Guest Editor's Introduction: Pain's Plurals and Narrative Disruption: Communicating Pain and Honoring Its Telling

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• Guest Editor's Introduction:Pain's Plurals and Narrative Disruption: Communicating Pain and Honoring Its Telling
• Sara Wasson (bio)

How to narrate an illnessin fairer climates andto fair-weather figures.

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How not to.

—Amy Allara¹

Pain may be a wind, a mist, live burial, a rubbish tip, a concrete suit, shattered glass, a knife.² Discussions of pain can readily become a list of the vivid metaphors created as people reach for language in extremity.³ Each of these metaphors—and this entire theme issue—is an example of the way pain generates words: it inspires telling. Yet despite such an abundance of language, a refrain of "invisibility" remains disturbingly prevalent in the lived experience of many people with pain, both mental and physical (and indeed pain problematizes that divide in multiple ways). This introduction to this issue will review and contextualize relevant recent debates in the cultural studies of pain. One of my primary aims in curating this issue is to acknowledge that insofar as pain experience poses challenges to representation, that is less a function of any intrinsic unspeakability of pain, and more of a varying cultural legibility of pain. Expectations of illness story—in the sense of both the events and the narrative of those events, the way they are told—has a direct impact on what kinds of pain experience [End Page 283] can most readily be heard, and who is heard. Cultural contexts and expectations of illness story influence what can be heard in pain, what can be known about it, and who is respected as knowing. These are matters of epistemic justice.⁴

Each article in this issue examines writing which brings pain vividly to life, and shows how a particular telling of pain requires unsettling certain conventions of writing or illness expression. While narratology notes the difference between story (events, plot) and narrative (the telling of those events), the essays in this issue are less concerned with precise narratological anatomization of narrative, and more interested in the cultural work done by narratives, by the telling of events within specific forms.⁵ Writing pain may require disruptions, textual experimentation and the breaching of cultural expectations of what narratives should do and who should tell them.

Pain takes many forms and has many temporalities. In the form of "chronic" or persistent pain, for example, it affects over 20 percent of all adults in the US, and for 12 percent of those people the pain severely impacts multiple parts of their life.⁶ Global estimations of chronic pain range between 20 percent and 27 percent, with local variations far in excess of this.⁷ Chronic pain is defined as pain that lasts for more than six months, and can be as severe as acute pain; it can impact employment, relationships, and even suicide risk; and its prevalence has been severely exacerbated by the legacies of the COVID pandemic and Long COVID.⁸ Yet many people who live with chronic pain describe feeling that their suffering is not visible: pain can be "Unseen. Unequal. Unfair."⁹ Responding to such crises requires initiatives economic, social, medical, and cultural. This theme issue stems from the need to expand the representational strategies, imagery, and imaginative models available to all those engaged with representations of pain. The essays here explore multiple chronic pains that need to be more visible, including: the legacies of Black, Native American, and First Nations systemic oppression; chronic physical and mental pain which resists recovery or closure and requires more ambiguous labels; gynecological pain and stigma; and grief from child loss.

Saying that pain may be invisible is not to say that it intrinsically resists representation. After Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain (1985), the idea of pain as unrepresentable became something of a critical refrain. In her analysis of the devastation wrought by torture, Scarry says, "Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language."¹⁰ Many critics have challenged Scarry's claim.¹¹ Hilary [End Page 284] Mantel, for example, praises the efficacy of metaphor, the "devil's vocabulary" of "singing aches, of spasms, of strictures and cramps...