The Body In Pain.
Elaine Scarry.
As part of my research, I listened to The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry, and it was key in the way that I approached my research paper. Scarry’s writing approaches pain with a clarity that is incredibly grounding. She speaks directly to the difficulties of expressing pain, the silence around it, and the way it resists any attempt to be fully captured in language. What resonated most was how carefully she articulates that absence, and how she shows the gaps where language falters, where it runs dry and leaves experience sitting just beyond words.
Scarry points out the near absence of pain in literature, something writers like Virginia Woolf have also highlighted in the past. Woolf suggested that when we try to describe pain, language seems to fall away, becoming thin and unreliable. Scarry takes this further, arguing that pain actively resists verbal objectification. It is immediate, overwhelming and entirely internal, and because of this it does not easily form an image or symbol that can be shared with someone else. Pain does not describe; it unravels description.
I kept returning to her observation that two people can be in the same room, yet the one in pain may be entirely hidden to the other. Scarry even asks how someone might inflict pain without fully understanding what they are doing, simply because pain is so inaccessible to those who are not feeling it. It is a strange truth that the person in pain becomes intensely aware of their own body while simultaneously becoming invisible to everyone else in the space. That disconnection is key.
Scarry also describes the way agency is often displaced onto the object that inflicts pain. The weapon becomes the “actor” rather than the person holding it, as though language seeks to distance itself from confronting the reality of pain directly. This distancing reveals something important: pain pushes us away from clarity. It forces us into abstraction, into metaphor, into silence. As she writes, pain is “world-destroying”; it collapses the structures we rely on to communicate and to make sense of our surroundings.
Listening to this reminded me of my own relationship with chronic pain, particularly through fibromyalgia, hypermobility and scoliosis. There are days where sensations shift so quickly or so intensely that it becomes nearly impossible to capture them in clear language. I often find myself reaching for metaphors that do not quite fit, or avoiding description altogether because the words feel too small. Understanding that this is not a personal limitation, but a structural feature of pain itself, has brought a certain gentleness into the way I approach my own experience.
What has also stood out is how Scarry describes the movement from pain towards imagination and creation. Pain destroys “the world” of the person who feels it, stripping away language and meaning, yet the act of creation can begin to rebuild that world. This idea has helped me understand why art often feels like a more reliable way of expressing experiences that resist speech. Painting allows me to move beyond the limits of vocabulary and into something more intuitive, where the body can speak without needing to explain itself.
Ink, in particular, continues to offer a language of its own. The way it gathers, separates, settles and moves across the surface mirrors sensations that are difficult to articulate in words. It holds intensity and delicacy at the same time. It can drift or cut sharply. It is unpredictable and yet grounding. Scarry’s writing has helped me see that what I am often doing when I paint is creating a space where something wordless can be acknowledged rather than translated.
Her work has made me think more deeply about how my paintings might operate as an alternative language, one that can occupy the space where verbal language runs dry. If pain resists being spoken, perhaps it can be seen or felt instead. Not in a literal way, not as an illustration, but as a form of presence that makes itself known.
As I continue with my research, Scarry’s writing sits alongside these thoughts. Pain shifts our relationship to the world, and in its own way, so does art. Both alter how we perceive, how we communicate and how we understand ourselves. Painting with ink lets me explore that shift without forcing clarity where there is none. It allows sensations, memories and uncertainties to take form in a space that belongs entirely to them, and perhaps offers a way for others to recognise something of their own experiences too.
