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  • Writing in Pain: Literature, History and the Culture of Denial
  • Alice Audoin (bio)
Vaheed Ramazani. Writing in Pain: Literature, History and the Culture of Denial. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

It is Ramazani’s perception of a distressed Baudelaire that inspired the title Writing in Pain. “Baudelaire puts pain in writing by putting writing in pain, that is, by miming textually both the structure of physical aggression and the destructive effects of grave sentient distress” (119). Vaheed Ramazani explores how the concept of “pain” has been evolving in different literary and sociohistorical contexts, from late nineteenth-century France to our contemporary post-modern Western world. If pain is potentially present in all cultures and at all times, its manifestations in Western cultures are subsumed under the dialectical relationship between irony and the sublime. To support his argument, the author and critic Ramazani revisits pain in three major literary works of nineteenth-century France: Au bonheur des dames, L’Education sentimentale and Le Spleen de Paris. A detailed and engaging close reading of each work bolsters the critic’s conclusions about pain in relation to irony and the sublime at the end of each chapter.

The author’s project is clearly laid out in the introduction, whose multidisciplinary theoretical content also forebodes the impressive horizon of expectations the reader might rightfully expect. Its thesis—namely, that “irony’s “egalitarian” oscillation between pain and power, or between the recognition of pain and the denial of pain, serves as a foil to the sublime’s attempt to subsume, once and for all, pain to power, recognition to denial” (7)—gives an idea of Ramazani’s critical scope and ambition.

Freudian analysis frames the author’s psychological take on pain and war in the first chapter. After examining “the institution and practice of war as a core feature of state fetishism” (25), Ramazani surmises that “there exists a fundamental structural affinity between fetishism, sublimity, and conventional forms of war discourse.” Ramazani asserts that war is the masculine way of giving birth. Correlatively, the relationship the infant maintains with her mother is analogous to the relationship citizens of the same country cultivate with their nation-state. The structure of pain, argues Ramazani, revolves around the “body image,” itself an instable figure, since life is renewed everyday and since neurocognitive aspects of the brain are incessantly changing.

This example illustrates Ramazani’s approach to his subject in its totality: “It is because the truth of the referent is never simply given that referential truthfulness—accuracy, if you will—is a goal that we must uphold as well as continually reexamine.” The first chapter, and to a lesser extent, the following chapters, engage flexibly with the reader’s mind. The essence of Ramazani’s assertions is instability. The critic fiddles with the multiple definitions that each term comports in various disciplines. Moreover, his affirmations derive from an attempted reconciliation between the terms of binary oppositions—“(nature and culture, gender and sex, reason and affect, pleasure and pain)” (52)—each of them dialectically construed. [End Page 1010]

A literary approach to pain is the object of chapters 2, 3 and 4. Following his portrayal of war as the virile way of giving birth, Ramazani demonstrates that Zola’s use of militaristic vocabulary in Au bonheur des dames seals “a ‘male’ incursion into ‘female’ territory.” If violence is mostly presented here as ontological deterritorialization, the author is nevertheless convincing in showing the ability of the androgynous hero of Bonheur to transcend binarisms, and to thereby desublimate pain.

In chapter 3, the critic steps away from the gendering of war in order to enter more deeply into the dichotomy of irony versus sublime on which the whole book is articulated. Psychology gives way to neurocognitive science; history’s chronology unwinds in order to show history as a nervous system (the title of chapter 3). The primordial positioning of History in this chapter reveals a more Marxian approach that sheds light on irony in L’Education sentimentale. The developing telos from irony to the sublime pertains to the dialectical dialogue between both terms, which like other terms in different binarisms, consist of multiple definitions: “The axis of intellect and...

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