Introduction: The Body in Pain in Irish Literature and Culture

Abstract

This volume elucidates the ways the pained and suffering body has been registered and mobilised in specifically Irish contexts across more than 400 years of literature and culture. The expansive historical landscape of this collection is populated by wounded, torn and broken bodies; bodies damaged by war, by political and sexual violence, and by economic and social marginalisation; bodies ravaged by starvation and illness and destroyed by grief and death. Conversely, that same landscape features individuals and communities reconstituted and affirmed by experiences of pain: marshalling their afflictions into wider symbolic narratives (religious, political, social), suffering becomes emblematic of fuller subjecthood. There is no singular approach to what pain means: the material addressed here covers diverse cultural forms produced in response to different historical circumstances in terms that confirm our understanding of how pain—whether endured or inflicted, witnessed or remediated—is culturally coded. It is as open to ongoing redefinition as the Ireland that features in all of the essays gathered here. What unites these bodies in pain is that in one way or another all express or attempt to express their suffering, and that that suffering reflects and refracts diverse Irish experiences and subjectivities. Each chapter critically attends to pain and suffering and analyses its signifying power. Cumulatively, these essays underscore the persistent and pervasive presence of pain in the constitution of self and wider communities of belonging in Ireland as elsewhere. A shared concern is summarised by Patricia Palmer in this volume’s second chapter in a deft renewal and reversal of Fredric Jameson’s dictum ‘history is what hurts’: she suggests instead, as does so much of the work in this collection, that ‘hurts make history’.

This volume elucidates the ways the pained and suffering body has been registered and mobilised in specifically Irish contexts across more than 400 years of literature and culture. The expansive historical landscape of this collection is populated by wounded, torn and broken bodies; bodies damaged by war, by political and sexual violence, and by economic and social marginalisation; bodies ravaged by starvation and illness and destroyed by grief and death. Conversely, that same landscape features individuals and communities reconstituted and affirmed by experiences of pain: marshalling their afflictions into wider symbolic narratives (religious, political, social), suffering becomes emblematic of fuller subjecthood. There is no singular approach to what pain means: the material addressed here covers diverse cultural forms produced in response to different historical circumstances in terms that confirm our understanding of how pain—whether endured or inflicted, witnessed or remediated—is culturally coded. It is as open to ongoing redefinition as the Ireland that features in all of the essays gathered here. What unites these bodies in pain is that in one way or another all express or attempt to express their suffering, and that that suffering reflects and refracts diverse Irish experiences and subjectivities. Each chapter critically attends to pain and suffering and analyses its signifying power. Cumulatively, these essays underscore the persistent and pervasive presence of pain in the constitution of self and wider communities of belonging in Ireland as elsewhere. A shared concern is summarised by Patricia Palmer in this volume’s second chapter in a deft renewal and reversal of Fredric Jameson’s dictum ‘history is what hurts’: she suggests instead, as does so much of the work in this collection, that ‘hurts make history’.

This collection offers new paradigms for understanding Ireland’s literary and cultural history. We see it as a contribution to the ongoing development internationally of affective historiographies and genealogies of literature and culture, accounts that are increasingly attentive to what Marianne Hirsch terms in another context, the ‘repertoire of embodied knowledge’.¹ The Body in Pain provides a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches to the analysis of how the body produces meaning, as befits a collection that covers historical and art forms from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century, and that deals with experiential suffering and literary and other cultural representations of such suffering, with both actual bodies and metaphorical bodies. Contributors address the complications that follow the narrativisation or witnessing of real instances of horrific pain, those expressive acts that turn bodies into potent symbolic tropes. Their work also draws attention to the ways that suffering metaphorical bodies testify to systemic and structural political violence, violence that is often framed as intersectional, posited on asymmetrical relations of power based on class, gender, religious background, or ethnic allegiances. The different forms of bodily pain attested to in these chapters draw naturally on a variety of disciplinary approaches including the historical, sociological, psychoanalytical, philosophical, and critical cultural. The ‘body in pain’ is thus an inclusive and elastic signifier, rather than a single overarching model for the analysis of suffering.

In her field-defining publication, The Body In Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985), Elaine Scarry, whose work clearly influences this volume, questioned the signifying capacity of pain. Attending critically to ways in which the infliction of pain destroys subjectivity she questions the motivation of remediations or representations of suffering bodies in literary or other cultural works: such efforts always turned pain into something else, she suggests, and use it for other ends, evacuating it of its distinctiveness. Pain, she argues, cannot be worded: ‘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 makes before language is learned’.² More recently, Rob Boddice, in Pain and Emotion in Modern History (2014), has suggested that Scarry’s work ‘understated human capacities for articulating their suffering on the one hand and implicitly overstated human capacities for articulating all other emotions on the other’.³ Challenging both the idea that pain exists outside of, or prior to, language, and that it cannot be communicated, he explains:

As we translate bodily experience into words, grimaces and art—as we make metaphors of our inner experiences—we literally ‘figure out’ what we feel. These figures may lack definition, but they are no less evocative for that. And just as I ‘figure out’ how I feel, so my witness reads my figures, checks them against her own and, to some degree, understands.⁴

There is an always unresolvable tension at both an individual and wider cultural-historical level, we suggest in this volume, between the physical experience of pain and the critical analysis of that pain; between the articulation of pain, its communicative potential and its remediation. As the work gathered here suggests, however, the grammar by which we ‘figure out’ pain is part of a shifting and dynamic politics of emotions. This is not to underestimate how painful emotions are primarily experienced and expressed in the body, physically, from pounding heartbeats to clenched fists to tears and suppurating wounds. Many of these sensations are similar whether the primary cause of pain is bodily trauma or emotional shock. Furthermore, whether it is experienced directly or indirectly—that is, whether it is first felt on one’s own body or on the body of another—pain is a thoroughly embodied, multisensory experience. The eyes might see the bright red of fresh blood, the nose might smell its metallic odour, the mouth and tongue might taste the saltiness of sweat and tears, and the ears might hear the crack of bones breaking, screaming, or other wordless expressions of pain, even deathly silence. The words that describe or the images that represent that multi-sensory experience of pain might indeed be hopelessly inadequate, yet they do attempt to ‘figure out’ or put into figurative shape the affective experience of pain.

Bodies Matter

Refusing the notion then that pain is inexpressible or that it is transparent, in this volume we attend to the many ways that bodies communicate their pain, reach for signification, insist on or are subject to a particular type of structuration. The material addressed testifies to a movement beyond the paralysing question that long dominated studies of literature and trauma: the paradox of representing the unrepresentable, or what Roger Luckhurst usefully described as the ‘narrative/anti-narrative tension at the core of trauma’.⁵ While not ignoring or oversimplifying the representational challenges that pertain to articulating, performing or visualising the body in pain, our contributors incorporate that challenge into a wider discussion of the ethics and politics of mobilising the body in pain in specific and transhistorical contexts, and the ethics and politics of witnessing such intimate suffering.⁶

Our choice of ‘pain’ over trauma raises the implicit question of whether trauma is a useful term, particularly in the context of the diversification of trauma studies beyond traditional and often prescriptive psychoanalytical models and an increasing openness among scholars to testing its own genealogies and terms of debate.⁷ ‘Trauma’ is a word that many of the contributors to this collection assiduously avoid; some are deeply ambivalent about the appropriateness of applying a concept that has its origins in late nineteenth-century psychoanalysis to the earlier materials analysed here. This collection moves purposefully from the problematics of representing the traumatised body that so preoccupied trauma studies from the 1980s and early 1990s, and instead concentrates on the potential and the politics of the affective. Having said that, trauma remains a resonant term, deployed subtly and consciously by other contributors, particularly in essays concerned with psychoanalytic approaches to healing pain.

Intergenerational trauma and psychological haunting have been used as critical paradigms in particular in accounts of the Great Famine and the Northern Irish conflict for some years now.⁸ Irish studies scholars, like those in various fields of critical studies internationally, have more recently demonstrated how trauma and memory modes together usefully illuminate narratives that register the ways in which past sufferings persist in structural and affective relations in social and political life.⁹ This combination of trauma and memory, however, while often revealing, runs the risk of over-concentration on particular crisis episodes of Irish history, and most especially modern Irish history. Though some of the work in this volume concentrates on ‘crisis’ episodes, such as the Elizabethan conquest or the War of Independence, the focus is not on an Ireland constituted post-Famine, nor on privileging particular episodes in the narratives of nationhood. The divergent readings of such crises and the repeated emphasis on the malleability of memory narratives of pain advanced here offer more plural histories constituted out of a wider range of hurts, and include embedded structural violence. Particular attention is paid to the politics of emotion in the various conceptualisations and representations of the traumatic (both historical-structural and catastrophic), that are analysed in these pages as well as to the need to incorporate affective historiography into wider considerations of aspects of political, social and cultural life that form part of the public sphere. The extended historical reach of this volume suggests the memory of pain as one way of understanding a tradition within Irish culture (with all of its inconsistencies), a tradition of constructing and narrativising the past in ways that acknowledge trauma (physical and psychological) while also accommodating other reactions to pain, such as creativity, political economy, and resilience. The body in pain can be subject as well as object, an example of the strength of the survivor, as well as the loss of the victim, the target of power and the expression of power in its endurance. The collective effect of this volume registers both ruptures and continuities in ways the body in pain has been mobilised in Irish history and culture across more than 400 years, clearly indicating not only the dynamic, relational, and contingent effects of encounters with the body in pain, but also the opposite: the persistent reach for mythologising tropes of cultural and political memory.

All the essays in the volume address different aspects of the temporal and cultural shaping of the body in pain in Irish literature and culture, illustrating the defining effects of factors such as gender, age, class, and models of national and religious identity, which are presented or available in different ways at specific historical junctures. The phrase ‘Body in Pain’ designates a particular temporality, a continuous present of ongoing suffering, which also invokes a precise spatiality: the delimited surfaces and boundaries of an individual physical being. Attention to the localised, singular, and unique body in pain, however, is rare; surprisingly, it might be thought, when the bodily suffering is so personal, so intimate. Suffering, however, will remain obdurately mute and, in practical terms, invisible or unheard, unless mediated or narrativised, witnessed, and translated, marshalled into a wider temporal and spatial frame, outside and beyond itself. So much more common, then, and inherent in aesthetic reproductions in particular, is the mobilisation of the body in pain as representative. Core preoccupations of this collection are the acts of mediation and remediation that extend the temporal and spatial boundaries of the body in pain into broader representational resonance. If the body in pain is to communicate across time and space through various genres, it must retain affective potency, that capacity to provoke feeling, of whatever kind. Remediation strategies mean that the original audience to the painful event is hugely expanded into a secondary or tertiary audience. This is true both for actual events, such as the 1798 Rebellion, and imagined events; for retrospective reconstructions of inflicted pain or the registration of the ongoingness of suffering. Audiences may further remediate the original narrative of pain by retelling or reusing it for their own purposes. The flip side of remediation is forgetting, which we see here as another of the multiple ways in which pain is not only socially and culturally constructed but is also often put to particularised political uses, whether through commemorative emphasis on remembering only certain events, in a particular way, purposeful ‘forgetting’, or instructive silencing.

Time and form are the crucial factors in the case of directive remembering or forgetting. The articulation of physical or mental distress encompasses the dual act of coming to terms for pain (that narrativisation, however approximate) and coming to terms with pain (the release, however partial or transient, that comes with putting words on feelings that give it shape and meaning, however temporarily). Neither ‘terms’ necessarily implies resolution or catharsis or the erasure of what might be viewed as the desperate meaninglessness of individual human anguish, but as Griselda Pollock observes, the representation of traumatic suffering inevitably involves a structuring of response that amplifies the somatic experience, however provisional, diffused, or unstable that articulation, whether in image, word, or other forms of representation.¹⁰ There is what Pollock calls in a suggestive phrase, the ‘relief of signification’ that follows such structuration, relief in the turn from feeling to saying/showing and relief in the expectation that such articulation ‘signifies’ or means something, even–especially, as this collection suggests—when that meaning is interpreted variously depending on to whom the suffering is directed or when and where it is received.¹¹

Witnessing Pain

The confidence that the articulation of inner feelings or private suffering will meet with some external understanding, recognition or reciprocity, the sense that either joyous or anguished affective experiences will trigger similarly empathic or shared responses, are relational equations that have been put under some pressure by Lauren Berlant, amongst others. Berlant persuasively argues that ‘an affect event is an effect in a process, not a thing delivered in its genre as such’; she draws our attention to the messy intersubjectivity of affective exchange, suggesting that ‘our current view of the communicating of affect and emotion is too often simply mimetic and literalising, as though their transmission were performative rather than an opening out to all sort of consequences, including none at all’.¹² Does a traumatic event, she provocatively asks, necessarily communicate trauma to all who encounter it? ‘If one determines that an event or a relation is shameful, must it produce shame in the subjects it impacts?’¹³ Much of the material discussed in this volume provides difficult reading and resists easy solutions that proscribe particular affective reactions to particular expressions of pain, especially given the unpredictability of affective responses to suffering. The representation of the body in pain through these pages can be disturbing, titillating, shocking, frightening, horrifying, nauseating, or repulsive. We don’t wish to sidestep the challenges of reading about pain and suffering but neither is there any suggestion of a normative or singular reaction; rather, the work gathered here interrogates such representations, critically analysing the affective power of the body in pain while remaining open to and emphasising its always multiplying signifying capacities.

As such, contributors take different theoretical and critical approaches to the body in pain. There is the sense that some of the material generated here is purposefully and hopefully directed towards the cultivation of compassion. Compassion, like empathy, involves recognising and identifying with the suffering of another, but has a third dimension, which is the desire to do something to ease that suffering or prevent future occurrences.¹⁴ It is a more engaged and active emotional response than empathy. Sometimes, however, as much of the work here suggests, we refuse or are incapable of attending to the body in pain because, following Susan Sontag, it is too difficult to hold in the mind the reality of what is being witnessed or recounted.¹⁵ It is a problem captured in Jacques Rancière’s account of ‘the intolerable image’, something that viewers cannot look at, listen to or forgive. As Rancière puts it, when the viewer is presented with something they cannot face, there is a shift from ‘the intolerable in the image to the intolerable of the image’.¹⁶ It is worth repeating too, however, that the extreme alternative to turning away, that is, the expression or feeling of fulsome sympathy with the suffering body can be even more problematic. Sympathy is not always a democratising impulse. The co-opting of another’s pain to one’s own narrative to fulfil a self-gratifying impulse can occlude the specific historical formations that caused the suffering in the first place given that pain can so often have a particularised politics. Dominick LaCapra’s conceptualisation of ‘empathic unsettlement’ helps to negotiate between the suspect articulation of total identification with suffering and the outright rejection of the suffering other. Empathic unsettlement, he explains, ‘involves a kind of virtual experience through which one puts oneself in the other’s position while recognising the difference of that position and hence not taking the other’s place’.¹⁷ Marianne Hirsch shares this strategic critical distancing (‘though it could have been me, it was decidedly not me’, as she puts it), advocating ‘a form of solidarity that is suspicious of empathy, shuttling instead between proximity and distance, affiliation and disaffiliation, complicity and accountability’, adding, crucially, that ‘Response in this sense works against appropriative empathy, enabled by incongruities that preserve the boundaries between past and present, self and other, without homogenizing suffering’.¹⁸

In Hirsch’s analysis of what she calls the ‘aesthetics of aftermath’ (for instance, the representation of the Holocaust by second or subsequent generations) she asks: ‘How can we allow the knowledge of past atrocity to touch us without paralyzing us? What aesthetic strategies might galvanize memory in the interest of activist engagement for justice and social change?’¹⁹ The concerns touch on the important and challenging question that is at the heart of much of Lauren Berlant’s influential work on vulnerable bodies: how do we turn feeling into social change? LaCapra, Hirsch, and Berlant make us alert to the need to move beyond the politically ineffectual position of only ‘feeling’, of which Scarry was so suspicious in that seminal study noted earlier, and each suggests alternative terms of engagement with the transformative potential of painful occurrences or atrocities in ways that overcome the structural and affective stasis of dominant features of trauma: its temporal and spatial dysfunctions, its repetitive loops and insistent ‘virtuality’ as a non-material (individual or collective) psychic ‘wound’ that locks the individual (or wider collective) in a permanent ‘now’. In this alertness to varieties of viewer responses to the body in pain, we need also to acknowledge the possibilities for the survivor of a painful ordeal to act and articulate their identity in ways that refuse or refute the label of the body in pain, and refuse empathic engagement, particularly given the often powerlessness of that identity position. Just as the reaction of the witness to pain can be unpredictable, so too can the affective, and political, responses of those experiencing the pain first hand.

The work gathered here also acknowledges that enabling agency or cathartic compensation can be gained from the narrativisation and expression of pain that has been oppressed or silenced (whether directly or indirectly experienced), and that both primary and secondary painful experiences can cause and create both silence and representation. Luckhurst succinctly sums this up: ‘In its shock impact trauma is anti-narrative, but it also generates the manic production of retrospective narratives that seek to explicate the trauma.’²⁰ It must be recognised then, as suggested here, that the production of narratives of suffering, in whatever format, provokes questions about the intentions of those who create or provide the representations, those who receive these representations, and those who continue to preserve or remediate the text, image, or performance of pain. As such, many of the essays in this volume probe at the ethical motivations behind the works they discuss, for instance in the awareness that many of the histories, performances and literature discussed here were not only consumed by a public, an audience or a reader, but were actively constructed in particular terms with specific audiences in mind. The registering of suffering in historical acts or historical records, in artistic and cultural works, is so often directed towards particularised groups. The management of the spectacle of pain, whether by state powers, communities, or writers and directors, must negotiate the levels and portrayals of pain that have become standard or culturally normative and stay within or push the boundaries of such norms, align with such parameters or extend them, and consider issues of voyeurism. For creative practitioners too, however, the issue of authority is relevant, since any disproportionate emphasis on pain can leave the work of art open to charges of being exploitative, rather than expressive only. Though as Berlant’s work cited earlier reminds us, affective reactions are never predictable.

This ethical concern is not limited to analysis of actual painful events but also to representative performances of pain, which aim to shock audiences through their representation of violated bodies. That shock value is again doubly indexed as appalling scenes of brutality can draw attention to these violations as well as providing a compelling spectacle (the term ‘value’ purposefully invoked to suggest both ethical and economic impact). Impact cannot be absolutely determined, just as responses cannot; however, form here plays a role as viewers of television, or readers of texts, for example, inevitably experience a different level of immediacy from the experience of collective witnessing mobilised by live performance. Whatever form is being discussed, however, the volume consistently seeks to question what it is to be an audience to pain.

Some narratives of pain in this collection also acknowledge the conflicting and mobile transitions from pain, pleasure, suffering, shame and gratification in ways that recall Berlant’s refusal to foreclose on possibilities of affective exchange. Contributors spotlight moments in which pleasure can exist within physical disgust, shame, or horror, though these emotions are often suppressed or technically disavowed by the writers. Questions of horror and pleasure are also pertinent to the witnesses to this pain, as readers or as viewers. Just as there is a range of responses to pain and trauma, from shock and disassociation, to vocalisation, catharsis, and resilience, as signalled earlier, affective events or experiences produce multiple potential responses. A taxonomy of such responses would always be partial, and pointless, we suggest, given the ongoingness of affective exchange. But we do want to raise the idea that some such responses must be, in some terms, emotionally satisfying. If a reader or viewer’s response is horror or empathy, there must be a simultaneous or subsequent experience of satisfaction, whether that be via catharsis or a thrill at the taboo, equal but opposite reactions to the storied intensity of painful narratives, a narrative force derived from the shock or high emotion of the experience of pain, and of the experience of witnessing pain, however transient or mixed with other emotional reactions. Pain can be pleasurable.²¹ Such gratification is presumably a contributing factor to the high valency and marketability of narratives of bodies in pain.²²

Whether the body in pain is being constructed then as a source of horror or paradoxical pleasure, the idea of audience is inbuilt to narrativisations of pain from the propaganda of war to explorations of sexual force; these narratives of pain are inevitably shaped to meet, or even exceed, expectations, even from a sympathetic audience. As many of the essays in this collection show, the culture of the body in pain is, at the least, a two-way street, of production and reception, performance and audience. Paraphrasing Luckhurst, such culture consists of both the ‘manic production’ and the manic consumption of ‘retrospective narratives that seek to explicate [or represent] the trauma’.²³ An overarching concern for this volume then is to consider how narratives of bodies in pain, as conduits of visceral and authentic experiences, have come to function not only as important moments of testimony or witnessing, but as forms of virtual (and thereby relatively ‘safe’) access to pain and its catharsis; whilst at the same time raising questions about what might be the implications of this accessibility.

Modes of Pain

Another form of containment comes through the essays that attend to the ways in which available modes for the articulation of pain shape and define expression. A rich variety of modes that mediate and remediate narratives of pain are explored here, including oral history, writing, woodcuts, acting, staging, reporting, filming, and projecting. The figuration of the body in pain in literary and cultural texts is partially constrained and determined by the particular mode of representation; as already suggested, the representation of bodily suffering is moulded and re-moulded by generic conventions, intended audience, the material circumstances of textual composition and medium of communication. Essays that think carefully about the marshalling of specific shared or transcultural frames demonstrate the purposeful play between local expression and the wider transnational referential potential of the body in pain. Shared frames of reference or signification allow for the ease of recognition that enables the mobilisation of suffering for particular religious, national, social, political, or personal ends across time and space. As Dirk Moses puts it ‘without analogues it is difficult to successfully bid for recognition’.²⁴ The translatability of suffering facilitates a repurposing of motifs of the stricken body, codifications of pain for instance that draw heavily on religious iconography (the strained, emaciated, wounded body of Christ; the afflictions of the often ecstatic martyrs that follow in imitative resignation or triumph) can be redeployed to forward the inherent rightness or sanctity of various national or other claims. It is a paradoxical operation: the potent localised expression of sacrificial suffering that gains its particularised impetus from collective, transcultural systems. Relatedly, the refusal of such religious or political or other identification, the turn from analogues, can suggest frank or existentialist acknowledgement of our ultimate disposability, our definite mortality, and our spatial and temporal limitations, in itself a type of codification. The layered processes parallel the claims for transcultural memory articulated by Michael Rothberg, for instance: transcultural memory, he suggests, is multidirectional and presumes a more complex understanding of the local, one that moves beyond monocultural or singular narratives. Such mobile codes allow for the ‘possibility of counter-narratives and new forms of solidarity that sometimes emerge when practices of remembering are recognized as implicated in each other’.²⁵

Mobilisations of the wider resonances of suffering, as Rothberg puts it, provoke questions about ‘whether we equate or differentiate histories’ and ‘whether we do so for reasons of solidarity or competitive antagonism’.²⁶ To put it another way, in invoking shared frames of reference for the body in pain, is the purpose competitive victimhood or solidarity of suffering, and in either case, when and how do such frames of reference become available? These questions underscore how the deployment of the body in pain for communal purpose is a type of commemorative act. As all essays here suggest, the doubled temporal and spatial planes that comprise first the representation and, second, the reading of the body in pain are implicated in such contingent paramaters. We must attend to the modes and processes of mediation, the multiplication of viewpoints—of victim or victimiser, of individual or collective understanding of what is being witnessed; the authority of certain narratives and the processes of authorisation; and the ethical implications of repeating, enshrining, or silencing narratives in social and collective memory acts.

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In the essays that follow, representations of the body in pain are analysed from the late sixteenth to the twenty-first century across a variety of media and genres, to produce a comprehensive critique of the transhistorical and genre-specific aesthetics of representing the traumatised body in Irish literature and culture. The first three essays examine the signification of mutilated, dismembered, disembowelled, and decapitated bodies in the violent colonial and confessional conflicts of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ireland. Patricia Palmer opens the volume with ‘Where Does It Hurt? How Pain Makes History in Early Modern Ireland’, in which she powerfully shows that the infliction and experience of extreme bodily pain was central to discourses of the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland by those promoting as well as those resisting the imposition of English colonial authority. Examining the literary and historical writings of Protestant colonisers such as Edmund Spenser alongside those of contemporary native Catholics such as Philip O’Sullivan Beare, Palmer points to the way the colonisers register their own pain yet are immune to the pain they are inflicting on their native enemies. She further argues that pain is inflicted by the English to assert their authority over the native population, and the experience of pain is used by the Irish for solidarity and resistance. By examining pain in this way, Palmer’s essay also importantly illuminates the confessional divide in the understanding of pain and suffering in early modern Ireland. Dianne Hall likewise addresses the afflicted body in times of war in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ireland, but turns more particularly to the space between the ordinary violence of war and unlawful killing. In ‘“Most barbarously and inhumaine maner butchered”: Masculinity, Trauma, and Memory in Early Modern Ireland’, Hall compares and contrasts the way men’s corporeal suffering and violent deaths in conflict situations are represented in different writings—by affiliates and opponents, for different audiences, at the time and after. Analysing two case studies—the wounding of English captives by Rory Óg O’More in the 1570s, and the killing of Sir John Piggott during the siege of Dysart Castle in 1646—Hall shows that representations of traumatised and damaged male bodies were mediated by contemporary ideas about masculine honour. In ‘“Those Savage Days of Memory”: John Temple and his Narrative of the 1641 Uprising’ Sarah Covington also attends to the wars of the mid-seventeenth century, but focuses specifically on Sir John Temple’s notorious but enduringly popular The Irish Rebellion (1646). The authority of Temple’s narrative of the rebellion famously relied upon the testimonies of Protestant refugees collectively known as the 1641 depositions. Covington usefully terms these depositions ‘memory fragments’, and her essay showcases Temple’s role in shaping these ‘fragments’ into social memory. In doing so, she persuasively contests the view that Temple’s book is a martyrology and instead illustrates its indebtedness to atrocity literature—and thus its primary purpose of encouraging retaliation. As she argues suggestively, unlike in a martyrology in which suffering and death for a cause gives meaning to that suffering, in Temple the Protestant bodies are blank spaces on which Irish barbarism is written.

Like Hall, Beiner, Kelleher, and Miller all interrogate remediations of bodies in pain in the context of retrospective reconstructions of particular atrocities or violent events that are shaped into narratives of resistance or forgetting for particular political ends. Guy Beiner traces the attempts via political amnesty to reshape ‘biographical and social memory’ in ‘Severed Heads and Floggings: The Undermining of Oblivion in Ulster in the Aftermath of 1798’, most tellingly demonstrated, he suggests, by the spectacle of former United Irishmen joining the ranks of loyal Orange brigades. Other factors that resulted in what Beiner calls a ‘drain of memory’ include the deportation of rebel prisoners, and of course the execution of rebel leaders. However, he also shows social memory to be resilient, despite the social motivation for and sanction of its reconstruction; this resilience revolves around the body in pain, for instance the image of publicly displayed severed heads, and the persistence of the body as a totemic image exemplifying a general period of multiple shocking experiences. In ‘“Tá mé ag imeacht”: The Execution of Myles Joyce and its Afterlives’, Margaret Kelleher invokes the concept of ‘memorial dynamics’ in her exploration of the multiple accounts of the ‘botched’ execution of Myles Joyce, one of three men hanged in connection with the notorious Maamtrasna Murders in December 1882. Examining a range of texts including newspaper reports, eyewitness accounts and inquest testimony, via ballads and oral history, to recent attempts to exonerate Joyce and commemorate his death, Kelleher reads the scene of Myles Joyce’s execution as visual spectacle and aural trace. Her essay compares the mediation and remediation of this scene, as crochadh san éagóir (unjust hanging), by state disciplinary representatives and through popular contestations, and reflects upon its continuing potency in cultural memory. Ian Miller’s ‘Pain, Trauma, and Memory in the Irish War of Independence: Remembering and Contextualising Irish Suffering’ also addresses the wounded body as a potent but complicated motif in the construction of national memory, specifically in the context of the Irish War of Independence. Pain pervaded this conflict, Miller observes, as it does in most wars, yet there has been relatively little attention paid to how bodies suffered or to the terms used to recount, structure and leverage such suffering in the aftermath of war. Miller’s detailed reading of the Bureau of Military History witness statements redresses this oversight revealing the paradoxical ways that pain was registered by republicans: following patterns similar to those identified by Palmer, Hall, and Covington, witnesses drew on transcultural narratives of suffering as indexed to particular versions of heroic masculinity yet they deliberately and strategically recorded their endurance of distress as exceptionally Irish to distinguish the nationalist body in pain from the unheroic British soldier, brutal in his acts of torture, cowardly in his suffering.

Michael Cronin and Sinéad Wall introduce the intersection of pleasure and pain in work that emphasises historical and political interpellations of the sexualised body. In ‘Pain, Pleasure, and Revolution: The Body in Roger Casement’s Writings’, Cronin reads Casement’s official writings during his role in the British Foreign Office against his private diaries, and identifies in both a preoccupation with bodies. Cronin makes a connection between Casement’s representation of bodies in pain and in pleasure, and between Casement’s eyewitness accounts of the effects of global capitalism’s political and ecological devastation on native bodies and his own (criminalised) homosexuality. Cronin demonstrates that between the lines of Casement’s private diurnal recordings of the pleasures of illicit encounters with men lie the injured and diseased bodies of the victims of European colonialism and global capitalism that he describes as part of his reports on the conditions in the Belgian Congo and in the Putumayo region of Amazonia in South America, bodies which give voice to the shame that he tries to repress. Sinéad Wall’s ‘Targets of Shame’: Negotiating the Irish Female Migrant Experience in Kathleen Nevin’s You’ll Never Go Back (1946) and Kate O’Brien’s Mary Lavelle (1936)’ examines different dimensions of shame as indexed to the representation of the migrant woman at mid-century in the context of linked discourses of patriotism and patriarchy. Wall suggests that these post-Independence, realist novels articulate the multiple and contradictory ways that the migrant woman’s body is constructed as a shamed body. The protagonists are condemned and socially sanctioned for their apparent sexual freedom as figured in their capacity to be mobile; they embody and express that shame physiologically in confused, tormented responses to alternative and foreign cultures. Yet, Wall argues, in O’Brien’s daring novel, the realised acuity of painful intra-psychic and physical experiences of shame responses provokes a transformative reconstitution of sexual identity that is liberating and lasting.

The issue of the violated body as spectacle recurs throughout the volume and is particularly resonant in Lisa Fitzpatrick’s essay ‘The Vulnerable Body on Stage: Reading Interpersonal Violence in Rape as Metaphor’ and Caroline Magennis’s ‘“That’s not so comfortable for you, is it?”: The Spectre of Misogyny in The Fall’. Fitzpatrick uses the proliferation of rape as a metaphor in colonial imaginings of Ireland as a platform to explore the victims’ ‘corporeal vulnerability’ in two plays, Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain and Bill Morrison’s The Marriage. Fitzpatrick explores the feminising effect of rape and the use of sexual violence as a ‘metaphoric device’ that has persisted into postcolonial constructions of intercommunity and sectarian conflict, showing that reading the body at the level of image, rather than plot, reveals the signifying annihilation of rape, and allows us to understand the affective impact of these bodies in pain on the audience. Taking on the television crime drama The Fall, Magennis likewise considers the affective relationship between the spectacle onscreen and the audience, exploring the ‘hidden’ aggression of the Troubles: sexual and domestic violence. Magennis particularly addresses the issue of voyeurism and the fine line in portraying the aestheticised body in pain between replicating and critiquing stereotypical and exploitative images.

The focus on Northern Irish culture in a volume on the body in pain is no coincidence, and in their essays Shane Alcobia-Murphy and Alison Garden demonstrate two further angles that artists and writers have taken in trying to come to terms with the legacy of civil conflict. In ‘Recovery and Forgetting: Haunting Remains in Northern Irish Culture’ Alcobia-Murphy takes up Beiner’s argument on the social effects of top-down attempts to promote cultural amnesia. Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark, David Farrell’s Innocent Landscapes, and Willie Doherty’s Ghost Story are considered by Alcobia-Murphy to demonstrate how writers and artists have taken different structural approaches to representing unresolved grief through fragmentation and absence, strategies that are particularly necessary and powerful in the context of the ‘disappeared’ victims of the Troubles. The absence of the body in pain in these instances provokes cultural hauntings driven by the lack of a ‘material focus’ for mourning. The tension between absence and presence in relation to bodies in pain is also addressed by Alison Garden in ‘“Intertextual quotation”: Troubled Irish Bodies and Jewish Intertextual Memory in Colum McCann’s “Cathal’s Lake” and “Hunger Strike”’. Garden considers the possibilities of intertextuality in McCann’s work to create empathic connections between cultural groups, investigating how tropes of Jewish history and cultural narratives are mobilised in stories that are set in the Republic, to allude to the crisis of the 1980–1 hunger strikes in Northern Ireland. The attempt at empathic connection, Garden argues, is aimed at creating an ethical communitas that might counteract the isolating effect of pain and foster a transcultural healing of the body in pain as symbol of sectarian and ethnic conflict.

The last essay in the collection, Catriona Clutterbuck’s ‘“The Art of Grief”: Irish Women’s Poetry of Loss and Healing’ offers further commentary on the dynamic relations of devastating pain and recuperative reformations attended to throughout this volume, in a careful tracing of the psychic life of mourning and melancholia. Eavan Boland, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Paula Meehan, and Kerry Hardie are situated in poetic traditions long shaped by the ‘forgetting’ of women writers and so their work is particularly attuned to ‘the complexities of representing loss’. The poems addressed here, Clutterbuck argues, reshape our understanding of what ‘healing’ means in the context of personal and national pain that follow the death of individual loved ones and the more systemic erasure of marginalised groups from national narratives. The grieving processes registered in what Clutterbuck terms the ‘elegy work’ of these poets, negotiates and combines the two dominant approaches that underpin ‘the human handling of sorrow’— the therapeutic recovery-focused approach and the cultural-political response driven by dissent. Their writing thus offers a vital alignment of both approaches providing ‘creative ways of coming to terms with loss’.

It is fitting that the volume closes with an essay on healing, for we hope that even as these essays illustrate the centrality of pain and trauma to Irish cultural history, they also show that by attending to the suffering of the past with openness and compassion, healing and recovery are possible, and different futures are imaginable.

Notes

• 1. Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), p. 2. Considerations of embodied knowledge have been fundamental to major critical, philosophical and political turns in the twentieth century including psychoanalysis, feminism, phenomenology, and post-colonialism. Specific attention to materiality and immateriality of the body continues to be interrogated across a wide range of disciplinary fields and critical practices, including medical humanities, critical race studies, disability studies, and cyber, post-human and trans-human studies. See for instance: The Journal of Medical Humanities (1980–) at http://link.springer.com/journal/10912 (accessed 4 October 2015); Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham: University of Durham Press, 2006); Disability Studies Reader, ed. by Lennard J. Davis, Fourth Edition (New York: Routledge, 2013); Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013). For a recent general introduction to writing on the body, see The Body in Literature, ed. by David Hillman and Ulrika Maude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

• 2. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 5.

• 3. Pain and Emotion in Modern History, ed. by Rob Boddice (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014), p. 1.

• 4. Pain and Emotion, pp. 1–2. For other recent responses to Scarry’s seminal work, see Jason A. Springs, ‘To Let Suffering Speak: Can Peacebuilding Overcome the Unrepresentability of Suffering? Elaine Scarry and the Case of Uncle Tom’s Cabin’, Peace and Change 40.4 (2015), 539–560; Amy Danziger Ross, ‘Revisiting The Body in Pain: the Rhetoric of Modern Masochism’, Sexuality and Culture 16 (2012), 230–40.

• 5. Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 80.

• 6. On the question of ethics and positionality in considerations of suffering bodies, see for instance, Anne Whitehead, ‘Geoffrey Hartman and the Ethics of Place: Landscape, Memory, Trauma’, European Journal of English Studies 7.3 (2003), 275–92; Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003).

• 7. See for example, Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Lauren Berlant, ‘Trauma and Ineloquence’, Cultural Values 5.1 (2001), 41–58; Political Emotions: New Agendas in Communication, ed. by Ann Cvetkovich, Ann Reynolds, and Janet Staiger (London: Routledge, 2010); Kali Tal, Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literature of Trauma (Cambridge: University Press, 1996); Roger Luckhurst, ‘Beyond Trauma: Torturous Times’, European Journal of English Studies, Beyond Trauma: The Uses of the Past in Twenty-First Century Europe 14.1 (2010), 11–21.

• 8. See in particular Memory Ireland, vol. 3: The Famine and the Troubles, ed. by Oona Frawley (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014); see also David Lloyd, ‘The Indigent Sublime: Specters of Irish Hunger’, Representations 92 (2005), 152–85; Tom Herron and John Lynch, After Bloody Sunday: Ethics, Representation and Justice (Cork: Cork University Press, 2007); Fiona McCann, A Poetics of Dissensus: Confronting Violence in Contemporary Prose Writing from the North of Ireland (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2014); Nicole R. McClure, ‘Injured Bodies, Silenced Voices: Reclaiming Personal Trauma and the Narration of Pain in Northern Ireland’, Peace and Change 40.4 (2015), 497–516; Peter Mahon, Violence, Politics and Textual Interventions in Northern Ireland (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

• 9. See for example Age of Atrocity: Violence and Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland, ed. by David Edwards, Clodagh Tait and Padraig Lenihan (Dublin: Four Courts, 2007); Guy Beiner, Remembering the Year of the French: Irish Folk History and Social Memory (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007); Robert F. Garrett, Trauma and History in the Irish Novel: The Return of the Dead (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011); John Gibney, The Shadow of a Year: The 1641 Rebellion in Irish History and Memory (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013); Ireland: 1641; Contexts and Reactions, ed. by Micheál Ó Siochrú and Jane Ohlmeyer (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013); Memory Ireland; Beata Piatek, History, Memory, Trauma in Contemporary British and Irish Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); Patricia Palmer, The Severed Head and the Grafted Tongue: Translating Violence in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Emilie Pine, The Politics of Irish Memory: Performing Remembrance in Contemporary Irish Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010); Recollecting Hunger: An Anthology: Cultural Memories of the Great Famine in Irish and British Fiction, ed. by Marguerite Corporaal, Christopher Cusack, and Lindsay Janssen (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2012).

• 10. Griselda Pollock, ‘Art/Trauma/Representation’, Parallax 15.1 (2009), 40–54 (p. 40).

• 11. Pollock, p. 41.

• 12. Lauren Berlant, ‘Thinking About Feeling Historical’, in Political Emotions, ed. by Cvetkovick et al., p. 229.

• 13. Berlant, ‘Thinking’, p. 229.

• 14. ‘The feeling or emotion, when a person is moved by the suffering or distress of another, and by the desire to relieve it; pity that inclines one to spare or to succour’ (‘compassion, n.’, OED, 2a).

• 15. Sontag, p. 8.

• 16. Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. by Greg Elliott (London: Verso, 2009), p. 83.

• 17. Dominick LaCapra, ‘Trauma, Absence, Loss’, Critical Inquiry 25.4 (1999), 696–727 (p. 699).

• 18. Marianne Hirsch, ‘Connective Histories in Vulnerable Times’, PMLA 129.3 (2014), 330–348 (p. 339).

• 19. Hirsch, p. 334.

• 20. Luckhurst, The Trauma Question, p. 79.

• 21. See Danziger Ross, ‘Revisiting the Body in Pain’, p. 231.

• 22. As Nancy Miller and Jason Tougaw note, ‘in a culture of trauma, accounts of extreme situations sell books. Narratives of illness, sexual abuse, torture or the death of loved ones have come to rival the classic, heroic adventure as a test of limits that offers the reader the suspicious thrill of borrowed emotion’, quoted in Martin Modlinger and Philipp Sonntag, ‘Introduction’, in Other People’s Pain: Narratives of Trauma and the Question of Ethics, ed. by Modlinger and Sonntag (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011), p. 7.

• 23. Luckhurst, The Trauma Question, p. 79.

• 24. Dirk Moses, ‘A Dialogue on the Ethics and Politics of Transcultural Memory, Part 1’, with Michael Rothberg, available at http://hgmsblog.weebly.com/blog/a-dialogue-on-the-ethics-and-politics-of-transcultural-memory-part-i (accessed 14 July 2015).

• 25. Michael Rothberg, ‘A Dialogue on the Ethics and Politics of Transcultural Memory, Part 1’, with Dirk Moses, available at http://hgmsblog.weebly.com/blog/a-dialogue-on-the-ethics-and-politics-of-transcultural-memory-part-i (accessed 14 July 2015).

• 26. Rothberg, ‘Dialogue’, n. pag.