‘I feel your pain’: some reflections on the (literary) perception of pain

In this chapter, Jonathan Sawday looks at some examples of the representation of pain on the renaissance stage, concentrating on the language which is deployed to reproduce the sensation of both physical and mental pain. Using Shakespeare’s King Lear as his source text, Sawday looks at the way in which eighteenth-century commentators (chiefly Dr Johnson) responded to the play’s ‘painfulness’. Sawday argues that, rather than seeing Johnson’s response as ‘excessive,’ it faithfully rehearses a theory of pain derived (in part) from Locke. Sawday goes on to examine the nature of ‘word-induced’ pain which has become a feature of modern cognitive studies of pain, and which might suggest that Johnson’s reaction to the play may, in fact, have some somatic basis. He concludes by suggesting the possibility that 16th- and 17th-century rehearsals of pain via the medium of metaphoric and devotional language may also have a somatic basis, and one which, with the arrival of new technologies for understanding the location and nature of pain, we are only just beginning to (re-)discover.

Introduction

Taking the infamous Theatrum Crudelitatum Haereticorum nostri temporis by the Catholic priest Richard Verstegan as its starting point, this chapter introduces the reader to the over-arching agenda of the book, clearly formulating its interdisciplinary research agenda. The Hurt(ful) Body focuses on both literal and metaphorical violence, performed and depicted in early modern performing and visual arts. Indeed, Theatrum Crudelitatum is a very outspoken example of the issues at stake in this book: the violence inflicted on bodies and the representation of this very same violence, in theatres, in pictures and paintings but also in non-artistic modes of representation. In the introduction, the editors describe the threefold structure of the book. The first part will focus mainly on performing bodies (on stage), whereas the second part will discuss the pain of someone who watches the suffering of others, both in regard to theatre audiences and beholders of art, as well as to the onlooker in art: the theatre character or individual on canvas who is watching a(nother) hurt body. The third and final part will analyse how this circulation of gazes and affects functions within a specific institutional context, paying particular interest to the performative context of public space.

Epilogue1

This epilogue discusses how the tension between the visualization of violence and the experience of pain affects our understanding of human suffering and the way in which we may consider its cultural modulations. Whereas the different contributions of the volume pay attention to the local and cultural variations of human suffering and visualisations and performances of hurt(ful) bodies, the epilogue provides a critical reflection on historical methods and the tension between experiences and narratives in particular. To do so, it deals with the work of pioneers in the history of emotions, like William Reddy, after which the work of Reinhart Koselleck is brought to the fore. It especially argues that it is important to consider long-term formal structures of the history of pain and the role of beholders and institutions in order to find out how a primal experience of pain may be turned into a story.

Theatrical torture versus dramatic cruelty: subjection through representation or praxis1

The distinction between the theatrical and the dramatic is pivotal for different modes of subjection in the early modern era. Institutionally speaking, society was organized ideologically, theatrically by the introjection of what was shown publicly to private, but equally collective, theatres of the mind. This could be described as a logic of torture. In contrast, and on the other hand, the dramatic application of punishment on ships, and the pain it involved, served what Robert Cover called a ‘balance of terror’, based on a logic of what Deleuze defined as ‘cruelty’. In order to clarify this distinction, and the implication it has for our ideas on gouvernmentalité, this chapter will propose a close reading of a painting by Lieve Verschuier that either depicts a peculiar case of keelhauling or, allegorically, the lynching of the brothers De Witt in 1672. Although the painting is clearly theatrical, formally speaking, it superimposes a dramatic logic on the traumatic political event of the lynching of the brothers De Witt. This will be considered in the chapter as one instance of a more general shift in the seventeenth century: a shift away from the theatrical logic of torture to the dramatic logic of cruelty.

Wounding realities and ‘painful excitements’: real sympathy, the imitation of suffering and the visual arts after Burke’s sublime

This chapter shows the vital role of injury and suffering in redefining art practices and aesthetic experience from the 1750s onwards. It investigates the role of Burke’s sublime in the introduction of a new lust for pain, which was combined with an equally painful call for the amplification of visual experiences – real and imitated. Sarafianos stresses Burke’s uncivil redefinition of sympathy as a painful delight in the suffering of others, and argues that, despite established anti-visual interpretations of Burke’s sub lime, such extreme forms of suffering are at the root of the way in which his Philosophical Enquiry (1757) built powerful continuities between ‘real sympathy’ and the reality of imitations in painting or theatre. Moreover, this chapter demonstrates that the same principles led to the reorganisation of the entire visual field: bodies in pain, painstaking styles of representation and hurtful habits of seeing were tied up in ways that determined the bursting forth of a specially modern kind of realism. Sarafianos uses Sir Charles Bell’s gruesome surgical sketches from Waterloo (1815) in order to show that the same tangle of hurtful experiences, tailored on Burke’s precise guidelines, encapsulated drives and aspirations for a ‘sublime real’ with a long career in modern art and criticism.

To travel to suffer: towards a reverse anthropology of the early modern colonial body

By focusing on the way early modern plays staged these colonial encounters, this contribution will address the question of the enslaved body which functioned as a site of both cultural exoticism and compassionate identification, directly dealing with complex issues such as pain, cruelty and martyrdom. This chapter will take two specific texts as its starting point: the fascinating play Les Portugais infortunés (1608) by Nicolas Chrétien des Croix, which stages an encounter of a shipwrecked Portuguese crew with an indigenous African tribe, and La Peinture spirituelle (1611) by Louis Richome, the account of the massacre of 39 Catholic martyrs from the ‘Compagnie de Jésus’, murdered by Protestants, on their way to Brazil on the 15th of July in 1570. In both cases the human body functions as a spectacular locus of intercultural dialogue (or warfare). This chapter proposes an analysis of both texts, not as literature in the first place, but as artefacts of cultural imagination which question the idea of alterity and the all too easy dichotomy between the self and the other, while at the same time showing that Europe, Africa and Brazil (or by extension South America) share a history and a culture of the (hurt) body.

Spectacle and martyrdom: bloody suffering, performed suffering and recited suffering in French tragedy (late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries)1

Biet’s chapter about French 17th- and 18th- century spectacle and text introduces the important theme of performance by reaffirming the key role of performing in terms of a public repetition of traumatic experiences already stirring the social fabric. At the start of the early modern period, when tragedy re-emerges in a sort of re-birth, tragic theatre becomes an alternative scenery for social action, a virtual scene for experimental lives, but also another scaffold and another judicial court for the audience, taking place inside theatres. Performing bodies, as Biet’s account reveals, are never at the start of a process of public spectacularization of violence. It thereby constitutes an essential meditation on where ‘art’ took up and discontinued the real to an early modern society that still knew spectacular punishment. Performers, as Biet sees them, engaged in anxieties opened by real trials and judiciary rulings, yet their repetitions permitted audiences to gain a more solid foothold in the ‘open wounds’ of an ongoing punitive judiciary.

The economics of pain: pain in Dutch stock trade discourses and practices, 1600–1750

In the early modern period, bourses were scenes of physical exchange. As most of our stock trade has grown into a virtual interplay between online traders and algorithms, researching the embodied stock trade of the early modern bourse floor can provide insight in the performance of trade and the role violence and pain played in this sector. This chapter researches the physical practices of stock trade on the Amsterdam exchange in the 17th and 18th century, with special attention for the role of the general public in this ‘financial theatre’. While exploring economic practices and concepts through images, artists made use of concepts of physicality to make distinctions between different kinds of trade. This becomes all the more transparent in the 1720s, when the South Sea Bubble spurred a wind trade in visual and textual commentaries. Cartoons, poems and theatre plays represented speculative trade through the image of clashing and hurting bodies. When and why did the stock trade hurt? What was the role of the public and the governing bodies in this deep play? How can the economy’s sick and hurting body be cured? This chapter will analyse the sensitivities of the painful stock trade practices on the bourse floor and in the theatre.

Forced witnessing of pain and horror in the context of colonial and religious massacres: the case of the Irish Rebellion, 1641–53

The Wars of the Three Kingdoms in Seventeenth Century Britain were determinant for the development of the English Revolution of 1640-1660, and they have received thorough attention by recent historiography. The conflict was particularly violent during the Irish Rebellion, between 1641 and 1653, something that could be explained by the combination of religious, colonial, political and economic factors. The consequence of these radical oppositions was the perpetration of massacres and deportations, of Protestants first and later of Catholics, which were exceptional in comparison to contemporary clashes in England and Scotland. Soon, depositions, books, engravings and pamphlets represented those violent events. Kwiatkowski’s contribution examines the afore-mentioned sources, following their focus on the torments inflicted upon the victims and on the fact that those horrors were performed ‘in sight’ of their families. It will also consider various visual and textual references to other violent religious and colonial conflicts, such as the French Wars of Religion, the Thirty Years War and the Spanish conquest of America. This comparative approach could allow for a better understanding of early modern forms of representing violence, pain, suffering and the witnessing of atrocity in the context of historical massacres.

Epicurean tastes: towards a French eighteenth-century criticism of the image of pain

This chapter argues that eighteenth-century French painting reserved a special type of image criticism for the scene of horror, taking a close look at works by prominent members of the Paris Académie Royale, in particular Fragonard’s Corésus et Callirhoe (1765). As these analyses will show, painting in France was responding to the retreat of a Christological, redemptive or punitive rationale for showing violence. Through writings by Dubos and Falconet, but also Diderot’s comments on Corésus et Callirhoe, this chapter argues that these new images of hurt allow new forms of distanced and unstable viewing. These depend on an epicurean form of reasoning that interconnects religious practice, fear, lust and disillusionment. The critical beholder who traverses these epicurean states of mind ends up calling into question the reality of the image beyond the drives of the appetites and anxieties of the beholder. This epicurean-inspired criticism of the image of pain opens up an opportunity for audiences to watch themselves act out a connection with the hurt body, but they also expose the image’s falseness, leaving the victim ‘unredeemed’.