The Method of Pain

In Visceral Poetics (ON Contemporary Practice), poet Eleni Stecopoulos’ recent book on, among other things, struggling with chronic pain while trying to write a dissertation about Antonin Artaud and Paul Metcalf, Stecopoulos writes about her frustration with being undiagnosable. Physicians “had no way to relate my pain, thus rendering it not only idiopathic but de facto idiolectical: my own private language.” Fed up with the limitations of a medical system that can’t help her, she speculates that the Western compulsion for classification itself produces illness. “What cannot be classified becomes equivalent to waste.”

Artaud was ill throughout his life and in this is a kind of guide for Stecopoulos. He made, as she writes, “a method of pain.” His Theater of Cruelty was at once a theory of theater and an expression of constant physical agony. Getting no help from doctors and seeking anything that might alleviate her suffering, Stecopoulos takes instruction from Artaud and self-treats with metaphor. She does things like assign colors to degrees of pain in order to translate it, change it. “Blocking out the energy, the color, of pain—with its own likeness—finding its form, realizing its movement—can translate pain into theater.” This method of pain suggests a way through: “It is not just that somatic conditions would influence the work but that they might block out, dictate, its very form and movement.”

The character Justine, played by Kirsten Dunst in Lars von Trier’s apocalyptic myth Melancholia, knows the method of pain and idiolects. She becomes unreachably limp and speechless, surrounded by privileged miseries and narcissistic alienations, nested in gorgeous landscapes, wearing the finest clothing and eating the finest food, suffering horror in aristocratic rooms. Beautiful, rich, engaged to be married, she has immobilizing depression. She has just undergone a miserable failed wedding ceremony, inauspiciously scheduled days before the apocalypse. For Earth is doomed to be hit by its mirror image, another blue planet, the eponymous Melancholia. The collision is global warming and the sixth great extinction. It’s also a white privilege apocalypse, given that film’s setting is one of surrealistically extreme white wealth.

In contrast to Justine, who opens herself to the oncoming abolition of her class (we are told the whole world will be destroyed, but all we see is the destruction of this .1% enclave) once it’s clear Melancholia will hit the earth, the patriarch of the family prefers to save himself—by killing himself—before he can be killed at the expense of his family who he thus abandons to their terror. Or to their inventiveness, in Justine’s case: although seemingly ill and incapacitated, Justine is the one, in the end, who provides the...