In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt writes that the bodily experience of great pain is “at the same time the most private [experience] and least communicable of all,” and “intense to the point of blotting out all other experiences”(50). Yet despite the intensity of its experience, pain “deprives us of our feeling for reality to such an extent that we can forget it more quickly and easily than anything else”(Arendt 51). We remember that we have experienced pain, yet we are unable to recall the actual feeling. Although Arendt suggests that pain is an inherently private experience which resists language, the experience of pain has been the subject of much great fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. In the sections that follow, I will outline Arendt’s conclusions on the human experience of pain, and explore how these conclusions align with representations of pain in several works of American literature and poetry.

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Arendt’s view of the body in pain is inherently tied to the dichotomy between the public and the private realm, and the decline of the public realm. Arendt traces this dichotomy back to ancient Greece, where the public and private spheres existed in sharp distinction to each other. Arendt suggests that the private sphere was a realm of deprivation and necessity, where family units were motivated by fulfilling basic needs for continued existence and procreation. In the household the man was oppressed by his need to command, while the wife and children were oppressed by their need to follow the man of the household. In contrast, the public or political sphere was “the sphere of freedom”(Arendt 30) and equality among men. Arendt writes, “to be free meant both not to be subject to the necessity of life or to the command of another and not to be in command oneself. It meant neither to rule nor to be ruled”(32). In Arendt’s view, the public and private realms existed in a clear hierarchy, with the private realm existing as the dark shadow of the public. The private realm was where childbirth and often death took place.

Arendt conceptualizes the public realm as the realm of appearance, where we are “seen and heard by others as well as by ourselves”(Arendt 50). It is this appearance to other men that Arendt says constitutes reality. On Arendt’s public-private dichotomy, Young Cheon Cho writes, “Privacy meant being deprived of things essential to humans, that is, of being seen and heard by other people”(5). The public sphere was also where men could achieve immortality through great deeds or great words.

According to Arendt, the public and private realms began to blur with the rise of the social realm in modernity. The social realm is “neither private nor public”(Arendt 28). In the modern age, Arendt suggests, “we see the bodies of peoples and political communities in the image of a family whose everyday affairs have to be taken care of by a gigantic, nation-wide administration of housekeeping”(28). We impose this family structure on the political sphere, creating from “a collective of families…one super-human family [that] we call a society” or nation(Arendt 29). Economic affairs, which were once relegated to the household, are now dealt with in the political or social realm. Arendt suggests that the public and private realms of ancient Greece disintegrated at the precipice of modernity, as the private realm subsumed the public, and issues previously limited to the private realm entered the public conversation. 

Despite this breakdown of the public-private dichotomy, Arendt emphasizes that both the ancient and modern public spheres were founded on action, which includes speech (Arendt 25). Speech allows the disclosure of one’s own image, of “‘who’ in contradistinction to ‘what’ somebody is”(Arendt 179). Because this self-disclosure through speech forms the foundation of all public life, experiences of the private realm which resist description are excluded from the public sphere. Arendt writes, “there are a great many things which cannot withstand the implacable, bright light of the constant presence of others on the public scene; there, only what is considered to be relevant, worthy of being seen or heard, can be tolerated”(51). 

Of all human experiences, Arendt suggests that pain is the most resistant to representation due to the inadequacy of speech to describe pain. In addition to resisting representation, Arendt says that pain has the unique ability to “deprive us of our feeling for reality”(51), as experiences of great pain are “so independent from the world that they do not contain the experience of any worldly object” (114). Arendt here emphasizes the alienating effect of pain, as the person in great pain is unable to perceive anything except the inner excruciating sensations, known to himself but to no one else. Of the three vita activa– work, labor, and action– Arendt says that the experience of pain is most similar to labor in its worldlessness, as during labor the human body “is also thrown back upon itself [and] concentrates upon nothing but its own being alive”(Arendt 115).

In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry echoes many of Arendt’s conclusions about pain’s privateness. Scarry writes that “physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it”, and reduces language to “the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned(4). In other words, during the experience of significant pain we are reduced from thinking and reasoning beings to sense organs; we are aware of pain and only pain.

While Arendt and Scarry’s assertions that the experience of pain is inherently private and resists or even destroys language may ring true for many readers’ subjective experiences of great pain, it also poses problems for those for whom the representation of pain is a critical aim, including artists of all types and activists. In her critique of the exclusion of pain from the public sphere, Cho points out that the success of humanitarian organizations such as Amnesty International rests on their “ability to verbalize…pain” and represent the experience of pain to those who are not in pain themselves. In The Human Condition, Arendt, quoting R.H. Barrow, says that “it is impossible to write a character sketch of any slave who lived…Until they emerge into freedom and notoriety, they remain shadowy types rather than persons”(Arendt 50). Similarly, Arendt wrote in On Revolution that the true curse of poverty is the obscurity which it casts over the impoverished, who become invisible to society.

These statements raise a significant question: how can we avoid repeating atrocious historical violence, and fight against current violence, if the pain of those who experience the violence is unrepresentable? For minoritized and oppressed groups, among others, the portrayal of personal truth, identity, and the subjective experience of pain– what Arendt describes as self disclosure or “disclosure of [one’s] own image”(175)– is often interwoven in artistic creations such as literature, music, and visual art. Is it true that these creations can never encapsulate the artist’s experience of pain, or are we simply shying away from the work that truly portrays pain and violence in the most graphic and pure forms?

To answer these questions, I will explore the representation of bodily pain in the medium that may come closest to encapsulating this most alienating of experiences: literature. I will examine the attempts of writers to represent pain in works across genres, focusing on Stephen King’s Misery, John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, and the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Max Ritvo. 

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The pain was somewhere below the sounds. The pain was east of the sun and south of his ears. That was all he did know.– Stephen King, Misery

When we think about the representation of pain in literature, our minds may first jump to Sylvia Plath, Ernest Hemingway, or Maya Angelou– famous authors known for their use of the written word to shed light on, and perhaps cope with, lives of hardship. Yet it is in Stephen King’s work that I found the most focused examination of the experience of physical rather than mental or emotional pain. While King is generally known as a horror writer, his many works cannot easily be confined to a single genre. His 1987 novel, Misery, diverged from much of his previous work in its exclusion of supernatural elements. It is a story, primarily, about a man in excruciating pain, and the struggle of a body and mind to cope with the far depths of human experience. The story follows Paul Sheldon, a well-known novelist who, after shattering his legs in a car crash, is rehabilitated by Annie Wilkes, an obsessive fan of his work. While Paul has found success with his romantic, chick-lit-esque Misery Chastain books, he dreams of being considered a “serious” author. And he thinks he may have just done it, with his newly finished manuscript for Fast Cars– a manuscript which he has on his person when Annie rescues him from the near-fatal car wreck.

Throughout the novel, King represents Paul’s pain through extended metaphor– rarely do we get a straightforward description of the type of pain experienced, or its specific location. As he becomes addicted the Novril, the pain medication which Annie provides him and uses to maintain her power over him, Paul comes to view his experience of pain and lack of pain as a tide which travels in and out over “a broken-off piling which had jutted from the sand” in a childhood memory from a trip to Revere Beach. In one scene, in which Annie withholds the Novril as Paul begs for it, King writes, “the tide had gone out and the splintered pilings stood bare, jaggedly real, things which could neither be avoided nor dealt with”(King 18). 

Through Paul Sheldon’s recollection of his childhood trip to the beach, King shares his own philosophy of extreme pain, and the way it is experienced. He writes:

“…and the blanket folded again, the piling had almost wholly reappeared, its blackish, slime-smoothed sides surrounded by scuds of foam. It was the tide, his father had tried to explain, but he had always known it was the piling. The tide came and went; the piling stayed. It was just that sometimes you couldn’t see it. Without the piling, there was no tide”(King 4).

King’s use of this metaphor for the experience of pain emphasizes what Arendt calls the “worldlessness” or “alienation” of pain. Paul’s reality becomes centered around pain and only pain: even when the pain is gone, it is still there under the relief, and he is preoccupied with when the pain will return. This cyclical representation of pain mirrors Arendt’s statement that “absence of pain is usually ‘felt’ only in the short intermediate stage between pain and non-pain”(Arendt 113). Furthermore, Paul’s use of a personal memory to make sense of the pain supports Arendt’s statement that pain is the most private of human experiences. While the reader has some access to Paul’s experience of pain through his recollections of the trip to the beach, the memory, and therefore the pain, is inherently personal to him, and incommunicable to the reader. 

It is not until Paul’s pain weakens slightly that he is able to make sense of who and where he is. King writes, “as the pain itself began not to recede but to erode…outside things began to impinge more rapidly until the objective world, with all its freight of memory, experience, and prejudice, had pretty much reestablished itself”(King 7). Here, King again speaks to the worldlessness of pain, which Arendt says “[does] not contain the experience of any worldly object”(Arendt 114). 

King’s representation of Paul’s pain also aligns with Arendt’s theories of pain’s existence or lack of existence in the private and public realms. As an author, Paul’s role is to be “seen and heard by others”(Arendt 50). Not only does Paul’s pain prevent him from writing, he is imprisoned by Annie, and thus unable to engage in self-disclosure with others. Furthermore, his one means of self-disclosure, his finished manuscript of Fast Cars, is taken from him: Annie forces him to burn it himself in return for Novril for his pain.  

In this sense, Paul’s experiences encapsulate many of Arendt’s statements about pain: its resistance to representation, its worldlessness, and its exclusion from the public realm. Yet while emphasizing the privateness of pain, King simultaneously undertakes the task of communicating Paul’s experience of pain to readers. Misery is a story about a man who is torn from public society not just by his physical imprisonment, but also by physical pain and the loss of his novel, through which he disclosed himself to other men and transcended mortality. It is ultimately this drive for self-disclosure and to be seen and heard by others that saves Paul: as he begins, at first unwillingly and at Annie’s orders, to write a sequel to his Misery Chastain series, he recaptures his ability to self-disclose and be seen, and eventually finds the strength to outwit and escape his captor. 

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The pain was creeping in her hands again and there was a new place. Her right hip ached angrily when she moved. She thought, so the pain will move toward the center, and sooner or later all the pains will meet in the center and join like rats in a clot– John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Written relatively late in his career, East of Eden was John Steinbeck’s self-proclaimed masterpiece, a family epic spanning multiple generations of two families in the Salinas Valley of California at the turn of the 20th century.  At the center of the story is Adam Trask, who grows up in an intense rivalry with his brother, Charles. Not far away from their farm, a girl named Cathy Ames is born with a “malformed soul”(Steinbeck 72). Cathy is vicious and manipulative; as a teenager she seduces a professor and drives him to suicide, and later she murders her parents through arson. When Adam finds Cathy badly beaten after an encounter with a whoremaster, he rehabilitates her and quickly falls in love with her. With her eyes on the Trask fortune, Cathy reluctantly marries Adam and moves with him to the Salinas Valley, where she gives birth to twins. 

In many ways, the pain represented in East of Eden is a generational pain or trauma that is passed down through the Trask lineage. Unbeknownst to Adam, Cathy’s twins were actually fathered by Adam’s brother, Charles. After giving birth, Cathy leaves Adam with the newborns, shooting him in the shoulder when he tries to prevent her from leaving. The twins, named Cal and Aron, mirror Charles and Adam in their tense and competitive relationship. Steinbeck is far from subtle with his biblical allusions: the two sets of brothers play out the tragic story of Cain and Abel. In addition to representing Abel to Charles’ Cain in the first part of the novel, Adam also clearly symbolizes the Adam from Genesis, father to Cain and Abel.

While Steinbeck meditates at length on emotional pain and generational trauma, it is only through his most villainous and inhuman character, Cathy, that he represents physical pain.  After leaving Adam in the twins, Cathy manipulates herself into a powerful position at a local brothel, eventually killing the Madame and taking over the brothel herself. Settled in her life of wealth and power, she begins to develop severe arthritis in her hands. 

After a lifetime distanced from other people by her inability to empathize with their emotions, Cathy is humanized by the pain in her hands. Steinbeck writes that “[Cathy] was almost glad when she learned that the pain in her hands was developing arthritis. An evil voice had whispered that it might be a punishment”(473). For the first time, Cathy questions her past actions. Steinbeck draws a clear link between Cathy’s physical pain and these seeds of moral qualms: descriptions of Cathy’s pain are often closely followed by self-questioning. He writes, “[Cathy] could almost feel her joints thicken and knot. Sometimes she tried to think of other things, even unpleasant ones, to drive the pain and the distorted fingers from her mind…Often in the night she thought of Faye…Was she sorry she had killed her”(502-503)? 

That Cathy’s pain brings out a more human and moral side of her connects to Arendt’s conclusion that “the human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms which can be removed without changing life itself”(120)–in other words, pain is fundamental to the human condition. Cathy’s experience of physical pain thus acts as an equalizer between her and the many victims of her malicious and calculating actions. After years spent driven by the external motivators of money and power, pain, which cannot “contain the experience of any worldly object”(Arendt 114) forces Cathy to reflect on her own being, as “one who is in pain really senses nothing but himself”(Arendt 310).

Cathy’s pain and regret eventually drive her to suicide through overdose. Steinbeck describes Cathy’s death as a disappearance, writing, “her heart beat solemnly and her breathing slowed as she grew smaller and smaller and then disappeared– and she had never been”(554). In The Human Condition, Arendt writes that “for the living, death is primarily disappearance,”(51), perhaps referring to the inability of the dead to be seen and heard among men. For Cathy, whose crimes and sociopathic nature relegated her to the private realm, death is a final disappearance following a life in which she never truly appeared, as she was “unable to transform into a shape fit for public appearance”(Arendt 51)

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There is a pain – so utter –
It swallows substance up –
Then covers the Abyss with Trance –
So Memory can step
Around – across – upon it –
As One within a Swoon –
Goes safely – where an open eye –
Would drop Him – Bone by Bone -Emily Dickinson, “There is a pain – so utter –”

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Pain – has an Element of Blank–
It cannot recollect
When it begun– Or if there were
A day when it was not –

It has no Future – but itself –
Its Infinite realms contain
Its Past – enlightened to perceive
New Periods – Of Pain. – Emily Dickinson, “Pain — has an Element of Blank”

In its entry on 19th century poet Emily Dickinson, The Poetry Foundation writes, “to make the abstract tangible, to define meaning without confining it, to inhabit a house that never became a prison, Dickinson created in her writing a distinctively elliptical language for expressing what was possible but not yet realized”(The Poetry Foundation). It is this mastery of the abstract which made Dickinson so adept at representing the experience of physical and mental pain.

Dickinson was an unusual character who spent most of her adult life living with her father, rarely leaving the house or allowing guests (The Poetry Foundation). Based on the many letters which she sent in lieu of accepting visitors, researchers have concluded that she likely suffered from panic attacks, agoraphobia, and possibly bipolar disorder(McDermott). Not only was Dickinson reclusive, her poems were unknown to all but her close friends until after her death. It was within these extremely solitary and private years that Dickinson wrote most of her poems– perhaps affirming Arendt’s suggestion that pain is the most private experience of all. 

In the poems, “There is pain – so utter” and “Pain – has an Element of Blank,” Dickinson’s portrayal of the relationship between pain and memory mirrors the writing Arendt would publish on this subject several decades later. Dickinson writes that pain “covers the Abyss with Trance / So Memory can step / Around – across – upon it.” Similarly, pain “cannot recollect  /  When it begun – Or if there were / A day when it was not.” Through these lines, Dickinson points to pain’s ability to “deprive us of our feeling for reality”(Arendt 51) to such an extent that we are unable to recall what it felt like to be in pain when we are not in pain, and visa versa. 

Yet while Dickinson writes that pain “has no Future – but itself,” the pain that she represented through her poetry did have a future, in which it was read, beloved, and seemingly understood by many. There’s nothing to suggest that Dickinson ever desired fame or sought a life in the public eye, and yet the public eye found her after her death. Perhaps, what makes Dickinson’s work some of the most successful in all of recorded history at representing the private experience of pain is the very fact that Dickinson did not write for a public that extended beyond her closest confidantes. Dickinson’s work raises questions of what it means to write for oneself versus to write for the public. While it is through the public life that Arendt says men can achieve immortality, it is perhaps the work done for private reasons that stands the best chance of representing private truths. 

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In the summer of 2014, I took a creative writing class for high school students at Columbia University. The class was taught by Max Ritvo, a Columbia MFA student. He was strikingly thin, his eyes owl-like behind thick lenses. Despites his small stature he was the kind of person you noticed and remembered, perhaps because when he spoke he was so animated and full of a child-like playfulness.

Through his poetry Max both embraced and battled with pain, pleasure, spirituality, and, more than anything else, death. At 16 he was diagnosed with Ewing’s Sarcoma, a rare kind of pediatric cancer. Though the cancer went into remission, it returned during his senior year of college. In early 2015, I went to a reading of his in New York. I couldn’t imagine how he did what he did– stand in front of a room full of people, his best friends, his parents, his fiance, and read poems about his own death, and laugh about them. 

Max’s poems, and even more so the way he delivered them in person, felt like raw and honest representations of his pain– both the physical pain of the cancer, and the emotional pain of grappling with the life he would lose and the people who would live on without him. Arendt says that pain resists language, and in a sense, I agree. No matter how many of his poems I read, I can’t truly understand what Max was experiencing. Yet it seems wrong to me to think that Max’s pain prevented him from being seen, or from “being among men”(Arendt 51). His life was full of people who loved him and knew him well. Language may not be able to represent the pure experience of pain, but I think it can come close. This seems to be true of human experiences in general– we will never have the words to describe exactly how we feel and who we are. 

Max died in August 2016, at age 25. For someone so young, he was a prolific and acclaimed poet. Perhaps his terminal illness gave him a sense of urgency to leave his mark. Arendt says that immortality is achieved in the public realm, from which pain is excluded. Yet what great writers, especially poets, who have attained immortality through words, do not write about pain? The topic of pain is so pervasive in great literature that Arendt would seem to question the ability of literature to communicate the human experience in general. Ultimately, while Arendt is correct in saying that we lack the language to fully express the experience of pain, there may be a middleground beyond the binary of private vs public, expressible vs inexpressible. Through language, we can at least approximate the experience of great pain. While these approximations will inherently be imperfect, they still allow the writer to be seen, heard, and understood by others, balancing the alienation and privacy of pain with the human drive to share even this most private experience.

Works Cited

Arendt, Hannah, and Margaret Canovan. The Human Condition. University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Cho, Young Cheon., and Bruce E. Gronbeck. “The Politics of Suffering in the Public Sphere: the Body in Pain, Empathy, and Political Spectacles.” The University of Iowa, 2009.

Dickinson, Emily, and Thomas Herbert. Johnson. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Little, Brown and Co., 1960.

“Emily Dickinson.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/emily-dickinson.

King, Stephen. Misery. Scribner, 2016.

McDermott, John F. “Emily Dickinson Revisited: A Study of Periodicity in Her Work.” American Journal of Psychiatry, 1 May 2001, ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.158.5.686.

Ritvo, Max. “Two Poems by Max Ritvo.” Two Poems by Max Ritvo | The Iowa Review, 2016, iowareview.org/from-the-issue/volume-46-issue-2-%E2%80%94-fall-2016/two-poems-max-ritvo.

Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain. Oxf. U.P.(N.Y), 1988.

Steinbeck, John. East of Eden. Penguin Books Ltd, 2017.