CorporealSemiotics:TheBodyoftheText/theTextoftheBody 379
Ona closer look,onecannot help noticing thathere,as in other19th
century writings, for example by Browning, Tennyson, or the "Fireside
poets"(Bryant,Whittier,Longfellow),painhardlyevergetsrepresented
assuch. The emphatic Now when pain is unleashed is instead used as a
launching pad or catalyst for a detached general moral lesson whose
presentationisthemaininterestofwriterortext.Paininwritingsofthis
kindistheretoinvite"deeper,"moreimportantreflectionsabouthuman
existence in general, the do-s and don't-s of bourgeois morality, etc.,
reflections which quickly take their departure from the pain experience
which marked the starting point of their text. Nietzsche, himself a
lifelong sufferer from intense bouts of pain, has his Zarathustra quip
contemptuously:"Thepainmakethhensandpoetscackle"(330).
Thetheoreticaldebateconcerningtherepresentabilityofpainhasby
and large organized itself around two opposing camps: one sees in the
artistic representation of pain the province proper of art, where it can
prove its independence from, if not superiority over, more mundane
forms of representation. Goethe's apothegm inTorquato Tasso"Denn
wo der Mensch in seiner Qual verstummt / Gab mir ein Gott, zu sagen,
wasichleide"("Thoughintheirmortalanguishmenaredumb,/Tome
a God hath given to tell my grief" [DramaticWorks315])can stand for
this position.^77 The opposite camp often argues that pain cannot really
cross the threshold into representation because its experience is made
evenmoreintolerablebythepainofrepresentingit.Thisistheposition
taken, most emphatically perhaps, by Virginia Woolf. Woolf complains
about
the poverty of the language, English, which can express the thoughts of
HamletandthetragedyofLear,[but]hasnowordsfortheshiverandthe
headache.... The merest schoolgirl when she falls in love has
Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her, but let a sufferer try to
describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.
(OnBeingIll6-7)(^77) Goethe would later return to this quote and use it as epigraph for his
"MarienbadElegy"(1823).