real and imagined pain and our complicity

The one thing i remember about pain in my own experiences is that pain cannot be 'reenacted'. One can recall the experience of pain, but never really feel that pain again..perhaps one can even remember the turmoil in the heart and mind when experiencing pain, but beyond these symptoms of pain, the actual experience of pain does not repeat itself in its exact form. (interestingly, pain, a physical condition, has symptoms that are psychological -- fear, tension etc. whereas most of the time, it is some deeper, internal cause that brings about physical and obvious symptoms.) In the same way, witnesses of pain, much as they are within the same time and space as he who suffers, never really experience even a fraction of that sensation of pain.

Hence the objectification of pain, as Scarry puts it -- the making it easier for third parties to glimpse at the possibility of pain. In fact, it is the objectification of pain that supplies the object for imagination; without pain being objectified, there is nothing to feed the imagination, and the experience of pain will then not be able to be passed on to a third party, the spectator. Probably that's why it's only in torture that pain is deliberately objectified; often the one being tortured is raised as an example, a deterrent to all other third parties so that they would not disobey a particular regime, and hence the need for these third parties to imagine pain, hence the need for objectification. As in our first article, "Though indisputably real to the sufferer, it is, unless accompanied by visible body damage or a disease label, unreal to others." (56)

Initially i thought that the position of power will then be rather simple -- the torturer has power over the tortured, yet the tortured in a way has some kind of power over the spectators? In that he has an experience that the spectators do not have control over, and is viewing without a tangible, closer relation to. The inaccesibility of pain to the spectators, despite their observation of it, seemed to me to render them 'helpless' in a way -- unable to stop it from happening, yet unable to participate and avoid guilt. But as Scarry continues, it is really the fact that the one in pain is so broken in connection to everything and everyone else that almost makes him cease to exist in reality :
"the lack of acknowledgement and recognition (which if present could act as a form of self-extension) becomes a second form of negation and rejection, the social equivalent of the physical aversiveness. This terrifying dichotomy and doubling is itself redoubled, multiplied, and magnified in torture because instead of the person's pain being subjectively real but unobjectified and invisible to all others, it is now hugely objectified, everywhere visible, as incontestably present in the external as in the internal world, and yet it is simultaneously categorically denied." (56)

The denial or inability to truly relate to the pain of another makes that pain heightened for the person who is already hurting, and yet it increases the power of the one inflicting pain, and the one watching. So the third party is really complicit in the infliction of pain too? The knowledge of the inflicted pain of another, yet doing nothing about it, makes one guilty also of inflicting that pain. And it seems like the only way to extend sympathy for the one in pain is really to participate in that pain as well. Often it would not be possible, nor make any sense to volunteer oneself for pain, but perhaps in being so struck in the conscience and consciousness of pain, one experiences the turmoil of the soul and heart, and that is also an experience of pain on a different plane?

Remembering then Grosz's point about society's inscriptions on the human body...torture and pain are very obvious and literal inscriptions on the body that are obviously 'bad'. A third party would know immediately that physical torture ought not be condoned. Yet in many other ways all of us are willing third parties, and hence complicit in insribing on the bodies of our fellow people -- society's treatment of those who are other from us. We cringe when we talk about torture, but in racial and gender prejudice, or even economic prejudice, we write on the bodies of fellow people by marking them out as different, and as less. So some of us are in fact not third parties, but torturers. People who assign themselves power by their "blindness [and] willed amorality" (Scarry, 37). Not hard to imagine, because there are so many objectified instances around us already.

the body, the soul, and their limitations

Reading the Metamorphosis really gave me the creeps cos for some reason, perhaps due to the "ideology" i was raised with, the innate mental framework (kudos to CDA), i kept having the picture of a cockroach as the monstrous vermin. And i really don't like cockcroaches. Especially huge ones the size of a human being! Which leaves splotches of stuff wherever he crawls..plus he flies. And can hang on the ceiling -- something human beings can't do, which really gives the vermin power over even the human beings. No wonder they were scared of him..

In Gregor's case, the 'other' is feared for a while, then trampled on. Which is a rather realistic depiction of all the other 'other's in society i think..what is unknown is feared for a while, but once it is ascertained that it cannot bring harm, it is simply rejected, excommunicated. For Gregor though, he is 'other' in body, and even though he is not othered in the mind (ie he still possesses thought and reasoning abilities as humans know it), he is treated as an 'other', and is misunderstood even by his own family, hence indirectly killed by their neglect of him.

That, we can understand. but for the reader who does realise that he is not 'other' in the mind, that there is are still traces of Gregor we can relate to, it seems we still respond with aversion to his grotesque transformation into a bug. But the really disturbing thing is how, within that unimaginable, gargantuan gross body, is a human soul that still loves, and still craves to be loved. The incongruity makes one cringe, and we realise that not only is the physical transformed body of gregor unimaginable, the combination of a monstrous body with a human soul is even more unimaginable..in some ways we may even reject trying to imagine it. So the othered body is not other just because it is different, it is othered by the minds that are unable to imagine nor fathom the possibility of that existence.

Another thing i was reminded of...in our first class we were talking about whether the body includes the soul, or whether the physical body should be distinctly differentiated from the soul. From the Metamorphosis, the dislocation between the body and the soul (or consciousness) seems to suggest that the two indeed can be distinct. Personally i'd agree with that. The human consciousness or soul, that inner being that just knows can stand aside far enough to look upon and criticise the physical body. So the human being is really divided in himself!

A random thought...why an insect rather than some other animal? Maybe cos kafka, being the long and scrawny person he was, could relate more to an insect? heh..ok a tad puerile here..but really, to have Gregor enjoy the lightness of being something other than human makes it quite necessary for him to have become an insect? i mean, if he'd turned into a cow or something, he won't be able to mount the ceiling. Also, the thing about kafka is how he can write about something so..impossible? in such a matter-of-fact way that one knows it wasn't mean to be funny, and in fact is disturbed, or at least impacted, by it.

*Aside: it's really hard to talk about kafka, because he's so big and yet so elusive at the same time? like there's so much to say but it's so hard to pinpoint it without putting kafka into unnecessary, undignified small boxes...

the body, language, and the reader

i don't know if it was the same for everyone else, but it actually took me quite a long time to realise the Isserly isn't really what we know as a normal human being...and after i got over feeling dumb, it struck me then that it could well be intended by Faber: that Isserly has an inner person -- the emotional, the commonly-termed 'soul' that is very much human, as we know it.

So are we all the same under the skin, as Amlis muses? Personally i think yes, and i think Faber does mean to say yes too. It struck me the way Faber highlights very base, bodily needs in the novel, and these needs are common to both vodsel and human (as is meant in the text). Isserly herself is besotten with physical needs to exercise, to eat and to shave, the fulfilment of which are crucial for her functioning as a pseudo-vodsel (p300-301). Besides these, she is also constantly conscious of her having lost her sexuality, after the operation to make her look like a vodsel, like how she looks upon her implanted breasts with "distaste", but was glad that "they prevented her seeing what had been done to her down below" (p71).

Despite being the 'alien' body, the kind of physical constraints and concerns that Isserly faces really sounds very familiar to the human body as the reader knows it. Particularly of interest to me is how Faber draws a response from the reader by not making it known right from the beginning that Isserly is 'alien'. Like the hitchhikers whose first observation of Isserly is her "fantastic tits" (p12), the reader's response to that would probably be sensual as well, much like the hitchhikers' impression that "women don't dress like that...unless they want a fuck" (p36). In fact, when i got only so far in the novel, i was wondering how to talk about something that seems almost pornographic as academia...only when i went on did i realise that Isserly herself had zero sexual thoughts towards her hitchhikers, despite contemplations on how "the bulge on [the hitchhiker's] jeans was promising, although most of it was probably testicles" (p10). (Which, i think, is really Faber's way of misleading the reader into making a physical response himself.) Yet Isserly's agenda is no less physical -- it is that of having these vodsels for meat.

So between vodsels and humans are all these physical desires and needs that overlap, but they serve each other in these purposes differently. There is a complete upheaval of physical needs and their satisfaction as we know it, yet we don't go beyond the fact that being bodied creatures, we are trapped by such needs. And whether it's vodsel or human or alien, these are the needs that seem to rule much of our lives. (I cringe to say "our", but "our" it is...the involvement of the reader in this examination of physicality is undeniable.)

What then is the binary opposite? Something that is not inside, nor part of the body, and that necessarily is the greater space beyond the body -- nature. Isserly herself finds much comfort in nature, and ultimately it is the only thing that can and does release her -- "The atoms that had been herself would mingle with the oxygen and nitrogen in the air...she would live forever." (p310-311)