The Obstacles of Otherness: Experience vs Ignorance
Yet, the concept of experience, and more specifically the experience of pain, is something that also presents complications for the magistrate in his search for meaning in the story of the barbarian girl. Elaine Scarry in her text, The Body in Pain, suggests that the pain of someone else is something unknowable, “one might almost appear to be speaking about two wholly distinct order of events.” (4) The magistrate experiences something similar in the text. As mentioned previously he is alienated from being a participant in the process of torture, and therefore does not have experiences on which to draw on when he first approaches the girl. The magistrate constantly asks her to tell him about what her torturers did, but it is not just facts that he is after. The magistrate seeks much more than that, what he is truly trying to do is find her deepest and most secret feelings, something Scarry tells us is unattainable.
