Making Sense of Suffering: a Collective Attempt : A Collective Attempt [1 ed.] 9781848881235, 9789004372269

Citation preview

Making Sense of Suffering

Probing the Boundaries Series Editors Dr Robert Fisher Dr Ken Monteith

Lisa Howard Dr Daniel Riha

Advisory Board James Arvanitakis Simon Bacon Kasia Bronk Jo Chipperfield Ann-Marie Cook Phil Fitzsimmons Peter Mario Kreuter

Mira Crouch Stephen Morris John Parry Karl Spracklen Peter Twohig S Ram Vemuri Kenneth Wilson

A Probing the Boundaries research and publications project. http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/probing-the-boundaries/ The Making Sense Of: Hub ‘Suffering’

2013

Making Sense of Suffering: A Collective Attempt

Edited by

Anja A. Drautzburg and Jackson Oldfield

Inter-Disciplinary Press Oxford, United Kingdom

© Inter-Disciplinary Press 2013 http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/id-press/

The Inter-Disciplinary Press is part of Inter-Disciplinary.Net – a global network for research and publishing. The Inter-Disciplinary Press aims to promote and encourage the kind of work which is collaborative, innovative, imaginative, and which provides an exemplar for inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary publishing.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission of Inter-Disciplinary Press.

Inter-Disciplinary Press, Priory House, 149B Wroslyn Road, Freeland, Oxfordshire. OX29 8HR, United Kingdom. +44 (0)1993 882087

ISBN: 978-1-84888-123-5 First published in the United Kingdom in eBook format in 2013. First Edition.

Table of Contents Introduction: How Can We Make Sense of Suffering? Anja A. Drautzburg and Jackson Oldfield Part I

vii

Theory On Suffering and Its Relation to the Conception of Nihilism in Nietzsche’s Thought Stein A. Hevrøy

3

Kierkegaard’s View on the Suffering Aspects of Life and the Role of Love on Decreasing the Suffering of Life Faezeh Moeinikorbekandi

11

Postmodern Suffering: Contemporary Society and the Postmodern Sublime Hadi Fayyaz

19

Part II Practice Suffering and the ‘Acceptability Gap’: A Concept of Convergence David MacKintosh

31

Human Rights Law and the Displaced Human: Silence, Suffering and Neglect Aslıhan Bilgin, Burak Haciahmetoglu and Jackson Oldfield

41

Religious Conversion and Suffering Joshua Iyadurai

51

Culturally-Embedded Meaning-Making: An Exploration of How Young, Resilient South African Adults Confront Suffering Linda C. Theron and Adam M. C. Theron

61

‘Grief is love’: Understanding Grief through Self-Help Groups Organised by the Family Survivors of Suicide Tomofumi Oka

75

‘A Blessing in Disguise’: The Meaning of Suffering in the Work of Viktor E. Frankl and Aldous Huxley Janko Andrijasevic

87

Book of Joe Donald Felipe

99

Part III Representation The Problem of Chivalry: Yvain’s Suffering in Chrétien de Troyes’ Le Chevalier au Lion Alexandria Krause

109

‘Numbing people was an art form now’: Cancer and Suffering in Pat Barker’s Another World and Andrew Miller’s Oxygen Anja A. Drautzburg

117

Pain Worth More than a Penny: Performance of Suffering in Omeros and The America Play Bev Hogue

127

Scarred Language: Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts Luísa Maria Flora

135

Introduction: How Can We Make Sense of Suffering? Anja A. Drautzburg and Jackson Oldfield We all suffer. Be it through pain, illness, bereavement, or due to a variety of distressing circumstances. Suffering is always an inherently personal experience. Thus we struggle to find a universally valid and all-encompassing definition of suffering because to each and everyone of us it carries different connotations and it can take various forms. Taking this into account, can the experience of suffering be collective at all? Can it be shared? And how do we make meaning out of suffering? Are there any coping mechanisms that can be applied, such as stoic endurance, acceptance, resilience, or changing one’s attitude? Those were some of the thoughts that were shared towards the end of the second global conference entitled Making Sense of Suffering, which took place in Prague in November 2011. The second international and interdisciplinary conference of this kind united scholars from all over the world and from a broad range of disciplines to engage with these questions, which is also reflected in this collection of chapters. Here, we do not seek to find answers to the questions above, but rather this is an attempt at making meaning out of a phenomenon which everyone can relate to but which remains mysterious above all. For the sake of clarity, the chapters presented here are subdivided into three main categories: theory, practice and representation. Theory How, in theory, do we understand the idea of suffering and the possibilities of taking meaning from it? In the theory section, three philosophers engage with the ideas of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Lyotard in order to explore different takes on suffering in theoretical thinking. Stein A. Hevrøy, in his chapter, ‘On Suffering and Its Relation to the Conception of Nihilism in Nietzsche’s Thought,’ juxtaposes suffering and Nietzsche’s conception of nihilism. He cogently argues that, ultimately, ‘the suffering connected to nihilism is an effect of trying to escape suffering in the first place.’ Faezeh Moeinikorbekandi in ‘Kierkegaard’s View on the Suffering Aspects of Life and the Role of Love on Decreasing the Suffering of Life,’ argues along the same lines by referring to Søren Kierkegaard and his belief that suffering is an essential element of life. She goes on to describe that Kierkegaard distinguishes between three stages of suffering, namely the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious stage. We learn that Kierkegaard believed that love was the only remedy to suffering. Hadi Fayyaz explores the nature of martyrdom/suicide attacks through Lyotard’s idea of the post-modern sublime in ‘Postmodern Suffering:

viii

Introduction

__________________________________________________________________ Contemporary Society and the Postmodern Sublime.’ He uses this in an attempt to explain why in today’s postmodern societies, people voluntarily accept pain and how, while all societies accept pain as sublime, the form of pain acceptance is one which is culturally specific. Practice How does the practice of suffering inform our understandings of it? This section focuses on the way suffering is perceived and dealt with in practice. One recurring aspect is the application of certain strategies in order to make meaning out of suffering. By analysing the concept of the ‘acceptability gap’, palliative care physician David MacKintosh is his chapter, ‘Suffering and the “Acceptability Gap”: A Concept of Convergence,’ points out that a clinically useful conceptualisation of suffering still remains elusive, and highlights the fact that suffering is of a very personal nature and thus unique. He ultimately challenges us to reconsider the perception of suffering in a clinical environment. By referring to the works of Hannah Arendt, Nancy Fraser and Jacques Rancière, Aslıhan Bilgin, Burak Haciahmetoglu and Jackson Oldfield in their chapter, ‘Human Rights Law and the Displaced Human: Silence, Suffering and Neglect’, focus on the way human rights law when addressing the issue of migration, can cause individual suffering. By drawing attention to the different kinds of suffering, the authors call for a reframing of international human rights law. Joshua Iyadurai describes the suffering that religious converts undergo in India by drawing on his qualitative research, in his chapter, ‘Religious Conversion and Suffering.’ He particularly focuses on the importance of sacred texts and prayer to which converts turn in order to make sense of suffering Linda C. Theron and Adam M. C. Theron, in their chapter, ‘CulturallyEmbedded Meaning-Making: An Exploration of How Young, Resilient South African Adults Confront Suffering’, discuss the ways in which young, Black South Africans make positive meanings out of their poverty and suffering to enable them to adjust positively to their lives, and how this meaning-making is informed by Africentric cultural traditions and beliefs. Tomofumi Oka describes and examines the use of self-help groups by the family survivors of suicide in Japan to cope with the grief of their loss, in his chapter, ‘“Grief is love”: Understanding Grief through Self-Help Groups Organised by the Family Survivors of Suicide.’ In exploring the evolution of these groups, he suggests that perhaps they have been created in response to the failure to adapt traditional, professional grief-work to the context of Japan and its Buddhist heritage. Janko Andrijasevic examines the perhaps strange parallels in the ideas of Viktor Frankl and Aldous Huxley concerning the purpose of life and its relation with suffering, in his chapter, ‘“A Blessing in Disguise”: The Meaning of Suffering

Anja A. Drautzburg and Jackson Oldfield

ix

__________________________________________________________________ in the Work of Viktor E. Frankl and Aldous Huxley.’ Ideas drawn through their individual, yet somehow shared, experiences of lives lived with suffering and the meanings they understood were contained within the experience of suffering. Donald Felipe describes the life of Joe, a sixty-four year old man who has suffered from severe schizophrenia throughout much of his life, in his chapter, ‘Book of Joe.’ This snapshot of a rich life provokes thought on the nature of what it is to suffer, on the power of the human spirit, and on finding redemption and peace. Representation One way of dealing with suffering is creative engagement and finding a language to describe the indescribable. In other words, bringing suffering to the page is another attempt at making sense of it, as the chapters in this section exemplify. The different kinds of suffering represented here have many causes: mental and physical illness, open wounds, and the experience of war. Alexandria Krause’s chapter, ‘The Problem of Chivalry: Yvain’s Suffering in Chrétien de Troyes’ Le Chevalier au Lion,’ takes us back into the twelfth century. She focuses on the representation of madness and suffering in Chrétien de Troyes’s French romance Le Chevalier au Lion, in which the hero Yvain turns into a suffering madman and can only be saved by the agency of women. Anja A. Drautzburg looks at suffering induced by physical illness in her chapter, ‘“Numbing people was an art form now”: Cancer and Suffering in Pat Barker’s Another World and Andrew Miller’s Oxygen.’ She uses Pat Barker’s novel Another World and Andrew Miller’s novel Oxygen, both looking at end-oflife cancer patients, to discuss the differences between pain and suffering and to explore the issues surrounding palliative care from the perspective of the cancersufferers, their carers and family members. Bev Hogue, in her chapter, ‘Pain Worth More than a Penny: Performance of Suffering in Omeros and The America Play,’ introduces us to the performative aspects of suffering. She points to the fact that in both Suzan Lori-Parks’ The America Play and Derek Walcott’s epic poem Omeros through repetition and performance, pain becomes meaningless. In both texts, suffering turns into a commodity and, finally, into empty spectacle. Finally, Luísa Maria Flora explores how Virginia Woolf, in Between the Acts, represents the threat of war and the consequential shattering of humanity, art and culture through the very traditional act of a village pageant, in her chapter, ‘Scarred Language: Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts.’ What comes out of such a wide-ranging and inter-disciplinary discussion on the idea of suffering and making meaning of it? What can in fact come out of such a diverse field of authorship and discipline? And can a coherent message be found, both within this book and within the idea of suffering as a whole?

x

Introduction

__________________________________________________________________ Some key ideas that are reflected throughout this book are that suffering is a concept that can be closely associated with humiliation, isolation and sorrow, however not necessarily with physical or mental pain; those in pain are not always those who suffer. But also that suffering can be a force for making meaning out of life, for changing and transforming the way we live and for finding a form of redemption. It is also, and paradoxically, something that can bring an end to life and destroy all meaning within it. At the end of the conference which gave impetus for this work, each of the participants was asked to explain to the others what they would take away from their experience during the three days. While the opinions were diverse, many participants expressed the view that, while suffering is individual and personal, it is through the collective – through discussing, analysing and writing about suffering and the many aspects it contains with others – that meaning can be made. This is the aim of this work; to bring together seemingly distant voices to speak in their words on a subject that affects us all and to, as a collective, contribute to making meaning out of the suffering we all face. We are indebted to Rob Fisher, Nate Hinerman, Daniel Riha for their organisation of the conference and their assistance in bringing this book together. Furthermore, we would like to thank Bev Hogue and Anna Sugiyama for inspiration and for setting a great example. And finally, we thank all the contributors, whose ideas and expertise are presented in this collection of chapters and those who participated in the conference but did not contribute to this book, whose inspiration was invaluable in many of our chapters. Thank you all for creating such a unique framework for discussing the plethora of forms of suffering and for trying to make meaning together. Anja and Jackson

Part I Theory

On Suffering and Its Relation to the Conception of Nihilism in Nietzsche’s Thought Stein A. Hevrøy Abstract My chapter revolves around the central role of suffering in Nietzsche’s understanding of nihilism: suffering is both a necessary condition for, and an effect of, nihilism. Firstly, suffering generates nihilism since it creates a search for meaning, i.e. will to truth, which in turn turns against itself: Will to truth eventually creates nihilism since its inherent honesty must also reveal its own truths as false. Secondly, nihilism generates suffering because humans have become addicted to eternal truths such as God before exposing this God as false. Nietzsche calls this stage of nihilism passive nihilism since a culture undergoing this process is not ready to take action on the very insight it has produced. Miguel de Unamuno may be said to represent this position as he struggles between faith and reason: reason says that God does not exist, while faith cannot tolerate this thought. But this also means that, from a Nietzschean perspective, Unamuno is unable to the see that it was suffering which created the crisis he himself is suffering. My chapter will argue that the Nietzschean conception of nihilism involves openness where suffering-generating values are laid bare and new ethics can arise. Nihilism may, in other words, be seen as the process where destructive values self-destruct and leave space for reevaluation and creativity. A central point is thus that some forms of suffering may be avoided in the future: the suffering connected to nihilism is an effect of trying to escape suffering in the first place. According to my reading of Nietzsche, it is in such insights that the potential of overcoming what may be called unnecessary suffering lies. Key Words: Nietzsche, ethics, ethical, nihilism, crisis, suffering. ***** 1. The Birth of Nihilism - Devaluation and Passive Nihilism According to Friedrich Nietzsche, nihilism is the result of the fact that ‘the highest values devaluate themselves.’ 1 But in order to reach the stage of this devaluation the so-called highest values have to be present. 2 Thus, the question of the birth of nihilism is a question concerning the creation of the highest values. These values are created because of suffering: humans only endure suffering if it is felt as meaningful suffering. In a sense, this is to say that worldly being may involve a creation of a world beyond, since bodily life necessarily involves some degree of suffering (like sickness, aging, death). This finds support in Thus Spoke Zarathustra where Nietzsche formulates that ‘Suffering it was and incapacity – that is what created all worlds behind.’ 3 Nietzsche also claims in The Will to Power

4

On Suffering and Its Relation to the Conception of Nihilism

__________________________________________________________________ that the advantage of Christian morality, as well as Platonism’s world of ideas, is that ‘[i]t granted man an absolute value, as opposed to his smallness and accidental occurrence in the flux of becoming and passing away.’ 4 Nietzsche’s observation is that human suffering, including both man’s feeling of smallness and bodily undergoing of pain, must connect itself to some meaning if humans are to tolerate it. According to Nietzsche, that is what has generated the production of the highest values. Thus, the question of the birth of nihilism (since nihilism is inseparable from the highest values) is a question of suffering. The religious safeguard against the tragic and meaningless lasts only until one of the consequences of Christian morality shows its destructive potential, namely truthfulness. Inherent in truthfulness, i.e. the will to truth, lies the tendency to expose the falseness of the ‘truths’ created by the same will to truth. According to Nietzsche, this shows us that the highest values are nihilistic since they devaluate themselves: nihilism obtains since ‘… the shabby origin of these [highest] values is becoming clear … .’ 5 If we trace the movement inherent in nihilism, it thus reveals that it follows a logic where suffering and will to truth (generated by suffering) are main elements. In short, suffering is a necessary condition for nihilism: the same forces which have now killed God, created God according to its need of a warrantor of meaning. The relation between suffering and nihilism is not only that suffering produces nihilism as a side-effect of the production of the highest values. In turn, nihilism also generates suffering because the world loses meaning and value when God, the warrantor of meaning and purpose, dies. It is an even more intense suffering than that which initially created God since humans now have developed an addiction to God. It creates a crisis in the sense that one is pulled in two different yet mutually exclusive directions. One cannot believe in God any longer, but one cannot live without God either. In The Will to Power, Nietzsche remarks: Having reached this standpoint, one grant the reality of becoming as the only reality, forbids oneself every kind of clandestine access to afterworlds and false divinities – but cannot endure this world though one does not want to deny it. 6 The death of the Christian God is not the only problem that Nietzsche’s concept of nihilism may contribute to the understanding of. More generally, it can prove fruitful when trying to grasp the psychological mode of a culture which has weakened or lost its ‘truths’. Thus, Nathan Jun’s introduction to Deleuze and Ethics can highlight this challenge: Perhaps the most tragic and frightening aspect of contemporary life is its systematic lack of imagination – the hopeless acquiescence of the powerless to those in power, coupled with

Stein A. Hevrøy

5

__________________________________________________________________ the latter’s insistence that everything is the way it is because, in some sense, it could not be otherwise. 7 What is central here is the inability to step out of the crisis one is experiencing. My point is not to criticise or describe ‘contemporary life’ but merely to point out that Nietzsche’s understanding of nihilism can be applicable also outside his own time since we will be confronted by challenges and opportunities again when crisis calls for creation of new values and perspectives. We will return to Nietzsche’s concept of creativity later. The suffering of the passive nihilist is connected to the fact that one is unable to actively accept the consequences of the discovery, namely that God is dead. Nietzsche discusses this stage of nihilism in Thus Spoke Zarathustra through Zarathustra’s speech called ‘The three transformations’ in which the spirit, finding itself in the desert, undergoes different transformations. The first transformation is from spirit to camel, an animal which is able to endure heavy burdens as well as dry, unfruitful land. This may be Nietzsche’s way of saying that in order to overcome nihilism’s passive stage, one must be able to live in its barren landscape. One must embody hardiness or expire. Nietzsche’s point regarding the importance of enduring nihilism, what the camel does as it survives in the landscape of the desert, is that any overcoming of nihilism must be done through nihilism. One must, like the camel, be able to bear the crisis of nihilism in order to surmount it. Miguel de Unamuno may be said to find himself within the struggles of passive nihilism, a struggle which for him is between faith and reason, when he says: ‘And the most tragic problem of philosophy is to reconcile intellectual necessities with the necessities of the heart and the will.’ 8 For him, nothingness, which the death of God implies since it involves a lack of any promise of afterlife, is the most terrible thing. Unamuno says that nothingness is much more frightening than ‘descriptions of the tortures of hell’ 9 given to him during his childhood. So, when the ‘uncanniest of all the guests,’ 10 nihilism, knocks on his door, he refuses him: ‘I do not submit to reason, and I rebel against it, and I persist in creating by the energy of faith in my immortalizing God … .’ 11 Unamuno’s point is that, in defying Aristotle’s view of the human being as the rational animal, reason is not the most important part of being human. According to Unamuno, man should rather be described as the animal which feels. 12 That is the reason why (since they contradict each other) the heart should triumph over the head. In other words, Unamuno may be viewed as one who undergoes the suffering of passive nihilism while lacking the strength of the camel to endure it. From a Nietzschean standpoint: when the highest values devaluate themselves, Unamuno remains passive since he is stuck within the crisis. If we imagine what Unamuno’s answer to Nietzsche would be, it would probably go something like this: by rejecting nothingness and by emphasising faith, one also rejects nihilism; the

6

On Suffering and Its Relation to the Conception of Nihilism

__________________________________________________________________ triumph of the heart over the head is the triumph of God over nothingness. For Unamuno the highest values have not really devaluated themselves, it is rather reason, which threatens to do so, and this is why he refuses reason. The Nietzschean reply would be that the ‘tragic sense of life’ felt by Unamuno is generated by suffering, and that the tragedy of this is the increased suffering experienced in the crisis. As we can see, the views of the two philosophers discussed do not harmonise: Nietzsche’s interpretation of the crisis, we know as passive nihilism, while for Unamuno it is the struggle between faith and reason. My understanding of Nietzsche is not that we are to live our lives without value. The point is rather that values have to be created: the human animal’s response to nothingness is to give value from within the life lived, which is to say values are created from within immanence and are not given from a transcendent being or principle. Let us therefore move toward Nietzsche’s more affirmative side. 2. Affirmation and Creativity: Active Nihilism and the Overcoming of Man In this section we will leave passive nihilism behind and move towards what may be thought of as the ethical potential of nihilism. The second transformation of the spirit is from the camel to the lion which is, unlike the camel, able to create freedom and to say no to duty. The lion does not bother with imperatives: when the great dragon says ‘Thou shalt’, the lion refuses the dragon with the answer ‘[no] I will.’ 13 After that, the spirit turns into a child. This is the transformation into the over-man, a creature without the boundaries of the all-too-human. The child is the figure associated especially with creativity: Innocence the child is and forgetting, a beginning anew, a play, a self-propelling wheel, a first movement, a sacred Yea-saying. Yes, for the play of creating, my brothers, a sacred Yea-saying is needed: the spirit now wills its own will, the one who had lost the world now attains its own world. 14 Overcoming nihilism involves being able to create new values. Or: it is from this meaningless ground that new values can arise. The child is the name of the becoming-creative, the one who is innocent as life is innocent, and thus without blame. The ethical connected to the overcoming of both man and nihilism, is the invitation to invent ‘new possibilities of life.’ 15 In The Gay Science, Nietzsche writes about nihilism as a precondition of ‘open seas’, i.e. new possibilities. In this text, Nietzsche seems more cheerful than for example in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Although he points out that we are not yet ‘influenced by the most immediate consequences of this event,’ 16 he focuses on the cheerfulness and lightness after the death of God:

Stein A. Hevrøy

7

__________________________________________________________________ Indeed, at hearing the news that ‘the old god is dead’, we philosophers and ‘free spirits’ feel illuminated by a new dawn; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, forebodings, expectation – finally the horizon seems clear again, even if not bright; finally our ships may set out again, set out to face any danger; every daring of the lover of knowledge is allowed again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; maybe there has never been such an ‘open sea’. 17 Although Nietzsche sounds somewhat reserved, the focus is on lightness, or gaiety, as a possible consequence of the death of God. But it is not a necessary consequence. It takes the endurance of a camel and the strength of a lion in order to reach the playfulness of the child (‘The three transformations’ may be read as a text about Nietzschean virtues). Still, it is evident that nihilism does not mean that everything is empty. It is rather a pressing understanding of a lack of prearranged purpose which will give humans a feeling of emptiness. In Reading the New Nietzsche, David B. Allison turns to the point that viewing the world as ’a vicious circle of meaningless change’ 18 gives possibilities to overcome meaninglessness through creativity: Alternatively, if such a view extended the prospect of creating new values and the celebration of new meaning for the very earth itself, freeing us at the same time from our enervating dependency of the past, then such a prospect would positively transfigure human existence and one would do well to embrace it with enthusiasm. 19 This insight is central in Nietzsche’s thinking, and (as we shall see) it is the hope Nietzsche has with regards to overcoming the destructive attitudes of a nihilistic culture. In order to understand Nietzsche’s view on creativity and values, it is crucial for us to have a look at his perspectivism. It is not the same as a trivial relativism which says something like ‘any perspective is as good as any other.’ Nietzsche’s point is that every value, or rather every evaluation, happens to be created from specific perspectives. Thus, it is not possible to view anything from an objective or neutral standpoint. Rather, we are always giving value according to our relations to what is evaluated. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche writes: It is we, the thinking-sensing ones, who really and continually make something that is not yet there … Whatever has value in the present world has it not in itself, according to its nature –

8

On Suffering and Its Relation to the Conception of Nihilism

__________________________________________________________________ nature is always value-less – but has rather been given, granted value, and we where the givers and granters! 20 Also, when we relate to the same thing with a plethora of affects and perspectives in contrast to only one, our so-called objectivity has increased. 21 The point is that nihilism can only be generated if humans forget their ability to create and lean towards already created values, that the overcoming of nihilism is dependent on creativity. Nietzsche’s hope is that humanity is able to give up old hopes, i.e. the hopes of a world without suffering beyond. According to Nietzsche, suffering must be seen as necessary. This is not only because it is an ontological necessity since all growth of life is inseparable from decay, hurt and diminishing of other life. It may also be ethically necessary: it is only by viewing suffering as a necessary part of life that suffering is kept at a minimum. Nietzsche’s proposal for a medicine, amor fati, is thus in contrast to will to truth’s world beyond since the latter generates more suffering through its nihilistic movement. Amor fati, on the other hand, is the ‘love of fate’ which accepts and obeys whatever situation exists. It is not a passive acceptance but an active attunement which depends on one looking the situation in the eye. It is to say that one cannot choose one’s fate, but one can adapt and thus play out one’s fate in many different ways. 22 In other words, denial of the situation cannot but bring disadvantage. If we view suffering through Nietzsche’s amor fati, the affirmation of everything in life as necessary (suffering included), we approach something like a Nietzschean ethics. My suggestion is that Nietzsche’s view, which in short claims that trying to avoid suffering may create more suffering, is well worth considering. Nietzsche’s ethics advises that we accept suffering as necessary and may thus help steer clear of creating what may be called ‘unnecessary sufferings’. Also, the ethical fruitfulness of the barren landscape of nihilism is that it makes room for new creations. Thus, I propose that the notion of ‘nihilism’ should not be associated only with hopelessness and despair, but also with new beginnings.

Notes 1

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 9. I am grateful to Torolf Myklebust, Helge Pettersen and Kristin Sampson for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. This chapter owes a great deal to Helge Pettersen’s book Nietzsche – Lidelse og menneskedannelse, Fortolkningsforsøk i Nietzsches filosofi. Any shortcomings in this chapter are of course my own responsibility. 3 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and Nobody (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 28. 2

Stein A. Hevrøy

9

__________________________________________________________________ 4

Nietzsche, Will to Power, 9. Ibid., 10. 6 Ibid., 13. 7 Nathan Jun, Introduction to Deleuze and Ethics, eds. Nathan Jun and Daniel W. Smith (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 4. 8 Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life (New York: Dover Publications, 1954), 15. 9 Ibid., 43. 10 Nietzsche, Will to Power, 7. 11 de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life, 50. 12 Ibid., 3. 13 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 24. 14 Ibid. 15 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (London and New York: Continuum, 2002), 103. 16 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 199. 17 Ibid. 18 David B. Allison, Reading the New Nietzsche (Lanham, Boulder, New York and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001), 162. 19 Ibid. 20 Nietzsche, Gay Science, 171. 21 See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals (New York: Dover Publications, 2003), 86. 22 See Mario Perniola, Ritual Thinking: Sexuality, Death, World (New York: Humanity Books, 2001), 150. 5

Bibliography Allison, David B. Reading the New Nietzsche. Lanham, Boulder, New York and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001. Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. London and New York: Continuum, 2002. Jun, Nathan. Introduction to Deleuze and Ethics, edited by Nathan Jun and Daniel W. Smith. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011.

10

On Suffering and Its Relation to the Conception of Nihilism

__________________________________________________________________ Madsen, Ole Jacob. ‘Nyliberalismens sosialpsykologi: Dany-Robert Dufours kritikk av nyliberalismen’. Nyliberalisme, Agora: Journal for metafysisk spekulasjon 1 (2011): 94-117. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ———. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and Nobody. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. ———. The Genealogy of Morals. New York: Dover Publications, 2003. ———. Twilight of the Idols. London and New York: Penguin Books, 1990. ———. The Will to Power. New York: Vintage Books, 1968. Perniola, Mario. Ritual Thinking: Sexuality, Death, World. New York: Humanity Books, 2001. Pettersen, Helge. Nietzsche – Lidelse og menneskedannelse, Fortolkningsforsøk i Nietzsches filosofi. Bergen: Ariadne Forlag, 1991. Unamuno, Miguel de. Tragic Sense of Life. New York: Dover Publications, 1954. Stein Arnold Hevrøy has a MA in Philosophy and is a member of the research groups ‘Subjectivation and late modernity’ and ‘Philosophy, language and art’ at the Department of Philosophy, University of Bergen, Norway.

Kierkegaard’s View on the Suffering Aspects of Life and the Role of Love in Decreasing the Suffering of Life Faezeh Moeinikorbekandi Abstract One of the most important features in human life is suffering and another one is love. Human beings bear various kinds of suffering in their lives, which are sometimes avoidable and sometimes unavoidable. A group of religious thinkers suppose that only one thing can help humankind in this condition, i.e. love. In this view, the true love of God is the essence of religious faith. As a matter of fact, everyone who does not have such love could not hold a real belief. Soren Kierkegaard belongs to this trend. However, love itself increases human suffering which makes the situation much more painful and complicated. The method of Kierkegaard for reconciling these two important aspects of human life and his description of their relation are of great importance. Key Words: Suffering, love, existential stages (aesthetic, ethical and religious), love of God and Christianity. ***** 1. The Suffering Aspects of Life Suffering as a feature of the worldly life is a universal and inseparable subjective experience in a human being. 1 Man suffers when he deals with an unchangeable or immutable fate. Therefore, suffering is the result of the contradiction between a human’s desires with free will and the real world. 2 The unpleasant situations construct two different kinds of suffering, i.e. physical and spiritual, which should be distinguished due to their essential differences. There are other phenomena to suffering such as pain, discomfort, distress, anguish, and so on, which belong to the body and are physical reactions of the neurotic system, while suffering is a subjective impression of an unpleasant situation. So its subjective feature means that nobody can resort to medicines and treatment to cure it. 3 Meanwhile, suffering is different from ‘Evil’. Evil is a more general concept that can be classified into three types but all sorts of it cause inner impressions that bring suffering to humankind. Earthquakes, floods, death, poverty … are the examples of natural evil. Secondly, moral evil is the attribution of human immoral actions such as injustice, cheating, stealing, pride which necessarily make unpleasant impressions for people. Lastly, metaphysical evil is the feature of worldly life and inescapable in any condition. In general, Kierkegaard believes that human suffering is the feature of existential situations such as anguish, hopelessness, loneliness and silence.

12

Kierkegaard’s View on the Suffering Aspects of Life

__________________________________________________________________ Therefore, suffering exists in all existential stages of human life. However, the essence and concept of it change in each stage; depending on what stage of life is taken into consideration, a different definition of pain and suffering will be formed. Suffering is the milestone of Kierkegaard’s thoughts. He goes beyond the usual notion of theologians that assume the spiritual pains of humanity are the result of their sin or the sins of people. He does not only reject suffering as the punishment of sins or obstacle to transcendence but also considers it an essential element of human existence, a part of religious practice and the necessary meaning of transcendence. In his view, the experience of suffering teaches humans how to follow Jesus and consequently these faithful endeavours will bring about eternal happiness. As he describes, suffering is the essential feature of Christianity in the religious stage and the pavement of ‘individuality’ for reaching transcendence. According to Kierkegaard, suffering is tied with human responsibility and individuality. Since no one can bear the others’ suffering, it is individual in itself. Meanwhile, by bearing suffering in our personal lives, instead of placing it on others, we can be true follower of Christ. 4 To be responsible to the hardness of your life and even in a higher level to bear the others suffering are the ethical aspects of Christianity. 5 However, the first essential feature of suffering is its inevitability, due to which no one can get rid of the suffering completely. Suffering as a spiritual pain of humanity is a part of life which can be changed from one form to another but cannot be omitted. In other words, human suffering can be classified into two parts; evitable and inevitable. Meanwhile, man has different suffering impressions are rooted in the existential stage of that painful feeling. Regarding the stages of suffering, Kierkegaard distinguishes between three stages of aesthetic, ethical and religious suffering. Humankind seeks for ‘pleasure’ in its ‘aesthetic stage’ of life as the important principle in this stage. But Kierkegaard believes thirst for pleasure is endless and leads him to the sense of hopelessness and emptiness; this is what he calls ‘Sickness unto Death’. This is the significant suffering in this stage. Generally, the more pleasure he takes, the more difficult it is to escape from suffering. In this stage man doesn’t have a consciousness and metaphysical engagement. Human beings keep going round a in circle from two major senses of ‘passionateness’ (thirst) and ‘repletion’ (satiation). Kierkegaard believes that the irony of this situation brings man to a critical point which is to decide whether to remain in this stage or pass beyond it and enter into the next stage. In the ‘ethical stage’ everyone faces obligations; considering the obligations is a necessity and there is no exception. 6 Most of the sufferings that are affirmed in the Bible belong to this stage. The suffering here is the consequence of giving precedence to others rather than oneself. Due to an ultimate aim of the individual, i.e. the other, bearing suffering becomes acceptable or even necessary.

Faezeh Moenikorbekandi 13 __________________________________________________________________ The suffering in this stage is neither negative – contrary to the last stage – nor desired but it is the by-product of the individual’s ethical choice. The ethical actor lives in suffering and pain since he always stands in front of hard choices. No matter the choice is, he/she will suffer. According to Kierkegaard, in this stage the ‘moral champion’ calls his choice, i.e. either/or. He faces paradoxical situations causing extreme suffering. For example, on one side the individuals’ belongings sit and on the other side he has a responsibility towards the ‘others’. In Kierkegaard’s view, if one chooses according to the moral principles, he would lose his own belongings. If not, he will suffer from immoral behaviour. The ‘moral champion’ does his responsibility with a broken heart. 7 In this stage, a moral man has moral ideals that let him sacrifice his pleasure for sake the moral ideals. Therefore, the most initial moral suffering of the human is his concern about the realization of the moral ideals. Like the last stage, the moral stage has also consists of avoidable and unavoidable suffering. Kierkegaard stresses that those who change the circumstances in a way to avoid suffering are ‘brave’ since they resist the suffering by their courage. However while encountering inescapable sufferings man should be ‘patient’. He emphasises that patient is more meritorious characteristic because it is the response of the ‘moral champion’ to the basic feature of worldly life. The third stage, the ‘religious stage’ is to somehow a synthesis of the last stages. 8 Kierkegaard says that suffering is essential element of the religious stage. Suffering for the religious man is the same as pleasure for the aesthetic and happiness for the ethical man. Suffering is essential for the religious man. But pleasure and prosperity are not essential for the aesthetic and the ethical man. 9 The ultimate suffering in this stage is ‘doubt’. Although the religious man obeys God, he is always in doubt whether a given order is a canonical duty that is assigned by God or not. So they always live in doubt and suffer from the lack of knowledge. Since, the religious man is mostly concerned about his faith, the doubt which aims at his certainty, leads him to the ultimate suffering in this stage. However, this suffering leads to eternal happiness for the real believer. In the religious stage there are two champions; the champion of submissiveness to the divine will and the champion of faith. The champion of submissiveness surrenders everything beyond the divine will to reach serenity and tranquillity. However, the real champion according to Kierkegaard believes Abraham who not only devoted his son but also was delightful and happy to be obeying God. 10 The feeling of contentment and happiness is because of the proximity of the champion of faith to God and those who do not have the real faith can only tolerate the suffering of this stage and be submissive to God. Contrary to the champion of submissiveness, the faithful person does not enjoy serenity and tranquillity, but he always lives in a state of gorgeous fear and suffering. In this stage, the suffering ascends but thanks to the truthful faith of the champion it will also be delightful. The champion of faith suffers due to his fear, hopelessness, loneliness and silence in facing his everlasting doubt but he is pleasant due to the proximity to God.

14

Kierkegaard’s View on the Suffering Aspects of Life

__________________________________________________________________ 2. The Suffering of Love In Kierkegaard’s view the only remedy for suffering is ‘Love’. Love as a strong affection for the other arising out of kinship or personal ties, is one of the third Divine Virtues in Christianity. But the paradoxical part of Kierkegaard’s idea is that all three types of love, i.e. love to the self, to the others, and to God, are sources of suffering. In the aesthetic stage, love is a source of life; however, the beloved is subjected to infinity and death. As far as possible, real love should be rooted in the eternal life. 11 Since in real love the lover should go beyond his desires and devote himself to his lover, the love in the ethical stage is more precious but the devotion is the source of suffering. 12 The ultimate and transcendental love is Love; a faithful love because not only is it not selfish but also the beloved is eternal and infinite. Since the nature of love is essentially different in this stage, we should have pure Love which can be possible by worshiping God as a true faithful believer and who is purifying the heart. Purification of the heart will be possible only through the Love for God. 13 The ideal type of Love is the spiritual Love of Abraham that made him devote his son and all of his belongings to God. Then he approximated to God and changed to the perfect man. This position is beyond human understanding. 14 However the tragic point is that Love for God creates suffering and it even reaches its extreme in this stage. Jesus was born in pain and died in suffering. 15 The true faith to God requires the suffering which was a part of Jesus’ life and death. According to Kierkegaard love is a source of life in all existential stages but it is tied with suffering. Meanwhile, man can reach salvation through Love 16 and deal with suffering happily and delightfully. 17 3. Healing Suffering with Suffering Now how shall human diminish or even reduce suffering? Can Love for God heal suffering and the tragic aspects of life? Can Love make them tolerable or meaningful in life? From Kierkegaard’s point of view, the only proper way to help man in dealing with suffering in life passes through the religious stage. He believes that the believer is certainly a lover; actually the purest Lover. As a religious thinker, Kierkegaard believes Faith is the most important reaction toward human pain and suffering and meanwhile, the real faith and love are with each other. This ‘lovely faith’ makes the suffering in life tolerable and delightful. However, this remedy is painful in itself; Love is suffering. In the religious stage, we reach to Love especially Love of God as the cure for the main suffering of human life but the new problem is the suffering essence of Love. In Kierkegaard’s idea this suffering is not bad in itself because it is the path of salvation and this feature makes it sensible and meaningful. A real and true Christian loves suffering through infinite and transcendent Love as he assumes it is

Faezeh Moenikorbekandi 15 __________________________________________________________________ the prerequisite for salvation. 18 Kierkegaard believes Saint Paul’s remarks that whoever loves, believes the whole of it. It seems that according to Kierkegaard, we cannot diminish suffering in life but we can relish it by giving new meaning to it. 19

Notes 1

T. B. Kilpatrick, ‘Suffering’, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings, vol. 12 (Edinburg: T&T Clark, 1980), 1. 2 Although, one can speak about pain and suffering for animals in their natural conditions but in this chapter we focus on suffering as a human phenomenon. 3 John Hick, Evil and the God of Love (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 292293. 4 Søren Kierkegaard, The Gospel of Suffering, in Up building Discourses in Various Spirits, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 220-224. 5 Matthews, 28: 11-20. 6 J. Kellenberger, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche: Faith and Eternal Acceptance (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997), 51-53. 7 Ibid; Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), 29-37. 8 Susan Leigh Anderson, On Kierkegaard (Belmont: Wadsworth, 2000), 60-61. 9 Harvie Ferguson, Melancholy and the Critique of Modernity: Søren Kierkegaard’s Religious Psychology (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 164. 10 Kierkegaard discussed it in the last chapter of Fear and Trembling. 11 Søren Kierkegaard, Works of love, trans. Howard Hong and Edna Hong (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 311. 12 Ibid., 7. 13 Ibid.,150. 14 Roger Poole and Henrik Stangerup, A Kierkegaard Reader (London: Fourth Estate, 1989), 163. 15 John, 3:16. 16 Yudit K. Greenberg, Encyclopaedia of Love in World Religions, vol. 1 (California: ABC-CLIO, 2009). 17 Soren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals, trans. Alastair Hannay (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1996), 101. 18 Kierkegaard, Gospel of Suffering, 313. 19 First Epistle to the Corinthians, 13:7.

16

Kierkegaard’s View on the Suffering Aspects of Life

__________________________________________________________________

Bibliography Anderson, Susan Leigh. On Kierkegaard. Belmont: Wadsworth, 2000. Ferguson, Harvie. Melancholy and the Critique of Modernity: Søren Kierkegaard's Religious Psychology. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Greenberg, Yudit K. Encyclopaedia of Love in World Religions. Vol. 1. California: ABC-CLIO, 2009. Hick, John. Evil and the God of Love. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Kellenberger, J. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche: Faith and Eternal Acceptance. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997. Kierkegaard, Søren. Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing. Translated by Douglas V. Steere. New York: Harper & Row, 1938. ———. Fear and Trembling. Translated by Walter Lowrie. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941. ———. The Sickness unto Death. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1941. ———. Philosophical Fragments. Edited and translated by David Swenson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962. ———. Works of Love. Translated by Howard Hong and Edna Hong. New York: Harper and Row, 1962. ———. ‘The Gospel of Suffering’. In Up building Discourses in Various Spirits. Translated by Howard Hong and Edna Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. ———. Papers and Journals. Translated by Alastair Hannay. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1996. Kilpatrick, T. B. ‘Suffering’, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics. Edited by James Hastings. Vol. 12, 1-10. Edinburg: T&T Clark, 1980.

Faezeh Moenikorbekandi 17 __________________________________________________________________ Kirmmse, Bruce. Encounters with Kierkegaard: A Life as Seen by His Contemporaries. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. ———. Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark. Indiana: Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1990. Poole, Roger, and Henrik Stangerup. A Kierkegaard Reader. London: Fourth Estate, 1989. The King James Version of the Holy Bible, last modified January 5, 2012, http:// www.heargoodnews.org/Bible/Kjvbilen.pdf. Faezeh Moeinikorbekandi is a graduate from Tabatabaie University of Tehran in the field of Philosophy of Religion. She is mostly concerned with Philosophy and Religion Studies. The existential problematic aspects of human life, especially in the realm of religion, are at the centre of her studies.

Postmodern Suffering: Contemporary Society and the Postmodern Sublime Hadi Fayyaz Abstract In a paper which was presented in the second Conference of Making Sense of Pain, I tried to explain voluntary pain acceptance, (such as martyrdom or in a negative case suicide attacks) as a sublime act. During the conference I was faced with a question which challenged my statement in the paper very seriously. The question was: since accepting pain is sublime, why it is not a common practice in contemporary societies? To answer this question this chapter tries to explain another aspect of the sublime which is introduced by Jean-Francois Lyotard as the postmodern sublime. Grand-narratives even in their religious/traditional forms or modern form are the sources of the sublime. They made the pain of totality acceptable for modern or pre-modern man. For instance pain of wars or mass killings was endurable because of the sacred or sublime position of the grandnarratives. In the postmodern age the situation is different as Lyotard argues. Postmodern man is aware of difference and diversity of his/her beliefs and desires from the others, and because of it postmodernism is characterized by an abundance of micro-narratives. Therefore, accepting great pains for the sake of a grand narrative is not sublime in this age, because the postmodern sublime is totally different from modern or pre-modern ones. By presenting the diversities and differences, the postmodern sublime brings us a sense of rapture or ecstasy which is interesting at first meet, but this variety of micro-narratives makes our environment unfamiliar and it causes a sense of anxiety and depression which contemporary man suffers from. Key Words: The postmodern sublime, Jean Francois Lyotard, Emanuel Kant, voluntary pain acceptance. ***** 1. Introduction In a paper which was presented in the second Conference of Making Sense of Pain, 1 I tried to explain a strange and complicated human behaviour which is voluntary pain acceptance, based on the Kantian notion of the sublime. To me, by accepting pain we feel ourselves superior to our nature and it causes to find ourselves sublime, a feeling which makes it easier to endure the pain. During the conference I was faced with a question which challenged my statement in the paper very seriously. The question was: if we accept this claim that accepting pain voluntarily can elevate our humanity and shows us our dominion to nature, how can we explain this reality that it is not a usual practice among all cultures

20

Postmodern Suffering

__________________________________________________________________ especially in today modern societies? To answer this question this chapter tries to explain another aspect of sublimity which is introduced by Jean-Francois Lyotard as the postmodern sublime. But because the Lyotard’s concept of the sublime is based on his special reading of the Kantian sublime, first I have to review the Kant’s approach to the definition of the sublime. 2. The Kantian Sublime For Kant, like the beautiful, the sublime is an aspect of aesthetic judgement and can be a source of pleasure. Aesthetic experience of the beautiful is engaged with the free interplay of the two of our faculties of mind: Understanding and Imagination. While for the beautiful it causes pleasure because of finding the beautiful adequate to our imagination, for the sublime this relation ends in a failure and causes pain. A pain which is overcame by finding our superiority to nature through the ideas of reason which causes a sense of delight. The beautiful as definite is felt as adequate to the imagination, and the imagination is considered as being in accord, in regard to a given intuition, with the understanding, which is a faculty of concepts. The sublime, however, does violence to the imagination; it overwhelms it, as it were. And it is then represented as being in accord with the reason, considered as the faculty of indeterminate ideas of totality. The sublime, in proportion as it involves absence of limits, is inadequate to our power of imaginative representation; that is to say, it exceeds and overwhelms it. And in so far as this absence of limits is associated with totality, the sublime can be regarded as the “exhibition”, as Kant puts it, of an indefinite idea of the reason. 2 Kant follows Burke in distinguishing between beautiful and the sublime, but from his point of view, Burke’s approach is a physiological exposition of aesthetic judgement. 3 Therefore, the pleasure and the pain which Burkes brings out that can be felt in the beautiful and the sublime, are some individual feelings which we cannot expect to be felt by other people the same as we feel. This situation is in contrast with Kant’s transcendental approach to the aesthetics judgement and the second moment of the judgement of taste concerning the quality of the judgement which is about the universality of it. 4 Therefore, a priori principle is needed to enable us to judge something aesthetically and expect others to approve of our judgement. Another point of difference between Kant and Burke’s ideas about the sublime is that for Kant, the sublime is something in our mind instead of being in nature, while the natural objects are the sources of the sublime for Burke. Kant defines the sublime in two deferent aspects, the Mathematical and the Dynamic sublime. In mathematical sublime, an object of huge dimensions is the

Hadi Fayyaz

21

__________________________________________________________________ source of the sublime, something which is absolutely great, which is ‘great beyond all comparison.’ 5 When we encounter something which is absolutely great, our faculties of imagination and understanding are not able to perceive it because it surpasses every measure which we know. This failure causes pain but, when the faculty of reason makes the concept of infinity or magnificence for instance, the pain will disappear, because we find our rational capacity superior to the object. The huge object is now grasped through the super-sensible idea which is made by our faculty of reason. So, the super-sensible idea of reason is eligible for being called the sublime. In the mathematical sublime, we find and are aware of our superiority to nature. For dynamic sublime, Kant talks about a natural power which has the capacity to endanger our life but when we are a safe distance from it we can find ourselves superior to it. Kant defines the dynamic sublime with the concepts of Power and Dominion. To him, ‘Power is a capacity that is superior to great obstacles.’ 6 Dominion 7 is a type of power that ‘is also superior to the resistance of something that itself possesses power.’ 8 Thus, ‘nature considered in aesthetic judgment as a power that has no dominion over us is dynamically sublime.’ 9 Although the natural object must be fearful in order to be a source of the sublime, it must not be frightening or dangerous for the one who tries to judge it as sublime. It means that we must be in a safe place for judging it, or be so brave as to resist it. Fearful natural objects; make our capacity to resist into an insignificant trifle in comparison with their power. But the sight of them only becomes all the more attractive the more fearful it is, as long as we find ourselves in safety, and we gladly call these objects sublime because they elevate the strength of our soul above its usual level, and allow us to discover within ourselves a capacity for resistance of quite another kind, which gives us the courage to measure ourselves against the apparent all-powerfulness of nature. 10 This capacity is based on the instinct of self preservation, but of a different type from that which we know. Its duty is to save our humanity instead of just our physical life. This is the reason bravery is called sublime. Even though the majority of people need to be a safe distance from the dangerous situation to experience the sublime feeling, some others are so brave to face the danger or even put their life in great danger and feel a greater sublime feeling in return. This characteristic of the dynamic sublime is the first key point which I tried to explain voluntary pain acceptance based on it. Kant believed that it is not very easy to expect others to confirm our judgement about the sublime, because from his point of view the one who wants to make

22

Postmodern Suffering

__________________________________________________________________ judgements about the sublime needs to be more civilized than the one who is judging the beautiful. This prerequisite is because of the special characteristic of the aesthetic judgement of the sublime. For judging something sublime the ideas of the reason have a very important role. Therefore: ‘In fact, without the development of moral ideas, that which we, prepared by culture, call sublime will appear merely repellent to the unrefined person.’ 11 In spite of the fact that Kant asserts it is necessary to be cultured to judge something sublime, he accepts that because of the natural foundation of the moral ideas from his point of view, one expects others to confirm his/her judgments. 12 It means that the one who experiences the sublime expects others to approve him/her, because he/she believes that they must feel the sublimity which he/she feels while in the reality it is not possible for him/her to attract their sympathy because they might be not as civilized as he/she is to feel it. In addition, this statement of Kant can lead us to this result that the sublime is something culturally and socially constructed. It means that in different cultures we may encounter different types of sublimity, some types of which may not meet our expectations or even go completely against them. 3. Introducing Voluntary Pain Acceptance as a Type of Dynamic Sublime We saw that, from Kant’s point of view, we can feel a sense of sublimity when we feel ourselves superior to natural powers. Accepting pain and acting against our natural instincts is the main reason for calling this situation sublime. When we find ourselves superior to our nature – I mean our instincts – a sense of sublimity will arise. Therefore, it is the experience of the elevated humanity or soul which is worthy of enduring the pain. Now, it is time to answer the fundamental question. As I said, the question was: if we accept this claim that accepting pain voluntarily can elevate our humanity and shows us our dominion to nature, how can we explain this reality that it is not a usual practice among all cultures especially in today’s modern societies? First, allow me to remind that lower degrees of pain acceptance are common activities which we can see everywhere in each culture. Some activities such as fasting are routine and accepted in many cultures. Even in non-religious societies, we can see a similar practice in hunger-strike which is a practice for showing protest in modern world. Therefore, the problem should be with those types which endanger our life or impose us unbearable pains. Similarly, this type of voluntary pain acceptance has an equivalent in modern world. Showing bravery in a battle or sacrificing one’s life for saving others are accepted forms of pain acceptance in modern world. Therefore, it seems that as modern humans, we cannot accept unfamiliar forms of this human behaviour which are specific to other cultures. My answer is based on the cultural nature of the sublime. As it was mentioned in the previous part of this chapter, the sublime has a close relation with moral ideas which are culturally developed. Therefore, while some beliefs or moral ideas might

Hadi Fayyaz

23

__________________________________________________________________ not make sense in some cultures, they might have a very strong social acceptability in another culture and, many people are ready to sacrifice their life for them. Because of this widely acceptability, we can see in many cultures that people do these acts in public very proudly and expect others to understand them. In other words, in their mental world, they expect us to have the ability to imagine their experience of the elevated soul because of their commitment to the specific culturally developed moral laws of their society, even though it is not possible for us to engage with their experience. Likewise, there is a modern equivalent for this situation which may not make sense in traditional cultures. When someone commits self-immolation for the sake of a protest, he/she tries to remind us of some socially accepted moral ideas which are going to be forgotten in the society or have been disregarded by the government. On the other hand, from the point of view of a pre-modern man, today social concerns such as environmental issues may not make sense and risking life for the sake of them doesn’t seem wise. Suicide terrorism as another type of voluntary pain acceptance which unfortunately is very common in some regions of today’s world, is a subject which can be understood based on this special characteristic of the sublime. If it is confirmable that accepting pain voluntarily is for the sake of preserving or elevating our humanity which is based on moral ideas, how it is possible to explain suicide terrorism? I think the answer is this sentence: their moral laws have been developed in a wrong way. A way which is equal to going astray for us, but leads them to enjoy a pleasure of a false sense of the sublime. From a different point of view, I want to emphasise that the mentioned question is more regardable if we consider the dominant beliefs of the contemporary postmodern societies about the unreasonableness of those types of voluntary pain acceptances which are done for the sake of an ideological belief, and I think the questioner regarded this atmosphere of distrust in contemporary western societies about the elevating of humanity by means of enduring pains for the sake of an ideological belief. In this regard, allow me try to consider the other aspect of the question, therefore we must ask why it is not possible for the postmodern man to understand the pain acceptances which are done for the sake of a religious or any other ideological belief? In other words, why there is no search for the sublime as it was in former ages or in pre-modern societies? 4. The Sublime in the Philosophy of Jean-François Lyotard The sublime has a very important role in Lyotard’s later philosophy, especially the Kantian concept of the sublime. Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998) in one of his later works with this title: Lessons on the Analytic of the sublime, challenges Kant’s claim in his third critique about the possibility of bridging the two separate domains of theory and practice which was introduced by his first two critiques; critique of pure reason and critique of practical reason. For Kant the critique of judgment;

24

Postmodern Suffering

__________________________________________________________________ serves as the sought-after “bridge” between the theoretical and the practical, spanning the gulf previously created between the knowledge of objects according to the conditions of possible experience and the realisation of freedom under the unconditional of moral law. 13 For Lyotard the Kantian unification project shows its disputableness when he tries to explain the sublime based on the interplay of imagination and understanding and the faculties of presentation and conception. Lyotard points out that the sublime shows the limits of the project; Sublime violence is like lightning. It short-circuits thinking with itself. Nature or what is left of it, quantity, serves only to provide the bad contact that creates the spark. The teleological machine explodes. The ‘leading’ that nature with its vital lead was supposed to provide for thinking in a movement toward its final illumination cannot take place. The beautiful contributed to the enlightenment... but the sublime is a sudden blazing, and without future. Thus it is that it acquired a future and addresses us still, we who hardly hope in the Kantian sense. 14 What the sublime shows us is the limits of enlightenment as a grand narrative of modern thinking. ‘A metanarrative sets out the rules of narratives and language games. This means that a metanarrative organises language games and determines the success or failure of each statement or language move that takes place in them.’ 15 While meta-narratives regard the past, on the contrary the grand-narratives consider the future. A future in which the problems that a society suffers from should be resolved. Lyotard introduces two main types of modern grand-narratives in his famous book, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. They are the speculative grand-narrative and the grand-narrative of emancipation (or freedom). The grand-narrative of emancipation shows itself in one of its most wellknown appearances as Marxism. Marxism; ...focuses on the freedom of the workers from exploitation by their masters and the development of their ability to control their own lives. The aim of this type of grand narrative, in whatever form it occurs, is thus the emancipation of an enlightened humanity from dogma, mysticism, exploitation and suffering. 16 Marxism as a continuation of the enlightenment project ends in a type of totality. A totality which we are familiar with in Soviet communism. This is a very good reason for Lyotard to connect philosophical totality, the idea (or illusion) of

Hadi Fayyaz

25

__________________________________________________________________ being able to explain everything or collecting all language games, in a single grand narrative, with political totalitarianism and terror. For Lyotard, it is not the aim of aesthetic judgment to effect a ‘reconciliation between “language games”’ because: Kant knew that they are separated by an abyss and that only a transcendental illusion can hope to totalise them into a real unity. But he also knew that the price of this illusion is terror. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given us our fill of terror. 17 Political movements in the twentieth century such as Nazism or Soviet Communism represent ideas that try to define the world totally, and anything or anyone that does not fit into these systems is violently suppressed, excluded or eliminated. In other words grand-narratives and meta-narratives even in their religious/traditional forms or modern form are the sources of the sublime. They made the pain of totality acceptable for modern or pre-modern man. Pain of wars or mass killings are endurable because of the sacred or sublime position of the grand narratives. For instance, the grand narratives such as the Nazi interpretation of Eugenics as a belief makes it easy to bear the pain of mass killing for the sake of improving the next generation. It is sublime to act against our desires even our sense of humanitarianism for the sake of a grand narrative. In the postmodern age the situation is different as Lyotard argues. Postmodern society is extremely tired from the totalitarian ideologies and is aware of differences and diversities of beliefs and desires, and because of it postmodern is defined by Lyotard as ‘incredulity towards metanarratives.’ 18 Postmodernism can be introduced as an abundance of micro-narratives. Therefore, accepting great pains for the sake of a grand narrative is not sublime in this age, because it doesn’t make sense. In a post-modern society, Lyotard’s postmodern sublime is ‘an art of negation, a perpetual negation ... based on a never ending critique of representation that should contribute to the preservation of heterogeneity, of optimal dissensus.’ 19 While the postmodern man doesn’t suffer from the pain of the terror of the modern sublime, by presenting the diversities and differences, the postmodern sublime brings us a sense of rapture or ecstasy which is interesting at first meet, but this variety of micro-narratives makes our environment unfamiliar. It makes our environment uncanny. A space which we cannot feel good in. An environment which Heidegger calls un-homely (unheimlich), it causes a sense of anxiety (angst) and depression which contemporary man suffers from them.

26

Postmodern Suffering

__________________________________________________________________

Notes 1

See Hadi Fayyaz, ‘Sublime Pain: A Study of Voluntary Pain Acceptance’, in Pain: Management, Expression, Interpretation, ed. Andrzej Dańczak and Nicola Lazenby (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2011), 143-150. 2 Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy: Volume VI Wolff to Kant (London: Newman Press, 1971), 364. 3 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 158 (5:277). 4 Ibid., 96 (5:211) and 140 (5:527). See §6: ‘The beautiful is that which, without concepts, is represented as the object of a universal satisfaction.’ And also §27: ‘On the quality of the satisfaction in the judging of the sublime.’ 5 Ibid., 132 (5:248). 6 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 143 (5:260). 7 Gewalt. 8 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 143 (5:260). 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., 144-145 (5:261). 11 Ibid., 148 (5:265) 12 See Ibid., 149 (5:266) 13 Jean Francois Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rothenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 1. 14 Ibid., 54-55. 15 Simon Malpas, Jean Francois Lyotard (London: Routledge, 2003), 24. 16 Ibid., 27. 17 Jean Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence 1982-1985, trans. Don Barry et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 15-16. 18 Jean Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), xxiv. 19 Hans Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern: A History (London: Routledge, 2005), 128.

Bibliography Bertens, Hans. The Idea of the Postmodern: A History. London: Routledge, 2005. Copleston, Frederick. A History of Philosophy: Volume VI Wolff to Kant. London: Newman Press, 1971.

Hadi Fayyaz

27

__________________________________________________________________ Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Kirwan, James. Sublimity. Abingdon: Routledge, 2005. Lyotard, Jean Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. ———. The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence 1982-1985. Translated by Don Barry, Bernadette Maher, Julian Pefanis, Virginia Spate and Morgan Thomas. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. ———. Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime. Translated by Elizabeth Rothenberg. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Fayyaz, Hadi. ‘Sublime Pain: A Study of Voluntary Pain Acceptance’. In Pain: Management, Expression, Interpretation, edited by Andrzej Dańczak and Nicola Lazenby. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2011. Shaw, Philip. The Sublime. Wiltshire: Routledge, 2006. Hadi Fayyaz is a PhD candidate in Philosophy of Art at Allameh Tabataba’i University, Tehran, Iran. His interests include aesthetics and Philosophy of Art, ethics and Philosophy of Religion.

Part II Practice

Suffering and the ‘Acceptability Gap’: A Concept of Convergence David MacKintosh Abstract The identification and relief of suffering are widely recognised as primary goals of medicine, particularly towards the end of life when treatment of disease may no longer give relief. However, a clinically useful conceptualisation of suffering remains elusive. To be clinically useful a conceptualisation of suffering should accurately describe the phenomenon in question, and, be intellectually accessible, generalisable in all respects and provide guidance over therapeutic intervention. It should, in addition, recognise the intensely personal nature of the experience, free of professional interpretation or judgement. One definition which claims to satisfy these conditions has been proposed – ‘Suffering is a consequence of self awareness and occurs when a person’s current state fails to match a state he or she is able to accept.’ – the ‘acceptability gap’. Based on the results of a qualitative study, reported in 2000, this conceptualisation shares much with related models in other areas of psychosocial enquiry, particularly the regulation of emotion and quality of life; for example ‘transition states’, ‘psychosocial transitions’, the ‘Calman gap’, the ‘response shift’, the ‘modal model’ of emotion regulation. The common feature of these models is a recursive process of appraisal resulting in individuals resetting their emotional responses and expectations with, hopefully, a consequent reduction in levels of distress. Despite their differing origins the above models, in fact, describe the same phenomenon – that of the experience of personal suffering and how individuals respond to and manage their suffering. The concept of an ‘acceptability gap’ in the description of suffering can be shown to satisfy the criteria for a clinically useful definition of suffering with particular regard to reaffirming its intensely personal nature. Importantly, it emphasises the primacy of an individual’s response to, rather than the nature of, a stimulus. Key Words: Suffering, emotion regulation. ***** 1. Why be Interested in Suffering Although it is not certain who actually said it, the aphorism ‘cure sometimes, comfort always’, or some version of that, has a rather catchy, feel-good ring to it; a sense that it is the right thing to do. In a more formal version Eric Cassell identified the relief of suffering as one of the cardinal goals of medicine along with the treatment of disease. 1 There can be little considered to be controversial in the expression of these goals but in the practice of medicine the balance of attention to these concepts is not uniform across all of medicine. In particular, in the practice of

32

Suffering and the ‘Acceptability Gap’

__________________________________________________________________ palliative medicine the balance is, or should be, heavily weighted towards the relief of suffering. Within the definition of palliative care is a recognition that disease is progressive, far advanced and beyond cure, the implication being that the individual will die from that disease within the foreseeable future. Under these circumstances, treatment of disease may make little contribution to overall wellbeing and takes a clear second place to the relief of suffering; indeed the treatment may itself contribute to the individual’s suffering. It is therefore of great importance that healthcare practitioners working in the field of palliative care have a clear understanding of the concept of suffering. It is apparent, however, that constructing a clinically useful conceptualisation has been difficult. To say that a clinically useful definition of suffering has been elusive is not to deny that a considerable body of scholarly writing has accumulated over many years. However, it can be argued that to be clinically useful, a definition of suffering should include a number of attributes which have not always been uniformly present: it should accurately describe the phenomenon in question, it should be generalisable, it should provide guidance on the need for therapeutic intervention and, importantly it should be intellectually accessible; that is to say it should be easy to understand in a clinical context, or ‘at the bedside’; unfortunately, a particularly trite expression. Additionally, any definition of suffering should recognise its intensely personal nature, meaning at least in part, its uniqueness and subjectivity. It is largely in suitability for ‘at the bedside’ use that available definitions have, in the author’s experience, been found wanting. A definition of suffering that claims to address these limitations has been proposed: ‘Suffering is a consequence of self awareness and occurs when a person’s current state fails to match a state he or she is able to accept’ – the ‘acceptability gap’. The remainder of this chapter will look at some other available conceptualisations of suffering, the evidence to support the concept of an ‘acceptability gap’ and, based on the assumption that ‘suffering’ is an emotion, how the ‘acceptability gap’ fits with other models of emotion regulation and quality of life assessment with particular regard to the convergence of ideas which can be seen as supporting the idea of an ‘acceptability gap’. 2. Describing Suffering In the discipline of palliative care, the most quoted conceptualisation of suffering is that of Cicely Saunders who, working with the terminally ill in London in the decade between 1958 and 1967 evolved the concept of ‘Total Pain’ preempting later and, at least outside of the field of palliative care, more widely recognised descriptions of suffering. 2 Although rather enigmatic in its brevity and linked as it is to a single symptom, Saunders’ idea encompasses later constructs of

David MacKintosh

33

__________________________________________________________________ suffering in regard to its nature as an emotional response to adversity, its subjectivity and its independence from the presence or absence of symptoms. 3 In what might be termed the modern era, as far as medicine and probably nursing are concerned, the most influential and widely quoted definition of suffering is that of Eric Cassell from his landmark paper in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1982 where suffering was defined as: ‘… an impending destruction of the person is perceived; it continues until the threat of disintegration has passed or the integrity of the person can be restored in some other manner.’ 4 Cassell, importantly, differentiated between disease and illness pointing out that disease happens to body organs but that illness, and as a consequence suffering, can only happen to ‘whole persons’. He also recognised that symptoms in themselves were not sufficient to cause suffering but, that suffering was a composite of symptoms and meaning ascribed to these symptoms by the suffering individual. 5 Some of these precepts have subsequently been echoed by other writers. Fishman and Loscalzo in 1987 agreed that ‘pain and suffering are not the same’ and defined suffering as ‘… a state of mind ... which is determined by many influences. 6 Pain is one of these influences, but its presence does not necessarily produce suffering, pointing out again that symptoms on their own may not produce suffering and placing suffering in the domain of the ‘mind’, the seat of our emotions. 7 Benedict, in a 1989 study of patients undergoing treatment for lung cancer, identified a number of physical and emotional triggers to suffering and ultimately defined suffering as ‘A negative affective state resulting from an event or situation that is perceived to be physically painful, uncomfortable or psychologically distressing ... Suffering is a unique and subjective experience ... .’ 8 Benedict clearly described suffering as an unpleasant emotional experience with a number of possible triggers, physical and psychological and emphasised the uniqueness of the experience for the suffering individual. 9 Of interest, 10 per cent of Benedict’s study population described no suffering related to either the cancer or its treatment, 10 although the numbers are small, 3 out of 30 subjects. The absence of perceived suffering in the presence of disease and, somewhat paradoxically, the presence of suffering in the absence of disease will be revisited in discussion of the ‘acceptability gap’. Benedict also takes care to point out the subjective nature of suffering. 11 While this may appear to be an obvious property of suffering, healthcare professionals, in keeping with many other people, are known to be unreliable interpreters of other peoples’ distress. Furthermore, in one of the earliest published studies of suffering in the biomedical literature, as recorded in Medline, Davitz and Pendleton in 1967 reported that age and socioeconomic status of the nurse observer influenced their interpretation of the suffering of others; they suggested that nurses from a given

34

Suffering and the ‘Acceptability Gap’

__________________________________________________________________ background perceived greater suffering in patients of a similar rather that different status. 12 The idea of subjectivity is related to that of contextuality where the meaning of events may not be uniform between individuals or populations. While your favourite football team winning or losing may not at first seem to be a source of suffering it serves as a useful example in demonstrating that one person’s sorrow is another’s joy; team X losing to team Y is a source of distress to supporters of team X but a source of pleasure to the supporters of the winning team. The intensity of emotional response for a supporter of team X is related to the meaning of the outcome for that supporter modulated by that supporters’ coping capacity. We are frequently exposed to images of apparent distress in the media and make inferences about the presence or absence of suffering. While it is not difficult to infer suffering from news items showing obvious examples of physical hardship such as war casualties or emaciated refugees, some signs are more difficult to interpret where the context is unknown and particularly where there is limited information. Take, for example, a photograph of the face of a woman crying; is she grieving the loss of a husband or a mother or, is she crying at the wedding of her best friend. The interpretation of situations where there is limited information, ambiguity and the influence of our own preconceptions requires care but much difficulty can be overcome by engaging in a conversation with the individuals in question. The literature of suffering, as can be seen, is rich in its descriptions of the phenomenon but still fails to provide a single clinically useful definition. Some of the difficulty relates, in part to the language used. For example, Sacks and Nelson acknowledged the importance of meaning and subjectivity but went on to write that the suffering individual ‘… created an emotional space apart from the meaning of loss within suffering.’ and that ‘Alleviated suffering was owning oneself and creating room away from the suffering to move beyond the suffering for the moment.’ 13 The elegance of Saunders’ description of ‘total pain’ has already been noted but its apparent simplicity hides a much wider complexity and subtlety that leaves it unsuitable for routine clinical use. Attempts to develop a taxonomy of suffering have, however, done little to clarify the concept. For example, Flaming identified 4 principal domains which were then subdivided into 10 themes which included ‘Existentially’, ‘Psychologically’ and ‘Physically’. 14 These themes were further categorised into 24 individual types of suffering which include rather paradoxically, ‘acceptable’ and ‘meaningful’ and ‘peaceful’. It is difficult to see how multiple levels of complexity can bring clarity to our understanding of suffering in a clinically meaningful way. 15 Taxonomies, however, do bring into focus the idea that there can be more than one type of suffering. A central thesis of this chapter, however, is that there is only one type of suffering. The constructions already considered have combined in

David MacKintosh

35

__________________________________________________________________ describing suffering as an unpleasant emotional response to aversive stimuli and have alluded to the fact that although there are multiple possible stimuli the individual’s response to the stimulus is the determining factor in defining the suffering experience rather than the nature of the stimulus. We will now continue to look at evidence supporting this notion. 3. The ‘Acceptability Gap’: Empirical Evidence In a study based on grounded theory using the emergent fit mode, support was sought for the proposition that ‘Suffering is a consequence of self awareness and occurs when a person’s current state fails to match a state he or she is able to accept’ – the ‘acceptability gap’. Using semi-structured interviews, patients linked to a palliative care service and their carers, where available, were interviewed regarding their experiences of suffering during the course of the patient’s illness. Interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim. A process of constant comparison of emerging themes was followed until saturation occurred at which time it was considered that sufficient evidence to support the proposed definition had been obtained. 3.1 Case Study 1 Norma was a middle-aged woman with an advanced carcinoma of the colon and a fistula between her rectum and vagina. She had a profuse, malodorous discharge and persistent nausea which had been difficult to control. She had four teenage children; her husband, who was her main carer, was trying to hold down a full time job. She was admitted to the hospice late one afternoon at her own request. The following morning she described her situation using the following expressions: ‘loneliness’, ‘my life was a bit pointless’, ‘causing other people to suffer’, ‘yesterday, there was something at home that was not quite right for me’. Surprisingly, Norma said she felt better and wanted to go home again because the hospice was ‘… a better environment’, ‘I’m not looking at them suffering’. She had received no additional treatment and her physical symptoms were unchanged. Norma was unable to say whether or not she had experienced suffering during her illness but clearly her request for admission to the hospice had been precipitated when she was no longer able to endure her situation at home. Two weeks later Norma, in her own home, said that being in the hospice ‘… enabled me to feel better about coming home’, she realised that ‘… I can’t stay in the hospice’ and that she was ‘… trying harder … to accept home.’ Norma’s physical condition remained unchanged during her short stay in the hospice; what had changed was her perception of her situation and her response to that.

36

Suffering and the ‘Acceptability Gap’

__________________________________________________________________ 3.2 Case Study 2 Mary was a middle-aged woman, married for the second time, whose husband, had been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumour nearly two years previously. He had undergone three episodes of surgery to de-bulk the tumour without prospect of cure, been treated with radiotherapy and chemotherapy and at the time of his interview had a significant right sided weakness. When asked about his experience of suffering during his illness he noted only that he had been upset for a short period of time when he realised he could no longer chop firewood. Mary was interviewed at a mutually agreed time after her husband had died. During that interview Mary spoke at great length, and at times, with much bitterness, about her suffering experiences during her husband’s illness. She was physically well throughout her ordeal but described herself as having been ‘consumed’ by suffering during his illness. She indicated that she could never go through a similar experience again. Mary had no disease but suffered and continued to suffer because she was unable to come to terms with the situation she had found herself in. The cases show that, in Norma’s case, it is possible to see suffering relieved without any significant change to an individual’s material situation. Norma was able to reframe her perception of her situation to make it more acceptable to her. Mary, however was trapped in her suffering. In a situation she was unable to accept and unable to change she experienced enormous distress which remained unrelieved following the death of her husband as she continued to ruminate over the past. The author contends that these brief cameos support the notion that suffering occurs in situations which an individual finds to be unacceptable but can resolve as the individual adapts to the situation and changes their view of their world to see their situation as being more acceptable. Failure to do so maintains the ‘acceptability gap’ with a consequent continuing of distress. 4. A Convergence of Ideas ‘Nothing has yet been said that has not been said before.’ Terence, 185 BC-159 BC. 16 The concept of an ‘acceptability gap’ is dependent on an individual making an appraisal of his or her current situation and comparing it with an alternative either from the past, a changed present or anticipated future. Where an alternative situation is more attractive, or acceptable, the disparity has the capacity to cause distress which will continue until the gap between current and preferred has closed. In keeping with the view expressed by Terence the Roman poet, it should not come as a surprise to find that this is not a new idea. In the fourteenth century epic poem Divine Comedy, Inferno, Canto V, Dante and Homer enter the second level of Hell (the least Hellish level of Hell proper) reserved for those condemned for sins of lust, where they meet Francesca da Rimini murdered as the result of an

David MacKintosh

37

__________________________________________________________________ adulterous relationship with Paolo Malatesta. Swept along by and unable to rest in eternal swirling winds Francesca laments that ‘No grief surpasses this … In the midst of misery to remember bliss.’ 17 More recently, Tyhurst, in 1958, discussed the role of states of change, ‘transition states’, in the development of psychological distress referring, in turn, to earlier work in transactional functionalism. 18 Transactionists recognise ‘assumptive form worlds’ which we as individuals inhabit, composed of all the assumptions we make about the world we live in, the individual’s assumptive world is unique to that individual. When a change occurs to that assumptive world the individual must adapt to the new reality; failure to accept that new reality will result in emotional distress. The change required in adapting to the new reality follows a process of appraisal and adjustment to a new set of acceptable assumptions with consequent relief of emotional distress. 19 In 1971 Parkes revisited the idea when writing about grief and loss but felt obliged to change the term to ‘psychosocial transition’ arguing that Tyhurst’s ‘transition state’ failed to capture the essential concept of process involved in making the adjustment to the new assumptive world. 20 Tyhurst and Parkes wrote about how individuals adapt to changes in their assumptive world; for Tyhurst these changes were large, dramatic changes such as natural disaster, retirement and migration, Parkes was more concerned with loss and bereavement. 21 While less obvious, changes provoked by illness are equally damaging to our assumptive world and consequently capable of provoking distress. Individuals living for an extended period of time with the anticipation of their inevitable death carry a particularly heavy burden. The work described above reveals a change of emotional state from distress to comfort through a process of iterative appraisal and adjustment. The intervening years have seen the concept resurface in a number of guises, the ‘Calman Gap’, 22 the ‘response shift’, 23 the ‘modal model’ of regulation of emotion 24 and, unsurprisingly, the ‘acceptability gap’. Underpinning this collection of ideas is the shared concept that distress will occur if an individual is unable to find his or her situation acceptable and will continue until the gap between reality and expectation closes. Such a view of suffering confirms the individual and subjective nature of suffering. It emphasises the importance of an individual’s response to a situation as being of primary importance and is independent of the nature of the stimulus. It is generalisable and avoids complex taxonomies and extravagant or opaque language. It gives guidance on the need for therapeutic intervention – only the individual can say if they need support. Finally, and importantly, it can be shown to fit with other models concerned with emotion regulation and quality of life.

38

Suffering and the ‘Acceptability Gap’

__________________________________________________________________ 5. A Case for Consideration Norman is an elderly man with an advanced, extensive and incurable cancer of the colon. He lives alone where he is barely capable of caring for himself, his bed a mattress on the floor. He is in constant pain from a large pressure area over his sacrum. But, as a consequence of his religious beliefs, he refuses to take any pain relieving medication believing that enduring the pain and privations will ensure his eternal salvation after death. “” Is Norman suffering?

Notes 1

Eric J. Cassell, ‘The Nature of Suffering and the Goals of Medicine’, The New England Journal of Medicine 306.11 (March 18 1982): 639-645. 2 David Clark, ‘“Total Pain”: Disciplinary Power and the Body in the Work of Cicely Saunders, 1958-1967’, Social Science & Medicine (1982) 49.6 (September 1999): 727-736. 3 Ibid., 732-735. 4 Cassell, ‘The Nature of Suffering and the Goals of Medicine’, 640. 5 Ibid. 6 Baruch Fishman and Matthew Loscalzo, ‘Cognitive-Behavioral Interventions in Management of Cancer Pain: Principles and Applications’, The Medical Clinics of North America 71.2 (March 1987): 271-287. 7 Ibid. 8 Susan Benedict, ‘The Suffering Associated with Lung Cancer’, Cancer Nursing 12.1 (February 1989): 34-40. 9 Ibid., 34. 10 Ibid., 37. 11 Ibid., 34. 12 Lois J. Davitz and Sydney H. Pendleton, ‘Nurses’ Inferences of Suffering’, Nursing Research 18, 2 (April 1969): 100-107. 13 Jodi L. Sacks and Jenenne P. Nelson, ‘A Theory of Nonphysical Suffering and Trust in Hospice Patients’, Qualitative Health Research 17.5 (May 2007): 675689. 14 Don Flaming, ‘Patient Suffering: A Taxonomy from the Nurse’s Perspective’, Journal of Advanced Nursing 22.6 (December 1995): 1120-1127. 15 Ibid., 1121. 16 Angela Partington, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, revised 4th edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 690. 17 Paolo Milano, ed., The Portable Dante: The Divine Comedy, trans. Laurence Binyon (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 30.

David MacKintosh

39

__________________________________________________________________ 18

James S. Tyhurst, ‘The Role of Transition States: Including Disasters in Mental Illness’, in Symposium on Preventive and Social Psychiatry (National Academies, 1958), 149-172. 19 Ibid. 20 Colin M. Parkes, ‘Psycho-Social Transitions: A Field for Study’, Social Science & Medicine 5.2 (April 1971): 101-115. 21 Ibid.; Tyhurst, ‘The Role of Transition States’, 150-155. 22 Kenneth C. Calman, ‘Quality of Life in Cancer Patients: An Hypothesis’, Journal of Medical Ethics 10.3 (September 1984): 124-127. 23 I. S. Breetvelt and F. S. Van Dam, ‘Underreporting by Cancer Patients: The Case of Response-Shift’, Social Science & Medicine (1982) 32.9 (1991): 981-987. 24 James J. Gross and Ross A. Thompson, ‘Emotion Regulation Conceptual Foundations’, in Handbook of Emotion Regulation, ed. James A. Gross (New York: The Guildford Press, 2007), 5.

Bibliography Benedict, Susan. ‘The Suffering Associated with Lung Cancer’. Cancer Nursing 12.1 (February 1989): 34-40. Breetvelt, I. S., and F. S. Van Dam. ‘Underreporting by Cancer Patients: The Case of Response-Shift’. Social Science & Medicine (1982) 32.9 (1991): 981-987. Calman, Kenneth C. ‘Quality of Life in Cancer Patients: An Hypothesis’. Journal of Medical Ethics 10.3 (September 1984): 124-127. Cassell, Eric J. ‘The Nature of Suffering and the Goals of Medicine’. The New England Journal of Medicine 306.11 (March 18, 1982): 639-645. Clark, D. ‘Total Pain: Disciplinary Power and the Body in the Work of Cicely Saunders, 1958-1967’. Social Science & Medicine (1982) 49.6 (September 1999): 727-736. Davitz, Lois J., and Sydney H. Pendleton. ‘Nurses’ Inferences of Suffering’. Nursing Research 18.2 (April 1969): 100-107. Fishman, Baruch, and Matthew Loscalzo. ‘Cognitive-behavioral Interventions in Management of Cancer Pain: Principles and Applications’. The Medical Clinics of North America 71.2 (March 1987): 271-287.

40

Suffering and the ‘Acceptability Gap’

__________________________________________________________________ Flaming, Don. ‘Patient Suffering: a Taxonomy from the Nurse’s Perspective’. Journal of Advanced Nursing 22.6 (December 1995): 1120-1127. Gross, James J., and Ross A. Thompson. ‘Emotion Regulation Conceptual Foundations’. In Handbook of Emotion Regulation, edited by James A Gross. New York: The Guildford Press, 2007. Gross, James J. Handbook of Emotion Regulation. New York: Guilford Press, 2009. Milano, Paolo, ed. The Portable Dante: The Divine Comedy. Inferno, Canto V. Translated by Laurence Binyon. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977. Parkes, Colin M. ‘Psycho-Social Transitions: A Field for Study’. Social Science & Medicine 5.2 (April 1971): 101-115. Partington, Angela, ed. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Revised 4th edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Sacks, Jodi L., and Jenenne P. Nelson. ‘A Theory of Nonphysical Suffering and Trust in Hospice Patients’. Qualitative Health Research 17.5 (May 2007): 675689. Tyhurst, James S. ‘The Role of Transition States: Including Disasters in Mental Illness’. In Symposium on Preventive and Social Psychiatry (National Academies, 1958): 149-172. David MacKintosh is a Palliative Care physician working in New South Wales, Australia and a Conjoint Lecturer in Medicine, University of Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia.

Human Rights Law and the Displaced Human: Silence, Suffering and Neglect Aslıhan Bilgin, Burak Haciahmetoglu and Jackson Oldfield Abstract This chapter focuses on the intersection between international human rights law and the nation state. While human rights claim to be universal and an inherent part of being a human, when it comes to international human rights law, this is not necessarily reflected. The law is tied to the idea of the nation state; each state must agree to be bound by human rights obligations and each state is only obligated to protect the human rights of those within its territory or over whom it has control. This human rights law-nation state nexus is approached by this chapter from three perspectives to explore how this linkage can cause human rights law to contribute to suffering. Each perspective focuses on migration – the displaced human – as the point where the idea of human rights is undermined by its translation into international human rights law as it is conceived of today. The first section uses Hannah Arendt’s ‘right to have rights’, which critiques human rights law for only protecting the rights of the citizen, through explaining and analysing the situation of refugees in Turkey. The second section discusses Nancy Fraser’s KeynesianWestphalian framing of social justice critique, through examining the situation of migrant domestic and care workers. The final section employs Jacques Rancière on the effects of linking human rights to the nation state, through examining current discussions on climate change-induced migration. The chapter concludes that the nation state-human rights law framing is one which results in the denial of the very universality of human rights it seeks to promote, in a furtherance of injustice and ultimately in the perpetuation and creation of suffering towards those outside the protection of citizenship. Key Words: Human rights, migration, Hannah Arendt, Nancy Fraser, Jacques Ranciere, Turkey, refugee, domestic care workers, climate change. ***** 1. The Nation State and Human Rights Mounting economic and political inequalities around the world have led to a growing demand for migration. People faced with the threat of death, torture or hunger, who lack nutrition and decent life conditions, try to flee from suffering in their home-lands towards their so-called ‘heaven’ where they hope to have a life lived in dignity: the central idea of human rights. If we speak in terms of suffering, the migration journey is one where people ‘suffer’. Suffering starts in the home country where an individual feels a need to leave, and it may continue on the way to a destination country; including at the

42

Human Rights Law and the Displaced Human

__________________________________________________________________ hands of traffickers or smugglers. However, in the context of this chapter, the focus is on suffering at the hands of the third state – the destination or transit state – when it comes to the recognition and implementation of the human rights of the non-citizens, the ‘others’. The human rights regime was born in the aftermath of the Second World War and it is accepted that, as also proclaimed in the UDHR, all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. Rights are therefore supposed to be independent of any authority or government approval, contrarily; they are inherent to a person’s birth. However, Arendt critiques this myth, emphasising that, through human rights law, directly after the construction of this ideal of universal human rights, the human for whom the rights were intended was immediately surrendered to the authority of countries. It ‘was immediately linked to the power of the nation state; it is the nation state that determines who has the right to have rights and who does not.’ 1 The nation state, which is basically a territorial organisation, based on land, borders, nationality and national sovereignty, is challenged on several grounds by migration issues, with migration primarily being perceived as a threat to national security. Therefore nation states aim to control movement under their ‘sovereignty’ clause; deciding who may come in and who may not (although immigrants have not always asked for permission to come in or to stay). This intruding peculiarity of migration therefore has stood as a strong challenge to state sovereignty, with national security-public order being used as an excuse to restrict the movements or the rights of people. The consequences of this power to determine who has the right to stay – to determine who has the right to have rights – is twofold. Firstly, because of strict pre-entry conditions, visa-regimes and/or border controls, legal entry to the third country seems almost impossible for a person who is persecuted by their own government or is anyhow in a distressing situation. In such a case, the only alternatives are paying smugglers, crossing dangerous borders or using forged documents. The result is victimising migrants by putting them in the hands of traffickers, smugglers or forcing them to make a dangerous journey. It is estimated that some 2,000 migrants die each year while trying to cross the Mediterranean from Africa to Europe. 2 Furthermore, between 600-800,000 women, children and men are trafficked internationally every year, in every region of the world. 3 Human rights law as a regime does not challenge nation states’ sovereign rights regarding entry even when people are left in suffering. Secondly, if the migrant has achieved entrance into the country, the nation state has the right to decide who may stay and who may not. Illegal entry will result in expulsion/deportation whenever the migrant is caught and, until that time, as an undocumented migrant without valid papers, the migrant will suffer due to the right-less situation; lacking essential human rights, including inter alia the rights to work, education, health, and social security. Although the idea of the universality

Aslıhan Bilgin, Burak Haciahmetoglu and Jackson Oldfield

43

__________________________________________________________________ of human rights claims that every person shall enjoy rights when under the jurisdiction or in the territory of the state, when the state has the right to deport, in practice there are no guaranteed rights for those people. The 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (CRS51 hereafter) is the generalised exception to the state’s discretion to decide who may stay and who may not; it commits states to recognise and not return people who flee from persecution as refugees within their territories, as well as to recognise their rights. 4 However, even nation states who have signed the convention still have the right to determine who can enjoy this right and who may not, as is clearly demonstrated in the case of Turkey. While having signed the convention, Turkey only admits European refugees, as this was all that was initially required when the country agreed to the convention. Non-European refugees, who have always been considered to be an economic burden and social threat to national security – unlike their European counterparts – can be recognised by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Turkey and resettled in third countries, as the UNHCR Turkey office is entitled to determine refugee status for non-European refugees. Nevertheless, this is often a slow process. The UNHCR refugee status determination and resettlement procedure may take many years due to the high number of asylum applicants and refugees and the limited number of resettlement places worldwide; resettlement cannot be offered to every refugee in Turkey. 5 Non-European refugees have the right to stay in Turkey until they are resettled in third countries, however, during this waiting process they lack the protection found within the scope of the Convention, including their human rights to work, health, social security, and education. The state has either limitedly allowed these rights or totally ignored them. As a result, non-European refugees in Turkey suffer from being ‘untitled’; neither a refugee under the protection of CSR51 nor a citizen, but a sort of ‘guest’ who does not know when their visit is going to end. Turning back to Arendt’s determination, it is clear that, although the nation state’s sovereignty is challenged by the universalism of human rights, according to human rights law the state still keeps the power in its hand to determine who has the right to have rights and who does not. 2. The Framing of Human Rights Law How is it possible then, despite human rights having a façade of universalism, that international human rights law fails to guarantee rights for every human being? With such a question in mind, this part of the chapter employs Nancy Fraser's theory on global social justice in relation to international law. Somewhat parallel to Arendt’s conclusion yet with a different focal point, Fraser argues that questions of social justice could be responded to within a ‘Keynesian-Westphalian frame’ before the current acceleration of globalisation: it was assumed that arguments about justice were typically played out within modern

44

Human Rights Law and the Displaced Human

__________________________________________________________________ territorial states, and were assumed to concern relations among fellow citizens. Such discussions were to subject the debate within national publics and redress was contemplated by national states. Hence, while the ‘what’ of justice was in dispute, the same was not the case for the ‘who’, as it was taken for granted that the ‘who’ was the national citizenry. 6 However, today's world is built on global cities run with the critical contributions of domestic workers, 7 and many are members of societies that are reproduced by ‘global care chains.’ 8 Hence, the nature of the international division of ‘reproductive labour’ – the reproduction of our everyday lives, homes, offices, schools and hospitals etc. – is becoming increasingly global. Various national care regimes, created by national governments with the very tools of so-called ‘nationbased’ policies, are the driving forces of this phenomenon. However, the effects and outcomes are far from being national; they are, indeed, truly global. Evidence is the worldwide ‘care deficit’ that has become more visible than ever before. Therefore, it is of no surprise that the predicament of the migrant domestic workers (MDWs) is one of those areas where the ‘who’ is questioned. Despite being positioned under some sort of global economic governance, 9 those who cross borders to offer ‘care’ to people in need, often find themselves beyond the reach and the scope of international laws supposedly designed to protect universal rights. This is mostly due to the tension between some of the fundamental principles of international law and the realities and experiences of migrant domestic workers. Whereas migrant domestic workers’ labour is placed in a highly globalised setting, their rights are defined by the boundaries of nationstates. This is most evident in the UN Migrant Workers Convention, 10 where a majority of rights are accessible only in reference to nation-states’ sovereign power to ‘legalise’ and ‘illegalise’ the entry and stay of foreigners on their territories. The current international law concerning the protection of the rights of MDWs then, in being understood and practiced within the Keynesian-Westphalian frame despite the globalised nature of care and domestic work, is trapped in an oblivion to the realities of those it is deemed to protect. Hence, put in the Fraserian terminology, the pertinent law is ‘misframed’ to the detriment of right holders. 11 In a striking – albeit, regrettably not sole – example, experiences of MDWs in Turkey suggest the clarity of the interplay between social policy, migration policy and informality. What is more striking is that states themselves are often complicit in the creation of informality in order to deal with their own citizens’ care-crisis. While seen as a reliable basis for the protection of migrant workers’ rights in the framework of international human rights law, the notion of the all powerful sovereign state has been subjected to rigorous questioning. Drawing on the experiences of Moldovan migrant domestic workers in Istanbul, Eder declares such a notion as a myth, and emphasises that state boundaries are being re-defined and reproduced within the context of informality, or what she calls ‘the deliberate

Aslıhan Bilgin, Burak Haciahmetoglu and Jackson Oldfield

45

__________________________________________________________________ negligence zone of the state.’ The very process of upholding the boundaries between what is legal and criminal, what is private and public, what is sovereign and not becomes a part of the continual formation of the state. Thus the state mutates by finding new avenues of intervention and control, 12 such as legal loopholes that allow informality. 13 Applying such an account of state power, formalisation or legalisation by the nation-state as the basis of – at least, a big bundle of – rights seems further questionable, since the states themselves are the main saboteurs of the coherence of the international system. This inevitably calls forth questions as to the meaning and value of ‘formal’ permission. MDWs often find themselves excluded as subjects of justice either or both in their country of arrival and origin, due to their inability to claim welfare benefits either on the grounds of citizenship, legal status or residency. Regrettably, territoriality is not the sole source of the predicament of MDWs. The pertinent international law as well – paraphrasing Fraser 14 – puts some relevant aspects of justice beyond their reach, as is evident, for example, in the UN Migrant Workers’ Convention, which gives two different sets of rights: more for documented migrants, less for undocumented. One set is inaccessible for most MDWs, since they are pushed into informality. International law then, as a result of its affirmative politics of framing which accepts that the principle of state-territoriality as the proper basis for constituting the ‘who’ of justice, produces hierarchies between groups of migrants on the basis of the Westphalian nation state’s permission. However, the criteria of social belonging should be established at an accurate level if the aim is to give effect to human rights. In the matter of transnational interdependency, it goes without saying that the nation-state can no longer serve as the sole arbiter of justice. Even when having ostensibly well-intentioned aims of promoting and protecting the human rights of MDWs, the politics of framing which conform with the nation state’s perceptual limits, accept the state-territorial principle rather than challenge the underlying tenets of the Westphalian order. 3. Acceptance of this Framing Building on this idea of the state-territorial framing of human rights law, the final part of this chapter examines the effect this framing can have when the idea of human rights is conflated with international human rights law. It seems clear that, if one perceives human rights to be synonymous with human rights law, then under an Arendtian reading of the latter, a logical consequence is that persons outside of the nation-state framework will be perceived as being outside the scope of human rights; as human beings without rights. Jacques Rancière 15 however goes further and argues that if we perceive of those outside the nation state framework as being without human rights (a situation he

46

Human Rights Law and the Displaced Human

__________________________________________________________________ refers to as being subject to inhuman repression), then not only do we see them as right-less, but we perceive ourselves as having assumed those rights and as being able to enact those rights in the place of those whose rights have been lost. As he calls it, as having the right to humanitarian intervention; as having the right to return those people to a situation of having human rights. Furthermore, he argues that as a result of assuming this right, we justify any action we take in order to return those rights to those who have lost them, i.e. we are given the justification to bring suffering onto those who have lost their rights, in order to bring them back within the nation state-human rights framework. While this assuming of the right to return the rights can most commonly be seen in military interventions, it can also be found when acting out of a desire to protect human rights; by failing to challenge the linking of human rights to this conception of human rights law. In the climate change-displacement discourse we can see an example of this. Climate change is likely to displace up to 200 million people, whose human rights will have been severely affected. 16 However, they will remain outside of the protection of international human rights law; the states they are living in for the most part will be unable to prevent the deterioration in their human rights and the structure of human rights law, as it is generally perceived currently, does not attribute responsibility to those outside of the nation state. 17 Nor will those affected have a right to move to somewhere where their human rights are likely to be better protected; as discussed previously, human rights law is in general subservient to the right of states to control their borders, 18 and only limited numbers of the climate change-displaced will be able to benefit from the loopholes to that rule. 19 Therefore they will be outside of the nation state-human rights framework. The academic and NGO discussions that have attempted to propose solutions to this have however largely failed to challenge this positing of human rights as human rights law. The solutions they have proposed, rather than primarily looking for ways to protect the human rights of climate change migrants, seek to bring them within a nation state as a path to human rights protection. This can clearly be seen in the most common solution proposed – refugee (or similar) status 20 – which, although enabling climate change migrants to access a nation state capable of protecting their human rights, would expose them to numerous human rights violations in order to reach the ‘safety’ of the nation state-human rights law framework, including the possibility of death when attempting to cross an international border, would presumably exclude those without the means to cross a border, and could result in human rights violations for those who have crossed the border (and are within again the (functioning) nation state), including indefinite detention, loss of dignity and damage to their health. 21 As this brief example has shown, the acceptance of this framing of human rights as tied to the nation-state can lead to calls for a subsuming of human rights as a path to human rights protection. By perceiving human rights in this way, it is

Aslıhan Bilgin, Burak Haciahmetoglu and Jackson Oldfield

47

__________________________________________________________________ easy to perceive of those who are seen as outside of the protection of human rights law as without human rights entirely and to focus on doing whatever is necessary to bring them within a nation state framework where their human rights can be protected, including ultimately proposing an increase in suffering, rather than first and foremost focusing on protecting their human rights. 4. Conclusion As shown above, the displaced human – the human outside of the nation state – is, according to current conceptions of international human rights law, a nonhuman or, at best, a human without rights. This framing of human rights law not only allows for and sustains suffering, but can lead to the creation of situations of suffering if the state-territorial framework of international human rights law is applied to the idea of human rights. To borrow again from Fraser, she reminds us that: Akin to the loss of what Hannah Arendt called “the right to have rights”, that sort of misframing is a kind a “political death” (Arendt 1973). Those who suffer it may become objects of charity or benevolence. But deprived of the possibility of authoring first-order claims, they become non-persons with respect to justice. 22 The solution then to avoid the perpetuation of suffering by the very system that was designed to prevent it, must be a reframing of international human rights law that better reflects the needs, realities and idea of human rights and a reconceptualisation of how we think of the human in relation to the nation state.

Notes 1

Ernst van den Hemel, ‘Included but not Belonging: Badiou And Rancière On Human Rights’, Krisis Journal for Contemporary Philosophy 3 (2008): 17. 2 Global Commission on International Migration, Migration in an Interconnected World: New Directions for Action. Report of the Global Commission on International Migration, 2005, 34. http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/435f81814.html. 3 Ibid. 4 CRS51 Art. 33 sets out the non-refoulement principle: ‘No Contracting State shall expel or return (refouler) a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened.’ 5 As of the 31st January 2011, 17,271 non-European persons of concern were registered with UNHCR Turkey, comprising of 10,391 refugees and 6,880 asylum

48

Human Rights Law and the Displaced Human

__________________________________________________________________ seekers waiting for a decision on their applications. (UNHCR, UNHCR in Turkey: Facts & Figures, 03 (2011): 22). 6 Nancy Fraser, ‘Re-Framing Justice in a Globalizing World’, in (Mis)Recognition, Social Inequality and Social Justice: Nancy Fraser and Pierre Bourdieu, ed. Terry Lovell (London: Taylor & Francis, 2007), 17-18. 7 See generally Saskia Sassen, Cities in a World Economy (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2006); Saskia Sassen, ‘Notes on the Incorporation of Third World Women into Wage Labor through Immigration and Offshore Production’, International Migration Review 18.4 (1984): 1144-1167. 8 See generally Arlie Hochschild, ‘The Nanny Chain’, American Prospect 11.4 (2000): 32-36. 9 For the Fraserian concept of the ‘all-subjected principle’, see generally Nancy Fraser, ‘Abnormal Justice’, Yale University, accessed 11 December 2011, available at: http://www.law.yale.edu/documents/pdf/Intellectual_Life/ltw_fraser.pdf. 10 International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Domestic Workers and Members of Their Families, (1990) UNTC I-39481. 11 For the Fraserian concept of ‘misframing’, see generally Fraser, ‘Reframing Justice’, 22. 12 Mine Eder, ‘Moldavian Domestic Workers and The State’ (paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association 48th Annual Convention, Chicago, February 28 2007) 1-2. 13 Ibid., 11. 14 Fraser, ‘Reframing Justice’, 22. 15 Jacques Rancière, ‘Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?’ South Atlantic Quarterly 103.2/3 (2004): 308-309. 16 Oli Brown, ‘Migration and Climate Change’, International Organization for Migration Research Series 31 (2008): 12. 17 Except in cases where the state has jurisdiction over an area outside its territory. 18 See for example: Boultif v Switzerland 54273/00, 46 (ECtHR 2001), Saadi v United Kingdom 13229/03, 64 (ECtHR (GC) 2008), Maslov v Bulgaria 1638/03, 68 (ECtHR (GC) 2008). 19 Including those that are migrating due to persecution under the Refugee Convention, in addition to climate change, those under free movement of person treaties and potentially those already outside their state at the time of a disaster. 20 See for example: Mollie Conisbee and Andrew Simms, Environmental Refugees: The Case for Recognition (London: New Economics Foundation Pocketbook, 2003). 21 Laura Westra, Environmental Justice and the Rights of Ecological Refugees (London: Earthscan, 2009), 106. 22 Fraser, ‘Reframing Justice’, 22.

Aslıhan Bilgin, Burak Haciahmetoglu and Jackson Oldfield

49

__________________________________________________________________

Bibliography Biermann, Frank, and Ingrid Boas. ‘Preparing for a Warmer World: Towards a Global Governance Scheme to Protect Climate Refugees’. Global Environmental Politics 10.1 (2010): 60-88. Brown, Oli. ‘Migration and Climate Change’. International Organization for Migration Research Series 31 (2008): 12. Conisbee, Molly, and Andrew Simms. Environmental Refugees: The Case for Recognition. London: New Economics Foundation Pocketbook, 2003. Cooper, Jessica B. ‘Symposium on Endangered Species Act: Environmental Refugees: Meeting the Requirements of the Refugee Definition’. New York University Environmental Law Journal (1998): 480-529. Docherty, Bonnie, and Tyler Giannini. ‘Confronting a Rising Tide: A Proposal for a Convention on Climate Change Refugees’. Harvard Environmental Law Review 33 (2009): 349-402. Eder, Mine. ‘Moldavian Domestic Workers and the State’. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association 48th Annual Convention, Chicago, February 28, 2007. Fraser, Nancy. ‘Re-Framing Justice in a Globalizing World’. In (Mis)Recognition, Social Inequality and Social Justice: Nancy Fraser and Pierre Bourdieu, edited by Terry Lovell, 17-35. London: Taylor & Francis, 2007. ———. ‘Abnormal Justice’. Yale University, accessed December 11 2011, available at: http://www.law.yale.edu/documents/pdf/Intellectual_Life/ltw_fraser.pdf. Global Commission on International Migration, Migration in an Interconnected World: New Directions for Action. Report of the Global Commission on International Migration, 2005, 34. http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/435f81814.html. Havard, Brooke. ‘Seeking Protection: Recognition of Environmentally Displaced Persons under International Human Rights Law’. 18 Villanova Environmental Law Journal (2007): 65-82.

50

Human Rights Law and the Displaced Human

__________________________________________________________________ Hemel, Ernst van den. ‘Included but not Belonging: Badiou And Rancière On Human Rights’. Krisis Journal for Contemporary Philosophy 3 (2008): 16-30. Hochschild, Arlie. ‘The Nanny Chain’. American Prospect 11.4 (2000): 32-36. Rancière, Jacques. ‘Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?’ South Atlantic Quarterly 103.2/3 (2004): 297-310. Sassen, Saskia. Cities in a World Economy. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2006. ———. ‘Notes on the Incorporation of Third World Women into Wage Labor through Immigration and Offshore Production’. International Migration Review 18.4 (1984): 1144-1167. Westra, Laura. Environmental Justice and the Rights of Ecological Refugees. London: Earthscan, 2009. UNHCR. UNHCR in Turkey: Facts & Figures 03 (2011). Aslihan Bilgin is an independent scholar, recently graduated from Lund University’s International Human Rights Law Master Programme. Her main interests include migration, gender and minority issues. She is currently working as a lawyer in Turkey. Burak Haciahmetoglu is a Master student at Lund University and Istanbul University. His interests include political participation, social justice and feminist legal theory. He is currently working on the issue of transnational care chains and social justice within the framework of international human rights law. Jackson Oldfield is an independent scholar, formerly of Lund University. His interests include migration and undocumentedness, human rights and participation, and the human rights obligations of non-state actors.

Religious Conversion and Suffering Joshua Iyadurai Abstract The conversion experience brings many troubles to converts, especially in India. They do not forsake their newfound faith to save themselves from the suffering that conversion brings. From an inter-disciplinary approach of spirituality and psychology, this chapter explores how converts draw meaning to their suffering. Converts’ experiences of suffering were analysed qualitatively explaining the kinds of suffering the converts went through, the coping mechanisms adopted by them, the perceived relationship with the ‘Other’, the meanings attributed to their suffering based on this relationship and the role of sacred text and prayer in shaping the meanings of suffering. Converts believe that the divine being is present with them during their suffering. They attribute the strength to cope with such situations to the divine presence and the confidence that prayer is answered by the divine. They claim that the perceived ‘intimate relationship with the divine’ and the belief that the divine being speaks to them through sacred text have sustained them. Converts assert that the certainty of a relationship with the ‘Other’ gives them a sense of nobleness in suffering. The significance of the chapter would be the findings of the role of the ‘Other,’ the sacred text and prayer in enabling converts to cope with suffering and draw meaning out of it. Key Words: Religious conversion, suffering, Christianity, religious practice, religious experience, India. ***** Some of the earlier studies portrayed conversion as a psychological mechanism to resolve crisis. Albert I. Gordon points out how parents react to children’s conversion; however, he has not spelt out the hostile consequences faced by the converts. 1 John Lofland and Rodney Stark made a passing remark on the reactions of family members while discussing the extra-cult affective bonds. 2 Lewis R. Rambo mentions how the Hindu community reacted to Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism. 3 However, the available studies on conversion have not elaborately dealt with the hostile reactions from family and community to religious conversion. My model on transformative religious experiences incorporates the suffering of converts due to conversion and makes a mention about converts’ response to such situations. 4 In my limited search, I have not come across any significant academic study dealing with how converts cope with suffering due to their conversion. In India, converts to Christianity face many troubles. However, converts find great strength in their newfound faith to face any eventuality in their lives. Many do not forsake the newfound faith to avoid the suffering. This chapter explores how

52

Religious Conversion and Suffering

__________________________________________________________________ converts draw meaning to their suffering from an inter-disciplinary approach of spirituality and psychology. The scope of the chapter is limited to deal with the suffering caused by conversion to Christianity in India. This is part of a larger research on conversion experiences to Christianity in India from a phenomenological perspective. The total number of conversion experiences dealt with were 165 (Survey: 67, In-depth Interview: 45, Five Focus Groups: 33, and Documents: 20). However, for want of space and time, I am using only two narrations to illustrate here, while the findings are drawn from the larger data. Though the research deals with conversion experiences to Christianity, it is not intended to promote a particular religious ideology. Qualitative data of converts’ experiences of suffering were analysed with the following objectives: 1. To delineate the kinds of suffering the converts went through due to conversion. 2. To discover the coping mechanisms adopted by the converts. 3. To understand the perceived relationship with the ‘Other’ and the meanings attributed to their suffering based on this relationship. 4. To analyze the role of sacred text and prayer in shaping the meanings of suffering. Converts had to face different kinds of hostilities from family, friends and community: threat to life, physical torture, verbal abuse, going without food and money, fear of troubles in the future, fear of being disowned by parents and friends and of being blamed for any mishaps, difficulties in finding a suitable life partner, and public humiliation. Life became far more difficult due to conversion. Reactions to conversion from family and community varied from persuasion to attempted murder. Sania, 5 a convert from Islam, a business person, was only 21 years when her father tried to strangulate her. She recalled the horrifying experience in the interview: My father never raised his hands on his daughters; he is such a person and has never even raised his voice on us – gentle. But one day, he got so angry that he wanted to strangle me to death. While he was strangling me, my mother came and took him away (voice shaking). I had a ligament fracture at my back. That night ... I was crying. I could not understand why my father was, I was 21, doing this thing. I couldn’t understand why he was doing this. I didn’t understand anything. I was hurt. I didn’t know, I was telling God, that night, “I feel like dying”, I was crying. I heard someone singing the entire Psalm 23. At that time

Joshua Iyadurai

53

__________________________________________________________________ I didn’t know it was Psalm 23. Now, I know, because I have read it. The entire psalm, somebody was singing in my left ear. No music, one male voice, no music and nothing, I never heard the song again. When it came to, “Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life,” I said, “I don’t believe this that goodness and mercy will follow.” It was like ... the song was going on and I calmed down. I felt peace. Then the Lord said, “Forgive your dad.” I said, “You must be crazy, (laughs) I can’t forgive; how can I? He has never done something like that.” But I kept hearing that “Forgive your dad, Forgive your dad” and I came to a point, I said, “OK fine. I don’t know how to. Tell me how to? I don’t know, if you want, I will forgive.” When I said that “OK I will forgive, but you have to actually help me,” ... the pain in my back just went off. It used to be there. 6 In India, an unmarried girl walking out of the house is culturally a very sensitive issue. Sania narrated the incident how she left the house as her father was planning to marry her off: He [My father] said, “Don’t take anything. If you are leaving, don’t take anything; everything you have belongs to me. I have given them all to you. So you can’t take anything.” So, I didn’t take anything. I was wearing jeans and a shirt and in my pocket, I had ten rupees. I just left the house. I wouldn’t say it was very easy or ... . But I was crying and it was hard. But I knew that either, I have to walk out or I have to face the consequences. They were trying to marry me off. I had to … I had to decide what to do, it was very tough, and it was very difficult. But I had to leave. I didn’t know where I was going. 7 Her father traced her whereabouts and gave troubles to those who gave her shelter. She described her struggles and was surprised to see how she was able to cope with such difficulties: I became weary, anyone would feel weary you know, because of me, so many problems [for others]. Why is my life like this? Why these struggles? Why am I struggling? There were times, many times I felt that I should not live; I felt like that. Many times I also felt like going back, as I missed my mom and dad. Whatever it is, I love my dad a lot. He was very close to me. I miss my sister, the best years of my life I had with her, because of a ten year gap between us. When I left, she was a kid and she

54

Religious Conversion and Suffering

__________________________________________________________________ didn’t know anything. I feel, she would never forgive me. But on the other hand, when I see the people around me, the support system is very good, the people who are around me. I always, I always had to go back to, back to Jesus, that is the closest that I have, I felt my energy. Now I am saying, it’s easy to say it in story form. But when you go through that, living that every day, it was hard. Especially those hard days, when I had to leave the mission [the place where she was hiding] even after moving far away from my city, when I didn’t know where I was going, shifting many times, moving to new cultures, new friends, very tough. The kind of person I was, I knew one thing that it could not be by my own strength. Because I knew about myself; I knew that it was some supernatural intervention. Because I was not that kind of a person [to face such situations]; so I guess, some kind of strength was inside me, something which was saying “go on, go on.” I tell this to many of my friends. 8 Before Sania moved out of her house – for about one and half years – she was not allowed to contact any Christian friends or to have a Bible. Sania realised that on her own she would not have had the strength to go through all the struggles. She attributed her strength to ‘supernatural intervention’. She also stressed the presence of some kind of ‘strength’ within her saying ‘go on, go on.’ In the absence of Christian friends and a Bible, the only resource she had was prayer, through which she could pour out her feelings to God. The religious experiences she had during those days, assured her of the presence of the divine with her. Biblical texts played a vital role in the religious experiences she had and they became the source of strength during her struggles. Sania has mentioned the link between forgiveness and pain relief. She also found the religious community very supportive in times of troubles. Their love and affection enabled her to hold on to the newfound faith and face the sufferings. Mohan, a Brahmin convert from the priestly caste in Hinduism, narrated his ordeal when his own friends came to kill him because of his conversion: In 1992, when I was 17, a group of people came and told me, “You being a Brahmin, why are you preaching about Jesus? Why are you going to the church?” They were very angry and in fact came to kill me. Because they thought, if they leave me, I would convert many. ... They poured kerosene over me to burn me to death. Before doing that, they abused me with vulgar words, which no one would like to hear. They used very dirty words against me. Even at that time, I was comforted by Jesus’ words. Because He said, “what the world has done to me will be done to

Joshua Iyadurai

55

__________________________________________________________________ you, be strong I am with you.” I didn’t reply and say anything to them. Isaiah says, “when He was beaten, He didn’t open his mouth.” Christian life is not just singing, preaching, giving offertory or doing ministry. It is displaying Christ and Christ’s qualities, his likeness. Earlier, I used to fight, I was short tempered. ... Since I accepted Jesus, who even embraced Judas, His likeness came into me, a small fraction of His likeness enabled me to keep quiet, while I was under attack. They were surprised, even one of them asked, “What is this? We have said so many things, but you have not replied a single word! Are you a stone, which cannot speak? ...” People who were with me earlier were surprised that I could be so quiet! I didn’t have any fear of death; rather my zeal increased. Earlier, I had fear of death. Similar to the story of David and Goliath: I faced them in the name of Christ and they came with kerosene and a matchbox. But I was facing them in the name of God. I was worshipping God and I didn’t even have an iota of fear of death. I didn’t think that God would leave me or they would burn me to death. Anyhow, death will come to everyone one day; whether it is today or some other day, I will die for Jesus rather than leave Jesus. I was zealous to hold on to Jesus. [They poured kerosene on him to burn him to death] Then I saw a heavenly vision. He [Jesus] opened my inner eyes and I saw Shadrach, Meshach walking in the fire … I saw the scene literally, face to face. I got the assurance, the one who saved Shadrach, Meshach … in 500 BC, is still alive in the 21st century to save my life. He [Jesus] encouraged me and strengthened me. I have heard and read this incident, but, that day I saw the vision face to face. I wish they should try another attempt, so that, I could feel the presence of God. (laughs) It was a miracle. I saw Jesus face to face, at the age of 17, he gave me the grace. They saw a bright light and realised that I had a supernatural power. They couldn’t come near me and were terrified and ran away. ... They were very violent but they ran for their lives. I knew them all; they were capable of killing anyone. 9

56

Religious Conversion and Suffering

__________________________________________________________________ Mohan shared how his family treated him due to his conversion: Whenever they [family members] came to know that I had gone to Church or met a Christian friend, they used to beat me severely. I could not predict who would beat me; anyone in the family would beat me to any extent. Many times there were no spot in my body where there was no bleeding. ... God has permitted these things. They wounded me verbally, physically, and denied my basic needs. But I am not worshipping a dead God but one who is living. Jesus promised, “Neither I will leave you, nor, I will let you down;” this was true in my life. It is the word of Christ that strengthens me. From Genesis to Revelation, Words – loving words comfort me, through pastors, sermons, and counsel of God’s people. ... I meditated on these incidents from the Bible with the help of the Holy Spirit. I strengthened myself in this way; it is beyond man’s capacity to bear this ordeal. Even today, I am surprised how I could bear all those things. ... He [God] was with me all 365 days of a year, as a hen cares for the chicks. God’s presence covered me. God’s words were my comfort, God’s presence was my comfort, and God himself was my comfort. 10 Mohan claimed that he could manage to bear all the troubles as he meditated on the words of Christ and about the incidents recorded in the Bible. He claimed that by his own strength it was not possible for him to cope with all kinds of suffering he underwent. He repeatedly emphasised the presence of the divine with him which enabled him to face the persecution. The participants of the larger study mentioned several factors along the same line which sustained them during the struggles, such as, the felt presence of the divine being, divine strength, supernatural protection, interaction with the divine being, divine love, the belief that divine speaks to them and loves them, the Bible, and hope of eternal life. They also reported that Jesus’ suffering was a model and inspiration to them to bear all the troubles. Converts could face any hostile situation with the belief and trust that the divine being is present with them even at such times. The perceived presence of the divine being with them during the persecution is the major source of strength for the converts. They also spoke about the divine being communicating to them and assuring them with texts from the Bible giving strength to face the sufferings. The assurance that prayer is answered by the divine being gives converts the strength needed. The intimate relationship with the divine being and the belief that the divine being speaks to them through the reading of the Bible and prayer, enable

Joshua Iyadurai

57

__________________________________________________________________ them to bear the struggles. Prayer, reading of the Bible and the support of the religious community are the sustaining factors for the converts to face the persecution. Prayer is the most important of these three. When access is denied to the Bible or the religious community, one finds the strength in prayer to cope with the difficult situations. Religious experiences of divine presence, divine intervention and divine communication are the factors that enable the converts to bear all the suffering and to hold on to the newfound faith. The connection between forgiveness and pain relief calls for attention of specialists in the field of spirituality and medical sciences to explore psycho-spiritual factors and physiological changes. The relationship with the ‘Other’ (divine) is a striking factor in coping with suffering. Converts attribute meaning to their suffering based on the perceived relationship with the divine. They also attribute nobleness to their suffering and consider that suffering for the sake of the divine is a privilege as they experience the divine love and divine presence. They claim to have experienced the divine love and developed an intimate relationship with the divine being. Channa Ullman 11 and Lewis Rambo 12 also found that converts develop an intimate relationship with the divine in conversion; however, they have not touched upon this aspect in their study. My study found that converts perceive the divine being in friendship and kinship roles rather than in a purely divine role; a convert finds a life-long companion in the divine being. 13 The link between the perceived relationship with the divine and coping with suffering needs further exploration as there are not many studies. Converts pray and read the Bible, not as religious rituals but to relate with the divine being. Through these religious practices, they feel that they are able to be in touch with the divine being. They have a strong belief that the divine being communicates with them when they read the Bible and answers their prayers when they pray. These two religious practices are the channels through which the divine being interacts with the converts. Religious practices play a vital role in the conversion process, especially, to cope with suffering. I hope future research will highlight the role of religious practices in dealing with suffering. If converts find the perceived relationship with the divine a source to cope with suffering, then it can be explored further how the same can be applied for others in different contexts. One’s relationship with the ‘Other’ (Divine), which is facilitated through prayer and the reading of sacred text, enables one to find meaning in suffering; this calls for our attention in dealing with suffering. The link between forgiveness and pain relief needs to be explored from an inter-disciplinary perspective of spirituality, psychology and medical science. Spiritual practices and sacred texts could be considered as essential factors along with other factors in leading people to make sense out of suffering through the perceived relationship with the ‘Other’.

58

Religious Conversion and Suffering

__________________________________________________________________

Notes 1

Albert I. Gordon, The Nature of Conversion: A Study of Forty-Five Men and Women who Changed their Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967). 2 John Lofland and Rodney Stark, ‘Becoming A World-Saver: A Theory of Conversion to a Deviant Perspective’, American Sociological Review 30 (1965): 862-875. 3 Lewis R. Rambo, Understanding Religious Conversion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). 4 Joshua Iyadurai, ‘The Step Model of Transformative Religious Experiences: A Phenomenological Understanding of Religious Conversions in India’, Pastoral Psychology 60.5 (2011): 5-521. 5 Names are changed and identifiable information is either changed or omitted in the extracts to protect the identity of the converts. 6 Sania, a business person, interview, India, Sep-Dec, 2005. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Mohan, a Brahmin convert, interview, India, Sep-Dec, 2005. 10 Ibid. 11 Channa Ullman, The Transformed Self: The Psychology of Religious Conversion (New York: Plenum Press, 1989). 12 Rambo, Understanding Religious Conversion. 13 Iyadurai, ‘Step Model’.

Bibliography Gordon, Albert I. The Nature of Conversion: A Study of Forty-Five Men and Women who Changed their Religion. Boston: Beacon Press, 1967. Iyadurai, Joshua. ‘The Step Model of Transformative Religious Experiences: A Phenomenological Understanding of Religious Conversions in India’. Pastoral Psychology 60.5 (2011): 5-521. Lofland, John, and Rodney Stark. ‘Becoming a World-Saver: A Theory of Conversion to a Deviant Perspective’. American Sociological Review 30 (1965): 862-875. Mohan, a Brahmin convert, interview, India: Sep.-Dec. 2005.

Joshua Iyadurai

59

__________________________________________________________________ Rambo, Lewis. R. Understanding Religious Conversion. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. Sania, a business person, interview, India, Sep-Dec, 2005. Ullman, Channa. The Transformed Self: The Psychology of Religious Conversion. New York: Plenum Press, 1989. Joshua Iyadurai, PhD, Director, Mylapore Institute for Indigenous Studies, Chennai, India; Guest Faculty, Department of Christian Studies, University of Madras, Chennai; Associate Editor of Dharma Deepika: A South Asian Journal of Missiological Research. He gained his PhD in Christian Studies from the University of Madras, India. His research was an inter-disciplinary approach to religious conversion. His research interest includes religious conversion, religious experience, spirituality, Psychology of Religion, Psychology and Theology, and postmodernism.

Culturally-Embedded Meaning-Making: An Exploration of How Young, Resilient South African Adults Confront Suffering Linda C. Theron and Adam M. C. Theron Abstract Resilience studies among majority and minority world inhabitants have shown that meaning making is a pathway to resilience. More recently, however, resilience researchers have urged deeper understanding of how context and culture inform processes (like meaning making) that encourage positive adaptation to hardship and suffering. Drawing on multiple case studies, including rich narrative and visual data, our chapter sheds light on how making positive meaning of poverty, and the suffering that is typically associated with indigence, encourages young Black South African adults to adjust positively to their difficult lives. More specifically, we focus on how their constructive meaning making is nuanced by Africentric cultural traditions and beliefs. The stories and drawings of these young Black South Africans illustrate how collectivist philosophy and kinship practices promote equanimity in the midst of suffering. Their stoical acceptance and simultaneous unwavering future orientation is rooted in profound respect for humanity (including their own), spirituality, and accounts (oral and written) of South Africans who survived suffering. These cultural resources encourage an interpretation of suffering that levies no blame (either at the self or others), that reframes hardship as temporary and manageable, and that attributes constructive rationales for suffering. Concurrently, these young people’s acceptance of the aforementioned cultural resources, and help-seeking transactions with their ecologies support their process of making positive meaning of suffering. Thus, we theorize that meaning making that promotes constructive adjustment to hardship, as a mechanism of resilience for Black South Africans battling poverty, is a dynamic, bi-directional process embedded in traditional culture. Key Words: Resilience, meaning-making, Africentric, poverty, qualitative. ***** 1. Introduction Poverty is a pervasive South African reality. 1 The National Planning Commission of South Africa (2011) reports about 48% of South Africans live below a poverty line of $2 per day. Such limited income is associated with inadequate access to health care, education and social infrastructure. In addition to income and material insufficiencies, poverty places people at risk for negative psychosocial outcomes that include marginalisation, exclusion, degradation, stigmatisation, hopelessness and misery. 2 In short, poor people are no strangers to suffering.

62

Culturally-Embedded Meaning-Making

__________________________________________________________________ Many studies of resilience have examined the mechanisms that protect some people against the challenges of suffering, including those associated with indigence. In essence, resilience is conceptualised as a culturally appropriate person-ecology transaction that encourages positive adaptation to adverse life circumstances. 3 Although there has been criticism of resilience studies, particularly with regard to how resilience and risk were defined, operationalised and measured, 4 authoritative reviews of the processes underlying resilience-promoting transactions point to generic mechanisms that promote people’s capacity to adjust well to adversarial contexts. 5 One of these is meaning making. 6 In the resilience literature, meaning making connotes an active process of making sense of adversity and finding benefits that have flowed from the experience of adversity. 7 Masten and Wright associated hope and optimism with meaning making, and suggest that cultural traditions and religion potentially offer belief systems that offer ways of making sense of adversity. 8 Ungar et al. explicitly commented on how culture nuances meaning making, and encourages divergent construal of adversity and positive adjustment. 9 Theron and Malindi reported that resilient street youth show capacity for critical reflection on their actions and cultural identity, and that this mitigated some of the risk inherent to streetism. 10 Theron and Dunn reported that resilient adolescents adjusted well to their parents’ divorce when they could find benefits in their parents no longer being together. 11 In their review of South African studies of resilience between 1990 and 2008, Theron and Theron noted that positive cognitive appraisal of adversity was associated with resilience. 12 Thus, as part of the process of resilience, meaning making resides in young people’s capacity to make sense of their situation and identify gains flowing from it. At the same time, young people’s appraisals and reflections are influenced by their culturally and contextually embedded ecologies. The above mentioned processes are akin to how meaning making is conceptualised in the early coping literature. Park and Folkman stressed that meaning making is a transactional process that relies on global meaning(s) (or fundamental schemata pertaining to beliefs about the world, about the self, the self in the world, and purpose) that people hold. It also relies on the meaning people make of a specific situation by appraising and re-appraising what has happened, and attributing causality and/or responsibility meanings to it. People’s value systems and life beliefs necessarily influence how specific situations are construed. Likewise, the appraisal of situational events can influence global meanings. 13 In later coping literature, Folkman reported meaning-focused coping or the process of drawing on global belief systems (or beliefs, values and existential purpose) to sustain coping over time. 14 Meaning-focused coping includes benefit finding (and periodically reminding the self of these benefits), adaptation of goals, reorganising priorities, and reframing everyday events in a positive light. 15 In contexts of longer term adversity, like poverty, benefit finding does not denote an outcome, but is rather a way of augmenting positive adjustment to chronic hardship. 16 In personal

Linda C. Theron and Adam M. C. Theron

63

__________________________________________________________________ communication with Susan Folkman (19 September 2011), she was unequivocal that meaning-focused coping nurtures the process of resilience. Nevertheless, despite probable conclusions about meaning making as integral to the process of resilience, researchers caution that detailed further research is needed to understand how diverse cultural contexts nuance resilience-promoting processes. 17 This counsel motivated our present study and led to the following research question: how do Black South African students adjust positively to the manifold challenges of poverty? 2. Contextualisation In the present study, we invited resilient Black South African students to help us gain a deeper understanding of the processes informing their resilience. We assumed from the outset that the Africentric culture and contexts of these students would nuance how they resiled in the face of poverty. We recognise that it is precarious to describe Africentric culture as uniform for all South Africans, or even for all Black South Africans. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify core features of Africentric culture. 18 These include strong spiritual (religious and ancestral), kinship, and collective beliefs and practices. 19 Bujo described an African way of being as an embedded or ‘anthropocentric’ way of being. 20 This means that individuals are interlocked with a larger community and this relatedness begets individual self-realisation. This collective way of being is informed by a cooperative philosophy called Ubuntu, 21 or Botho. 22 This value system inculcates deep respect for human interdependence. 23 Reverence for communalism encourages kinship practices or ‘a family community’ 24 in which raising children is a collective responsibility. In communities that adhere to kinship practices, older people (like grandparents) are respected, and often accept responsibility for child-rearing. Children are treated courteously, but have little influence, and are socialised to be religious, respect elders and ancestors, and to esteem collectivist values. 25 A handful of studies of South African youth resilience have reported that the Africentric culture of Black South African youth and young adults shape their processes of adjustment to hardship. 26 Nevertheless, as noted above, detailed explorations of how culture informs meaning-making have been neglected to date. 3. Method We employed a qualitative, phenomenological design to explore how Black South African students resile in the face of poverty. For the purposes of this chapter, we report only on their meaning making as a pathway to resilience, but our study had a broader focus. Thus, we engaged 13 students (seven male, six female; average age of 26 years) in unstructured interviews and asked them to tell us their life story, with a special emphasis on how poverty had challenged positive adjustment and how they had managed to adapt well, despite these challenges. At

64

Culturally-Embedded Meaning-Making

__________________________________________________________________ the close of each interview we also invited each participant to illustrate the process of their resilience in a drawing, and then to explain the meaning of their illustration. 27 Our first participant was recommended to the study by lecturers who were struck by his ongoing resilience. He in turn nominated a fellow student, who in turn was invited to nominate other resilient students. We requested that participants should at least have successfully completed one year of tertiary education as success at university is often considered to be an indicator of resilience, 28 but also that their peers consider them to be resilient. Thus we made use of purposive, snowball sampling. 29 Each participant agreed in writing to be part of the study, following detailed informed consent procedures and reassurances of the right to withdraw. The interviews were conducted by the first author in English – the students were comfortable expressing themselves in English, even though this is not their mother tongue. On average interviews lasted some 90 minutes and were conducted at times and in spaces that were convenient for the participants. Each interview was audio-recorded and then transcribed verbatim. We offered the participants a range of media to illustrate their resilience, and most chose coloured pencil crayons. Their explanation of this drawing was also audio recorded and transcribed verbatim. Although the participants’ English is not perfect, we chose not to language edit the transcripts. We coded the contents of the transcripts and drawings inductively and independently. Thereafter we met for extensive consensus discussions, before agreeing on emerging findings. In addition to multiple data sources and inter-coder consensus, the trustworthiness of our findings were heightened by inviting comment from independent researchers familiar with resilience literature, and by asking participants to comment critically on the meaning we were making of their lived experiences. 30 4. Findings Meaning making emerged unequivocally as a process which participants engaged in to adjust well to the suffering inherent to poverty. In the process of making meaning, students made sense of their poverty, and identified benefits in their situations. Sense making included the themes of: revised perspectives of poverty, reframing poverty as temporary and manageable, and stoical acceptance of suffering. Benefit finding was very seldom related to themselves as individuals, but rather encompassed ways in which poverty had advantaged the family group. It included the themes of steeling, and gratitude.

Linda C. Theron and Adam M. C. Theron

65

__________________________________________________________________ A. Making Sense of Poverty a. Revised perspectives of poverty All participants appraised poverty as inimical. This included reference to the hardships of hunger, inadequate clothing, marginalisation, humiliation and powerlessness. For example, Participant Four, a young man who grew up in a township related: ‘They will tease you that you so poor.’ Likewise, Participant Six, who grew up in an impoverished township, commented: Yeh, uh that’s, that’s the one part that made my life to be difficult … with that stigma from the community because you – where I come from – if you’re poor you have that stigma that means you’re nothing, you will never mount up to anything. However, with the support of their grandparents, our participants reported that they were able to revise their perspective of how adverse their suffering was. In most instances, their grandparents told them stories of their own childhood suffering and this encouraged students to reappraise their own suffering. For example, Participant Seven, a young man who grew up with his grandmother in a rural mountainous area, reported: At some point I used to say, ‘I’m suffering, yeh, I’m suffering!’But my Granny’s stories – when she told me, uh, her stories during her times of her suffering, then I realised no, this is a, it’s a little thing (laughs) In addition to grandparents encouraging new perspectives via the African oral tradition, some participants reported that religious beliefs helped them to modify their perceptions. For example, Participant Five recounted: ‘In the process like, of our sufferings, my brother became a Christian and then he introduced this thing into the family. And then, that’s when I started seeing things differently.’ b. Perceiving hardship as temporary and manageable Our participants reported that reframing poverty and its concomitant hardships as temporary also facilitated positive coping. In most instances, this offered participants hope that at some stage in the future, their lives would improve and encouraged them to orientate themselves towards the future. Most typically, their religious beliefs encouraged them to hope for a better future. For example, Participant Four who not only battled crippling poverty but also had to contend with an abusive father, learned via his religious faith to reconsider suffering as both temporary and manageable:

Culturally-Embedded Meaning-Making

66

__________________________________________________________________ Um, when I accepted Jesus Christ, that’s when I started to define myself, ... The reason why I’m in the situation is because I can handle that situation. So, I started to understand that [this] situation is not there permanently, but it’s just there just to, for a, a certain period of time ... .

Educational aspirations also encouraged participants to see an end to their poverty. Passing well at school and gaining access to university was considered a foothold to an upward trajectory. Teachers and religious leaders encouraged this understanding. For example, Participant 13 whose single mother was illiterate regularly encouraged her to make a success of her schooling, but so did her school environment: At school we had teachers, and preachers coming and telling us that uhm you are the answer to, to your family. ... By working hard you will get a bursary, you’ll be educated, and you’ll help at, at your family. They would live a better life ... Grandparents – most of whom were illiterate – also urged youth to make the most of their educational opportunities so that they could have access to a life with less poverty-related suffering. For example, Participant Five, who was raised by his grandmother until she died and his older brother assumed the caregiver role, reported: My grandmother ... she always wanted us to – though she couldn’t read and write – she would always ask us to pass at school…’cause I mean she believed in education. She will influence you to study... c. Stoical acceptance of suffering The participants all reported a stoical acceptance of their hardship. Their willingness to be long-suffering was nurtured by relationships to family in similar situations (particularly cousins, siblings, and grandparents), but also by a determination to prove themselves as strong enough to endure hardship for the interim. Their deep respect for fellow human beings discouraged them from blaming anyone for the suffering that they were enduring, and encouraged selfregulation. For example, Participant Two who was sent to the mountains to herd his uncle’s cattle in order to supplement his single mother’s income illustrated this stoical acceptance as follows:

Linda C. Theron and Adam M. C. Theron

67

__________________________________________________________________ … Yes, there was nothing we could do. If we didn’t accept we would have done every day angry in our hearts. So we just accepted that we were strong and everything just became simple. B. Benefit Finding a. Steeling When participants reflected on the consequences of their having known and still knowing poverty, they reported that it steeled them and taught them to endure hardship. Often, they steeled themselves because this had benefits for their family system. Participants reported that their doing well, despite the challenges they faced, was a way of honouring their mothers, grandparents, and/or teachers who had invested in them. Most often, participants referred to younger siblings, or cousins, or their own children who had benefitted from the participants’ rolemodelling of tenacity and equanimity. For example, Participant Three related: So, everything that was negative in my life, I had to turn to positive … I pushed myself so hard … What makes me happy now, is that I didn’t lose my cousins to this very hard life. There was a point whereby I didn’t care about myself. I only cared about what’s gonna happen to them. b. Acquiring gratitude Likewise, participants reported that having known poverty and learning how to survive its hardships, had not only made them stronger, but also taught them gratitude. They expressed gratitude to grandparents who had shared their meagre pensions to feed them and their stories to bolster them. They expressed gratitude to older siblings who supported them financially, materially and emotionally, once they started earning. For example, Participant Six gave credit to his brothers for turning his life around: ... So after they [his brothers] graduated I could also have those things. Yeh, so life got better after they graduated ... and so I was the lucky one ‘cause I’m the last born. So I guess that made life simpler for me. Participants also expressed gratitude to God, and in some cases to their ancestors, for supporting them. For example, Participant Nine, a young woman who had been challenged not only by poverty but also by pregnancy outside of a committed relationship, said: ‘This year, things are going right for me … so I’ll be like thanking my ancestors and God, they really helped me; they really stood by me.’

68

Culturally-Embedded Meaning-Making

__________________________________________________________________ 5. Conclusion We concluded that, in part, our participants coped positively with the hardships of poverty because they constructed positive meaning. As previous resilience literature 31 and coping literature 32 have indicated, meaning-focused coping among our participants included processes of making constructive sense of suffering and finding benefits in suffering. However, how our participants made sense reflected the Africentric cultures and contexts they were embedded in. For example, their sense making was facilitated by their attachments and by their spirituality. As is customary in traditional Africentric and other collective contexts, these attachments were mostly to grandparents and/or (older) siblings 33 rather than to biological parents as Western resilience literature reports. 34 Likewise, their sense-making was influenced by deep respect for the interdependence of human beings and so obviated laying blame. 35 It was also informed by deep spiritual beliefs, both religious and ancestral, which encouraged the participants to feel strong in the face of suffering and to redefine themselves. Prior studies of resilience among African American youth have associated strong religious beliefs with positive adjustment to hardship, 36 but ancestral support has not been explicitly reported. At the same time, our participants demonstrated capacity to collaborate towards resilience. Their deep respect towards their ‘family community’ 37 strengthened their determination to resile and encouraged a grateful attitude towards support. They heeded the stories of their grandparents and internalised their lessons, thereby reappraising their own suffering; they accepted and were grateful for the support of older siblings; they perceived younger siblings and cousins as worthwhile encouragement towards personal mastery for the eventual gain of the greater family system; and they diligently pursued further education. In essence, our participants demonstrated that although their meaning making was informed by previously reported mechanisms of sense making and benefit finding, the ways in which they attributed meaning and identified suffering-related gains reflected their cultural and contextual situatedness, or their Africentric global meaning systems. 38 At the same time, they demonstrated that these mechanisms were not just person-centred. Instead, the process of making helpful meaning was couched in participant-ecology transactions 39 that were nuanced, in the instance of our study, by Africentric, or communalist culture. Our participants made, and were supported to make, meaning that facilitated revised perceptions of suffering (e.g. suffering that was not as dreadful as their grandparents’ experiences, indigence that was temporary). This encouraged a stoical acceptance of the here-and-now, and concomitant dedication towards a better future, mostly via graduate pathways. This acceptance for the interim coupled with dreams of a better future promoted their coping well with poverty and its associated privations. Thus, in answer to our research question we theorise that meaning making is a mechanism of resilience for Black South Africans battling poverty. Although we

Linda C. Theron and Adam M. C. Theron

69

__________________________________________________________________ recognise that our study is small, its findings encourage a conceptualisation of meaning-making as a dynamic, bi-directional process embedded in cultural systems. As such this study urges further exploration of how other cultural contexts might inform meaning making in both similar and diverse ways.

Notes 1

Sarah Mosoetsa, Eating from One Pot: The Dynamics of Survival in Poor South African Households (Johannesburg: WITS University Press, 2011), 1. 2 Regis Chireshe, ‘The Impact of Poverty on Women’s Psychosocial Well-Being: Narratives form Zimbabwean Migrant Women in South Africa’, Journal of Psychology in Africa 20.2 (2010): 193. 3 Michael Ungar, ‘The Social Ecology of Resilience: Addressing Contextual and Cultural Ambiguity of a Nascent Construct’, American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 81 (2011): 4. 4 Suniya S. Luthar, ‘Resilience in Development: A Synthesis of Research across Five Decades’, in Developmental Psychopathology: Risk, Disorder and Adaptation, ed. Dante Cicchetti and Donald J. Cohen (Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons, 2006), 742. 5 Ibid., 780-83, Ann S. Masten, and Margaret O. Wright, ‘Resilience over the Lifespan: Developmental Perspectives on Resistance, Recovery and Transformation’, in Handbook of Adult Resilience, ed. John W. Reich (New York: Guilford, 2010), 222-229. 6 Ibid., 227. 7 Steve R. Baumgardner and Marie K. Crothers, Positive Psychology (Upper Saddle River: Pearson, 2010), 69. 8 Masten and Wright, ‘Resilience over the Lifespan’, 227-228. 9 Michael Ungar, et al., ‘Unique Pathways to Resilience across Cultures’, Adolescence 42, 166 (2007): 306-307. 10 Linda C. Theron, and Macalane J. Malindi, ‘Resilient Street Youth: A Qualitative South African Study’, Journal of Youth Studies 13.6 (2010): 728-729. 11 Linda C. Theron, and Nadine Dunn, ‘Enabling White, Afrikaans-Speaking Adolescents towards Post-Divorce Resilience: Implications for Educators’, South African Journal of Education 30 (2010): 236. 12 Linda C. Theron, and Adam M. C. Theron, ‘A Critical Review of Studies of South African Youth Resilience, 1990-2008’, South African Journal of Science 106(7/8) (2010), accessed August 8, 2011, http://www.sajs.co.za/. 13 Crystal L. Park and Susan Folkman, ‘Meaning in the Context of Stress and Coping’, Review of General Psychology 1.2 (1997): 116-27. 14 Susan Folkman, ‘The Case for Positive Emotions in the Stress Process’, Anxiety, Stress and Coping 21.1 (2008): 7.

70

Culturally-Embedded Meaning-Making

__________________________________________________________________ 15

Ibid., 7-11. Vicki S. Helgeson, Kerry A. Reynolds and Patricia L. Tomich, ‘A Meta-Analytic Review of Benefit Finding and Growth’, Journal of Consulting & Clinical Psychology 75.4 (2006): 798. 17 Masten and Wright, ‘Resilience over the Lifespan’, 229; Michael Ungar, ‘The Social Ecology of Resilience: Addressing Contextual and Cultural Ambiguity of a Nascent Construct’, American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 81 (2011): 8-10. 18 Desmond Lesejane, ‘Fatherhood from an African Cultural Perspective’, in Baba: Men and Fatherhood in South Africa, ed. Linda Richter and Robert Morrell (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2006), 173. 19 Nhlanhla Mkhize, ‘African Traditions and the Social, Economic and Moral Dimensions of Fatherhood’, in Richter and Morrell, Baba: Men and Fatherhood in South Africa, 187; Munyaradzi F. Murove, ‘Beyond the Savage Evidence Ethic: A Vindication of African Ethics’, in African Ethics: An Anthology of Comparative and Applied Ethics, ed. Munyaradzi F. Murove (Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2009), 28; Martin H. Prozesky, ‘Cinderella, Survivor and Saviour: African Ethics and the Quest for a Global Ethic’, in Murove, African Ethics, 9-11. 20 Benezet Bujo, ‘Is There a Specific African Ethic? Towards a Discussion with Western Thought’, in Murove, African Ethics, 115. 21 Prozesky, ‘Cinderella, Survivor and Saviour’, 9. 22 Musa W. Dube, ‘“I am because we are”: Giving Primacy to African Indigenous Values in HIV & AIDS Prevention’, in Murove, African Ethics, 200. 23 Mluleki Munyaka, and Mokgethi Motlhabi, ‘Ubuntu and its Socio-Moral Significance’, in Murove, African Ethics, 66. 24 Mkhize, ‘African Traditions’, 187. 25 Lesejane, ‘Fatherhood from an African Cultural Perspective’, 177. 26 Priscilla Dass-Brailsford, ‘Exploring Resiliency: Academic Achievement among Disadvantaged Black Youth in South Africa’, South African Journal of Psychology 35.3 (2005): 585-586; Tlakale N. Phasha, ‘Educational Resilience among African Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse in South Africa’, Journal of Black Studies 40.6 (2010): 1248-1250; Linda C. Theron, ‘Uphenyo ngokwazi kwentsha yasemalo kishini ukumelana nesimo esinzima: A South African Study of Resilience among Township Youth’, Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics of North America 16.2 (2007): 371; Linda C. Theron, and David R. Donald, ‘Educational Psychology and Resilience in Developing Contexts: A Rejoinder to Toland and Carrigan (2011)’, School Psychology International, forthcoming (2012); Linda C. Theron et al., ‘A ‘Day in the Lives’ of Four Resilient Youths: A Study of Cultural Roots of Resilience’, Youth & Society 43.3 (2011): 812; Theron and Malindi, ‘Resilient Street Youth’, 726; Theron and Theron, ‘A Critical Review’. 16

Linda C. Theron and Adam M. C. Theron

71

__________________________________________________________________ 27

Marilys Guillemin, ‘Understanding Illness: Using Drawings as Research Method’, Qualitative Health Research 14.2 (2004): 274-77. 28 Dass-Brailsford, ‘Exploring Resiliency’, 575-76. 29 John W. Creswell, Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design: Choosing among Five Approaches (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2007), 127. 30 John W. Creswell, Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2009), 190-192. 31 Baumgardner and Crothers, Positive Psychology, 69. 32 Folkman, ‘The Case for Positive Emotions’, 7; Park and Folkman, ‘Meaning in the Context of Stress and Coping’, 116-127. 33 Emmy E. Werner, ‘What Can We Learn about Resilience from Large-Scale Longitudinal Studies?’ in Resilience in Children, ed. Sam Goldstein and Robert B. Brooks (New York: Springer, 2006), 97. 34 Masten and Wright, ‘Resilience over the Lifespan’, 223. 35 Munyaka and Motlhabi, ‘Ubuntu and its Socio-Moral Significance’, 66. 36 Karol L. Kumpfer, ‘Factors and Processes Contributing to Resilience: The Resilience Framework’, in Resilience and Development: Positive Life Adaptations, ed. Meyer D. Glantz and Jeannette L. Johnson (New York: Plenum, 1999), 199. 37 Mkhize, ‘African Traditions’, 187. 38 Park and Folkman, ‘Meaning in the Context of Stress and Coping’, 116. 39 Ungar, ‘The Social Ecology of Resilience’, 4.

Bibliography Baumgardner, Steve R., and Marie K. Crothers. Positive Psychology. Upper Saddle River: Pearson, 2010. Bujo, Benezet. ‘Is There a Specific African Ethic? Towards a Discussion with Western Thought’. In African Ethics: An Anthology of Comparative and Applied Ethics, edited by Munyaradzi F. Murove, 113-128. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2009. Chireshe, Regis. ‘The Impact of Poverty on Women’s Psychosocial Well-Being: Narratives form Zimbabwean Migrant Women in South Africa’. Journal of Psychology in Africa 20.2 (2010): 193-198. Creswell, John, W. Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design: Choosing among Five Approaches. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2007.

72

Culturally-Embedded Meaning-Making

__________________________________________________________________ Creswell, John, W. Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2009. Dass-Brailsford, Priscilla. ‘Exploring Resiliency: Academic Achievement among Disadvantaged Black Youth in South Africa’. South African Journal of Psychology 35.3 (2005): 574-591. Dube, Musa W. ‘“I am Because We Are”: Giving Primacy to African Indigenous Values in HIV & AIDS Prevention’. In African Ethics: An Anthology of Comparative and Applied Ethics, edited by Munyaradzi F. Murove, 188-217. Scottsville: University of Kwazulu Natal Press, 2009. Folkman, Susan. ‘The Case for Positive Emotions in the Stress Process’. Anxiety, Stress and Coping 21.1 (2008): 3-14. Guillemin, Marilys. ‘Understanding Illness: Using Drawings as Research Method’. Qualitative Health Research 14.2 (2004): 272-289. Helgeson, Vicki S., Kerry A. Reynolds, and Patricia L. Tomich. ‘A Meta-Analytic Review of Benefit Finding and Growth’. Journal of Consulting & Clinical Psychology 75.4 (2006): 797-816. Kumpfer, Karol L. ‘Factors and Processes Contributing to Resilience: The Resilience Framework’. In Resilience and Development: Positive Life Adaptations, edited by Meyer D. Glantz and Jeannette L. Johnson, 179-224. New York: Plenum Press, 1999. Lesejane, Desmond. ‘Fatherhood from an African Cultural Perspective’. In Baba: Men and Fatherhood in South Africa, edited by Linda Richter and Robert Morrell, 173-182. Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2006. Luthar, Suniya, S. ‘Resilience in Development: A Synthesis of Research across Five Decades’. In Developmental Psychopathology: Risk, Disorder and Adaptation, edited by Dante Cicchetti and Donald J. Cohen, 739-795. Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons, 2006. Masten, Ann S., and Margaret O. Wright. ‘Resilience over the Lifespan: Developmental Perspectives on Resistance, Recovery and Transformation’. In Handbook of Adult Resilience, edited by John W. Reich, 213-237. New York: Guilford, 2010.

Linda C. Theron and Adam M. C. Theron

73

__________________________________________________________________ Mkhize, Nhlanhla. ‘African Traditions and the Social, Economic and Moral Dimensions of Fatherhood’. In Baba: Men and Fatherhood in South Africa, edited by Linda Richter and Robert Morrell, 183-198. Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2006. Mosoetsa, Sarah. Eating from One Pot: The Dynamics of Survival in Poor South African Households. Johannesburg: WITS University Press, 2011. Munyaka, Mluleki, and Mokgethi Motlhabi. ‘Ubuntu and its Socio-Moral Significance’. In African Ethics: An Anthology of Comparative and Applied Ethics, edited by Munyaradzi F. Murove, 63-84. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2009. Murove, Munyaradzi F. ‘Beyond the Savage Evidence Ethic: A Vindication of African Ethics’. In African Ethics: An Anthology of Comparative and Applied Ethics, edited by Munyaradzi F. Murove, 14-32. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2009. Park, Crystal L., and Susan Folkman. ‘Meaning in the Context of Stress and Coping’. Review of General Psychology 1.2 (1997): 115-144. Phasha, Tlakale N. ‘Educational Resilience among African Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse in South Africa’. Journal of Black Studies 40.6 (2010): 1234-1253. Prozesky, Martin H. ‘Cinderella, Survivor and Saviour: African Ethics and the Quest for a Global Ethic’. In African Ethics: An Anthology of Comparative and Applied Ethics, edited by Munyaradzi F. Murove, 3-13. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2009. South Africa: Diagnostic Overview. Accessed September 20, 2010. http://www.npconline.co.za. Theron, Linda C. ‘Uphenyo Ngokwazi Kwentsha Yasemalokishini Ukumelana Nesimo Esinzima: A South African Study of Resilience among Township Youth’. Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics of North America 16.2 (2007): 357-375. Theron, Linda C., Catherine A. Cameron, Nora Didkowsky, Cindy Lau, Linda Liebenberg, and Michael Ungar. ‘A “Day in the Lives” of Four Resilient Youths: A Study of Cultural Roots of Resilience’. Youth & Society 43.3 (2011): 799-818.

74

Culturally-Embedded Meaning-Making

__________________________________________________________________ Theron, Linda C., and David R. Donald. ‘Educational Psychology and Resilience in Developing Contexts: A Rejoinder to Toland and Carrigan’. School Psychology International, forthcoming (2012). Theron, Linda C., and Nadine Dunn. ‘Enabling White, Afrikaans-Speaking Adolescents towards Post-Divorce Resilience: Implications for Educators’. South African Journal of Education 30 (2010): 231-244. Theron, Linda C., and Macalane J. Malindi. ‘Resilient Street Youth: A Qualitative South African Study’. Journal of Youth Studies 13.6 (2010):717-736. Theron, Linda C., and Adam M. C. Theron. ‘A Critical Review of Studies of South African Youth Resilience, 1990-2008’. South African Journal of Science 106.7/8 (2010). Accessed August 8, 20. http://www.sajs.co.za/. Ungar, Michael. ‘The Social Ecology of Resilience: Addressing Contextual and Cultural Ambiguity of a Nascent Construct’. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 81 (2011): 1-17. Ungar, Michael, Marion Brown, Linda Liebenberg, Rasha Othman, Wai M. Kwong, Mary Armstrong, and Jane Gilgun. ‘Unique Pathways to Resilience across Cultures’. Adolescence 42.166 (2007): 287-310. Werner, Emmy E. ‘What Can We Learn about Resilience from Large-Scale Longitudinal Studies?’. In Resilience in Children, edited by Sam Goldstein, and Robert B. Brooks, 91-106. New York: Springer, 2006. Linda Theron is a Professor in the School of Education Sciences, Faculty of Humanities, North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus. Her research is resilience-focused, and she prefers using visual participatory methodologies to explore resilience in contexts of risk. Adam M. C. Theron is Executive Dean, Faculty of Humanities, North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus. His research is resilience-focused and primarily qualitative.

‘Grief is love’: Understanding Grief through Self-help Groups Organised by the Family Survivors of Suicide Tomofumi Oka Abstract In 2006, the Japanese Government implemented the Basic Act on Suicide Countermeasures in response to an extremely high suicide rate. In accordance with this act, and supported by local government grants, mental health professionals have established support groups in many cities for the family survivors of suicide. Such families have met others like themselves in the support groups and have organised themselves into self-help groups because they were dissatisfied with the concepts of grief work that form the foundation of the professional support. They also felt the need to create new, alternative values and meanings for their grief. This ethnographic research aims to discuss the self-help groups’ beliefs regarding grief and the strong cultural influence of Japanese Buddhism on their attitudes toward death and the deceased. The groups’ beliefs, which they have developed themselves, and which differ significantly from those of professionals who customarily provide support group services, are examined as ‘liberating meaning perspectives’. The three themes identified as perspectives are ‘Living with Grief’, ‘Grief is Ours’, and ‘Grief is Love’. I also examine how these perspectives influence the social actions of the self-help groups. Key Words: Self-help groups, support groups, family survivors of suicide, Japan, grief work, Buddhism, cultures, ethnography, liberating meaning perspectives. ***** 1. Social Backgrounds and Research Methodology This research discusses and compares the beliefs regarding grief, as developed by self-help groups for family survivors of suicide, to professionals’ beliefs, and demonstrates how these beliefs are based on Japanese culture, including Japanese Buddhism. In this first section, I describe the social backgrounds and the development of the self-help groups for family survivors of suicide, and I illustrate how I started this research and what methods I used. Japan has had one of the highest suicide rates among OECD countries. 1 As one report says, ‘In Japan, the number of deaths due to suicides has been increasing and exceeded 30,000 in 1998.’ 2 It is estimated that about three million people are family survivors of suicide in Japan. 3 This fact finally forced the government to pass the Basic Act on Suicide Countermeasures in 2006, 4 which provides three levels of programs relating to suicide:

76

‘Grief is love’

__________________________________________________________________ Primary prevention is to detect people who have a high risk of suicide, and to raise the general level of knowledge about mental illness and suicide. Secondary prevention is crisis intervention by medical and health professionals or services. Tertiary prevention is postvention by psychological treatment for survivors. 5 Thus, under the new law, family survivors of suicide are targeted for tertiary prevention, and the service is psychologically focused. Many ‘professionally led support groups’ 6 have been set up across Japan for family survivors of suicide. 7 Until the professionally led support groups were established, Japanese family survivors of suicide had very few chances to come together. The family survivors decided to start their own groups after being deeply disappointed with the professionally led support groups they had joined. Survivors’ disappointment can be summarised in a simple phrase: ‘No one, unless they have had the same experience, can truly understand us.’ However, as will be shown later, the helper’s philosophy on life and death is more important than whether he or she has had the same experience. The most pressing question for the leaders who started their groups was how to legitimize such groups with the public. It was very difficult for the leaders of family survivors to derive support from professionals, because the latter actually discouraged the survivors from starting their self-help groups. The professionals expressed themselves thus: In meetings for sharing the experiences, many intense and powerful emotions are evoked and vented, therefore [the leaders] need to be stable, calm and sensitive. Although we appreciate that it is important [for the leaders] to have had the same experience, this nature [of having had the same experience] can lead to strong subjective notions, emotional instability, and difficulty in keeping an objective perspective. We are afraid that consequently [the leaders] may harm other survivors. 8 Failing to get support from the mental health professionals, in 2008, two leaders, who knew that my expertise is in self-help groups, came to my university office and asked me to support their groups. I accepted their request on the condition that the two leaders would join me as co-researchers in a research project: I suggested that we should conduct participatory action research because such a project would aim to strengthen their civil movements and change their social surroundings. They agreed, and later another leader joined us as a third coresearcher. My methodology was thus a combination of ethnography and participatory action research. Because I knew that – except for the leaders who had approached me and the members to whom they were close – many of the members were wary

Tomofumi Oka

77

__________________________________________________________________ of me, an outsider, I obtained much of the data through my three co-researchers. In addition, I collected data myself. Although many meetings of their self-help groups are strictly exclusive to family survivors, they also have open meetings and workshops that outsiders can attend. I attended and observed these open meetings and conducted many conversational interviews with several leaders and members. To validate what I found through these interviews and my observation of the meetings, I made presentations of my research results in their open meetings or workshops as a speaker, and received a great deal of feedback from conversations with the leaders and members, as well as through emails from the leaders. These activities helped me confirm my findings. 2. Grief Work Hypothesis In this section, I discuss the theoretical and conceptual backgrounds of professionally led Japanese support groups because I assume that these factors constitute the most important reason that many Japanese family survivors leave these groups. In Japan, most mental health professionals use grief theories that professionals have introduced from Western countries, the major one being the ‘grief work theory.’ Japanese professionals seem to believe the grief work theory deeply. The hypothesis of the grief work theory is ‘the notion that healthy grief necessitates the expression of the pain of grief in order to complete the grief process.’ 9 Although this hypothesis is not fully supported by empirical data, 10 discussing the overall validity of the grief work hypothesis is not relevant to this paper’s purpose. The issues around grief work that concern us more are 1) the cultural issue and 2) the medicalisation issue. The cultural issue relating to grief work is that ‘the ultimate goal [of grief work] is the severing of the attachment bond to the deceased.’ 11 As Stroebe et al. state, Principles of grief counseling and therapy follow the view that, in the course of time, bereaved persons need to break their ties with the deceased, give up their attachments, form a new identity of which the departed person has no part, and reinvest in other relationships. People who persist in retaining a bond with their deceased loved one are in need of counseling or therapy. 12 This reflects ‘the culture-bound nature of prevailing North American practices, which view grief as an isolated individual experience and emphasize detachment from the dead as a way to promote recovery.’ 13 On the other hand, in Japan, ‘continuing bonds with the dead remain an enduring part of Japanese culture’, 14 and ‘Japanese spirits of the dead interact with the living.’ 15 One author describes part of the Japanese custom of speaking to the dead:

78

‘Grief is love’

__________________________________________________________________ It is at the butsu-dan [Buddhist altar] and the grave that the Japanese genuinely speak to the dead in private. This is no gruesome conversation with unknown ancestors but rather a loving monologue between husband or wife and the deceased spouse or between a child and his or her mother or father. 16 At a Buddhist altar, families offer food, sweets, drink (including liquor), and a lit cigarette, if the deceased liked to smoke, as an everyday routine. ‘The dead remain close to the living.’ 17 However, offering food at the altar of a loved one would be classified as pathological by most Westerners, who would fear that the bereaved was fixated in the grief process and had failed to relinquish the tie to the deceased. However, in the Japanese case, such practices are fully normal. 18 In my fieldwork with the self-help groups for family survivors of suicide, a woman whose son committed suicide and who is an active member of a self-help group, laughingly said to me: I always talk to him. Anybody [except for our group members] will say, ‘Oh, how crazy, she is mumbling to herself.’ In the kitchen, while making croquettes, I ask him about the taste. Once, I found one croquette was missing, and I said, ‘My son, did you eat it up?’ Maybe, if somebody saw it, they would tell me to go to a mental hospital. The self-help group I was observing completely accepted her attitude. Some of the leaders said that their deceased loved ones support them. A leader said to me jokingly, pointing in a general direction behind her back, ‘My son is standing here and protecting me.’ In such cultural backgrounds, the grief work approach that aims to sever the bonds between the living and the dead is not well accepted. Another issue is the medicalisation of grief. The grief work hypothesis often treats grief not as a natural part of life, but as a pathological process. Granek states: Modern grief researchers claim that grief is a psychological problem necessitating extensive study and intervention by trained professionals. . . . the pathologization of grief is part of the widespread phenomena of turning everyday problems into psychological disorders to be managed and treated by mental health professionals. 19

Tomofumi Oka

79

__________________________________________________________________ The pathologisation or medicalisation of grief can divert people from the social aspects of the grief, 20 and in particular, the medicalisation of grief can disempower the family survivors of suicide. 21 These first two sections have dealt with the social backgrounds of Japanese family survivors of suicide, including professionals’ support and their theoretical frameworks, which are not necessarily helpful to the family survivors. Next, I will present the perspectives that family survivors have developed to deal with these social situations discussed above. 3. ‘Grief is Love’ Self-help groups usually develop their own theoretical frameworks to understand and deal with their situations by using the accumulation of their members’ direct experiences, which they share and exchange in the meetings. Borkman calls it a ‘liberating meaning perspective’: People with stigmatized conditions need a liberating meaning perspective that can free them of self-hate, a negative selfidentity, and assumptions that they are inadequate. They need to redefine their humanity. Moreover, they need a constructive way of dealing with their problem. 22 Through my fieldwork with self-help groups for family survivors of suicide in Japan, I found various liberating meaning perspectives, but not all of them were well articulated. The members often said, ‘We understand each other, but we cannot find a way to tell others how we understand ourselves.’ As an articulator of group thoughts, 23 I helped the family survivors put their thoughts into simple phrases by interviewing them and observing their conversations. As a result, I have identified the following three themes in their liberating meaning perspectives: ‘Living with Grief’, ‘Grief is Ours’, and ‘Grief is Love’. I will explain each of the themes and the social attitudes that accompany the themes. The first one, ‘Living with Grief’, means that members of the self-help groups reject the notion of ‘recovery from grief’, because they believe that ‘recovery is impossible unless our lost one revives.’ This notion fits the Japanese Buddhist custom of keeping relationships with the deceased, as stated above, and contradicts the grief work hypothesis that stresses the importance of severing the bonds between the living and the dead, along with the timelines for when these grief processes should occur. The second one is ‘Grief is Ours.’ The members of the self-help groups frown on professionals’ explanations of their grief: professionals speak with family survivors about their grief as oncologists talk to cancer patients about their cancer. However, even if it is understood that oncologists know more about cancer than the patients do, is it logical to believe that mental health professionals know more about survivors’ grief than the family survivors themselves? Additionally,

80

‘Grief is love’

__________________________________________________________________ professionals like to show survivors the stage model of grief and the timeline for when the various stages will occur. Although these models and notions can quite justly be called ‘myths’ because of the paucity of empirical data to substantiate them, 24 most Japanese bereavement professionals believe them and impose these models on family survivors. The perspective expressed by ‘Grief is Ours’ asserts that the family survivors know their grief better than any professionals, and that they have ‘experiential authority’ 25 over their grief and emotions. The third and final perspective is ‘Grief is Love’, which contradicts the pathologisation of grief. The survivors oppose the professional notion of ‘recovery from grief’, because the notion treats grief as if it is illness or something evil. They accept their grief fully, because their grief and their love for the deceased are closely connected. In a meeting of family survivors of suicide, I once talked about the fact that in ancient Japanese, ‘love’ and ‘grief’ are expressed by the same Japanese letter, and introduced a linguist’s comment that ‘love’ and ‘grief’ are indistinguishable in traditional Japanese sentiments. This expression of the relationship between love and grief was well appreciated by the family survivors, and some members said, ‘This phrase fits our feelings completely. We really feel relieved, because it says that there are no problems even when we feel grief.’ How do these perspectives influence the social actions of their self-help groups? I would like to offer two points by way of an answer: first, members of self-help groups begin to be wary of suicide prevention campaigns, which are apt to label the bereaved families as ‘unhappy’ and the suicide victims as ‘losers.’ One leader criticised a phrase in the suicide prevention campaign sponsored by the government: ‘Watch your families carefully!’ She said: I know a couple who very carefully watched their daughter around the clock, literally. They even slept beside her, knotted together by their wrists. However, they could not prevent her from jumping out of the window all of a sudden. Can we say to them, ‘You should have watched her more carefully’? No! It’s cruel to them. We have to admit that there are suicides that we can never prevent. A second social action arising from the influence of liberating meaning perspectives is members’ anti-discrimination campaigns. Japanese family survivors suffer from discrimination that can include the irrational imposition of compensation for alleged financial damage by real estate owners: for example, some families have been asked to pay compensation for the damage that their suicide victims inflicted on their real estate. ‘Under Japan’s strict laws on tenants’ rights, a property owner is obliged to inform a potential tenant if the unit was the scene of an unnatural death.’ 26 Consequently, ‘few would choose to rent an apartment where a previous occupant had taken their own life. So a death is

Tomofumi Oka

81

__________________________________________________________________ frequently followed by a demand for money.’ 27 ‘Many families are also required to pay for expensive purification rituals’ 28 that are performed by priests. Originally, the self-help groups referred to this kind of irrational treatment as ‘secondary damage’, as some psychiatrists or psychologists suggested. However, they felt uneasy with this terminology, because the next possible question is, ‘If there is secondary damage, what is the primary damage?’ They did not want to consider their loved ones as the cause of ‘primary damage’ to them, but they had still been unable to see any alternative to that term. As they discussed it, I listened to them carefully, picked one word from their speech – discrimination – and suggested that they use it. After discussing it, they decided to use this more socially oriented terminology. By changing the term from ‘secondary damage’ to ‘discrimination’, they could avoid placing the blame on the suicide victims. 4. Problems to Be Solved In this last section, I discuss three unsolved problems regarding the liberating meaning perspectives presented above, and these reflect the limitations of this research. First, it seems that there are huge differences in attitude between the bereaved who are parents and those who are not. A father who had lost his only daughter stressed that it is unthinkable for him to recover from his grief. However, he added, ‘This would not be the case with children who lost their parents. They have their future.’ A man who lost his wife, got married again, and now works as a professional counsellor said to me, ‘Parents are bereaved forever. However, many children [who have lost their parents] or spouses [who have lost their mates] will later become supporters for the bereaved, not regarding themselves as bereaved anymore.’ In actuality, all three of my co-researchers are bereaved parents. Therefore, it is possible that my findings are biased towards bereaved parents. Second, many members, especially bereaved parents, deny the timeline of the grief process and claim that there is no endpoint to the grief. However, it is an undeniable fact that some people, including bereaved parents, have left the selfhelp groups after passing through the ‘toughest periods.’ Some people for whom the suicide of their loved ones happened many years ago find it difficult to empathise with newly bereaved people. In a self-help group, such people are asked to leave the meetings in which serious and deep feelings are shared, and are invited to a casual chat gathering where people do not need to exchange their painful experiences any longer. How can the self-help group members understand these people even as they publicly deny the notion of recovery from grief? My research has not yet provided any conclusive answers on this issue. Third, because it is hard for me to talk to many members directly, I am not sure whether the perspectives presented above are shared by leaders and active members only, or by most members in general. Although I have met many leaders in large conferences or workshops, many of their groups’ members go only to their own local meetings, which are strictly limited to family survivors. Because their

82

‘Grief is love’

__________________________________________________________________ civil movement started as recently as only a few years ago – many groups started after 2008 – the number of self-help groups is less than thirty. Although they have printed some handmade books, which are collections of the members’ own poems and essays on grief, they have not published any books that systematically and formally present their own perspectives. The self-help-group movement has just begun, so it might be too early to summarise their perspectives. Despite these unsolved questions and the limitations of this research, this paper shows the great potential of self-help groups for assisting Japanese family survivors of suicide, because Japan comprises a rare combination of a highly modernised and democratic society, and a very old tradition of worshipping the deceased. We can expect that the self-help-group movements will create a new culture on grief and suicide in very different social and cultural conditions from those in the West, where until now, most modern grief theories have been developed.

Notes 1

‘Mental Health in OECD Countries’, OECD Policy Brief, November 2008, http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/6/48/41686440.pdf, (16/09/11). 2 Shiho Yamashita et al., ‘Suicide in Japan’, Crisis: The Journal of Crisis Intervention and Suicide Prevention 26 (2005): 12-19. 3 Joe Chen, et al., ‘Those Who ae Left Behind: An Estimate of the Number of Family Members of Suicide Victims in Japan’, Social Indicators Research 94 (2009): 535-544. 4 Tadashi Takeshima et al., ‘Japan’s Suicide Prevention Strategy and the Role of the Centre for Suicide Prevention’, (paper presented at the 13th Pacific Rim College of Psychiatrists Scientific Meeting, Tokyo, 2008). http://www.ncnp.go.jp/nimh/keikaku/kisochousa/pdf/gakkai1.pdf, (16/09/11). 5 Yamashita et al., ‘Suicide in Japan: Present condition and prevention measures’, Crisis: The Journal of Crisis Intervention and Suicide Prevention, 26 (2005), 1516. 6 Although there are some groups that can be called ‘volunteer-led’, this paper considers them as part of ‘professionally led’ support groups because the leading volunteers are usually trained or supervised by professionals. 7 Murad Khan et al., ‘Addressing in Asia the Problems of Survivors of Suicide’, in Suicide and Suicide Prevention in Asia, ed. Herbert Hendin, et al. (Geneva: WHO Press, 2008), 89-96. 8 Shinji Shimizu, ‘Shakai Mondai toshiteno Jishi Izoku Shien [Supporting Family Survivors of Suicide as a Social Issue]’, Gendai no Esupuri 501 (2009): 26. This quotation was translated by me.

Tomofumi Oka

83

__________________________________________________________________ 9

Lauren J. Breen, ‘Professionals’ Experiences of Grief Counseling: Implications for Bridging the Gap between Research and Practice’, OMEGA: Journal of Death and Dying 62 (2010-2011): 286. 10 For example, see, Margaret Stroebe, ‘Coping with Bereavement: A Review of the Grief Work Hypothesis’, OMEGA: Journal of Death and Dying 26 (19921993): 19-42; Wolfgang Stroebe, Henk Schut, and Margaret S. Stroebe, ‘Grief Work, Disclosure and Counseling: Do They Help the Bereaved?’, Clinical Psychology Review 25 (2005): 395-414; Margaret Stroebe and Wolfgang Stroebe, ‘Does “Grief Work” Work?’, Journal of Consulting & Clinical Psychology 59 (1991): 479-482. One of the most influential papers related to this is Camille B. Wortman and Roxane C. Silver, ‘The Myths of Coping with Loss’, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 57 (1989): 349-357. 11 George A. Bonanno and Stacey Kaltman, ‘Toward an Integrative Perspective on Bereavement’, Psychological Bulletin 125 (1999): 760. 12 Margaret Stroebe, et al., ‘Broken Hearts or Broken Bonds: Love and Death in Historical Perspective’, American Psychologist 47 (1992): 1206-1207. 13 Ester R. Shapiro, ‘Family Bereavement and Cultural Diversity: A Social Developmental Perspective’, Family Process 35 (1996): 313. See also, Dennis Klass, ‘Developing a Cross-Cultural Model of Grief: The State of the Field’, OMEGA: Journal of Death and Dying 39 (1999): 153-178. 14 Dennis Klass, ‘Continuing Bonds in the Resolution of Grief in Japan and North America’, American Behavioral Scientist 44 (2001): 742-763. 15 Dennis Klass, and Robert Goss, ‘Spiritual Bonds to the Dead in Cross-Cultural and Historical Perspective: Comparative Religion and Modern Grief’, Death Studies 23 (1999): 550. 16 Dickson Kazuo Yagi, ‘Protestant Perspectives on Ancestor Worship in Japanese Buddhism: The Funeral and the Buddhist Altar’, Buddhist-Christian Studies 15 (1995): 50. 17 Jane E. Rutty, ‘Religious Attitudes to Death’, in Encyclopedia of Forensic and Legal Medicine, ed. Roger Byard, Tracey Corey and Carol Henderson (Oxford: Elsevier, 2005), 533. 18 Margaret Stroebe, et al., ‘Broken Hearts or Broken Bonds’, 1207. 19 Leeat Granek, ‘Grief as Pathology: The Evolution of Grief Theory in Psychology from Freud to the Present’, History of Psychology 13 (2010): 66. 20 See Peter Conrad, The Medicalization of Society: On the Transformation of Human Conditions into Treatable Disorders (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), and Allan V. Horwitz, and Jerome C. Wakefield, The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

84

‘Grief is love’

__________________________________________________________________ 21

Tomofumi Oka and Mikihiro Hayashi. ‘Do Members of Self-Help Groups in Japan Consider the Medicalisation of Their Problems and Conditions to Have Liberated Them or Pathologised Them? Three Case Studies’, (paper presented at 2010 Joint World Conference on Social Work and Social Development: The Agenda, Hong Kong, 2010.) 22 Thomasina Borkman, Understanding Self-Help/Mutual Aid: Experiential Learning in the Commons (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 115. 23 This role for professionals is suggested by Klass and Shinners. See Dennis Klass, and Beth Shinners, ‘Professional Roles in a Self-Help Group for the Bereaved’, OMEGA: Journal of Death and Dying 13 (1982), 361-375. 24 For example, see, Alison E. Holman, Jennifer Perisho, Ada Edwards, and Natalie Mlakar, ‘The Myths of Coping with Loss in Undergraduate Psychiatric Nursing Books’, Research in Nursing & Health 33 (2010): 486-499, and Ruth Davis Konigsberg, The Truth About Grief: The Myth of Its Five Stages and the New Science of Loss (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.) 25 Thomasina Borkman, Understanding Self-Help/Mutual Aid. 26 Julian Ryall, ‘Japanese Landlords Sue Families of Suicide Victims’, The Telegraph, October 14, 2010, accessed September 20, 2011, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/8064010/Japaneselandlords-sue-families-of-suicide-victims.html. 27 Buerk, Roland, ‘The Stigma of Japan’s “Suicide Apartments”’, BBC News, February 10, 2011, accessed September 20, 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/mobile/world-asia-pacific-12397216. 28 Ibid.

Bibliography Bonanno, George A., and Stacey Kaltman. ‘Toward an Integrative Perspective on Bereavement’. Psychological Bulletin 125 (1999): 760-776. Borkman, Thomasina. Understanding Self-Help/Mutual Aid: Experiential Learning in the Commons. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999. Breen, Lauren J. ‘Professionals’ Experiences of Grief Counseling: Implications for Bridging the Gap between Research and Practice’. OMEGA: Journal of Death and Dying 62 (2010-2011): 285-303.

Tomofumi Oka

85

__________________________________________________________________ Chen, Joe, Yun Jeong Choi, Kohta Mori, Yasuyuki Sawada, and Saki Sugano. ‘“Those Who Are Left Behind”: An Estimate of the Number of Family Members of Suicide Victims in Japan.’ Social Indicators Research 94 (2009): 535-44. Conrad, Peter. The Medicalization of Society: On the Transformation of Human Conditions into Treatable Disorders. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Feigelman, Beverly, and William Feigelman. ‘Suicide Survivor Support Groups: Comings and Goings, Part II’. Illness, Crisis & Loss 19 (2011): 165-185. Granek, Leeat. ‘Grief as Pathology: The Evolution of Grief Theory in Psychology from Freud to the Present’. History of Psychology 13 (2010): 46-73. Holman, E. Alison, Jennifer Perisho, Ada Edwards, and Natalie Mlakar. ‘The Myths of Coping with Loss in Undergraduate Psychiatric Nursing Books’. Research in Nursing & Health 33 (2010): 486-499. Horwitz, Allan V., and Jerome C. Wakefield. The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Khan, Murad, Herbert Hendin, Yoshitomo Takahashi, Annette Beautrais, Prakarn Thomyangkoon, and Jane Pirkis. ‘Addressing in Asia the Problems of Survivors of Suicide’. In Suicide and Suicide Prevention in Asia, edited by Herbert Hendin, Michael R. Phillips, Lakshmi Vijayakumar, Jane Pirkis, Hong Wang, Paul Yip, Danuta Wasserman, José M. Bertolote and Alexandra Fleischmann, 89-96. Geneva: WHO Press, 2008. Klass, Dennis. ‘Developing a Cross-Cultural Model of Grief: The State of the Field’. OMEGA: Journal of Death and Dying 39 (1999): 153-178. ———. ‘Continuing Bonds in the Resolution of Grief in Japan and North America’. American Behavioral Scientist 44 (2001): 742-763. Klass, Dennis, and Robert Goss. ‘Spiritual Bonds to the Dead in Cross-Cultural and Historical Perspective: Comparative Religion and Modern Grief’. Death Studies 23 (1999): 547-567.

86

‘Grief is love’

__________________________________________________________________ Klass, Dennis, and Beth Shinners. ‘Professional Roles in a Self-Help Group for the Bereaved’. OMEGA: Journal of Death and Dying 13 (1982): 361-375. Rutty, Jane E. ‘Religious Attitudes to Death’. In Encyclopedia of Forensic and Legal Medicine, edited by Roger Byard, Tracey Corey and Carol Henderson, 52536. Oxford: Elsevier, 2005. Shapiro, Ester R. ‘Family Bereavement and Cultural Diversity: A Social Developmental Perspective’. Family Process 35 (1996): 313-332. Stroebe, Margaret. ‘Coping with Bereavement: A Review of the Grief Work Hypothesis’. OMEGA: Journal of Death and Dying 26 (1992-1993): 19-42. Stroebe, Margaret, Mary M. Gergen, Kenneth J. Gergen, and Wolfgang Stroebe. ‘Broken Hearts or Broken Bonds: Love and Death in Historical Perspective’. American Psychologist 47 (1992): 1205-1212. Stroebe, Wolfgang, Henk Schut, and Margaret S. Stroebe. ‘Grief Work, Disclosure and Counseling: Do They Help the Bereaved?’. Clinical Psychology Review 25 (2005): 395-414. Stroebe, Margaret, and Wolfgang Stroebe. ‘Does “Grief Work” Work?’. Journal of Consulting & Clinical Psychology 59 (1991): 479-482. Wortman, Camille B., and Roxane C. Silver. ‘The Myths of Coping with Loss’. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 57 (1989): 349-357. Yagi, Dickson Kazuo. ‘Protestant Perspectives on Ancestor Worship in Japanese Buddhism: The Funeral and the Buddhist Altar’. Buddhist-Christian Studies 15 (1995): 43-59. Yamashita, Shiho, Tohru Takizawa, Shinji Sakamoto, Manabu Taguchi, Yuka Takenoshita, Eriko Tanaka, Ikuko Sugawara, and Naoki Watanabe. ‘Suicide in Japan’. Crisis: The Journal of Crisis Intervention and Suicide Prevention 26 (2005): 12-19. Tomofumi Oka is a Professor of Social Work at Sophia University, Tokyo. He earned his PhD from the Cardiff School of Social Sciences and has studied various self-help groups, including those for family survivors of suicide, alcoholics, parents of children who have intractable diseases, and single fathers.

‘A Blessing in Disguise’: The Meaning of Suffering in the Work of Viktor E. Frankl and Aldous Huxley Janko Andrijasevic Abstract ‘Blessing in disguise’ is a phrase that Sir Julian Huxley used to describe the ordeals his brother Aldous was forced to face in the early years of his life. Viktor Frankl would also have probably agreed that suffering is a hidden blessing, despite the fact that he had spent years in Nazi concentration camps. Unlike millions who were left struggling with meaninglessness after the brutal Holocaust experience, Frankl emerged from it with an even stronger conviction that meaning underlies every facet of life. The phenomenon of human suffering and the dilemma whether there is any meaning in it played a central role in the life philosophy of Aldous Huxley, too. These two outstanding 20th century thinkers expressed ideas on suffering in their books, Frankl in autobiographies, scientific and philosophical titles, Huxley in fiction and discursive prose. However, despite the differences in approach or biographical circumstances, the conclusions reached by them are impressively similar, well-documented and personally experienced. The core element common in their understanding of suffering is attitudinal value. This means that suffering per se does necessarily imply the qualitative kind of experience a person will have while undergoing it, but that the decisive factor is the attitude we adopt toward our suffering, which renders us able to ‘make a heaven out of hell or a hell out of heaven.’ The decision which attitude to take when suffering is unavoidable is a matter of personal choice. Positive choices in the face of pain exact great courage, but at the same time represent the essential freedom we have as human beings, no matter how grave the circumstances. This chapter expounds the ideas Frankl and Huxley had about the role of suffering in human life, compares their differences and similarities, and highlights the common conclusions that regard human life as a spiritual, meaningful, indefinable phenomenon, as opposed to the reductionist view shared by a large proportion of intellectual and artistic elites within the last hundred years. Key Words: Suffering, meaning, Viktor Frankl, Aldous Huxley, attitudinal value. ***** This chapter outlines the quantity, the quality, and the effect of suffering in the lives of two great 20th century thinkers: Aldous Huxley, a British writer, and Viktor E. Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist. The clichéd hardship of an unapproachable father befell Huxley in his early childhood. However, he had a loving mother as a counterpart to his distant father, but also the misfortune to lose her when he was only 14. She had left him a note

88

‘A Blessing in Disguise’

__________________________________________________________________ saying: ‘Don’t be too critical of other people and ‘love much.’’ 1 Two years later, keratitis punctata left Huxley blind for a year and a half, after which his eyesight never greatly recovered. While at college, Huxley’s older brother Trev committed suicide. The two of them had been close and had shared a room at Oxford’s Balliol College for a year. Then came the great wars. After the wars, in 1955, Huxley’s wife and closest companion of several decades Maria died from cancer. Not long after that he was also diagnosed with a malignant tongue disease. Then his library burned down, with the invaluable manuscripts and diaries and letters. Eventually, he succumbed to his illness at the age of 69, the same November ’63 afternoon John Kennedy was assassinated. Frankl’s childhood in Vienna was not easy either. He was at times a target of anti-Semitic bullying. During World War One he had to get up at 3 am and stand in line in order to wait for milk, and only then go to school. The real trouble started with the rise of Nazism. First his psychiatric patients started calling him a ‘Jewish swine’, then his license was taken away in 1938, and he was forbidden to climb mountains, which was a lifelong passion. In 1942 his family was sent to concentration camps, where he lost his parents, pregnant wife, brother and sisterin-law. He also lost the manuscript of his groundbreaking book on logotherapy. Besides the usual hardships of camp life, he fell prey to typhus, but still managed to survive it all and return to Vienna. Frankl suddenly lost eyesight when he was 85. At 92 he had a heart surgery, from which he never recovered. How did Huxley and Frankl react to these blows of destiny? Is there a common denominator for their behavior in harsh circumstances? Here are their responses to the instances of suffering listed above. Huxley never directly spoke or wrote about his mother’s death. However, in one of his novels he obliquely expressed his true feelings on that occasion: He had not wanted to know – had done his best not to know, except superficially, as one knows, for example, that thirty-five comes after thirty-four. But this black well was dark with the concentrated horror of death. There was no escape. His sobs broke out uncontrollably. 2 Though fourteen, he tried to protect himself from the emotional hurt by not wanting to know, by repressing the irrepressible. Two years later came his blindness. This time he was ready to face the calamity. He played the piano and learned to read Braille. In a letter to his cousin he wrote that it ‘ha[s] the great advantage of enabling one to read in bed without taking one’s hands out from under the blankets.’ 3 His brother Julian remarked that for Aldous it was a ‘blessing in disguise,’ 4 while Huxley himself said many decades later: ‘It did stimulate a tendency […] towards solitude and what may be contemplation.’ 5 He was only

Janko Andrijasevic

89

__________________________________________________________________ sixteen. The next tragedy was his brother Trevenen’s suicide. Although shattered, Huxley thought about it in philosophical terms: It is just the highest and best in Trev – his ideals – which have driven him to his death […] Trev was not strong, but he had the courage to face life with ideals – and his ideals were too much for him. 6 During World War Two Huxley lived in California, but was deeply depressed. The situation in Europe weighed on him heavily. He did what he could – sent packages to family and friends, helped two Jewish children out of Germany, wrote books, and immersed himself in the study of mysticism. His wife Maria’s death in 1955 shattered him, too. However, while she was dying, he was sitting by her side, with tears streaking down his cheeks, whispering into her ear the messages of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, urging her to go on – to go further – not to be preoccupied or encumbered with this present body, or with relatives or friends or unfinished business, but to go into a wider state of consciousness. 7 His second wife Laura was doing the same for him when he was on his deathbed. A couple of years before he died his private library had burned down. His spirits were very low, but then he interpreted the incident as an early warning of the grim reaper, and as an ‘involuntary test of nonattachment.’ 8 The grim reaper did arrive in November 1963. Huxley could not speak any longer and was in great pain. However, three days before he died he finished the article on Shakespeare and religion, so as to maintain his lifelong habit of being ‘ahead of deadlines.’ 9 Besides asking for a shot of LSD several hours before he passed away, he also scribbled on a piece of paper: aun aprendo. He was ‘still learning.’ 10 It is difficult not to be impressed and awed by the man who was an observer at his own deathbed, and who turned the situation into an opportunity for learning. Frankl was likewise trying to come up with meaningful responses to the difficulties life was setting on his path. At the end of World War One, when he was rushing through the streets of Vienna with a half cup of flour for his family, five teenage ruffians surrounded him and growlingly asked if he was Jewish. Frankl confused them with his answer – ‘Yes, but does this not mean I am not also a human being.’ 11 The boys just ‘walked away without hurting him.’ 12 When Nazis started calling him a ‘dirty Jewish swine’, 13 he identified them with his mental patients, trying to protect himself from being utterly humiliated. Except for his sister Stella, who left for Australia, the whole of Frankl’s family died in concentration camps. He managed to survive for two and a half years in four different camps. Despite indescribable psychological and psychical agony, and

90

‘A Blessing in Disguise’

__________________________________________________________________ despite the fact that at the moment of liberation he had ‘a damaged heart muscle, edema from hunger, and frostbite on three fingers,’ 14 after coming back to Vienna Frankl wrote a book titled … trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen, which translates as ‘say yes to life in spite of everything.’ During the encampment years he was not losing the idea of life’s purpose. He would talk to other inmates about the necessity of keeping the struggle on, about how to preserve their nerves and discard suicidal ideas. ‘He began to daydream […] about standing on the platform of a warm, welllit lecture hall. He saw himself lecturing about the psychology of the concentration camps.’ 15 When he fell ill with typhus, knowing that falling asleep would mean death, he stayed awake for sixteen nights on end, writing on scraps of paper the ideas for his book The Doctor and the Soul. After liberation he returned to Vienna. Many wondered at his decision to go back there, asking him: ‘Didn’t they do enough to you in this city?’ 16 Frankl replied with a counter-question: ‘Who did what to me?’ 17 having in mind ‘a Catholic baroness who risked her life by hiding [his] cousin for years in her apartment’ 18 and ‘a Socialist attorney (Bruno Pitterman, later vice chancellor of Austria)’ 19 who smuggled food to him whenever he could, although they knew each other only superficially. He concluded: ‘For what reason, then, should I turn my back on Vienna?’ 20 and was among the first ‘to take an open stand against collective guilt.’ 21 He said: ‘I am the former inmate number 119104, and […] it is my obligation to speak against it.’ 22 He spent the following fifty two years on a mission of peace and meaningfulness, whereby the meaning of suffering was one of the main concepts of his philosophy, which is referred to as logotherapy or logophilosophy. Logophilosophy is based on the premise that at every moment for every person life provides numerous opportunities for actualisation of values. The actualisation of values fills our actions and thoughts with meaning, which Frankl envisages as a beneficial stream flowing around us. The task of our lives, therefore, is to go with the meaningful flow, since immersing in it confirms our humanness and charges the batteries of our existence. Failure to realise meaning leads into existential vacuum, which is the root of many psychopathologies. Amid the myriad opportunities life sets around us at any given moment, only one of them is the meaningful choice. What we, as human beings, should cherish as supremely important is the ability to make the right choices. However, as soon as we talk about choice, it implies that we have the freedom whether or not to make it. This freedom is something that makes us human, and that no imaginable circumstances can take away from us. In order to use our freedom and make the meaningful choices, we need to subject our freedom to responsibility. The quality within us that is the supreme judge of meaning, freedom and responsibility, is our conscientiousness. We have noted that meaning is achieved through actualisation of values, and that every situation offers possibilities for it. Frankl divides values into three classes: creative, experiential and attitudinal. Creative values are of primary

Janko Andrijasevic

91

__________________________________________________________________ importance and they imply ‘achieving tasks’, 23 or more precisely ‘creating a work or doing a deed.’ 24 Experiential values are achieved by ‘experiencing the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, or by knowing one single human being in all his uniqueness,’ 25 which, in essence, means ‘to love him.’ 26 Finally, in situations in which we are unable to realise either creative or experiential values, the only remaining way to still give meaning to our lives is to take a certain kind of attitude toward the situation we are faced with. ‘When we are no longer able to change a situation – just think of an incurable disease such as inoperable cancer – we are challenged to change ourselves.’ 27 It is redundant to say that suffering is unavoidable, but sometimes it happens that people suffer without necessity. Frankl emphasises that whenever creative and experiential values can be realised, we should apply ourselves to them. Only when suffering is unavoidable should we engage in the realisation of attitudinal values, and transform agony into achievement. How is this possible? First of all, inevitable suffering should not be avoided in any way, either by escapism or by ‘narcotisation’, 28 because running away from it solves no problems. All that we manage to do is ‘get rid of a mere aftereffect of the misfortune: the sensation of unpleasure.’ 29 Meaning does not lie in ‘the pleasant or unpleasant tone of [people’s] experiences,’ 30 but in the fact whether their experiences are fulfilling or unfulfilling. Homo patiens should not be balancing between the binary of success and failure, but that of desperation and fulfillment. 31 Successful people may feel unfulfilled, and vice versa. Suffering should be faced with dignity, nobility and humility, and we should not let it degrade us. Since Frankl believes that not a single moment of existence is meaningless, suffering thus has its meaning, and it is our task to figure it out. When we manage to do so, like when, for example, we know that we are sacrificing ourselves for a higher cause, we suffer gladly and honourably. As soon as we are ready to accept suffering, ‘we establish a distance between our personality and this something,’ 32 thus transcending our own selves. Frankl considers self-transcendence a conditio sine qua non for fulfillment of meaning. Only by loosening the grips of self-centred hyper-reflection are we in a position to mature and grow. Transcending our experience of suffering gives us the ultimate chance to ‘realize even the highest values, to fulfill the deepest meaning’ 33 by changing our deepest selves, which is ‘the most creative of all human potentialities.’ 34 The suffering culprit ‘undergoes a moral rebirth’, 35 and by repenting ‘he can undo the outer event on a spiritual, moral plane.’ 36 Without the experience of suffering there is no repentance, no moral transformation, and thus no realisation of values. Suffering in extremely unfavourable conditions is also a kind of safeguard against apathy and ‘melancholia anæsthetica’, 37 which is by far the worst scenario. Besides, one of the things we might be most proud of is the suffering we have endured, even though nobody envies us for that. 38 Frankl’s own experiences in the

92

‘A Blessing in Disguise’

__________________________________________________________________ concentration camps, despite indescribable horrors, made him proud and reasserted his humanity. Once he received a letter from a prison inmate who was profoundly transformed by reading Man’s Search for Meaning. Despite remaining to live in the prison, this man writes that only now he started ‘fulfilling his dreams’, 39 and that his ‘resurrection came from Auschwitz.’ 40 As shocking as it may sound, human capabilities are unimaginable and enable us, in Milton’s words, to ‘make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.’ 41 Frankl’s whole life can be taken as an example of actualisation of all three classes of logotherapeutic values. He even said that ‘each founder of a psychotherapeutic school in the final analysis describes in his system his own neurosis and writes in his books his own case history.’ 42 However, since Frankl’s ideas claim universality, is it possible to find logotherapeutic parallels in other people’s lives? What about Huxley (we have not yet encountered any proof that either of them was familiar with the work and ideas of the other)? The answer to the above question is affirmative. Where creative values are concerned, it is superfluous to add that Huxley excelled in that field, and when speaking about experiencing ‘the Good, the True, and the Beautiful’, there are numerous poignant examples that Huxley was able to let these values in even when life was hard. Faced with his terminal illness, he wanted to learn ‘how to be more loving, more aware, more useful or ... more content.’ 43 On his last trip to Italy he wrote to his wife Laura: Perhaps just because death seems to have taken a step nearer – everything seems more and more beautiful, the leaves on the trees, the flowers, the sky, the green unwrinkled sea as we flew over it this afternoon, and my memories of you and all the people I have loved. 44 The previously described way in which Huxley reacted to the calamities that were besetting him represents what Frankl would agree to be the realisation of attitudinal values. Huxley was using his immanent freedom to decide what kind of attitude to take toward the ordeals. Despite profound vulnerability, skepticism and proneness to depression, he still managed to distance himself from himself, and attach himself to the sustaining life power in the noological dimension. In his last novel Island he wrote that to reconcile with a hardship is ‘already a great achievement.’ 45 That is only the first step, though inevitable, but often the hardest one. Otherwise, in case we choose to cherish our enmity against the inevitable situation, we are just defectors who want ‘to escape […], to become someone else or, better, some other thing – a mere body, strangely numbed.’ 46 Huxley has metaphorically presented this escapism in his dystopian novel Brave New World. One example is the drug called soma, which is distributed to every member of the society and swallowed upon the slightest sign of discomfort, so as to avoid

Janko Andrijasevic

93

__________________________________________________________________ unpleasantness. However, the outsider John the Savage cries out for his ‘right to be unhappy.’ 47 He says: ‘I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.’ 48 The effect that a harsh event can have on us differs depending on our personalities. Huxley said about one of his characters: ‘The experience was making a worse man of him.’ 49 Whether experience makes better or worse people of us depends entirely on our ultimate freedom which side to choose. We are beings who are ‘choosing and then setting to work in the right way,’ 50 and ‘the solidarity with evil is optional, not compulsory.’ 51 Acceptance and philosophical stoicism add meaningfulness to life. One of Huxley’s characters in his favourite novel Time Must Have a Stop lost an arm in a war and said: ‘Hateful experience! But it had at least one good point; it made it impossible for one to cherish the illusion that one was identical with a body.’ 52 For another character in the same novel, dying from cancer, the last days had been the most memorable period of his life. The most memorable and, in a certain sense, the happiest. There had been sadness, of course, and the pain of having to watch the endurance of a suffering which he was powerless to alleviate. And along with that pain and sadness had gone the gnawing sense of guilt, the dread and the anticipation of an irreparable loss. But there had also been the spectacle of Bruno’s joyful serenity. 53 Despite the expected differences between the two thinkers who probably never got in touch with each other, the degree of Frankl and Huxley’s consensus about the idea of purpose in life, and of suffering as one of the ways of its fulfillment, is unexpectedly high. What could be an explanation for the similarities of their insights and conclusions? Could it be that the two of them dared explore their deeper selves, and reach toward the common source of all humanness, which, we believe, is universal. Bearing in mind that their imperatives included objectiveness, clear- and open-mindedness, unbiasedness, is it really possible that their insights could have differed greatly? It seems more likely that they were just tracing out the timeless blueprints that underlie human existence.

Notes 1

Guinevera A. Nance, Aldous Huxley (New York: A Frederick Ungar Book, 1988), 5. 2 Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), 26. 3 Aldous Huxley, quoted in: Philip Thody, Aldous Huxley (London: Studio Vista, 1973), 13.

94

‘A Blessing in Disguise’

__________________________________________________________________ 4

Julian Huxley, quoted in: Julian Huxley, ed., Aldous Huxley: A Memorial Volume, (London: Chatto & Windus, 1965), 22. 5 Aldous Huxley, quoted in: Nicholas Murray, Aldous Huxley, An English Intellectual (London: Little, Brown, 2002), 31. 6 Grover Smith, ed., The Letters of Aldous Huxley (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 61-62. 7 Laura Archera Huxley, This Timeless Moment (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1968), 174. 8 David King Dunaway, Huxley in Hollywood (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 358. 9 Laura Archera Huxley, This Timeless Moment, 277. 10 Ibid., 287. 11 Anna Redsand, Viktor Frankl, A Life Worth Living (New York: Clarion Books, 2006), 15. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 36. 14 Ibid., 81. 15 Ibid., 75. 16 Viktor E. Frankl, Recollections, trans. Joseph and Judith Fabry (Cambridge, MA: Basic Books, 2000), 101. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 102. 21 Ibid., 103. 22 Ibid. 23 Viktor E. Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), xiii. 24 Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (New York: Pocket Books, 1985), 133. 25 Viktor E. Frankl, Doctor and the Soul, xiii. 26 Ibid. 27 Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 135. 28 Viktor E. Frankl, Doctor and the Soul, 110. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 107. 31 Viktor E. Frankl, Nečujni vapaj za smislom, trans. Tanja Stanojevć (Belgrade: IP ‘Žarko Albulj’, 2007), 33. 32 Viktor E. Frankl, Doctor and the Soul, 107.

Janko Andrijasevic

95

__________________________________________________________________ 33

‘da ostvari čak i najviše vrednosti, da ispuni i najdublji smisao,’ Viktor E. Frankl, Psihoterapija i egzistencijalizam, trans. Neda Dragojević and Aleksandar Đ. Milenković (Belgrade: IP ‘Žarko Albulj’, 2009), 46. 34 Viktor E. Frankl, Nečujni vapaj za smislom, 33. 35 Viktor E. Frankl, Doctor and the Soul, 109. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., 111. 38 Viktor E. Frankl, Nečujni vapaj za smislom, 79. 39 ‘ostvarujemo svoje snove.’ Ibid. 34. 40 ‘Iz Auschwitza dolazi naše usrsnuće.’ Ibid. 41 John Milton, ‘Paradise Lost’, in The English Poems of John Milton (Ware: Wordsworth, 2004), 143. 42 Viktor E. Frankl, quoted in: Haddon Klingberg, Jr., When Life Calls Out to Us, The Love and Lifework of Viktor and Elly Frankl (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 48. 43 Aldous Huxley, quoted in: Laura Archera Huxley, This Timeless Moment, 209. 44 Aldous Huxley, quoted in: Nicholas Murray, An English Intellectual, 448. 45 Aldous Huxley, Island (London: Flamingo, 1994), 255. 46 Aldous Huxley, After Many a Summer (New York: Avon Books Division – The Hearst Corporation, 1939), 161. 47 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950), 197. 48 Ibid. 49 Aldous Huxley, After Many a Summer, 80. 50 Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza, 390. 51 Aldous Huxley, After Many a Summer, 221. 52 Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have a Stop (London: Chatto & Windus, 1945), 270. 53 Ibid. 280-281.

Bibliography Dunaway, David King. Huxley in Hollywood. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. Tender is the Night. Australia: A Project Gutenberg of Australia Book, 2003. Accessed 28 February 2012. http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0301261h.html. Frankl, E. Viktor. Man’s Search for Meaning. New York: Pocket Books, 1985. ———. Nečujni vapaj za smislom. Translated by Tanja Stanojevć. Belgrade: IP ‘Žarko Albulj’, 2007.

96

‘A Blessing in Disguise’

__________________________________________________________________ ———. Psihoterapija i egzistencijalizam. Translated by Neda Dragojević and Aleksandar Đ. Milenković. Belgrade: IP ‘Žarko Albulj’, 2009. ———. Recollections. Translated by Joseph and Judith Fabry. Cambridge, MA: Basic Books, 2000. ———. The Doctor and the Soul. New York: Vintage Books, 1973. Huxley, Aldous. After Many a Summer. New York: Avon Books Division - The Hearst Corporation, 1939. ———. Brave New World. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950. ———. Eyeless in Gaza. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962. ———. Island. London: Flamingo, 1994. ———. Time Must Have a Stop. London: Chatto & Windus, 1945. Huxley, Julian, ed. Aldous Huxley: A Memorial Volume. London: Chatto & Windus, 1965. Huxley, Laura Archera. This Timeless Moment. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1968. Klingberg, Haddon, Jr. When Life Calls Out to Us, The Love and Lifework of Viktor and Elly Frankl. New York: Doubleday, 2001. Milton, John. ‘Paradise Lost’. In The English Poems of John Milton. Ware: Wordsworth, 2004. Murray, Nicholas. Aldous Huxley, An English Intellectual. London: Little, Brown, 2002. Nance, A. Guinevera. Aldous Huxley. New York: A Frederick Ungar Book, 1988. Redsand, Anna. Viktor Frankl, A Life Worth Living. New York: Clarion Books, 2006. Smith, Grover, ed. The Letters of Aldous Huxley. New York: Harper & Row, 1969.

Janko Andrijasevic

97

__________________________________________________________________ Thody, Philip. Aldous Huxley. London: Studio Vista, 1973. Janko Andrijasevic, University of Montenegro, Montenegro.

Book of Joe Donald Felipe Abstract Joe is sixty-four years old. He has suffered from severe schizophrenia from his early twenties, and he admitted to me that he lived with voices since his teens. He was a handsome young man, not unintelligent, born to loving parents, who cared for him in their home for twenty years, until the death of his father in 1995. Since then Joe has had a conservator and lived in a variety of care homes, half-ways houses, and lock down facilities. He now lives in a home for seniors with dementia and Alzheimer’s. I sometimes find him sitting by himself in a kitchen area, well groomed, listening to the radio, smiling, looking off in the distance. His voices tortured him from his youth. He has attempted suicide, crashed cars, thrown objects through windows, scratched himself until he bled, pulled his hair out; he was run over by a truck around twelve years ago. His leg was crushed and the surgeon said he would never walk again. But Joe walked within a year. His conservator told me that she has never met a more compassionate and generous man. He talks of God, and laughs joyfully as he says, ‘I live with God.’ And he has told me, softly, without hesitation, that he has never suffered. This chapter is about Joe. Key Words: Suffering, schizophrenia, transformation, redemption, faith. ***** In Northern California, some sixty-four years ago, Joe was born to his father Joseph Sr. and mother Ruby. On the night of his birth the doctors and nurses at the local hospital were overwhelmed by the carnage of a horrific automobile accident. Ruby was told to hold her baby in, to wait for the next available doctor. She did so for a very long time in enormous discomfort. Joe came into the world amidst confusion, anxiety, suffering and sacrifice – these seemed to follow him for the next half century. But Joe was not an unfortunate child. He was blessed with the most loving of parents, with natural charm and good looks. He had a gentle face, a handsome blend of Spanish-Anglo-Irish, an irreverent wit, and an infectious laugh that he keeps to this day. I do not know much about Joe’s childhood, except that he caused his parents worry from early on. Joe was not unintelligent, but he sometimes had difficulty with school. Joe was not anti-social, but he often had trouble conforming to normal expectations, and he was prone to nervous, unpredictable behavior. Joe did not receive any formal religious education to my knowledge. The family would sometimes go to Catholic Church for midnight mass or on some odd Sunday, at the

100

Book of Joe

__________________________________________________________________ behest of Joseph Sr.. But religion itself was not a matter of great concern to the family, and Joe had no interest in it. Joe got into trouble on occasion, mostly fistfights. He did not graduate from high school and lived a rebellious life in his teens. He loved to flirt with danger and recklessness – he had quick reflexes and a talent for driving. He took up drag racing and became quite a successful driver. Tall, shiny trophies, monuments to his many victories, filled the bookshelves of his parents’ home. During the Vietnam War Joe avoided the draft by joining the California National Guard. The training and service were terribly taxing for him, but he struggled through it. Joseph Sr. left coaching and helped build a successful lumber company in the small town. The company provided Joe Jr. with employment as a salesman in the San Jose area after his term in the National Guard. The family prospered. At around the age of twenty-five Joe had a good job and made good money, living a decadent bachelor’s life in California in the early 1970s – girls and dreams of becoming a millionaire filled his life. But something horrible was happening to him. The family did not know that Joe had been hearing voices since his teens. His voices were a secret known only to him. He confessed this to me some years later. Somehow Joe had managed to live with them and function normally, albeit in his own unconventional ways. He had been quirky and unpredictable from his youth. No one was the wiser. But his behavior was becoming more erratic and paranoid with the frenetic pace and anxieties of his adult life. There were warnings from a roommate. Then it happened. Joe broke from reality as we know it. He stopped eating and barricaded himself in his apartment; he was filled with paranoid delusions, convinced that the mafia was going to kill him. His parents had to retrieve him from San Jose and bring him home. Joe was uncontrollable. He was suffering. And no one knew what was wrong with him. Suffering begets more suffering. Suffering begets confusion. Suffering demands knowledge of reasons and causes, and the assignment of blame. Cries for justice rise in its wake. Someone or something must be responsible. Someone must have a solution. No expense was spared for doctors, psychiatrists, and private mental health facilities. Joe was eventually placed in lockdown at one of the most reputable and expensive institutions in the San Francisco bay area. He was given the primitive and powerful drugs of the time. It silenced him. His cheeks sank. His spirit left him. He wandered the halls listlessly with a blank stare, the walking dead. Joseph Sr. and Ruby could not bear to see their son like that. So, they brought him home. He came back to life without the drugs, but life tortured him. They could have abandoned him to State custody, and Joe would be institutionalised. But the State institutions were even worse. They became his conservators, and Joe lived in their home for the next twenty years.

Donald Felipe

101

__________________________________________________________________ And promises became lies and the truth impenetrable. A top psychiatrist told Joseph Sr. and Ruby, with dry clinical certainty, that he could take Joe’s voices away, but it would destroy him. The pride of the haughty will not suffer ignorance, as the hope of the loving will not suffer hopelessness. Lies pierce the heart, and the innocent are yoked with more burden than their due. The hunt for reasons never slept. Was it the trauma of his birth? He inhaled gas in a training exercise in the National Guard. Did that cause it? Was it the grandeur of his father? Impossible expectations? Social alienation? Or, did it just run in the family? At least Joe was alive. He was with those who loved him. But his voices clawed and tore at him endlessly. His face contorted in distress from the relentless onslaught. The characters and personalities of his delusions would not give him a moment’s rest. He only slept when he collapsed from pure exhaustion. Joseph Sr. and Ruby did not know what to do to relieve his pain, so they gave him freedom. Joe smoked incessantly, drank, took cabs to and from town, played loud music at all hours, paced up and down the hallway – and on rare occasions, if his voices were kind, he would laugh. Joe’s moods were unpredictable. He would fly into agitated rage and scream. He pulled at his hair until he had bald spots. He cursed his voices. He would stare at the wall and mumble in eerie dialogue with himself. He threw a stereo through the window, drove off with the car and wrecked it, scratched himself until he bled. He threatened his voices with suicide, as if that mattered to them. And then one evening he came home drenched – he had thrown himself into the river to drown, but the water was too cold. Fruitless effort sinks slowly and reluctantly into hopelessness, until effort itself speaks the only hope. Time fashions effort into routine. Suffering imperceptibly passes into life diminished. Years pass. Faces droop with age. Lines are the voice of truth. But forgetfulness hides in suffering and slowly rubs away what it can. Dim light brightens the darkness, and moments of happiness shine like the brightest star, fixed in the heavens of memory forever. Christmas lights sparkle, green, red, yellow and white, twisting around the tree, along the windowsill and over the rocky hearth aglow with winter warmth. Joseph Sr. sits contentedly at one end of the couch in oversized sweats tearing wrapping paper from a gift, while Ruby smiles brightly, her face shining like a happy sun. Her family is home. And in the kitchen, Joe takes a drag of his cigarette and mumbles in a low voice, as Christmas carols blare from a boom box. Joe’s breakdown appeared to arrive suddenly, like an uncontrollable firestorm. His transformation seemed to come on as slowly and subtly as a new epoch of history. But appearances deceive and reality remains unknown. Even now one must learn to listen to Joe to know something of him.

102

Book of Joe

__________________________________________________________________ Twenty years after Joe’s breakdown, Joseph Sr. was dying of cancer, and the family was preparing for his loss. Ruby would not be able to care for Joe on her own. She would have to give up the conservatorship. But having Joe as a ward of the State was unthinkable. A private conservator was found who knew the family, and funds set aside for his care. A daughter-in-law cared for Joseph Sr. while he was dying. She and her brother, who made a few supportive visits, occasionally prayed the rosary in the evening. Joe would sometimes listen and it seemed to sooth him. And Joe’s younger sister, who lived at home, had taken up religious studies in college. Joe enjoyed listening to her as well. God became a new topic in the home, and Joe now spoke about God in his ramblings. But it did not seem to matter. The family was accustomed to imaginary friends and strange topics coming and going. Here today, gone tomorrow, or in a month, or in a year, no one kept track. There was also progress with Joe’s anti-psychotic medication – new drugs seemed to soften Joe’s delusions. But the shifts in behaviour were not dramatic, and that, as well, did not seem to matter. After Joseph Sr.’s death Joe moved out of the family home and into a halfway house in a small, peaceful community in the mountains. Joe started to walk. He loved to walk. His older sister gave him a tall, thick walking stick made of Sedona wood. He grew a beard, donned colourful, plastic rosary beads around his neck, and wandered the streets and paths of the town studded with tall pines. But, he continued to occasionally breakdown. Terrible squalls remained in calmer seas. I did not visit Joe very often the first few years after his father’s death, but I do remember my surprise that Joe was doing so well. He spoke more and more of God and his colorful rosary beads seemed to define a new persona – he still wears them today. He would walk for hours with his walking stick in hand. He enjoyed visiting the Catholic Church, which was about a mile from where he stayed. I found him one afternoon sitting in the Church in the back listening to a group of elderly saying the rosary. Joe waited patiently and silently until the prayers were over, and then he walked up to each member of the group, shook their hand and thanked them. Joe smiled more. He constantly talked about God, and how he talked to God. There was gentleness in his voice, and graciousness in everything he did. When I took him to lunch he would softly and politely order his food, and he never failed to thank the waiter or waitress. He also seemed to be aware his limits and would excuse himself and find a quiet place if he felt disturbed. Gradually, I became entirely confident being with Joe. I did not fear unexpected outbursts, and I cannot remember a visit in which I did not enjoy his company. I had stopped listening to Joe years before this, but Joe was becoming more coherent, at least it seemed that way. And how he could walk, for hours on end among the pines proudly trotting along with this staff, like Moses leading an imaginary tribe of friends on adventures of spirit.

Donald Felipe

103

__________________________________________________________________ I got a call in the late morning. Joe had been in an accident. He was run over by a truck. He was badly injured. His leg. Internal injuries. He had just gotten out of surgery. They put a metal rod in his lower leg. He had a colostomy bag. He may never walk again. I called the surgeon immediately and I got through. I felt lucky to reach him. He said in a tired voiced, ‘I have been a surgeon for 25 years and I have never seen the bone of the leg crushed that bad.’ ‘But walking is his life,’ I said. ‘He must be able to walk.’ ‘He should learn how to use a wheelchair,’ he flatly replied. ‘It’s impossible for him to walk again?’ I pleaded. ‘You can try physical therapy, good nutrition, healthy lifestyle,’ he said, ‘but don’t get your hopes up.’ ‘But he’s schizophrenic! He smokes compulsively.’ ‘Then forget it,’ he said emphatically. In my future visits to Joe I tried to get him used to the idea that he would have to use a wheelchair and that he should not try to walk. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said in a steady voice, ‘God will heal me.’ The conversation always ended there, so I let it go. No heroic physical therapy was ever attempted – no therapy at all to my knowledge. Joe kept smoking cigarette after cigarette. And the accident did not change Joe’s demeanor and attitude. He was as gracious and kind-hearted as ever, and seemed almost happy, as he sat in his wheelchair. ‘Don’t worry,’ he repeated, ‘God will heal me. God will heal me.’ Joe was walking within a year. He limped, supported by the metal rod, and could not go far. But he walked. It was not long after that that the colostomy bag was removed. His body had healed to the extent it could. But that was not the end of it. An infection developed around the rod in his leg a few years later. He had another surgery. The rod was removed. He healed again. And he walked again. He walks to this very day. In the twelve years or so since the accident, and even for some time before, I have never heard Joe utter an unkind word. His conservator has told me that she does not dare give him any money, because if he is asked, he will give it away.

104

Book of Joe

__________________________________________________________________ ‘I have learned so much from him,’ his conservator told me, ‘I have never met a more compassionate and generous man.’ And he will never fail to thank you for any deed done on his behalf. ‘God bless you Donnie, God bless you,’ are always his parting words to me. And I will never forget the afternoon we were driving among the tall trees on a sunny day, and he told me, softly, without hesitation, that he had never suffered. His graciousness and thoughtfulness extend to his delusional world – at lunch or dinner, after kindly asking for an extra plate, he will set food aside for his company, so that they are included in the meal. And he will not protest if the food is later claimed, given to someone else or taken home – he merely wants to acknowledge the presence of others. His concern for others runs through his very depths and is unmistakable. I enjoy bragging about my beautiful, intelligent, athletic daughter, who is already in training for her black belt at the age of eleven. Joe reacted with intense concern. ‘Be careful Donnie. She could hurt someone. You tell her not to use that! You tell her never to use that! She could hurt someone. She could hurt someone.’ He repeated his warnings until I acknowledged the danger and promised never to let it happen. Finally, just two weeks ago, I asked him again about what he had told me years before. ‘Joe,’ I said, ‘you once told me that you have never suffered. Is that true?’ The question surprised him. It was unusual. There was silence for a moment as he studied me. And then he said, ‘I am fine Donnie. I live with God. I live with God. He keeps me busy. I don’t suffer.’ A period of silence stood between us, as he looked ahead. I knew what it meant. His suffering was not a concern, because he did not suffer – he was worried about me. He wondered why I had asked the question. He did not want me to suffer with concern for him. Joe has suffered from severe schizophrenia for around forty years. He has taken powerful anti-psychotics for much of that time. His brain is diseased and damaged. He is delusional. He does not talk to God. Or does he? Could one imagine a more divine life in such circumstances? Joe now lives in a home for seniors with dementia and Alzheimer’s. Iron bars surround the facility. When I pick him up for lunch I try to move quickly, because I don’t like being there. Elderly patients, shells of their former selves, sitting on the couch, in wheelchairs, or in chairs against the back wall, stare painfully, quietly without recognition. Silence is seldom kindly broken. A scream, a complaint, a question, a proclamation directed at you comes out of the nowhere, and you don’t know how to reply. People deserve to be acknowledged. People deserve a reply. But what can you say? I sometimes find Joe sitting in the kitchen area, well groomed, listening to music, smiling, looking off into the distance. He loves music, oldies rock, and will twist and shake his shoulders in a lively groove if the song is right.

Donald Felipe

105

__________________________________________________________________ Joe lives behind bars and is not free. But he flies freely in ways we cannot comprehend. Joe has no property of his own. He has little or nothing to give. But what he does have he would give away to anyone who asked. Joe would be an outcast in the world beyond the bars of his current home, but he never fails to treat the people of that world with the purest graciousness and concern. Joe is trapped in his own mind, a prisoner of delusions for four decades. But his concern for others cannot be imprisoned – it lives, ever attentive, among the voices and visions only he knows. Joe lives alone among strangers who cannot talk to him. But he is routinely engaged in the most sublime of conversation. Joe has no occupation, nothing to do. But he is always busy. Joe’s body is crippled. But he never complains. Joe lives among the cries of the helpless. But he is forever hopeful. Much has been taken from Joe in his life, but gratitude graces his lips. Joe has suffered much in his life. I have witnessed it. But it is of no concern to him. ‘I live with God,’ he says. Who am I to say that he doesn’t? Donald Felipe is a Professor of Philosophy and Chair of Liberal Studies at Golden Gate University in San Francisco.

Part III Representation

The Problem of Chivalry: Yvain’s Suffering in Chrétien de Troyes’ Le Chevalier au Lion Alexandria Krause Abstract Yvain, the hero of Chrétien de Troyes’s twelfth-century French romance, Le Chevalier au Lion, is a character who endures a kind of suffering that causes him to go mad and reject civilization. When his new wife, the high-ranking and beautiful Laudine, rejects Yvain because he has forgotten to return to her within the time they had agreed upon (a little over a year), while off increasing his honour and reputation by playing the tournament circuit, Yvain’s despair is so immediate and deep that he abandons his fellow knights, along with all trappings of knighthood and courtliness, and lives as a wild man in the forest where he hunts with the bow and arrow taken from a villein, consuming his kills raw. Yvain’s state is clearly caused by the shock, guilt and despair that suddenly overcome him, and his behaviour can be interpreted as a rejection of courtly society and of the expectations placed on knights such as himself. He realises he should not have been swayed by his friend and renowned knight Gauvain, and instead remained with his bride. Yet Yvain’s reasoning behind his decision to leave her is wellfounded, at least when one considers, as is Gauvain’s argument, that a knight must continue to prove his worth as a warrior. Yet the chivalric ethic also includes devotion to ladies and the keeping of oaths. Yvain finds that he simply cannot uphold these conflicting expectations, and consequently, he abandons all the responsibilities thrust upon him by his society. Interestingly, it is the women of the tale and not his comrades-in-arms who restore him to his former state and reconcile him with Laudine; without their wisdom and noble actions, Yvain would remain in a state of suffering. Key Words: Arthuriana, Chrétien de Troyes, French literature, knighthood, knights, madness, medieval literature, medieval romance. ***** Yvain, the hero of Chrétien de Troyes’ twelfth-century French romance, Le Chevalier au Lion, is a character who endures a kind of suffering that takes the form of madness. Although shock, guilt and despair are the immediate causes of his extreme depression, Yvain’s behaviour can be interpreted as a rejection of courtly society and of the expectations placed on knights such as himself. Finding that he simply cannot uphold these conflicting demands and ideals, Yvain abandons society altogether. Interestingly, it is the women of the tale and not his comrades-in-arms who restore him to his former state and reconcile him with

110

The Problem of Chivalry

__________________________________________________________________ Laudine, his estranged bride; without their wisdom and noble actions, Yvain would remain in a state of suffering. On the surface, Yvain’s madness is the result of Laudine’s banishment and rejection of him. He had already been made to suffer by leaving her shortly after their wedding, at Gauvin’s insistence that he join him tourneying, but the time of his greatest suffering is when he learns that he is no longer welcome to return to Laudine. Yet even before his wife’s messenger accuses him of breaking the oath he had made to her, in fact just before she arrives, we are told by the narrator that Yvain’s thoughts are of his bride. 1 As he thinks of her he has difficulty holding back his tears, ‘because he knew well that he had broken his promise and that the term [they had agreed upon] had passed.’ 2 The maiden’s speech only serves to heighten Yvain’s feelings of guilt; she begins by saluting King Arthur and Sir Gauvain, then the rest of the court who have gathered there after the tournament, withholding a greeting for her lady’s young husband, singling him out as ‘Yvain the liar, the traitor, the disloyal, the cheater,’ who ‘fooled’ and ‘deceived’ her lady. 3 Her accusations might be read as harsh, considering Yvain had no malicious intentions or designs upon Laudine, but the fact remains that he broke his word to her. Yvain therefore fails as a husband and lover, as well as an upholder of chivalry, which is significant since King Arthur’s court is known for modelling this set of standards and behaviours. Although Yvain is not a courtly lover in the strict sense, considering that he is married to his paramour, he is wrong to neglect her. As part of the courtly tradition, a knight was to ‘dedicate himself to the praise of his beloved, and … strive for the greater glory of her fame and his own reputation for steadfast loyalty [,] by performing heroic exploits.’ 4 We see that Yvain’s interest in tournaments arises not from Laudine’s insistence that he win renown for himself and to increase his reputation (thereby doing credit to both of them), or for the purpose of upholding her honour. He has no need to defend her, as Troyes’ Lancelot does, when he is compelled to fight for Queen Guinevere’s release, as well as her reputation. As one of the king’s best knights, it was certainly expected of Yvain to engage in knightly activities, yet his reasons for doing so are not wellfounded, nor are they in accordance with the ideals of chivalry. Perhaps Yvain’s greatest error is neglecting the duty he owes Laudine as her husband, and therefore the lord of her lands; he should be guarding the marvellous fountain whose protector, Esclados le Roux (Laudine’s previous husband), he defeated in private combat. Arguably, Laudine’s need of a competent guard for her storm-unleashing fountain is why she agrees to marry Yvain, the man whom she initially feels only hatred towards for defeating and killing her lord, who was, according to her, the best of knights. 5 Laudine’s decision to marry is logical for a woman in her position; regardless of her professed love for Yvain, she is wellaware that as the only knight ever to have beaten her husband, he is the knight best-able to defend her perilous fountain. She is also careful to ensure that he will

Alexandria Krause

111

__________________________________________________________________ carry out this service for her; before she consents to their union she inquires whether or not he would dare undertake to defend her fountain for her. 6 Yvain responds in the affirmative, swearing, without hesitation, that he will defend it against all men whom he encounters there. 7 The implication of Yvain’s neglect of this responsibility which he has formally agreed to by marrying Laudine, is that those who dwell on the couple’s land are without protection in the event of an attack (which they are mistakenly expecting from King Arthur). Because it was a lord’s duty to provide protection for those who owed him fealty in return for their obedience and aid, particularly in times of war, Yvain is also breaking his word, in the sense of his feudal obligations, to his people. Furthermore, Laudine’s barons only give their consent to her union with Yvain because, in agreement with their lady and with Lunette (Laudine’s advisor and lady-in-waiting), they believe him to be the best candidate for the defence of their territory, symbolically represented by the magical fountain. They in fact insist, in this time of impending war, that she marry without delay. 8 It is therefore generous, and also risky, for Laudine to consent to Yvain’s year-long absence, and we might speculate that either her love for him, or her respect for his position as a knight of King Arthur’s court, inspired her decision. In her study of Yvain’s madness, Penelope B. R. Doob focuses on the issue of truth (or troth) in the romance, which she defines as ‘faithfulness to a person or an ideal, the keeping of promises, [and] personal integrity.’ 9 She places emphasis on the chivalric notion that truth is the ‘virtue which presupposes and maintains all other virtues without which no true excellence can exist [for a knight].’ 10 Doob applies this ideal of upholding truth by keeping one’s word, or honouring a contract, to Yvain’s situation, claiming that ‘his lack of truth’ is a ‘moral fault’ of his, 11 and that his failure to meet his obligations, specifically to Laudine and his newly acquired estate, ‘is a breach of truth and a violation of both Christian and chivalric ideals, involving dishonour (from the chivalric perspective) and sin (from the Christian one).’ 12 Therefore, she concludes, this ‘less immediate’ moral flaw is the underlying cause of Yvain’s descent into madness. 13 Yvain has therefore failed on two accounts, both involving his worth as a knight; first, as a proponent of chivalry, and second, as a model of Christian virtue. Not only does Yvain sin, as Doob points out, by breaking his troth, his reasons for leaving Laudine for the tourney-grounds are not valid, either in a chivalric, or in a Christian context. A knight was not merely expected to win renown by showing off his skills as a warrior, but his purpose, as Clifford R. Backman clarifies, was to ‘promote justice’ and to ‘defend the poor’ as well as the Christian faith. 14 Backman effectively summarises the chivalric ethos of the period, embodied within the literature of romance: ‘[t]he chivalric element of knighthood … [is] derived from the purpose and manner of one’s fighting and not from fighting alone.’ 15 A reminder of the ideals to which a knight is sworn would serve Gauvain as it would Yvain. Yvain is cast in a more positive light than his companion-in-arms,

112

The Problem of Chivalry

__________________________________________________________________ however, because he is not easily convinced that leaving his new wife is the best course of action, even though his fellow ‘knights begged and took great pains to persuade [him] to leave with them.’ 16 Gauvain’s fear is that his friend’s renown will diminish, and Yvain is clearly pressured by him to enter tournaments for the upkeep and growth of his reputation, an aspect of Arthur’s court that Gauvain adheres to in his belief of the susceptibility of a married knight (or a knight in love) to grow soft and effeminate. Yet, had Yvain a complete understanding of knighthood with its implied duties and behaviours (and were he truly heroic at this point in the tale), he would have corrected the older knight’s skewed view of chivalry. Essentially, were Yvain already an accomplished knight, he would have made the decision to stay with Laudine and defend her people, and the tale would be at its end; there would be nothing more for Yvain to achieve. As it is, Yvain has yet to learn about chivalry and the meaning of knighthood, and he is punished for his erroneous ways by madness, and the necessity of embarking on another quest; one that will lead him back into Laudine’s good graces. Fortunately for him, he is helped along in times of need by various ladies and maidens. Returning to the scene in which Yvain’s greatest time of suffering begins, when he learns that Laudine has rejected him, his despair is so profound that he immediately abandons the tournament and his friends altogether. We are told that ‘Sir Yvain leaves without uttering a word since he feared looking a fool in front of the assembled barons.’ 17 This statement implies that Yvain is aware of his impending madness because of his fear of appearing foolish in front of the nobles in attendance; thus he must distance himself from them before he completely loses his sense of self, and the decorum appropriate to his class. The following statement concerns the barons whom Yvain is desperately trying to avoid: ‘They let him go off alone without paying him any attention.’ 18 Here, in case we are worried about Yvain’s reputation, the narrator assures his audience that the barons (and presumably the other competitors and spectators as well), pay no attention to him as he takes his hasty leave. Yet we are also told that they let him go off alone, which implies that they choose to ignore his departure. This attitude reveals that they, like Yvain, are aware that were he to look a fool he would be debasing himself, thereby lowering his status below that of knight, and marring his reputation irreparably. Clearly, there is an acute consciousness of class at work in this medieval tale, which comes as no surprise since European society in the Middle Ages was highly stratified. Yet the embarrassment of appearing to have gone mad is also a concern, as well as a taboo, for the upper classes. As I noted in my brief outline of madness during this period, 19 those deemed mad, although they might have been looked after by family members or those of religious houses, were still ostracised and excluded from society. Their place was on the margins of civilization; as others they posed a threat, and these unfortunates were either figures to be mocked and

Alexandria Krause

113

__________________________________________________________________ laughed at, or guarded against. Viewed in this historical context, we therefore come to understand the urgency and silence with which Yvain takes his leave of his fellow knights and nobles at the tournament. Yvain’s transformation from the ranks of nobility to an othered member of society, a madman, is almost immediate. Soon Yvain is far from the tournament pavilions, and, as foreshadowed, a delirium seizes him. 20 His actions that follow are representative of mad behaviour as a medieval audience would have interpreted them: ‘he rips [off] his clothes then escapes through the fields.’ 21 Then, ‘running as if crazed,’ he tears a bow and some arrows away from the grasp of a boy. 22 Yet, although he is acting like a madman, he has not yet lost all sense of himself and his agency; we know this because the narrator, whose insight into the characters is greater than our own, remarks that he carries out these actions while he still has some reasoning powers left. 23 Yvain is intuitive enough to sense a crazed state coming over him, and he deals with this disabling condition the best way he can: by fleeing civilization and readying himself for a pre-civilization type of lifestyle and livelihood. In the forest, Yvain encounters one other human who has made this liminal area his home: a hermit. Like him, this religious man has exiled himself from society, albeit for different reasons. We must presume that, since he is a hermit, he has chosen to remove himself to the forest out of a desire for a solitary lifestyle, where he is free from distractions and worldly temptations. If we believe that Yvain, feeling his impending madness and not wanting to be seen in this condition, aware that he would no longer have a legitimate place within the social hierarchy, chose to exile himself, then we might see a parallel between him and the hermit. In this light, we might consider the hermit to be mad as well in a sense. As Doob writes of the literary romantic figure whom she labels the ‘Holy Wild Man,’ this character’s ‘love of God prevents him from acting reasonably like other men, [who value] life, comfort, and kindred.’ 24 ‘From the secular point of view,’ she continues, ‘it is insane to forsake worldly pleasures for almost intolerable hardship.’ 25 As we see in the story, Yvain and the hermit establish a relationship of sorts: Yvain brings him his kills, and the hermit cooks them, also supplying the former knight with freshbaked bread and water. Although the text implies that the hermit both fears and pities Yvain for the crazed, but unfortunate state he is in, 26 since he is without clothes, memory, language, or even the knowledge fire, their understanding, if we might term it thus, is perhaps based on a mutual recognition of the other’s insanity. Or, what is more likely, they are bonded by their position as social outcasts. The hermit undoubtedly helps Yvain to survive in this environment. Yet it is to a trio of women, one demoiselle in particular, to whom he owes his salvation. As in Troyes’ romance of Lancelot, the hero is rescued by an unexpected heroine: an active, motivated, caring, and noticeably unnamed maiden. Although the situations the two knights find themselves in differ considerably, because of the nature of their rescuer, the parallels between the two texts are visible. Yvain’s rescue occurs

114

The Problem of Chivalry

__________________________________________________________________ when he is asleep under a tree, still in his crazed state. 27 A party of three noblewomen, led by the Dame de Noroison, is passing nearby on horseback, when one of her ladies-in-waiting recognises the sleeping man by a scar on his face. Astonished at finding the esteemed knight in such a condition, she tells her lady of her discovery. They return to the Dame’s castle to retrieve a magical ointment given to her by Morgan La Fée, a powerful sorceress, as a remedy against toute rage de tête, 28 which can be translated loosely as mental illness. The concerned maiden applies the remedy to Yvain’s entire body (not just his head), and, ignoring her lady’s instructions of sparing only what is necessary, she uses all of the contents, later explaining that she accidentally dropped the container into the river when her horse had an accident on the bridge. 29 The maiden’s concern for Yvain is evident, and she goes to lengths to ensure that he is not dishonoured by her having seen him in a state of madness (and nakedness). Leaving him clothing to change into, she does not reveal herself until he is fully dressed, and she sees that he has come to his senses. 30 Yet she does not let on that it is she who has cured him, and she even ignores him when first he calls to her. 31 (Her attitude, in this regard, is reminiscent of the tournament goers who overlook Yvain’s sudden change in behaviour preceding his hasty departure.) The narrator concludes that she does him a great courtesy by behaving thus. 32 She is indeed respectful towards the helpless and embarrassed knight, and her actions are notably selfless; she wants no credit for the help she has given him. Yet were it not for her role in the tale, small but crucial, Yvain would not be capable of embarking on a return quest to Laudine, nor would he ultimately rise to fame in Arthur’s court. It is in fact another woman, Lunette (Laudine’s advisor and lady-in-waiting), who assists Yvain most often, and it is significant that she hides him from Laudine’s men who would kill him, then manages to convince her lady to marry him, despite his defeat of her husband. Yet it is Troyes’ mysterious and anonymous female characters, like Yvain’s rescuer, who provide the deus ex machina without which the hero would fail in his quest and his pursuit of honour. Furthermore, this demoiselle not only feels a compassion towards him which prompts her not just to approach, but to care for him (something the hermit would not dare do), but, also unlike the hermit, she has a certain insight into his madness; in tears, she tells her lady that the state Yvain is in is the effect of a great sorrow, and that such sadness leads ultimately to madness. 33 She also sees that he has lost his spirit. 34 In modern terms, she recognises the signs and causes of his depression. Yvain finds that he cannot fulfil the contradictory obligations of being a good husband and feudal lord to his wife’s people while meeting the expectations placed upon him as a knight of King Arthur’s household. Yvain mentally collapses under this stress, taking refuge in the forest, where he is able to escape society and its demands. His existence is thenceforth a pitiful one; he lives and acts as a madman until a compassionate and capable young woman discovers and heals him. With

Alexandria Krause

115

__________________________________________________________________ her aid, he is resurrected from his state of suffering, and he emerges ready to prove himself a worthy knight and husband.

Notes 1

Chrétien de Troyes, Le Chevalier au Lion (Paris: Belin Gallimard, 2008), 58. (All translations from modern French text into English are my own.) 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., 59. 4 Clifford R. Backman, The Worlds of Medieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 316. 5 de Troyes, Chevalier au Lion, 41. 6 Ibid., 47. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 49. 9 Penelope B. R. Doob, Nebuchadnezzar’s Children: Conventions of Madness in Middle English Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 141. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., 140. 12 Ibid., 141. 13 Ibid., 140. 14 Backman, Worlds of Medieval Europe, 225. 15 Ibid. 16 de Troyes, Chevalier au Lion, 55. 17 Ibid., 69. 18 Ibid. 19 This discussion (including cited works), can be found on the Interdisciplinary.net website. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Doob, Nebuchadnezzar’s Children, 138. 25 Ibid. 26 de Troyes, Chevalier au Lion, 70. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., 71. 29 Ibid., 73. 30 Ibid., 72. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid.

116

The Problem of Chivalry

__________________________________________________________________ 33 34

Ibid., 71. Ibid.

Bibliography Backman, Clifford R. The Worlds of Medieval Europe. 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Doob, Penelope B. R. Nebuchadnezzar’s Children: Conventions of Madness in Middle English Literature. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974. Troyes, Chrétien de. Le Chevalier au Lion. Edited by Dominique Trouvé. Paris: Belin Gallimard, 2008 Alexandria Krause is a graduate student of Medieval Literature at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus.

‘Numbing people was an art form now’: Cancer and Suffering in Pat Barker’s Another World and Andrew Miller’s Oxygen Anja A. Drautzburg Abstract Roy Porter termed cancer ‘the modern disease par excellence’ 1 and it goes without saying that being an inhabitant of what Susan Sontag called the ‘kingdom of the sick’ 2 is bound to be painful. Basically, illness epitomises suffering. Thus, it does not come as a surprise that in more and more contemporary works of fiction the condition takes centre stage. Pat Barker’s novel Another World (1998) and Andrew Miller’s Oxygen (2002) are two cases in point. The chapter seeks to trace how suffering from cancer is brought to the page. Both novels invite readers to ask questions such as: How is pain described? What does medicine do in order to make pain more bearable and in what ways do narratives reflect related current discourses, for instance, on palliative care? Moreover, different topics that are inextricably linked with suffering and illness, such as humiliation and alienation, will be worked out. Besides, I will focus on the question of suffering and its metaphorical implications. Unlike in the case of tuberculosis in the nineteenth century, nothing is glamorous in contemporary depictions of cancer. First and foremost, it is a painful condition. Finally, it will be seen that in both novels pessimism prevails because only death can end suffering. Key Words: Pat Barker, Andrew Miller, cancer, pain, palliative care, metaphor, death. ***** Illness narratives have been the subject of interdisciplinary research for quite some time now because studying illness in literature can benefit clearly from involving diverging traditional disciplines and vice versa. 3 But what do we learn about illness and suffering by consulting novels? David B. Morris argues that works of fiction can shed new light on the phenomenon of pain. In his seminal study The Culture of Pain, he claims that: [w]riters in fact express a range of knowledge and experience for which the person struggling with pain quite often cannot find words. Most important, they tell a story about pain that differs significantly from the traditional medical account and helps to reveal its limitations. 4 Ulrich Teucher argues along the same lines, claiming that ‘[l]iterary representations of illness may be of interest to health professionals, psychologists,

118

‘Numbing people was an art form now’

__________________________________________________________________ and literary scholars in order to better understand the often harrowing experience of life with cancer.’ 5 In this chapter I will address the question how two examples of contemporary literature, Pat Barker’s Another World 6 and Andrew Miller’s Oxygen, 7 shed light on cancer and suffering. What is more, I will show that Morris is right in saying that authors, by creating fictional accounts of illness, ‘allow us to examine various moments – specific historical junctures – when pain thrusts above the plane of silent, blind, unquestioned suffering in which it ordinarily lies concealed.’ 8 In Barker’s novel, the patient is 101-year-old war veteran Geordie suffering from colon cancer. He lives with his daughter Frieda and is looked after by her and his grandson Nick. In Oxygen, the woman protagonist is Alice, a terminal lung cancer patient, whose last months at home surrounded by her two sons, Alec and Larry, are depicted. The titles of both novels are significant because they give a sense of direction to the narratives and are a first indication of a certain metaphoricity which often goes hand in hand with writing about illness. 9 As will be seen later, the dying Geordie more or less lives in ‘another world.’ In the case of Oxygen as the title of a novel about a lung cancer patient, the metaphorical implications are fairly obvious. It is important to recognise that there is a difference between pain and suffering. As Morris remarks, the two are ‘conceptually distinct, in that you can be in pain without suffering or suffer without being in pain, so that suffering cannot be defined merely as a heightened degree of pain.’ 10 In addition, Tom Sensky points out that ‘[a] key feature of suffering is that it is a property of the whole person – suffering is not a phenomenon that can be reduced to part of the person. This is the key distinction between suffering and pain.’ 11 As the patients in the two novels are end stage cancer patients, pain and suffering are inextricably linked to one another, which will be seen in the following analysis. Given the fact that both authors favour the narrative perspective of the carers, the suffering of patient and carer alike are juxtaposed. The carers suffer without being in pain and the patients suffer in manifold ways. 1. Narrating Suffering As was stated above, in both novels, the readers are confronted with the carers’ perspectives. In Another World, we learn about Geordie through the moral framework of his grandson Nick, who serves as the main focaliser throughout. The fact that the reader is mostly confronted with Nick’s point of view, means that the degree of suffering can only be presented in a filtered and slightly altered way. This in enhanced by the fact that Nick is a very close, sometimes even merciless, observer. Due to Barker’s use of free indirect discourse, even the smallest detail of Geordie’s old and sick body is communicated. At times, Nick’s gaze at Geordie appears cruel. However, it can be argued that Barker aims at describing exactly what happens to an end stage cancer patient. At any rate, she does not dwindle

Anja A. Drautzburg

119

__________________________________________________________________ away into sentimentality when she has Nick depict Geordie, ‘witnessing flesh peeling back from bones, revealing what’s been there all along, working its way to the surface from the moment of birth.’ 12 Barker’s unadorned depiction of the parallelism of death and birth culminates in Nick’s matter-of-fact reflection that ‘[t]he fact is that birth and death both go on too long for those who watch beside the bed. The appropriate emotions dry up.’ 13 In Oxygen, Andrew Miller depicts the final stage of lung cancer as a physically disastrous illness. On the one hand he has the characters surrounding Alice describe her condition. On the other hand, he uses Alice’s perspective. The multiple perspectivity is conducive to the vivid depiction of the often harrowing dimensions of cancer. Alec, the son, is in charge of his mother. Similar to Nick and Frieda in Another World, Alec is an untrained home carer who needs the support of a nurse, Una O’Connell, and Alice’s GP. His mother is dependent on him, which exhausts him to a point where he hopes ‘that Alice would already have fallen asleep and would not need him.’ 14 The notion most recurring is that Alec is suffering because of a strong sense of helplessness. Free indirect discourse reveals how much he struggles with his task. He, too, has to endure his mother’s violent coughing fits, which distresses him so deeply that he is unable to find comfort. Whenever the stubborn Alice climbs the stairs to reach her room, Alec suffers with her. She refuses to move downstairs, which could be read as denial of her severe condition and the preservation of the last bit of independence. To Alec, this is torture and more than once he wants ‘to tell her what it was like to watch her, that twenty-minute ordeal, hauling herself a step at a time towards the landing, her fingers clutching at the banister like talons.’ 15 No matter how hard Alec tries, Alice of all people does not always appreciate his efforts. At times, she is upset perceiving him as ‘interfering […], standing at the end of her bed, peering through his glasses, his ‘specs’, pretending to be some kind of doctor perhaps.’ 16 But she could not be more wrong because actually, Alec yearns ‘for a chore that would not make him feel incompetent.’ 17 The further the novel progresses, the more Alec’s frustration is voiced. But most of all, he feels misunderstood and alone in his senseless fight against Alice’s terminal cancer. When his brother Larry arrives from the US to support Alec, he cannot embrace his presence. On the contrary, he is even more aware of his isolation because ‘he didn’t think Larry understood a thing. […] Of course, he cared, they all cared, but the others were just looking on, and that wasn’t enough.’ 18 2. Tropes of Childhood Due to Geordie’s age and the severity of his condition, Another World is built on the juxtaposition of life and death. Another reason suggests itself after consulting Susan Sontag. In her essay ‘Illness as Metaphor’ (1978) she argues that ‘in the popular imagination, cancer equals death.’ 19 The juxtaposition finds its

120

‘Numbing people was an art form now’

__________________________________________________________________ strongest expression in the metaphor of the circle of life, which is referred to time and again. In the course of the novel Geordie and his condition are more and more described in tropes of childhood. Among many other small tasks, caring for the fatally ill includes daily washing and feeding. In the first feeding scene, which takes place in hospital, Nick explicitly compares Geordie to his own toddler Jasper. The potato mash for the toothless Geordie is equally suitable for infants. Moreover, like a baby, Geordie needs a beaker on his cup in order to be able to drink. Besides, Geordie’s gestures remind Nick of his pregnant wife Fran’s. Having tried in vain to eat his dinner, Geordie lies with his hands pressed against the swell of his stomach, clasping the bulge from the sides. Many of his gestures echo Fran’s. Life growing inside one belly; death in the other. 20 Here again, life and death are juxtaposed. At the same time, the severity of the cancer and the nearing death are once more emphasised. Drawing connections between death and pregnancy has a long tradition. Susan Sontag gives several examples of writers who described cancer as ‘a fetus with its own will’ 21 as early as in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. What is more, she calls cancer ‘a demonic pregnancy.’ 22 Pregnancy in this case refers to the growth of the tumour. And, of course, it is nothing but demonic because it causes suffering and in the worst case ends in the patient’s death. 3. Humiliation Part of being reduced to the state of a helpless child is the fact that one is dependent on others in most aspects of daily life. In both novels, one particular scene comes to stand for the utterly humiliating helplessness of Geordie and Alice, respectively. According to the NHS, colon cancer ‘is the third most common cancer and the second most common cause of cancer death in the UK.’ 23 One of the manifold symptoms is the possible ‘bleeding from the back passage’, 24 which is also depicted explicitly in Another World. Yet again, Nick refers to Geordie’s child-like condition. Not having been able to reach the bathroom on time, Geordie has to use a bucket in his bed room. Afterwards, his grandson is ‘puzzled because the shit on the paper looks like tar. The only thing he’s seen remotely like it is meconium.’ 25 Moreover, the fact that Geordie needs help in the bathroom makes clear that he is gradually turning into a person as helpless as a baby. Geordie has obviously reached a state where he is completely dependent. In Susan Sontag’s words, he ‘is portrayed as robbed of all capacities of self-transcendence, humiliated by fear and agony.’ 26 Part of that is a feeling of constant embarrassment. To Sontag, the cancer

Anja A. Drautzburg

121

__________________________________________________________________ patient is plagued by these feelings of shame which can even enhance the suffering. 27 Only very late, Nick comes to realize how humiliating Geordie’s situation is. Bearing in mind that Nick describes him as an orderly and squeamish man when it comes to personal hygiene, Geordie’s helplessness appears even more tragic. All in all, the message permeating the entire novel is that, no matter how hard the carers and the patient try, there is no dignity whatsoever in dying of cancer and that in addition to the suffering caused by pain, the suffering caused by feelings of dependence and humiliation is just as problematic. The same holds true for Oxygen. The scene described is strangely reminiscent of what happens in Another World: one night, Alice does not manage to reach the bathroom on her own. Larry finds her on the floor her nightdress caught up around her thighs, her panties in a tangle round her ankles. The back of her legs were streaked with diarrhoea, and there were small black pools of it on the carpet. It was not hard to see what must have happened. 28 It is striking how precise Miller depicts the physicality of terminal cancer in this passage. This time, it is Larry who takes over; he washes and dresses his mother, and supplies her with what she needs most: oxygen. The scene can be read as a variation of the childhood trope introduced earlier. 4. Alienation In the course of Another World it becomes apparent that end stage cancer patients have to live with a strong ‘sense of alienation’, 29 as psycho-oncology 30 specialist Jennifer Barraclough puts it. This can be seen as one aspect of the second important metaphor repeatedly occurring in both novels, namely that of ‘another world.’ Geordie is not only suffering from colon cancer, but he is also deeply traumatised by World War I, in which he lots his brother in the trenches. Although this event lies in the distant past, he is increasingly haunted by nightmares and hallucinations which take him back to the battlefield. Cancer and trauma are juxtaposed the moment Geordie’s old bayonet wound is mentioned because he actually believes that this wound is going to kill him, not cancer. By day, he is also a member of this other world, namely Susan Sontag’s ‘kingdom of the sick.’ 31 Frieda also notices that ‘he’s in a world of his own.’ 32 What is more, his condition turns Geordie into a ‘semi-stranger’, 33 who is ‘living to the tick of a different clock.’ 34 5. Medication One of the most important topics in Oxygen is medication. Ultimately, lung cancer is going to kill Alice, the only things to be done for her is treat her with

122

‘Numbing people was an art form now’

__________________________________________________________________ strong pain killers, as is still the case for most cancer patients these days. 35 By describing Alice’s difficult situation, Miller raises the issue of palliative medicine. This evocation converges with a very contemporary discourse amongst medical professionals. In the UK, palliative care was installed when Dr. Cicely Saunders founded St. Christopher’s Hospice in London in 1967. 36 And in 1990 palliative care was defined by the WHO as an approach that improves the quality of life of patients and their families facing the problem associated with life-threatening illness, through the prevention and relief of suffering by means of early identification and impeccable assessment and treatment of pain and other problems, physical, psychosocial and spiritual. 37 The definition implies that even the pain of a terminal cancer patient can be erased through correct assessment. However, instead of pain relief, Alice has to endure strong side effects and feels reduced by her pills. The effect on her is devastating. Most of all, she experiences a strong sense of self-fragmentation, which means that she cannot understand herself and her reactions because the drugs influence her mood. According to Jennifer Barraclough, this is not uncommon for patients who have to take high doses of medication. 38 She calls this sensation ‘loss of mental integrity.’ 39 After an angry attack on Alec, it occurs to Alice that her pills might be to blame. ‘How could she know what was her, the old Alice, and what was some kind of toxic side effect? Is this me? she thought. What am I now?’ 40 Significantly, Alice does not perceive herself as a person anymore because she does not ask ‘Who am I?’ but ‘What am I?’ In other words, her terminal cancer causes a deep identity crisis due to the fact that it is slowly destroying her body and mind. Apart from this heightened sense of self-fragmentation, which causes immense suffering, Alice is in pain constantly. She has reached a stage where painkillers do no longer ease her agony. Through Alice as the focaliser, Miller explains the WHO’s pain ladder, 41 but the assessment is of a critical nature when Alice remarks that [n]umbing people was an art form now. There were pain specialists in pain laboratories, and the World Health people had created an analgesic ‘ladder’ so that you were never just in pain, plain and simple. 42 Alice’s statement confirms the notion that palliative care is not necessarily beneficial to the patient because mere classification of her pain neither eases it nor the suffering. Sometimes it overwhelms her so fundamentally that she considers

Anja A. Drautzburg

123

__________________________________________________________________ committing suicide and later, when she is almost powerless, euthanasia. Jennifer Barraclough points out that this behaviour is by no means uncommon in end stage cancer patients in whose cases requests for euthanasia often ‘represent the plea for better control of pain or other symptoms.’ 43 At some point Alice even begs her sons to kill her but both decline. During her last days, Alice is still on palliative medication. But Una finds it hard ‘[t]o find among the vials and bottles something useful, something to match Alice’s suffering without making her nauseous or terrifying her with hallucinations.’ 44 Miller raises another important issue here because the drugs provided for terminal cancer patients are so strong that the sideeffects can be just as bad as the pain itself. Still, the WHO explains that 90% of cancer patients find relief through the application of the pain relief ladder. 45 Alice, however, belongs to the remaining 10%, for which there seems no other way out of suffering but death. Both patients in the novels die in the end, although Oxygen ends before Alice’s death. The last image of her is that of a weak woman lying in bed, too weak to even speak, reliant on life-giving oxygen from a bottle. In Another World, death comes as utter relief to Geordie's carers because it ends long years of agony and anguish. 6. Conclusion Ultimately, Pat Barker and Andrew Miller paint a rather bleak picture of modern medicine and palliative care in their pessimistic portrayal of the final days of the two cancer patients. Only death ends suffering in both novels and prior to that, medication could not ease pain and suffering. Both authors make it explicit that cancer is a condition which takes patients back to their childhood because in a role reversal, they are utterly dependent on others, often their children or other family members, for care and support. With this process of stealthy deterioration come feelings of helplessness, shame and alienation. Besides, the illness affects patients and their families and carers alike and thus induces suffering on many different levels.

Notes 1

Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (NewYork and London: Norton, 1999), 574. 2 Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Picador, 1990), 3. 3 See Ulrich Teuscher, ‘Aestheticizing Cancer: Metaphors and Narratives of Revaluation’, in The Body as Interface. Dialogues between the Disciplines, ed. Sabine Sielke and Elisabeth Schäfer-Wünsche (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2007), 145-167, 150.

124

‘Numbing people was an art form now’

__________________________________________________________________ 4

David B. Morris, The Culture of Pain (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 3. 5 Teucher, ‘Aestheticizing Cancer’, 147. 6 Pat Barker, Another World (London: Penguin, 1998). 7 Andrew Miller, Oxygen (London: Sceptre, 2002). 8 Morris, The Culture of Pain, 3. 9 See, for instance, Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, and Thomas Anz, ‘Metaphorik’, in Literatur und Medizin: Ein Lexikon, ed. Bettina von Jagow and Florian Steger (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005) 534-539. 10 David B. Morris, Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 193. 11 Tom Sensky, ‘Suffering’, International Journal of Integrated Care 10 (29 January 2010): 66-68, 66. 12 Barker, Another World, 146. 13 Ibid., 232. 14 Miller, Oxygen, 10. 15 Ibid., 10. 16 Ibid., 25. 17 Ibid., 15. 18 Ibid., 205. 19 Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 7. 20 Barker, Another World, 167. 21 Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 13. 22 Ibid., 14. 23 ‘Bowel Cancer’, NHS UK, accessed August 21, 2011, http://tinyurl.com/6cnects. 24 ‘Bowel Cancer: Symptoms’, NHS UK, accessed August 21, 2011, http://tinyurl.com/bhd5ow5. 25 Barker, Another World, 223. 26 Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 17. 27 See Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 17, 48 and 57. 28 Miller, Oxygen, 280. 29 Jennifer Barraclough, Cancer and Emotion: A Practical Guide to PsychoOncology (Chichester: Wiley, 1999), 108. 30 See Ibid. Psycho-oncology is a field in cancer research, which is mainly concerned with the relationship between cancer and the mind, particularly with the psychological consequences of cancer. 31 Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 3. 32 Barker, Another World, 70. 33 Ibid., 71.

Anja A. Drautzburg

125

__________________________________________________________________ 34

Ibid., 148. Roy Porter remarks that ‘Despite the immense investment of money and research effort, cancer remains a disease imperfectly understood, in which relief is far more common than cure, and relief generally temporary and subject to serious sideeffects.’ Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, 577. 36 See Barraclough, Cancer and Emotion, 112. 37 ‘WHO Definition of Pallitive Care’, World Health Organisation, accessed August 21, 2011, http://www.who.int/cancer/palliative/definition/en/. 38 See Barraclough, Cancer and Emotion, 111-112. 39 Ibid. 39. 40 Miller, Oxygen, 25. 41 See ‘WHO’s Pain Ladder’, World Health Organisation, accessed August 21, 2011, http://www.who.int/cancer/palliative/painladder/en/. 42 Miller, Oxygen, 26. 43 Barraclough, Cancer and Emotion, 75. 44 Miller, Oxygen, 305. 45 See ‘Cancer – Palliative Care’, World Health Organisation, accessed August 21, 2011, http://www.who.int/cancer/palliative/en/. 35

Bibliography Anz, Thomas. ‘Metaphorik’. In Literatur und Medizin: Ein Lexikon, edited by Bettina von Jagow and Florian Steger, 534-539. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005. Barraclough, Jennifer. Cancer and Emotion: A Practical Guide to PsychoOncology. Chichester: Wiley, 1999. Barker, Pat. Another World. London: Penguin, 1998. ‘Bowel Cancer’. NHS UK. Accessed August 21, 2011. http://tinyurl.com/6cnects. ‘Bowel Cancer – Symptoms’. NHS UK. Accessed August 21, 2011. http://tinyurl.com/bhd5ow5. Miller, Andrew. Oxygen. London: Sceptre, 2002. Morris, David B. The Culture of Pain. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993.

126

‘Numbing people was an art form now’

__________________________________________________________________ ———. Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000. Porter, Roy. The Greatest Benefit to Mankind. A Medical History of Humanity. New York and London: Norton, 1999. Sensky, Tom. ‘Suffering’. International Journal of Integrated Care 10 (29 January 2010): 66-68. Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York: Picador, [1979, 1989] 1990. Teuscher, Ulrich. ‘Aestheticizing Cancer: Metaphors and Narratives of Revaluation’. In The Body as Interface. Dialogues between the Disciplines, edited by Sabine Sielke and Elisabeth Schäfer-Wünsche, 145-167. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2007. ‘WHO Definition of Pallitive Care’. World Health Organisation. Accessed August 21, 2011. http://www.who.int/cancer/palliative/definition/en/. ‘WHO’s Pain Ladder’. World Health Organisation. Accessed August 21, 2011. http://www.who.int/cancer/palliative/painladder/en/. Anja A. Drautzburg has a MA in English Literature from Bonn University, Germany and works as a German ‘Lektorin’ at the University of Oxford. Her research interests include 20th and 21st century British literature and culture as well as dialogues between medicine and literature.

Pain Worth More than a Penny: Performance of Suffering in Omeros and The America Play Bev Hogue Abstract When the performance of pain becomes a commodity, who gains? Who loses? And why does it matter? Derek Walcott and Suzan-Lori Parks explore these questions in Omeros and The America Play. Both Walcott’s epic poem and Parks’ play attempt to recuperate histories sundered by colonialism and the slave trade. Both works affirm the power of the performance of suffering while calling into question the ethics of appropriation of pain, suggesting that recuperating lost narratives of suffering may heal the wounds of history but commodifying pain may trivialise suffering by transforming mourning into empty spectacle. Key Words: African-American literature, Caribbean literature, performance, history, suffering. ***** A man stands before an audience (of tourists or voyeurs, on a beach or a stage) and for a small fee (a dollar, a penny) recites or performs a scene of suffering (private and personal or public and social). Consumers seeking authenticity purchase experience awash in artificiality as the performers parade ‘Reconstructed Historicities’ 1 for the pleasure of patrons. When the performance of pain becomes a commodity, who gains? Who loses? And why does it matter? Derek Walcott and Suzan-Lori Parks explore these questions in Omeros and The America Play. Both Walcott’s epic poem and Parks’ play attempt to recuperate histories sundered by colonialism and the slave trade. In Omeros, the character Philoctete willingly sells tourists stories of authentic island culture, but when they ask about the scar on his leg, he refuses to reveal the story of his pain and its healing because, he says, some things are ‘worth more than a dollar.’ 2 But the story he will not sell to tourists on the beach is revealed in the poem and provides an index to the passing of time and a metaphor to unite the various strands of the narrative, the wound reflecting black holes in Caribbean history. Similarly, in The America Play the Foundling Father charges tourists a penny to join him in performing an iconic moment of suffering – the assassination of Abraham Lincoln – while submerging the story of his own private pain. Both works affirm the power of the performance of suffering while calling into question the ethics of appropriation of pain, suggesting that recuperating lost narratives of suffering may suture the wounds of history but commodifying pain may also trivialise suffering by transforming it into empty spectacle.

128

Pain Worth More than a Penny

__________________________________________________________________ 1. The America Play: A Penny for your Pain At its most basic level, The America Play by Suzan-Lori Parks invites an audience to pay for the privilege of observing the spectacle of a black man being shot on stage – repeatedly. Such a scene appears in popular media so frequently as to be unremarkable, but Parks complicates the situation by multiplying layers of performance: the theatre audience pays to see an actor performing the role of a gravedigger performing the role of Abraham Lincoln for tourists who pay a Lincoln penny for the privilege of ‘shooting’ Lincoln. Among the many visitors who arrive on stage to shoot Lincoln in Act I is a honeymooning couple, 3 and while faux assassination seems an odd way to consecrate their union, thoughtful viewers must realise that they occupy a parallel position because paying for a ticket pulls the trigger for the performance of suffering. Indeed, Parks implies from the start that viewers are not passive observers but participants ethically implicated in demanding and constructing the scene of suffering to assuage the painful absences haunting history. In the opening scene, the Foundling Father first speaks solely in quotations from others and then begins his own story in the third person as if describing some figure from history or myth: ‘There once was a man who was told that he bore a strong resemblance to Abraham Lincoln.’ 4 The man who is telling becomes the man who was told, his identity and vocation shaped by the words and expectations of others. Later, while working as a gravedigger, he tries to capitalise on his resemblance by reciting Lincoln’s speeches, only to find that listeners are willing to pay for his speeches only when encouraged to throw food at him while he speaks. ‘This was a moderate success,’ he explains, ‘And when someone remarked that he played Lincoln so well that he ought to be shot, it was as if the Great Mans [sic] footsteps had been suddenly revealed,’ 5 so that ‘his act would now consist of a single chair, a rocker, in a dark box. The public was invited to pay a penny, choose from the selection of provided pistols, enter the darkened box and ‘Shoot Mr. Lincoln.’ The Lesser Known became famous overnight.’ 6 But famous for what? For effacing his own identity, becoming a blank slate on which viewers could inscribe the identity of the dead Lincoln. The gravedigger bears no name except the Foundling Father – an orphan, a man without origins – or the Lesser Known performing in and as the shadow of the Great Man. Despite his resemblance, he continually foregrounds his difference from Lincoln and the artificiality of his performance of suffering, performing with a ‘wink to Mr. Lincolns [sic] pasteboard cutout’ 7 or a nod to the Great Man’s plaster bust. Tourists seek not just to observe history but to participate in its performance, to pull the trigger that incites the scene of suffering, but their search for authenticity depends upon acceptance of artificiality. ‘Some inaccuracies are good for business,’ explains the Foundling Father; ‘Take the stovepipe hat! Never really worn indoors but people dont [sic] like their Lincoln hatless.’ 8 Similarly, tourists object to a blonde beard on Lincoln because, as the Foundling Father explains, ‘If

Bev Hogue

129

__________________________________________________________________ you deviate too much they wont [sic] get their pleasure … . Some inconsistencies are pepetuatable because theyre [sic] good for business. But not the yellow beard. Its [sic] just my fancy.’ 9 The Foundling Father keeps a box of beards of various styles and colours; despite their obvious artificiality, he considers them entirely authentic because ‘procurement and upkeep of his beards took so much work he figured that the beards were completely his. Were as authentic as he was, so to speak.’ 10 The self he considers authentic, then, is assembled from purchased fragments, from echoes of the Great Man’s speech and reflections of the Great Man’s gestures; the performance of suffering provides the Foundling Father a vocation and a voice while obscuring the self he might have possessed outside of the Great Man’s shadow. The Foundling Father performs a shadow, a gap, an absence – a reading reinforced by the second and third acts of the play when the Foundling Father’s wife and son dig up the meager and mediated remains of their lost loved one. They may be paid mourners, but their grief over the absence ancestor seems deep and sincere; Brazil’s wailing over his lost ‘foe-father’ 11 or ‘faux-father’ 12 mingles with Lucy’s litany of loss as she recalls all she sacrificed to her absent husband, including ‘My mores and my folkways. / My rock and my foundation’ 13 and ‘My re-memberies – you know – the stuff out of my head.’ 14 Their performance of suffering results in the digging up of fragments and echoes evoking absence; when Brazil insists that the hole they have been digging is ‘our inheritance of sorts,’ 15 he expresses a loss more personal and authentic than the highly artificial suffering performed by his absent father. When performance of suffering becomes a commodity, who pays the cost – and why? Lucy and Brazil dig in order to find enough echoes of the lost ancestor to suture over the painful gash opened up by his absence, but what wound do the tourists who pay to ‘kill’ Lincoln hope to heal? Parks’ repeated references to the Great Hole of History provide a hint. The original Great Hole of History is a theme park where ‘Reconstructed Historicities’ 16 parade to entertain tourists seeking an experience of authenticity, but it is also a black hole whose great force deformed the life of the Lesser Known: ‘The Hole and its Historicity and the part he played in it all gave a shape to the life and posterity of the Lesser Known that he could never shake.’ 17 At various points, the Great Hole of History and its facsimiles suggest the deep hold of sexual passion, the black hold of a slave ship, the absence of minority voices in official histories, or, more literally, thuh great black hole that thuh fatal bullet bored. And how that great head was bleedin. Thuh body stretched crossways acrosst the bed. Thuh last words. Thuh last breaths. And how thuh nation mourned. 18

130

Pain Worth More than a Penny

__________________________________________________________________ We cannot know Lincoln, cannot hear his voice or touch his wounds; his body and being belong to the past and we are left with empty hands holding tight to a great hole in the shape of a penny bearing Lincoln’s image, a penny that allows us to pull the trigger and participate in the performance of suffering. To close the gap and suture the wound, we first must pull the trigger that creates the wound. 2. Omeros: Dollar Daze In his Caribbean epic Omeros, Derek Walcott excavates similar holes in history, reading the layers of signification washed up on the shores of St. Lucia and assembling from the flotsam a palimpsest of overlapping stories concerning characters who construct absent ancestors in their own image. For Walcott, history is a sea of arbitrary, incomplete, shifting narratives providing only occasional hints and glimpses of absent ancestors whose names, voices, and visages have been washed away by the tides of time. Assembling that ancestor, then, requires plunging into the sea of history, reading the signs deposited on the sands, and moving submerged stories to the surface. But what force motivates this plunge into painful seas of memory? As in The America Play, a paying audience opens the mouth from which the tale of suffering pours. In the opening scene, tourists pay Philoctete to recount a typical tale of exotic island life: how his fisherman friends felled trees to make canoes. 19 This simple story opens up a site for waves of narrative to wash ashore: first the wind brings the news to the trees that they must be sacrificed 20 and then the ‘garrulous waterfall’ and ‘talkative brooks’ pour out the story and carry it to the sea. 21 The felling of the trees sends the story thundering through the soil as ‘the ground / shuddered under the feet in waves, then the waves passed.’ 22 But beneath these opening waves of narrative are hints of other submerged stories. Brush from the felled trees burns in a bonfire redolent of a silenced culture: ‘the Aruacs’ patois crackled in the smell / of a resinous bonfire that turned the leaves brown // with curling tongues, then ash, and their language was lost.’ 23 The rapid work of the fire in translating the trees to ash reflects the rapid destruction of the island’s indigenous people, swept out of the way by the forces of Empire and leaving behind only scattered artifacts and place-names. Similarly, Philoctete reveals his scar to the tourists but refuses to sell them the submerged story of the wound’s healing because ‘It have some things … worth more than a dollar.’ 24 Here, Philoctete willingly performs for tourists stories revealing the wounds and gashes within the island’s conflicted history, suggesting, as Natalie Melas points out, that the tourists act in the role of muse so that ‘Omeros’ inaugural gesture is also a transaction between tourist and local that turns a story and a scar to profit.’ 25 Like the Foundling Father, Philoctete commodifies the stories of his island’s suffering but maintains title to his own suffering. His reluctance, however, does not silence his story, for Philoctete’s gaping wound provides the link suturing

Bev Hogue

131

__________________________________________________________________ together the many narratives of suffering gathered in the poem. If the tourists’ dollars will not open Philoctete’s mouth, what will? The will of the poet, of course. The poet/narrator takes centre stage as a character at several distinct points in the poem, but here in the opening passage his presence remains deeply submerged. Walcott has written eloquently elsewhere of the great holes wounding Caribbean history: But who in the New World does not have a horror of the past, whether his ancestor was torturer or victim? Who, in the depth of his conscience, is not silently screaming for pardon or for revenge? 26 These silent screams find voice in Omeros when Walcott invites readers inside the story Philoctete refuses to sell. And like Parks, Walcott invites readers to consume a performance of suffering in which authenticity contends with artificiality. Walcott peoples his poem with characters attempting to excavate gaps in their personal or historical narratives, but these efforts fall afoul of the inadequacy of the historical record: Archives and artifacts tell an incomplete, static story, while the repertoire of practices embodied in folklore and oral narrative relies on individual and collective memory, which is fluid and impermanent. The cure for the wound of history requires bringing together archive and repertoire in a performance of suffering that foregrounds its own constructedness. This is especially evident in the story of Philoctete’s wound, caused by a cut from a rusted anchor that suppurates and produces a swelling that Philoctete believes originates in ‘the chained ankles / of his grandfathers.’ 27 The healing of the wound requires a performance of painful immersion in history and memory. The character most connected with cultural memory – with the repertoire of folklore and embodied knowledge passed down informally from generation to generation – is Ma Kilman, who suffers at first from a memory gap: struggling to find a cure for Philoctete’s festering wound, she recalls ‘a flower somewhere, a medicine’ 28 prepared by her grandmother, but the only clue to its identity is the memory of ants climbing the white flower-pot to get to the flower. The first step toward the cure occurs when Ma Kilman follows the footsteps of the ants and abases herself in the dirt to hear them ‘talking the language of her greatgrandmother’ 29 and loses herself to a ritual she was never taught but practices by instinct, discovering in the process ancestral knowledge submerged beneath her conscious awareness. However, the flower, growing from a seed transported from Africa, is not sufficient in itself to effect the cure; first, Ma Kilman compounds the healing mixture in a rusting cauldrons rescued from the ruins of a sugar plantation. Philoctete enters ‘his bath like a boy,’ 30 baptising himself in a brew representing embodied knowledge passed down as folklore and contained within a historical

132

Pain Worth More than a Penny

__________________________________________________________________ artifact representing the painful history of the Cariebbean sugar industry. He emerges a new man, like Adam facing a yard that ‘was Eden. And its light the first day’s.’ 31 This healing is the story Philoctete had withheld from the tourists in the opening scene, but the poet/narrator brings that submerged story to the surface – indeed, Omeros itself springs from Ma Kilman’s cauldron, combining artifact and repertoire, history and memory, in a performance of suffering that heals the wound. Here, explains Jahan Ramazani, Walcott repudiates ‘a separatist aesthetic of affliction’ and ‘turns the wound into a resonant site of interethnic connection within Omeros, vivifying the black Caribbean inheritance of colonial injury and at the same time deconstructing the uniqueness of suffering.’ 32 Here, the performance of suffering heals the wound, covers the great hole, sutures the raw edges of the painful gash. That healing, though, is available only to those willing to imaginatively enter into the performance of suffering alongside Philoctete, or to join Lucy and Brazil in mourning the anonymous Lesser Known whose life was submerged beneath the shadow of the Great Man. Tourists seeking authenticity through performance of suffering receive only a superficial souvenir emphasising its own artificiality, while those who dig and moan and mourn, who vicariously suffer the wounds and pay the costs with their bodies, find a measure of healing in the performance of suffering.

Notes 1

Suzan-Lori Parks, The America Play, The America Play and Other Works (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995), 163. 2 Derek Walcott, Omeros (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990), 4. 3 Parks, The America Play, 170. 4 Ibid., 159. 5 Ibid., 164. 6 Ibid., 164. 7 Ibid., 160. 8 Ibid., 168. 9 Ibid., 163. 10 Ibid., 160. 11 Ibid., 178. 12 Ibid., 184. 13 Ibid., 193. 14 Ibid., 194. 15 Ibid., 185. 16 Ibid., 163. 17 Ibid., 162. 18 Ibid., 189.

Bev Hogue

133

__________________________________________________________________ 19

Walcott, Omeros, 4. Ibid., 3. 21 Ibid., 4. 22 Ibid., 5. 23 Ibid., 6. 24 Ibid., 4. 25 Natalie Melas, All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison (Stanford: Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2007), 140. 26 Derek Walcott, ‘The Muse of History’, in What the Twilight Says: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998), 39. 27 Walcott, Omeros, 19. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., 244. 30 Ibid., 247. 31 Ibid., 248. 32 Jahan Ramazani, ‘The Wound of History: Walcott’s Omeros and the Postcolonial Poetics of Affliction’, PMLA 112 (May 1997): 405. 20

Bibliography Melas, Natalie. All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Parks, Suzan-Lori. The America Play. In The America Play and Other Works. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995. 157-199. Ramazani, Jahan. ‘The Wound of History: Walcott’s Omeros and the Postcolonial Poetics of Affliction’. PMLA 112 (May 1997): 405-417. Walcott, Derek. ‘The Muse of History’. In What the Twilight Says: Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998. 36-64. ———. Omeros. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990. Bev Hogue is Associate Professor of English at Marietta College in Marietta, Ohio, where she also directs the Worthington Center for Teaching Excellence. Her research focuses on literature of the dispossessed, examining how individuals and groups assemble narratives to fill gaps in history.

Scarred Language: Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts Luísa Maria Flora Abstract Miss La Trobe stood there with her eye on her script. ‘After Vic.’ she had written, ‘try ten mins. of present time. Swallows, cows etc.’ She wanted to expose them, as it were, to douche them, with present time: reality. But something was going wrong with the experiment. ‘Reality too strong,’ she muttered. ‘Curse ’em!’ She felt everything they felt. 1 Between the Acts (1941), Virginia Woolf’s response to Nazism, the 2nd world war and patriarchy, is set at the very end of the period between the wars and largely written while Britain suffered the Blitz. Her reaction to (the threat of) war is a daring formal experiment, her final attempt to incorporate life in art, facing the limits of representation. While the house and the pageant provide the text with both outer and inner frames, underlining continuity, stability of place, family and history, its actual form undermines and eventually deconstructs this whole façade. The imminence of war threatens to fracture and rip apart humanity, art and culture. In such circumstances, Woolf confronts the dislocation and demolition of language, the suffering of language. In Between the Acts both everyday language and literary language are permanently tormented by means of allusions, blank spaces, (mis)quotations, spoken and unspoken words, clichés repeated over and over again, predictable narrative situations revisited and parodied, the use of verse, drama and novelistic devices subverted in a deliberate process where the general syntax of the novel is taken to pieces, dismantling former conventions and readers’ expectations. ‘The gramophone gurgled Unity – Dispersity. It gurgled Un…dis… And ceased’. 2 Presenting the demise of civilization through the decay of language, Woolf brings the war into her text, in a characteristically ambivalent lament for tradition and celebration of its collapse. Key Words: Virginia Woolf, language, suffering, Second World War, experiment. ***** Language began as a tool to identify things and keep stock, and without a common language it is difficult to work together; (…). But words are not simply our tools; they often take us places we did not expect. It is imagination that gives a sense of hope, progress and the future. 3

136

Scarred Language

__________________________________________________________________ A few days after the publication of Between the Acts, a review for the Listener summarizes what may be considered the novel’s main design: [Woolf] describes a summer day, and stages in it a pageant of English history, thus packing ages of change, separation and vicissitude into a few hours. (…) Memory has inevitably a large place in [it]; memory which (…) opens like a gulf beneath the ordinary surface of life, displaying a strange and disconcerting landscape. The memory is not confined to the actual lives of people who remember; but goes far back. 4 These observations appropriately focus on the pageant, acted, ‘on a June day in 1939’ 5 and the centre to which every sequence of roughly chronologically connected epochs and historical events converges. The successive display of cultural periods, generations, social types and literary modes enables the text to be, as Woolf had confided to her diary, ‘all kinds of forms in one book. (…) poem, reality, comedy, play: narrative, psychology, all in one. Very short.’ 6 In 1938 Virginia Woolf, uneasy witness to the build-up of tension which will shortly lead to the 2nd World War, faces yet another artistic challenge. An alternative fiction, like an alternative future, or, to put it bluntly, any future, must be imagined. So why not engage with the artists’ plight and experience the suffering of language by exploring different forms before it is too late? When, under the threat of impending war, not only the veneer of western civilization but some of its foundational beliefs are cracking, ominously suggestive of the regress to a prehistoric state, respectful tribute to previous cultural forms, traditional literary conventions, deferential fictional proprieties can no longer be lavished on a text. The new war threatens to tear up a social and political (inter) national situation that Woolf forebodes will bring about the destruction of the cultural legacy she still recognises as her own. All the walls, the protecting and reflecting walls, wear so terribly thin in this war. […] There’s no standard to write for: no public to echo back: even the ‘tradition’ has become transparent. Hence a certain energy & recklessness – part good – part bad I daresay. But it’s the only line to take. 7 Woolf’s tear up of linguistic and literary syntax is her way out of such a predicament. When everything around her is at risk, previous rules, even of her own making, no longer apply. More than ever before Woolf responds to the looming fracture of civilization with fictional transgression. She defies language conventions, narrative expectations, the norms of novelistic and other genres. ‘Never once did she do the same thing over again.’ 8

Luísa Maria Flora

137

__________________________________________________________________ As imagining Between the Acts offers Woolf the opportunity to explore the legacy handed down through language and to experiment with a new form, so does the yearly performance of the village pageant provide its author, Miss La Trobe, with yet another occasion to reach out to her audience. La Trobe strives to expose what she considers the unchanging nature of humankind, its farcical follies along with its noble craving for mutual understanding and companionship. The pageant, acted for the benefit of the local church’s new lighting system (which may actually have little use because of the probable blackout in the near future), functions within the novel as the unifying device which allows Woolf to, ‘bring together an unusual range of personages and interests (…), and to free them from the restraints of convention sufficiently to give her creative power full play.’ 9 Woolf confronts the dislocation and demolition of language, the suffering of language. In Between the Acts both everyday language and literary language are permanently tormented. The general syntax of the novel is tortured and taken to pieces, by means of blank spaces, typographical gaps, allusions, (mis)quotations, songs and nursery rhymes, spoken and unspoken words, alliterations and assonances, clichés repeated again and again, predictable situations revisited and parodied, the use of verse, drama and narrative devices deliberately subverted, accommodating a cooking recipe, a newspaper article or a library collection. Dismantling former conventions and readers’ expectations, this is a literature haunted by (the threat of) war, dreading its destructive impact, its appalling devastation. Trying to free herself from the constraints imposed by war on aesthetic creation, aware that such endeavour is nearly impossible to achieve, ‘(…) the war – our waiting while the knives sharpen for the operation – has taken away the outer wall of security. No echo comes back. I have no surroundings,’ 10 Woolf chooses not to include any open references to the conflict. ‘[T]he stylistic daring is shaped by her response to war as the cognitive disorientation recorded in her diaries becomes inscribed into the fictional world.’ 11 But out of the pageant, this ‘skimble-skamble stuff’, 12 Miss La Trobe, ‘a slave to her audience’, 13 still hopes and manages to engender artistic illusion, to ‘brew emotion’, 14 to glow with glory if only ‘for a moment behind her tree.’ 15 Between the Acts’ experiments are much too extensive to be revealed here – only a few hopefully eloquent examples will be given. The text is divided into sixty-seven unnumbered sections, separated by typographical spaces which more often than not seem disconnected while, at the same time, building a chronological as well as emotional tension that will eventually culminate in the two succeeding finales, the pageant’s and the book’s. A metafictional self-awareness pervades the novel and literary echoes, quotes and references accompany several characters, mostly though by no means exclusively the Oliver family group. 16 Such awareness returns over and over, above all in Isa Oliver’s amateurish ‘abortive’ 17 poetic ambition, and Miss La Trobe’s professional apprehension.

138

Scarred Language

__________________________________________________________________ ‘The library’s always the nicest room in the house,’ she [Isa] quoted, and ran her eyes along the books. ‘The mirror of the soul’ books were. The Faerie Queen and Kinglake’s Crimea; Keats and the Kreutzer Sonata. There they were, reflecting. What? What remedy was there for her at her age – the age of the century, thirty-nine – in books? Book-shy she was, like the rest of her generation; and gun-shy too. Yet as a person with a raging tooth runs her eye in a chemist’s shop over green bottles (…) lest one of them may contain a cure, she considered: Keats and Shelley; Yeats and Donne. Or perhaps not a poem; a life. (…) Or not life at all, but science – Eddington, Darwin, or Jeans. None of them stopped her toothache. For her generation the newspaper was a book; and, as her father-in-law had dropped the Times, she took it and read: ‘A horse with a green tail…’ which was fantastic. 18 The structure and performance of the pageant, whose surface is rambling, messy, flimsy and precarious, full of misunderstandings and puns (some of which the novel shows to be accidental), contribute to bring about a new form. Both La Trobe and Woolf engage in the fracture of any recognizable aesthetic syntax opening a gulf in literary traditions. Their formal experiments and attempts to incorporate real life suffering in art are pursued through unexpected techniques. Facing the limits of representation both artists deliberately challenge predictable responses and put their audiences to the test. Louis Kronenberger, attacking the novel in his review, came unintentionally close to recognition of Woolf’s attempt at a new way of expressing herself. He objected that ‘[she] came to be preoccupied by words and phrases, by literary tags and echoes and the bright harness of tradition (…)’, further reproaching that some of the people she introduced have ‘frustrated and fractured lives’ and ‘instead of exploring them, [Woolf] makes us sit with them as they watch a pageant.’ 19 He deplored that ‘the pasteboard dramas’ of the pageant ‘completely overshadow the [sic] flesh-and-blood’ 20 characters and wrote: Even an ironic intention of showing that the real people are as dead and done for as the stage puppets cannot justify Mrs Woolf dabbling in human beings while expending great space and effort on her Sir Spaniel Lilylivers and mid-Victorian Eleanors. 21 In the audience of the pageant, particularly in those spectators which the text follows more deliberately, the family and its two unexpected lunch guests, the reader does not come across fully developed characters. And Miss La Trobe, yet

Luísa Maria Flora

139

__________________________________________________________________ another of Woolf’s artists, is also, by design, a briefly sketched figure. But they all are distinctive enough to act as the reader’s companions throughout the novel and they operate within a wide imaginative space where each has its own role to perform. ‘Our part,’ said Bartholomew ‘is to be the audience. And a very important part too.’ ‘Also, we provide the tea,’ said Mrs. Swithin. ‘Shan’t we go and help?’ said Mrs. Manresa. ‘Cut up bread and butter?’ ‘No, no,’ said Mr. Oliver. ‘We are the audience.’ ‘One year we had Gammer Gurton’s Needle,’ said Mrs. Swithin. ‘One year we wrote the play ourselves. The son of our blacksmith – Tony? Tommy? – had the loveliest voice. And Elsie at the Crossways – how she mimicked! Took us all off. Bart; Giles; Old Flimsy – that’s me. People are gifted – very. The question is - how to bring it out? That’s where she’s so clever – Miss La Trobe. Of course, there’s the whole of English literature to choose from. But how can one choose? Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I’ve read; what I haven’t read.’ ‘And leaving books on the floor,’ said her brother. ‘Like the pig in the story; or was it a donkey?’ 22 Pointz Hall, the outer frame of Between the Acts, and the traditional pageant, its inner frame, both ostensibly underline continuity, resilience of place, social and cultural history, family and community, and then recurrently deconstruct, demolish this façade. Returning to a linguistic and (meta) literary pattern that foregrounds the pressures within the Oliver household and the community at large, the novel all but implodes the reader’s expectations. The space is open and exposed, offering no actual protection. The main characters inhabit a personal and historical cul-de-sac and, while each of them responds (or, more to the point, fails to respond) differently to the current predicament, the count-down to war is inexorable. Vulnerable to the all intrusive violence of war, the community is impotent and largely unaware of its approaching doom. Alert to the technical devices Woolf uses to address the aesthetic problems she is confronting, Alice Wood comments: Rather than affirming the importance of England‘s literary heritage as an elevating and civilizing force, the elusive intertextuality of Between the Acts presents literature as shattered into pieces and unable to offer shelter from the onslaught of night and violence which hovers portentously at the novel‘s close. 23

140

Scarred Language

__________________________________________________________________ Art is considered just as defenceless as an island or maybe a whole civilization. Brooding over the land, the impending disaster and imminent destruction lurks in the near future. 24 Attentive to the community’s inner social divisions, highly critical of much of her own cultural and social inheritance, the writer nevertheless treasures the English tradition. Conscious of the vulnerability of any imaginative effort, she mourns the loss of values still somehow shared, and the suffering their devastation involves. Her intentional challenge to conventional expectations and predictable plots is also a means of honouring this legacy, ‘creating art that subtly transforms our perspectives by enacting in its form a subversive content.’ 25 Woolf confronts adverse circumstances by revisiting, recycling, deconstructing and tentatively rewriting significant moments of English history. Traditionally correlated to communal feeling and cultural inheritance, the pageant is both elegiac representation and parodic celebration of a way of life on the brink of dissolution. It ‘fails to unite the spectators, and their comments in the intervals and after the performance only confirm their separateness’ 26 and Woolf privileges its reclaiming of former texts and epochs. The tune changed; snapped; broke; jagged. Fox-trot was it? Jazz? Anyhow the rhythm kicked, reared, snapped short. What a jangle and a jingle! Well, with the means at her disposal, you can’t ask too much. What a cackle, a cacophony! Nothing ended. So abrupt. And corrupt. Such an outrage; such an insult. And not plain. Very up to date, all the same. What is her game? To disrupt? Jog and trot? Jerk and smirk? Put the finger to the nose? Squint and pry? Peak and spy? O the irreverence of the generation which is only momentarily – thanks be – ‘the young.’ The young, who can’t make, but only break; shiver into splinters the old vision; smash to atoms what was whole. What a cackle, what a rattle, what a yaffle – as they call the woodpecker, the laughing bird that flits from tree to tree.’ 27 On the other hand, the whole text, particularly the pageant’s shocking finale, suggests that this may be one last opportunity to come together. Mystified to find themselves disjointed and exposed in a myriad of reflecting surfaces, the spectators are dis-oriented by the disarray of present-day experience. Out they come, from the bushes (…) Holding what? Tin cans? (…) Old jars? (…) And the mirror – that I lent her. My mother’s. Cracked. What’s the notion? Anything that’s bright enough to reflect, presumably, ourselves? Our selves! Our selves!

Luísa Maria Flora

141

__________________________________________________________________ Out they leapt, jerked, skipped. Flashing, dazzling, dancing, jumping. Now old Bart…he was caught. Now Manresa. Here a nose…There a skirt…Then trousers only…Now perhaps a face…. Ourselves? But that’s cruel. To snap us as we are, before we’ve had time to assume…And only, too, in parts…That’s what’s so distorting and upsetting and utterly unfair. (…) The hands of the clock had stopped at the present moment. It was now. Ourselves. So that was her little game! To show us up, as we are, here and now. 28 As Anna Snaith perceptively realized, [t]he episode in which the cast recite fragments of their lines, thus collapsing the chronology, destroys the notion of a progressive narrative, as well as adding to the dizzying effect of intertextuality, since the actors are creating a new scene by quoting from their own script. The mirror scene extends the boundaries further by including the audience in the pageant, (…). 29 Woolf, in a characteristically ambivalent lament for tradition and celebration of its collapse, brings the war into the text presenting the demise of civilization through the suffering of language. Literary decorum requires less atypical features or a more dependable narrative sequence. Under current circumstances it is difficult to maintain any form of articulate interpretation of experience. Between the Acts brings such disarray to the forefront by recurrently dis-ordering the expectations of artists, performers, characters, literary structures and audiences, i.e. also the reader’s. If a whole civilization has blundered language cannot help being scarred. Before language fails her, Virginia Woolf writes: Here came the sun – an illimitable rapture of joy, embracing every flower, every leaf. Then in compassion it withdrew, covering its face, as if it forebore to look on human suffering. 30 As the novel’s final curtain descends, La Trobe, a sense of hope and the future waiting in the wings, is starting anew.

142

Scarred Language

__________________________________________________________________

Notes 1

Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts, ed. Mark Hussey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 129. 2 Ibid., 144. 3 Alberto Manguel, A Cidade das Palavras [The City of Words] trans. Maria de Fátima Carmo (Lisboa: Gradiva, 2011), my translation into English. 4 Edwin Muir, ‘Review in Listener, July 1941’, in Virginia Woolf. The Critical Heritage, ed. Robin Majumdar and Allen McLaurin (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), 443-5. 5 Woolf, Between the Acts, 55. 6 Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie, eds., The Diary of Virginia Woolf (London: Hogarth, 1985), V, 238. 7 Ibid., 304. One of Woolf’s means of self-preservation when she perceives that her civilization is threatened is ‘reading the whole of English literature through…By the time I’ve reached Shakespeare the bombs will be falling. So I’ve arranged a very nice last scene: reading Shakespeare, having forgotten my gas mask, I shall fade far away, and quite forget…’ Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, eds. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautman (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975-80), VI, 466. 8 Elizabeth Bowen, ‘The Principle of Her Art Was Joy: Virginia Woolf's Diary Reveals Her Deep and Intense Relationship to Her Writing’, review of A Writer's Diary: Being Extracts From The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Leonard Woolf, The New York Times, February 21, 1954, accessed 28 August 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/08/reviews/woolf-diary.html. 9 B. G. Brooks, Review of Nineteenth Century, December 1941’, in Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage, eds. Majumdar and McLaurin (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), 459-60. 10 Olivier Bell and McNeillie, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, V, 299. 11 Hana Wirth-Nesher, ‘Final Curtain on the War: Figure and Ground in Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts: World War II’, Style, FindArticles.com, accessed August 29, 2011, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2342/is_n2_v28/ai_16528206/. 12 Woolf, Between the Acts, 69. 13 Ibid., 69. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 100. 16 It is ‘a highly intertextual work, laden with fragmentary allusions to (…) poetry, drama and prose as well as folkloric sayings and references to popular culture.’ Alice Wood, ‘The development of Virginia Woolf’s late cultural criticism, 1930-

Luísa Maria Flora

143

__________________________________________________________________ 1941’, (PhD diss., De Montfort University, 2010), accessed August 29, 2011 http://hdl.handle.net/2086/4806, 233. 17 Woolf, Between the Acts, 11. 18 Ibid., 14-5. 19 Louis Kronenberger, ‘Review in Nation, October 1941’, in Majumdar and McLaurin, Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage, 451. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Woolf, Between the Acts, 43. 23 Wood, The Development of Virginia Woolf’s Late Cultural Criticism, 233. 24 Of course, as Woolf proceeded with her text, the near future became the present. 25 Mark Hussey, ‘Living in a War Zone: An Introduction to Virginia Woolf as a War Novelist’, in Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality, and Myth, ed. Mark Hussey (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 10. Hussey refers originally to what he considers a Woolfian pattern of occlusion of war throughout her fiction not to Between the Acts. 26 Alex Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 320. 27 Woolf, Between the Acts, 131. 28 Ibid., 131-2, 33. 29 Anna Snaith, Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations (London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 2000), 149. 30 Woolf, Between the Acts, 17. I’m indebted to Strode’s review for bringing this particularly felicitous passage to my attention. In his words ‘[it] ‘seems to epitomize the attitude, the prose style, the whole art of Virginia Woolf.’ Hudson Strode, ‘Review in The New York Times, October 1941’, in Majumdar and McLaurin, Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage, 447.

Bibliography Bowen, Elizabeth. Collected Impressions. London: Longmans Green And Co, 1950. ———. ‘The Principle of Her Art Was Joy: Virginia Woolf’s Diary Reveals Her Deep and Intense Relationship to Her Writing’. Review of A Writer's Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf, edited by Leonard Woolf. The New York Times, February 21, 1954. Accessed 28 August 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/08/reviews/woolf-diary.html.

144

Scarred Language

__________________________________________________________________ Brooks, B. G. ‘Review article: Nineteenth Century, December 1941’. In Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage, edited by Robin Majumdar and Allen McLaurin, 452-460. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975. Hussey, Mark. ‘Living in a War Zone: An Introduction to Virginia Woolf as a War Novelist’. In Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality, and Myth, edited by Mark Hussey, 1-13. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1991. Kronenberger, Louis. ‘Review in Nation, October 1941’. In Virginia Woolf. The Critical Heritage, edited by Robin Majumdar and Allen McLaurin, 450-452. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975. Manguel, Alberto. A Cidade das Palavras. Translated by Maria de Fátima Carmo. Lisboa: Gradiva, 2011. (Original English version 2007). Muir, Edwin. ‘Review in Listener, July 1941’. In Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage, edited by Robin Majumdar and Allen McLaurin, 443-445. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975. Snaith, Anna. Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations. London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 2000. Strode, Hudson. ‘Review in The New York Times, October 1941’. In Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage, edited by Robin Majumdar and Allen McLaurin, 446-447. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975. Wirth-Nesher, Hana. ‘Final Curtain on the War: Figure and Ground in Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts: World War II’. Style. FindArticles.com. Accessed August 29, 2011. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2342/is_n2_v28/ai_16528206/. Wood, Alice. ‘The Development of Virginia Woolf’s Late Cultural Criticism, 1930-1941’. PhD diss., De Montfort University, 2010. Accessed August 19, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/2086/4806. Woolf, Virginia. Between the Acts, edited by Mark Hussey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. ———. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautman. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975-80.

Luísa Maria Flora

145

__________________________________________________________________ –––, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, edited by Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie. London: Hogarth, 1984. Zwerdling, Alex. Virginia Woolf and the Real World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Luísa Maria Flora is Associate Professor of the English Department, Faculdade de Letras, Universidade de Lisboa and Principal Investigator at ULICES (University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies).