with you?\u2019 (an invitation to narrative) to asking \u2018Where does it hurt?\u2019 (a decoding of internal signs).\u00a0 That too gives Romantic-period pain a particular resonance.\u00a0 Thirdly, you could look to Romantic aesthetics.\u00a0 What\u2019s the relationship between bodily pain and the culture of the sublime, especially given that many of the canonical Romantics were chronic pain sufferers?\u00a0 I dwell on Coleridge and Shelley, but you might also think about Byron\u2019s club foot, Dorothy Wordsworth\u2019s migraines, and much else.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m most interested, though, in how bodily pain became intellectually productive for a series of individual writers.\u00a0 As a starkly exceptional and extreme state of life, pain confronted certain thinkers with particular challenges for their idiosyncratic views of the world.\u00a0 I look at how some writers\u2019 characteristic agendas and preoccupations \u2013 which might not obviously have anything to do with physical hurt \u2013 ran up against problems raised by pain, and at how they struggled creatively with those problems.\u00a0 Hence the kind of questions I concentrate on.\u00a0 Does Bentham believe that sufficiently intense torture is bound to overcome its victim\u2019s ability to resist interrogation, and what does his answer tell us about his psychological theory?\u00a0 How do Sade\u2019s depraved anti-heroes experience pain differently from the victims of their cruelty, and what does that mean for the relationship between Sade\u2019s characters and their sensations?\u00a0 Why did Coleridge suggest that he\u2019d achieved an intellectual breakthrough by \u2018metaphysicizing on Pain<\/em>\u2019, or \u2013 much later \u2013 argue that pain helps knit together the great chain of being by reinforcing a polarity between the subjective and the objective?\u00a0 What\u2019s with<\/em> that first act of Prometheus Unbound<\/em>? And so on.<\/p>\n

4) How have modern medical discourses helped you to reconsider earlier modes of representing pain?<\/strong><\/p>\n

In recent decades there\u2019s been a lot of great work investigating the nature and significance of pain.\u00a0 Scholars have reinterpreted pain not as the product of impulses flowing along specific pain pathways in the nervous system, but instead as an embodied experience that\u2019s necessarily constituted partly by ideas, emotions, and cultural entanglements.\u00a0 That\u2019s helped to undermine the clinically disastrous opposition between \u2018authentic\u2019 and \u2018psychogenic\u2019 pain, and to bring about more thoughtful and efficacious \u2013 because more holistic \u2013 methods of treatment for the enormous number of people who suffer from chronic pain.\u00a0 Within medical institutions, that humanist project still has much more ground to win.<\/p>\n

For all that, I think that on a still more basic level the cultural study of bodily pain has run into a bit of an impasse.\u00a0 I argue in the book that we can divide recent pain studies in the humanities into two broad schools.\u00a0 There\u2019s a currently dominant tradition arising from the medical humanities, concerned with pain experience as acculturated and meaning-laden.\u00a0 There\u2019s also a relatively subordinated one, best represented by Elaine Scarry\u2019s The Body in Pain<\/em>, that discerns an inescapable negativity or resistance to language within the feeling of pain.\u00a0 The two traditions have been at cross purposes lately.\u00a0 Though Scarry\u2019s work continues to generate much discussion, it\u2019s often read rather selectively by medical humanists, and without attention to some important precursors (Frederik Buytendjk, David Bakan).\u00a0 I argue that Scarry\u2019s analysis still has more to offer than has fully been recognised.\u00a0 Part of the problem, I think, has been some very imprecise use of the word \u2018pain\u2019 by historians of culture.<\/p>\n

I try to develop a new account of pain that draws on both recent traditions, and to argue that physical pain is indeed intrinsically mediated by culture, and yet not identifiable with any positive meaning that it carries.\u00a0 I think that the most economical and most serviceable way to characterise bodily pain is as a demand to pay attention to the otherwise diffuse, background sense of sensing the world that arises simply from the fact of embodied existence.\u00a0 Pain is a more or less intense compulsion to notice what Daniel Heller-Roazen calls the \u2018inner touch\u2019: the sense of one\u2019s own body that normally hovers on the edge of perception.\u00a0 Characterising physical hurt in this way \u2013 as an experience that summons up the feeling of having feelings, in a nutshell \u2013 makes it a distinctively reflexive and ironic phenomenon.\u00a0 It neither belongs to language nor is merely opposed to it.\u00a0 That ironic dividedness, I argue, is at the root of its importance for the Romantic-period writers I discuss.<\/p>\n

5) What\u2019s next for you?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m currently working on a short book called The Birth of the Anthropocene<\/em>.\u00a0 It begins from the fact that talking about the present environmental crisis often involves references to extremely long-ago times: \u2018CO2 levels are at their highest for at least three million years,\u2019 or whatever.\u00a0 That doesn\u2019t really happen in other kinds of political discussion.\u00a0 It seems that ecological politics needs to be able to tell a story about the deep past in order to explain its concerns and its aims \u2013 but it\u2019s not very good at telling stories like that at the moment.\u00a0 I think that we might find such a story, a kind of origin myth for green politics, in the idea of the Anthropocene epoch.\u00a0 Over the last decade, many Earth scientists have concluded that the Earth is entering a new geological epoch, one in which human activities are a principal influence on the planet\u2019s geology.\u00a0 That is, after nearly 12,000 years of the Holocene epoch, we\u2019re witnessing the birth of the Anthropocene.<\/p>\n

All this might sound a bit remote from Romantic literature.\u00a0 But geology itself emerged as a science in the Romantic era, and the most widely accepted start date for the Anthropocene is precisely our period: the \u2018base\u2019 of the Anthropocene is most often associated with industrialisation in late eighteenth-century Britain.<\/p>\n

I think the Anthropocene gives us a vantage-point from which to think our way back into deep time, geological time.\u00a0 Recognising industrial civilization as a geologic force allows us to see it in a fresh light, as the source of a new epoch within a series of epochs that stretches back many millions of years.\u00a0 If the idea of the Anthropocene helps us to narrate the long historical context of the present crisis, it might serve \u2013 I hope \u2013 to nourish and revivify the ecological movement.\u00a0 As the poet Don McKay puts it, the Anthropocene can enable us to recognise human beings as \u2018members of deep time, along with trilobites and Ediacaran organisms \u2026 one expression of the ever-evolving planet.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 Jeremy Davies is Lecturer in English at the University of Leeds; prior to taking up this post in 2011, he studied and taught at Cambridge, Glasgow and Queen Mary.\u00a0… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=271"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":277,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271\/revisions\/277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}