“The Body in Pain”: An Interview with Elaine Scarry Elizabeth Irene Smith University of California, Santa Cruz

http://www.concentric-literature.url.tw/issues/Who%20Speaks%20for%20the%20Human%20Today/10.pdf

ELIZABETH IRENE SMITH: Does the problem of the difficulty of expression
apply to other forms of intense bodily experience, such as pleasure?1
ELAINE SCARRY: It is true that if something is intensely physical it can absorb all
of one’s energy so that one might not have any resources left over for speech. But I
do think that pleasure, unlike pain, is really language-building.
But what about an experience like orgasm, which seems difficult to describe?
It is true that we often think of lovers as speaking baby-talk, or resorting to
monosyllables, so one might say that language is backing up, the way it does when
one is suddenly put in pain: language not only disappears, but you can actually chart
its disappearance across the sudden reaching for monosyllables or for the kinds of
cries and whispers that one made before one learned language. But the fact of the
matter is that even intense sexual desire is productive of narratives, as witnessed by
the fact that we’ve got a huge number of wonderful stories about being in love, and
even acute desire is included in those stories.
If you think of other kinds of bodily pleasure, such as eating, one again sees the
fact that from Homer forward, people in a state of pleasure are often not alone with
their food, but in a very social situation—having a dinner party, moving into the


Immediate reaction:  since when is language necessary, or what kind of speech are you requiring here, exclamations are separate from formal exchange, it is more immediate than the construction of language, it is the starting point of language, not the other way around.