‘A Petty Form of Suffering’

All living creatures, including inorganic ones, live inside – and thus with – a skin. More often than not, this context or relationship of containment is taken for granted: it is rarely made explicit and then mainly by dermatologists, beauticians, advertisers or pornographers. But when life within a containing (or not so containing) skin becomes a problem, we need to consider it psychologically. This article studies a series of textual examples, ranging over two millennia, three languages and a variety of modes of approach, of the phenomenon of itching – a condition that separates the sufferer, for whom it is no less harrowing than pain, from the onlooker, who may be intrigued, amused or repelled. I will begin with a discussion of how one man thought about the skin in general and lived with his own inherited psychical skin in particular, and then move on to a set of literary instances of skins that irritate, torment and reveal.

Didier Anzieu (1923–99) was the replacement child of a replacement child. His mother Marguerite was born in 1892, less than two years after a sister of the same name had died as a result of severe burns. Thus she carried with her the fearful inheritance of another person’s burning skin, and indirectly passed on this ‘tragic destiny’ to her child (Anzieu, 1991: 20). In an interview in 1991, Anzieu said:

I might put it this way – it sounds banal, but in my case it seems true: I became a psychoanalyst to care for my mother. Not so much to care for her in reality, even though I did succeed in helping her, in the last quarter of her life, to find a relatively happy, balanced life. What I mean is, to care for my mother in myself and other people. To care, in other people, for this threatening and threatened mother…(Anzieu, 1991: 20).

The idea of the mother enclosed inside her child is typical of the adventurous inversions of the idea of containment that Anzieu develops in his writings.

Looking back to his childhood, Didier Anzieu describes himself in a draft autobiography, as ‘unloved, the son of unloved people’ (Anzieu, 1991: 36). But on another occasion he characterizes himself as over-loved:

I couldn’t go out of doors without being bundled up several times over: jumper, coat, beret, muffler. The layers of my parents’ care, worries and warmth never left me, even when I lived far away from home. I carried it like a weight on my shoulders. My vitality was hidden at the core of an onion, under several skins (Anzieu, 1991: 14–15).

Thus the skin, with its material and virtual extensions, is both protective and stifling, troubling because of its very ambiguity. As we shall see, itching is one instance of the ‘toxicity’ of that ambiguity.

Anzieu’s theory of the skin-ego first appeared in book form as Le Moi-peau in 1985 and was reprinted in an expanded form in 1995. It is premised on the central importance of the body to psychical life. In Freud’s time, ‘what was repressed, both in the speech of individuals and in collective representations, was sex’ (Anzieu, 2016: 23); yet in the 1980s, according to Anzieu, the ignored and repressed issue was the body. Since Lacan, the stress on language had meant that the body was not being psychoanalytically theorized; yet ‘every psychical activity leans anaclitically on a biological function’ (Anzieu, 2016: 44). Anzieu’s aim was to fill this gap: ‘Psychical space and physical space constitute each other in reciprocal metaphors’, he wrote in 1990. ‘The skin-ego is one of these metaphors’ (Anzieu, 1990: 58).

The context for his analysis is not only psychological but also social. In the late 20th century (and surely still today, see Bauman, 2012 [2000], or the ubiquitous media rhetoric of globalization, migrancy, epidemiology that surrounds us, not least in the hysterical retrenchment of the Brexit vote), the typical patient is no longer a neurotic suffering from hysteria or obsessions but a borderline case (that is, on the border between neurosis and psychosis) whose problem is a lack of boundaries. In the life of the mind, similarly, science has moved to the relations of borders: Anzieu cites recent advances in maths, biology and neuro-physiology that made them into sciences of interfaces, membranes and borders; and in the life of the embryo the ectoderm forms both the brain and the skin; thus ‘the centre is situated at the periphery’ (Anzieu, 2016: 9).

Like any shell or peel, the skin has a double surface – ‘a protective one on the outside and, underneath it or in its orifices, another layer which collects information and filters exchanges’ (Anzieu, 2016: 10) – and it is this complex structure of surfaces, rather than the old image of thought penetrating through into a truth-core, that can help us understand our physical, psychical and intellectual worlds in a different way. As Anzieu puts it:

The skin is permeable and impermeable. It is superficial and profound. It is truthful and deceptive. It regenerates, yet is always drying out. … It provokes libidinal investments that are as often narcissistic as sexual. It is the seat of well-being and seduction. It provides us with pains as well as pleasures. … In its thinness and vulnerability, it represents our native helplessness, greater than that of any other species, but at the same time highlights our evolutionary adaptability. It separates and unites the various sense-faculties. In all these dimensions – and my list is far from exhaustive – it has the status of an intermediary, an in-between, a transitional thing. (Anzieu, 2016: 19)

The concept of a ‘skin-ego’ is not only metaphorical, then: it arises out of the lived experience of the very young child, in which the skin-ego is ‘wrapped’ (adequately or poorly) in the sensations, emotions and responses of carers, which include speech and singing, caresses and gazes, feeding and holding – or, in cases of neglect or abuse, excessive or empty sensations. In its earliest days, a baby not only receives but also gives out signals. In the mother–child dyad, the child is no passive partner: by a sort of ‘feedback’ loop, it solicits as much as responds and can withdraw as much as be neglected. Because touch is the first sense-faculty to develop embryonically, ‘the skin is the basic referent to which we spontaneously relate the various other sense data’ (Anzieu, 2016: 66). And because touch is the only reflexive sense, it gives rise gradually to the reflexivity of thought. Thus, ‘to have an Ego is to be able to turn in on oneself’ (Anzieu, 2016: 67). The baby develops the phantasy of ‘an interface, represented as a skin common to the mother and the child, with the mother on one side and the child on the other’ (Anzieu, 2016: 67) – again an illusion of reciprocal inclusion that is ‘revived later in life in the experience of being in love, in which each of the lovers encloses the other in their arms while at the same time being enclosed by them’ (Anzieu, 1995: 85). But just as love can fail, the common skin can appear too tight, too loose or violently torn away, leading to pathologies of the skin-ego.

Anzieu describes eight main functions of the skin-ego, each of which develops aspects of the metaphor linking skin and self, and they lead, later, to eight corresponding functions of the thought-ego. In each case, he also offers examples of the pathology, which is the negative potential of that function. The eight functions are: holding [maintenance]; handling or containing [contenance]; protection against stimuli [pare-excitation; in Freud, Reizschutz]; individuation [individuation]; consensuality [consensualité] or inter-sensoriality; sexualization [soutien de l’excitation sexuelle]; libidinal recharging [recharge libidinale]; and inscription or signification [inscription des traces]. But there is an extra, ninth function, which, like the last fairy at the christening, crowns the positive with a negative: the skin, as conditions like asthma and eczema show, also has a capacity for self-destruction or toxicity [activité toxique] – which is what I turn to now.

Here are three quotations. The first is from André Gide’s Journal of 19 March 1931:

The itches I’ve been suffering from for months now (or rather, for years, with interruptions) have recently become intolerable and made it impossible for me to get any sleep at all in the last few nights.

… On both legs, from the ankle to the calf, and on my arms (but here less violent and more spread out), it’s like an incessant provocation to scratch myself until the skin is worn off. One resists only with the greatest difficulty and by perpetual efforts; I force myself not to give in, knowing by experience that the relief is minimal and having, last time I let myself do it, given myself a nasty wound.

Actually, nothing shows on the outside: it’s just underneath the skin, like a poison trying to escape – an injection of extract of bedbug.

… it seems to me that a real pain would occupy one’s attention less and altogether be more tolerable. And a real pain is, in the scale of misfortunes, something more elevated, more dignified; itching is a petty form of suffering, impossible to own up to, ridiculous. People have sympathy with a person in pain; someone who wants to scratch himself just makes them laugh. (Gide, 1954 [1931]: 263–4)

The second is from Lorette Nobécourt’s first novel, La Démangeaison [Itching] (1994):

Less than six months after I was born I got a monumental case of psoriasis, proof of my infamy and difference – scabies, in a word, the kind they treat with regular small shots of arsenic – my skin-disease, a symptom visible to everyone and soon to me too. Over the years this condition changed sporadically into leukoplasia, which invaded my mouth, placing me in isolation like a mad person.

I scratched myself to the utmost, and I can announce officially here that anyone who has not known uninterrupted itching has little idea of hell. This dreadful thing, which kept me cut off from the world for so long, well before I could even speak, this thing that kept me a virgin for so many years.

It would start early in the morning after an appalling night: I would wake up, turn over and over before I found some rudiments of calm sleep, even though already I was hacked to pieces by my nails. Sometimes I was woken by rain, or the smell of blood. What pain was it exactly that drew me from my rest? What state did I find myself in? … A weird taste, a savour of death if ever there was one, or of terror, like mashed spiders’ shit, filled my mouth and I didn’t even want to get rid of it. I was dizzy with my flying scurf, literally overrun by this vile pruritus. Often I would get up and pour icy water over my skin, covered in those hateful hieroglyphs. (Nobécourt, 1994: 16–18)

The third is from the book of Job: ¹

There was a man in the land of Uz named Job. That man was blameless and upright; he feared God and shunned evil. Seven sons and three daughters were born to him; his possessions were seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen, and five hundred she-asses, and a very large household. That man was wealthier than anyone in the East.

The Lord replied to the Adversary [often translated as ‘Satan’ – השטן], ‘See, all that he has is in your power; only do not lay a hand on him’. The Adversary departed from the presence of the Lord. (Job 1: 1–3, 12)

Everything Job has is successively taken from him. Even after he throws off his clothes and cuts off his hair, he still worships God. Then:

The Adversary answered the Lord, ‘Skin for skin – all that a man has he will give up for his life. But lay a hand on his bones and his flesh, and he will surely blaspheme you to your face.’ So the Lord said to the Adversary, ‘See, he is in your power; only spare his life.’

The Adversary … inflicted a severe inflammation on Job from the sole of his foot to crown of his head. He took a potsherd to scratch himself as he sat in the ashes. His wife said to him, ‘You still keep your integrity! Blaspheme God and die!’ But he said to her, ‘You talk as any shameless woman might talk! Should we accept only good from God and not accept evil?’ For all that, Job said nothing sinful. (Job 2: 4–10)

What do these three texts tell us? The Gide text is all about the irritation of itching. I’d like to begin with his last point. He contrasts the way people think of itching with how they think about pain. Pain, essentially, is tragic; itching is comic. Readers of Gide might recall the character who suffers most from itches: the pseudo-tragic hero of Les Caves du Vatican [The Vatican Cellars] (1914), the Catholic Amédée de Fleurissoire who sets off on a journey to rescue the Pope from his supposed incarceration in the Vatican cellars and finds himself in a seedy hotel where, as well as being seduced out of his married virginity by a cheery prostitute, he is plagued by bedbugs, boils and other figures of the pathetic grotesque written on the skin. In Gide’s fiction and also in his thinking more generally, Catholicism – that religion of institutions, so easily exchangeable in Les Caves with freemasonry – is comic, while Protestantism, his own religion, which focuses on the individual’s conscience and direct relation to the Bible and God, is tragic. Fleurissoire’s quixoticism is absurd – and even his death at the hands of the peachy-skinned young Lafcadio is an event we are not encouraged to take seriously.

At the same time (in the paragraph I have given in italics, and which he omitted from the Journals published in his lifetime) it is clear that there is something deadly serious about the compulsion to scratch. That compulsion is not simply a wish to repair the disturbed boundaries of a skin-ego, but something more directly physical, indeed sexual. It has close echoes to his adolescent horror of masturbation and his irresistible urge to do so, which appears most fully in the early, autobiographical Les Cahiers d’André Walter [The Notebooks of André Walter] (1891), but also in the gentle Boris of Les Faux-monnayeurs [The Counterfeiters] (1925) and much of Gide’s confessional writing. His adult sexuality was above all masturbatory, and he attributed the ‘freakishness’ (Martin du Gard, 1993: 232) of his multiple orgasms to the fact that, as a child, he held himself back from completing the masturbatory act: ²

This series of shockwaves without culmination, which had become a regular habit with him, may have been the cause of the peculiarities of his disposition today, for he would repeat them often, sometimes a whole night long, without ever allowing himself to commit the ‘full sin’. (Martin du Gard, 1993: 233)

In his memoir Si le grain ne meurt… (2001 [1926]), where his peculiar masturbatory practices are discreetly noted in the narrative of one of his first sexual experiences, Gide also cites several occasions where he lamented – but by implication later celebrated – the sense that ‘I’m not like other people!’, a fact that connects to the Protestantism, the skin conditions, the pederasty and of course the gift of writing (Gide, 2001: 166). In these ways, Gide implicitly elevates the indignity of itching into his version of election, inseparable from both creativity and sexual desire. In the latter, his version of undesire – the pursuit of pleasure which ends in a sudden swerve – is surely compatible with the obsessive futility of scratching.

Much of this, in a more violent language, reappears in the Nobécourt text. Her first-person protagonist, Irène, writes at a pitch of linguistic intensity that demonstrates both horror and triumph. She blames her condition, her ‘pitiful difference’ (Nobécourt, 1994: 84), first on her family, the ‘they’ who offer her what she reads as hypocritical kindness, and later on society in general: ‘I dug into my skin because it was the only way to make a stand against this confused world oozing with mindlessness’ (Nobécourt, 1994: 96). By scratching, she is surely trying to mark, or create, the kind of boundaries lacking in the over-fluid, ‘oozing’ world of liquid modernity. But, as the final phrase of my earlier citation shows, her condition is inseparable from her linguistic gifts. At first, she finds relief reading in the school library, mainly because the air-conditioning needed by the books also gives her a cool freshness on the skin; later, when she writes, she finds temporary relief from her symptoms. ³ Unlike Gide, she does not contrast itching with pain. For her the scratching, which is also a ‘delving/rummaging/excavation’ [fouillement], and both external and internal, is on a continuum with pain; and later – through both masturbation and in bed with a Gide-like boy who is attracted rather than repelled, in sexual activity in which she can experience her itches being scratched for her – with pleasure. The stress on perversity, which she discovers at last after all those years of virginity (again, like Gide, there is the joy of coming-out from an originary itchy skin), is also directly linked to her talent as a writer. After she murders her lover, she seems to end up relatively content, shut off from society in a prison that is literally her asylum. In Nobécourt’s text, then, there is a kind of recuperation, but it is one that depends on refusal: the hard-won seclusion of the incarceration from which, in a noble French tradition, she sends forth her writing, appeases a skin that has always been garrulous.

And now to Job. What this text reveals is the sublimity of abjection. Job never curses God, despite the extreme humiliation, loss and degradation to which he is subjected. The skin condition is the final stage of being stripped of all he possesses. At last, having lost his children, home, flocks and herds, and all external wealth, he is attacked ‘skin for skin’, as ‘the Adversary’ puts it. He scratches himself with a shard of broken pottery (heresh חרש) found among the ashes (efer אפר) he is sitting on.

In the Bible, of course, the classic humiliating skin condition is the so-called leprosy. So-called because the Hebrew word tzara’at (צרעת) is now acknowledged to refer to psoriasis, rather than Hansen’s disease. ⁴ Leprosy causes more acute disfigurement of the face and other extremities, affecting the voice as well as skin colour, and itching may be no part of it, but what it shares with other conditions is the traditional separation of the affected individual from other people – by a complex body of laws based not so much on realistic fear of contagion as on ‘religious implications’ (Richards, 1977: 53).

In Leviticus 13, the priest is told to examine any skin sore and declare its bearer unclean and subject to isolation; after seven days, if the sore has not spread or changed, there is a further seven days’ separation and then the person may either be pronounced clean and discharged or deemed to be leprous, unclean and isolated permanently. The same quality can be found in clothing or, interestingly, in houses: ‘If, when he examines the plague, the plague in the walls of the house is found to consist of greenish or reddish streaks that appear to go deep into the wall’ (Leviticus 14: 37), the remedy for this is to close the house, remove the affected stones and scrape the walls, pouring the dust away in an ‘unclean place’ (Leviticus 14: 37) outside the city.

‘Leprosy’ is, of course, used more often as a metaphor than to refer to a specific condition. We all know of instances where goodness is measured, in however far-fetched a way, by the individual’s willingness to ‘touch lepers’. This is evidenced in the phenomenon of the rois thaumaturges, described by Marc Bloch (1973 [1924]), kings in France from around the year 1000 and in England from a century later, supposedly curing skin conditions such as ‘scrofula’ by touch in imitation of Jesus. A more recent example is a caption for a photo of Princess Diana in Hello magazine the week after she died: ‘She made a point of reaching out to those whom others were loathe [sic] to touch, including AIDS sufferers, lepers, and these Indian Untouchables (above)’ ( Hello, 1997: 15). History is full of Christian saints and martyrs vying with each other in the level and type of disgust they could overcome in the name of sanctity – and recent work, from Mary Douglas (1966) to Julia Kristeva (1980), or William Ian Miller (1997) and beyond, retains this fascination with the abject. As I shall explore in a moment, it is the instability of the body borders, the detritus of the body, which counts. This touching of the leper, like many other of these ‘acts of charity’, takes no account of course of the wishes of the recipient of the gesture, which is itself as flamboyantly visible as the condition it is meant to anoint; the following scene from Sartre’s play Le Diable et le bon Dieu [The Devil and the Good Lord] (1951) is only somewhat funny. Unlike my three main examples, it turns the focalization around and allows a comic effect to arise precisely out of the incongruity of the actions of a would-be saint. Sartre’s protagonist Gœtz dares his friend Teztel to kiss a leper:

GŒTZ

If the Church can love the lowest of its children, without disgust or repulsion, what stops you from kissing him? (Tetzel shakes his head.) Jesus would have embraced him. I love him more than you do.

A pause. He walks up to the Leper.

THE LEPER

through gritted teeth:

Not another one who’s come to do me the old kiss-the-leper turn. (Sartre, 1951: 137–8)

Social scientist Ray Jobling has researched psoriasis from a sociocultural as well as personal viewpoint; he notes:

The signs of skin disease threaten the fundamental system of categorization we employ to order all things. They dirty the pattern. Only clear controls, physical and social, will suffice to restore ‘good order’ and normality. Accordingly, treatment, again both physical and social, may well be strict and ritualized, authoritarian and arguably even punitive. (Jobling, 2000: 98–9)

Psoriasis is ‘dirty’ principally because it involves the shedding of scaly skin. If ‘it is the skin (including the hair) which is most immediately the self … a disordered skin can put us at a disadvantage’ (Jobling, 2000: 96), belying the idea of stable body-schema (Schilder, 1978 [1923]) on which our sense of self depends. Thus, ‘skin disorder spoils identity [because] the psoriasis sufferer is all too aware that his [sic] bodily boundary is constantly crumbling away’ (Jobling, 2000: 97).

As we have seen, Anzieu sees the ninth, negative function of the skin-ego as ‘toxicity’. What exactly does this mean? He notes that:

In the structure of allergies, the signals of security and danger are reversed: instead of being protective and reassuring, what is familiar is seen as bad and thus shunned, while unknown things, instead of seeming disturbing, are attractive; this leads to the paradoxical reaction of allergy sufferers, and also of drug addicts, who avoid what might do them good and are fascinated by what will harm them. (Anzieu, 2016: 115)

One instance of this fascination is the dangerous alternation of asthma and eczema, in which the individual dices with two versions of the skin-ego, internal and external, refusing in both cases to allow it to extend from a two-dimensional entity to three dimensions.

Asthma is an attempt to feel the wrapping of the bodily Ego from within: asthmatics fill themselves up with air to the point where they are able to feel the borders of their body from below and are assured of the expanded limits of the Self; in order to maintain that sensation of an inflated Sac-self, they hold their breath in, at the risk of blocking the rhythm of respiratory exchange with the environment and suffocating. … Eczema is an attempt to feel the bodily surface area of the Self from the outside, with the skin’s painful lacerations, rough feel, humiliating appearance and at the same time a wrapping of warmth and diffuse erogenous excitations. … The imaginary skin that covers the Ego becomes a poisoned tunic, suffocating, burning and disintegrating. One may call this a toxic function of the Skin-ego. (Anzieu, 2016: 116–17)

By way of illustration, let us return to Nobécourt’s protagonist Irène who uses the same epithet to describe her social protest:

I held on to my illness as my definition. I didn’t need to give an account of myself, my face spelled out my refusal; that was good. It declared me guilty, devilish, showed I had let myself be invaded by my pityriasis [a scaly skin condition]. My mind was clear, I knew; I was on my way to a space of pure interiority, close to indifference, an intolerable toxicity. (Nobécourt, 1994: 94)

Specifically on itching, Anzieu draws a conclusion that could be said to connect Gide’s sexualized scratching with Irène’s relational activity: if I scratch my skin, it is both a reproach and an appeal to my family. He begins by describing a shameful compulsion tinged with eroticism:

As far as skin problems are concerned, scratching is one of the earliest modes of turning aggression back onto the body (rather than onto the Ego, which presumes a more highly developed Super-ego). The resulting shame derives from the feeling that once one begins to scratch one will not be able to stop, that one is led by a hidden and uncontrollable force, that one is opening up a breach in the surface of the skin. Shame, in its turn, tends to be erased by the return of erotic excitation through the act of scratching, in an increasingly pathological circular reaction. (Anzieu, 2016: 22)

But later it is extended, voluntarily or not, into an aggressive demand to others:

Though they first appear spontaneously, [skin] ailments are often maintained or aggravated by compulsive scratching, which transforms them into symptoms the subject can no longer do without. … In such pathomimetic disorders, one sometimes finds cases in which the skin lesion is deliberately irritated and exacerbated; … the primary benefit is not sexual but consists in the tyranny they are able to wield over those around them, as well as the prolonged satisfaction of triumphing over medical know-how and power; thus, the drive to mastery is at play but it is not the only factor. There is a sneaky undercurrent of aggression in this behaviour, an aggression, which is the reaction against a nagging inner need for dependency that these malingerers find intolerable. They attempt to recover this need by making other people dependent on them, people who replicate the earliest objects of their attachment drive, who frustrated them in the past and who seem ever since to have been inviting revenge. … Because their Skin-ego is so fragile, malingerers veer between a terror of abandonment if the object of their attachment is not within reach and a terror of persecution if he or she is too close. (Anzieu, 2016: 35–6)

To Anzieu, then, itching is a plea; to Nobécourt, a triumphant act of revolt. Both recognize the interpersonal nature of the condition, the privacy of bodily sensation and activity turned outwards towards others who intervene by view or touch. Other people are never not involved, even when, for Gide or Job, abjection is an excessively isolating state. Jobling talks of ‘stigma fallout’ (Jobling, 2000: 100, italics added), an effect on those caring for or living with the psoriatic, which is little less boundary-breaking than the literal falling out of skin-scales read as ‘dirt’. But he also writes:

It must be said that there is a possibility of secondary gains in all this. Even morbid experience … can enhance life rather than totally blighting it. Major skin disorder makes one sensitive not just to one’s own feelings but, by extension, to those of others. (Jobling, 2000: 100)

Rather less sunnily, we have seen positive effects in the steadfast stoicism of Job (he teaches God a lesson, after all) and the creativity of Gide or Irène – even in those who do not, like Gœtz, take their virtue in spoonfuls doled out to others.

How then does itching represent the toxic inversion of the Skin-ego? Even from these few examples, it seems to cover the full range of human discomfort. I shall close with a last quotation. Here is the child narrator of Sarah Winman’s When God was a Rabbit listening to her neighbour Mr Golan talking about ‘the meaning of suffering’:

I looked at his old hands, as dry as the pages he turned. He wasn’t looking at me but at the ceiling, as if his ideals were already heaven-bound. I had nothing to say and felt compelled to remain quiet, trapped by thoughts so hard to understand. My leg, however, soon started to itch; a small band of psoriasis, which had taken refuge under my sock, was becoming heated and raised, and I urgently needed to scratch it – slowly to start with – but then with a voracious vigour that dispelled the magic in the room.

Mr Golan looked at me, a little confused.

‘Where was I?’ he said.

I hesitated for a moment.

‘Suffering’, I said quietly. (Winman, 2011: 14)

Itching is an insistent and infuriating demand made by the body: just as a person cannot tickle themselves, so it is almost impossible to ignore the claims of an itch, which comes from the skin but seems to speak from the soul – we must not forget that Freud’s word for ‘the psyche’ is most often ‘die Seele’: the soul – so that it turns the inner out and the outer in. It seems inevitable that we refer this demand to something other than ourselves, for it arises on the boundary between self and world that is our psychical skin. In my textual examples we see a long but ultimately circular progression. With Gide, we begin on the smallest scale: itching, he insists, may look comical, but it is worse than pain, and it is always personal. Nobécourt’s protagonist likewise has no sense of humour, but she is also looking for someone else to blame for her suffering, casting outward to those who see or fail to see her: the family or the ‘oozing’ social world. Job knows his humiliation is externally produced – and this allows him to bear it, scratching patiently, for he is wrapped at least in righteousness. To these I have appended two other fictions that work to undo the metaphysical claims of bodily irritation by allowing the comic potential of itching to appear through indirect viewpoints: both Sartre and Winman deflate the grand scale of the first three texts – whether it is borne with clenched teeth or an air of resignation, they suggest that there is nothing saintly but perhaps much that is ‘voraciously vigorous’ about itching.