'How Does It Hurt? Narrating pain' by Stephanie de Montalk

"Pain is always new to the sufferer, but loses its originality to those around him. Everyone will get used to it except me." - Alphonse Daudet
De Montalk uses her own long-term suffering of chronic pain as a touchstone to explore the relationship between pain and language, and pain and literature, as well as the transformation of the relationship between the sufferer and the particulars of their own life. This book melds memoir, poetry and imagined interviews with three writers who suffered from, and wrote about, pain. Her assertion that pain is unlike other experiences in that it is incommunicable to non-sufferers I am not sure is philosophically robust, but because of weaknesses inherent in all communication rather than anything particular about the nature of pain. That said, de Montalk's demonstration of pain's utter lack of meaning is a rare and important one, a corrective to the popular 'spritiualisation' of pain experiences, and a necessary step in the acceptance of (but not surrender to) protracted suffering, for both sufferers and those who live with them. "Physical pain is not of or for anything, It is precisely it takes no object that it, more than any other phenomenon, resists objectification in language." - Elaine Scarry

(Jan 15)