Recently I asked a student if getting branded with his fraternity symbol was painful. "No ma'am," he replied, "it's actually so hot that it doesn't hurt--you just smell it." It's surprising what we don't know about pain, and it is this gap that Marla Carlson's interdisciplinary study examines, considering pain in all its facets: psychosomatic, neurochemical, enacted, shared, and imagined. Carlson is interested in the political, theological, and social ramifications of spectacular pain, as well as its physical effects on the sufferer. At first glance, such a focus may seem irrelevant to the medievalist, but perhaps the cultural stereotype of the medieval period as rife with violence should logically extend to an understanding that it, like our own time, is also rife with pain.
It would be misleading to suggest that Carlson's is primarily a study of medieval topics. Much of her material--pain artistry, postmodern theatre, technical descriptions of neurochemical processes--is relatively foreign to medievalists. And yet I have found this book nearly impossible to stop talking about. Carlson's premise is that "pain is unique among sensations, not because it is inexpressible or radically unshareable, but because it creates an urgent need to communicate things to which no one is eager to listen [...] Because pain so powerfully solicits the spectator's engagement, aestheticized physical suffering plays a vital role in creating communities of sentiment and consolidating social memory, which in turn shapes the cultural and physical realities that cause spectators to respond in different ways at different times" (2). By its nature, pain requires sufferer's attention, demands communication, and yet resists comprehension from listener or audience. Our own discomfort with even reading about pain, which we must constantly confront as readers of Carlson's book, proves this point. Carlson's descriptions are not salacious, but they are graphic: she negotiates lines between violence and pain and disgust and understanding as she compiles a sometimes-jarring mix of "real" pain, including war atrocities in 15th-century France and twenty-first century Iraq, and that depicted or performed on both eras' theatrical and artistic stages. Carlson sees more of a connection among these than many readers might; as she states in her conclusion, "Pain is a performance that we interpret, both when it happens within ourselves and when we witness the pain of others" (155).
Each chapter pairs one postmodern performance of pain with a late- medieval one to illustrate various aspects of the cultural interpretations of depicted suffering. If this method sounds a little forced, that's because it is: while the theoretical underpinnings of Carlson's thinking are solid, with frequent reference to Scarry, Lacan, Kristeva, Derrida, and others, the framework does not always work in practice, particularly as Carlson often uses the postmodern as a lens through which to view the medieval. To be fair, Carlson herself makes no bones about this; she makes clear from the beginning that it is her interest in the postmodern that drives her inquiries into the medieval, but those looking for a dedicated medievalist's take on pain theory may be disappointed. For example, the late- twentieth-century performances of Marina Abramovi_ might indeed inform our interpretation of late-medieval mystics' affective spirituality, but the immediacy of and readily available commentary on such postmodern examples sometimes overshadow Carlson's acknowledgements that the mystics and their contemporaries would have cultural explanations of their own for pain willfully undertaken.
Perhaps in part because of my (and TMR readers') bias toward the medieval, I found the book most engaging in its discussions of pain itself, i.e., both the summaries of pain performances and Carlson's physical and theoretical descriptions of its effects on the physical and sociopolitical body. The introduction offers an overview of the Cartesian model of pain and recent refinements of the scientific understanding of pain: Melzack and Wall's gate-control theory, Melzack's postulation of the neuromatrix, Hebb's understanding of cell assembly. Unfortunately Carlson does not quite realize fully the implications of these theories in the rest of the text: it is of course impossible to determine from casual observation of pain performance whether that pain is genuine, and because her theoretical focus for much of this study is on the communication or depiction of pain rather than its manifestation in the body, the scientific material ultimately seems gratuitous rather than crucial to the argument.
As Carlson sees it, attitudes toward spectacular pain in the late medieval period oppose those of the (post)modern one: in the former, "suffering creates order" (6); in the latter, "bodies have rights" so that the "body is thus a site of control; the violated body a familiar sign of injustice" (5). She "argue[s] for using different ethical and emotional frameworks to view pre-modern and post-modern pain: post- modern theatre stages pain to raise human rights issues. Spectators respond with empathy [...] medieval theatre stages pain as a component of affective spirituality, and spectators respond with compassion--in the pre-modern sense of cosuffering. In both periods, spectacular pain elicits an obligation, but the nature of that obligation differs" (27). Because medievals considered pain divinely rather than humanly inflicted, then, medieval depicted pain inspired private spiritual practice instead of its postmodern result, public action. Paradoxically, according to Carlson, postmodern culture's individualism needs empathy to effect collective social action, and medieval culture's emphasis on private suffering required public display to promote private devotion. In other words, spectacular pain provoked medieval witnesses to suffer pain themselves, but provokes us to try to alleviate suffering in others.
Carlson's evidence for these observations, in addition to widely known instances of torture such as internet-publicized executions, is drawn largely from a few decades' worth of her own participation as an audience member at postmodern performances of pain. She notes that the late-medieval French depictions of pain that form the body of her medieval examples all occur after the Black Death, when medical practitioners were growing more aware of their own inadequacies in alleviating pain and thus were becoming more open to new ideas.
Chapter 1, "Feeling Torture," opens with a summary of The Island, Fugard's 1972 play concerned with South African prisoners and their physical suffering. Carlson argues that audience response to this play--because of postmodern expectation of a life free of pain-- differs from medieval audiences' response to martyrdom plays such as the late-fourteenth-century or early-fifteenth-century performances of Le Geu Saint Denis. This pairing is the cornerstone of Carlson's argument that postmodern audiences respond to their own empathy by participating in public activism, while medieval viewers were motivated to private devotion by similarly depicted spectacular pain.
Chapter 2, "Imagining Death," examines the differing medieval and postmodern understandings of sympathy in response to witnessing death using The Pillowman and returning to Le Geu Saint Denis as examples. Carlson observes the late medieval Church-supported belief that everyone, even criminals, should die a "good death" (marked in France by the addition of confession to execution ceremonies); in contrast, because of the postmodern assumption that death hurts, we now try to minimize depictions of the moment of death, both in state-sponsored executions and on stage.
Carlson's third and fourth chapters consider gendered performances of self-imposed actual (as opposed to depicted) pain. In Chapter 3, "Enduring Ecstasy," she observes tension between the Church-approved depiction of pain in virgin martyr narratives and the actual pain experienced by female mystics, noting a parallel to the gap in public discourse into which pain artists such as Abramović have stepped in the past few decades. This chapter's close focus on affective spirituality and the role of abjection and its connection of women's performance of pain to social expectations and interpretations of the female body are among the most compelling of the whole book.
Chapter 4, "Whipping Up Community," discusses the sexualizing of flagellation and other forms of masochism, with St. Sebastian as the medieval counterpart to pain artist Ron Athey's twenty-first-century homoerotic performances. Carlson points out that the sexualizing of Sebastian's experience, as well as that of ritual flagellants, was meant to demonstrate purity in hopes of receiving divine protection from the plague. Athey's performances, on the other hand, are intended to rally supporters against homophobia.
Chapter 5, "Containing Chaos," returns to Sebastian (Le Mystère de Saint Sébastien) and Sarah Kane's play Blasted to consider violence as a destabilizing force and depicted pain as a (medieval) wall against or (postmodern) acknowledgement of social chaos.
Obviously, this brief overview of the chapters cannot do justice to the richness or ambition of Carlson's scope; TMR readers may find, as I did, that this study is finally as engaging and compelling as it is overwhelming. As she notes early in the study, there is "no reason to look for a single cultural function for performances of pain" (11). By the same token, the subject of pain can hardly be contained or exhausted in such a slim single volume, and it is a testament to rather than criticism of Carlson's range that she has left open so many possible avenues for future researchers.