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"About suffering, they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position. ..." --W. H. Auden
"Musee des Beaux Arts"
WHAT CAN THE STUDY OF LITERATURE tell us about suffering? It is, of course, an impossible question, a sinkhole, a yawning chasm that dissertation directors warn against. It is also a question that opens up special difficulties because debates in contemporary theory have forced us to ask hard questions about such basic issues as the nature of interpretation, the boundaries of literature, and the relations between texts and the world. Literature, for example, is now routinely described as an ideological category that did not exist before the Enlightenmentits status threatened by such postmodern upstarts as discourse, ecriture, and grammatology.(1) A loose alliance of new academic disciplines has shown how once-canonical works of Western literary tradition relegate minority figures-i.e., women, blacks, and Asians--to, at best, marginal status. What literature has to tell us about suffering, in short, depends on basic decisions about what counts as literature and whose suffering matters.
The difficulties mount because current theory makes it often hard to say what literature has to tell us about anything. Some theorists hold that all texts are inherently undecidable or receive temporarily stable meaning only through their changing historical receptions by different interpretative communities. A move from theory to practice does not promise firmer ground. The individual texts to consider are numberless. "It is probably no exaggeration to say that the single most common subject of art," writes Walter Slatoff, "is some form of human suffering."(2) Practical critics in the analysis of specific texts often simply replicate contested theoretical assumptions. We can expect that Marxist critics will show how suffering is bound up with social class and with the means of production; psychoanalytic critics will show how it taps into mechanisms of desire; feminist critics will show how it follows the fault lines of gender. While recent literary debates have left us in no danger of oversimplifying a discussion of suffering, they may appear at times as merely a conflict among partisans of wholly incompatible ways of reading.(3)
A final difficulty--the presumed need to define suffering and to distinguish it from related or overlapping states such as grief and pain-would seem to...