Elaine Scarry’s treatise The Body in Pain explores pain as a force that “makes” and “unmakes” the world, from the perspectives of both those who experience and those who administer it. Early in this book, she observes that in the context of torture, the infliction of pain supposedly has the purpose of gaining information, but notes that “just as the motive for punishing those imprisoned is often a fiction, … so what masquerades as the motive for torture is a fiction” (28). Later in this book, Scarry approaches pain in a more general sense, characterizing it as a state without intention except when the imagination constructs and assigns meaning to it. Scarry writes,
“Of course, it is probably inaccurate to identify an essentially objectless state as an ‘intentional state without an object’ since only by having an object does it exist in an intentional state: in isolation, pain ‘intends’ nothing; it is wholly passive; it is ‘suffered’ rather than willed or directed. To be more precise, one can say that pain only becomes an intentional state once it is brought into relation with the objectifying power of the imagination: through that relation, pain will be transformed from a wholly passive and helpless occurrence into a self-modifying and, when most successful, self-eliminating one” (164).
These analyses of related aspects of pain, of the inherently passive yet traumatic experience of torture and the inherent aimlessness of pain without an imagined meaning, provide an intriguing approach to the 1981 hunger strike. One can interpret engaging in a hunger strike, and especially seeing it to its natural end, as an act of self-torture, in which the striker is simultaneously the active party inflicting pain onto himself with a perceived intention, and the passive party receiving this pain. Being a prisoner is a deeply and inherently demeaning experience because of the loss of power over the self implicit in living according to the agenda of another, submitting to the schedule and will of both the prison guards as people and the state as a grander, more abstract oppressive force. Understanding this, the 1981 hunger strike gains a new significance, becoming not just a way to take a stand for POW status and legal recognition for IRA prisoners, but also a way for those prisoners themselves to reclaim control over their bodies and identities. Here, self-starvation, especially that which ultimately leads to death, is a way not just to protest internment, but also to reify the self.
Of course, as Scarry notes, the experience of this pain is only significant when one assigns meaning to it. A hunger strike without a cause is merely anorexia. Death at one’s own hands without a cause is merely suicide. These manifestations of the same pain do not and cannot take on the same connotations of heroism or reverence that a hunger strike does. By assigning the meaning of Irish freedom to a hunger strike, the experience of this pain becomes noble, and death becomes the self-sacrifice of a martyr. That Bobby Sands and his fellow hunger strikers embraced this and reveled in their pain reflects this imagination and construction of meaning.
Notably, the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising, especially Padraig Pearse and Thomas Clarke, underwent a similar translation of their pain in the face of their own executions, which they arguably expected and even embraced in advance of the rebellion itself. This is especially pertinent in the case of Clarke, whose prison diaries from a few decades prior to the Rising communicate themes of denying the body and the mind overcoming the physical, which are echoed throughout Bobby Sands’ writings from during his hunger strike. Moreover, in the case of Pearse, one of the most notable stories about him comes from a prison guard present at Kilmainham Gaol the day of his execution, who recorded that Pearse whistled as he walked to meet the firing squad. All of these men reveled in their own death and suffering, and, not coincidentally, are all honored as heroes and martyrs for the cause of Irish republicanism.