The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry

Author:Elaine Scarry [Scarry, Elaine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1985-09-25T22:00:00+00:00

Body, Weapon, Voice in the Larger Framework

The extreme separation into body and voice that characterizes what almost seem randomly recurring scenes of hurt (as well as the scenes of reproduction) is also recognizable in larger and more central units of thought. The ten commandments are an explicit articulation of the separation. They are themselves divided into an initial three that describe God and seven that describe man, a division insisting on the categories of voice and body. In the first God asserts that He and only He is the Lord. In the second, he forbids all forms of materially representing him, prohibits all attempts to endow him (and other aspects of the invisible world) with a body. In the third he specifies that he is to be represented only by a single verbal construct, a name; and that must be used with extreme reluctance and care. His province is absolute precisely because he is unlimited by any specifying acts of representation, except in the human beings who come to represent him in the commandments that follow. In effect, the first three describe God by prohibiting description. The next seven command that man embody God, that man’s actions describe God. If God is materialized, he is so only in the actions and prohibited actions of men and women, beginning with the fourth commandment, the mimetic re-enactment every seven days of the initial Creation: the temporal rhythm of work and rest is absorbed into, enacted by, the body of the believer.

This fourth commandment is a crucial transition between the three devoted to God and the seven devoted to man, for it is explicitly about creation, and the purity of categories insisted on in the overarching, three-seven division is itself a way of maintaining the original structure of creation. To insist that God be only verbally indicated is to ensure that the initial division between creator and created is maintained. That is, to have a body is to be describable, creatable, alterable, and woundable. To have no body, to have only a voice, is to be none of these things: it is to be the wounder but not oneself woundable, to be the creator or the one who alters but oneself neither creatable nor alterable. It is therefore appropriate that the fourth and transitional commandment has as its explicit subject the instruction that humanity abstain from the act of creating; for it is the “rest” part and not the “work” part of God’s original act of creation that we are here required to imitate. Although mankind is instructed to re-enact both the six days of work and the one of rest, the whole force of the commandment is focused on the second part: in all the iterations of this commandment throughout the Old Testament scriptures, men and women are never threatened, reprimanded, or punished for not working on the six days of work, while the failure to rest on the seventh repeatedly brings the most severe punishment.18 Here as so often elsewhere in

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