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Abstract
How do Goyas representations of the body disrupt the Enlightenments congurations of
the corporeal? If for eighteenth-century aesthetics the body is both the site of ideal beauty and
the limit of what can and may be represented, then Goyas panoply of monsters provides a
way of understanding other modes of reason(ing), other ways of representing the body and its
functions within culture. In his work there is a recuperation of those elements that seem to lie
outside the ken of the Enlightenment project: physicality, animality, hybridity, the grotesque,
the popular; a recognition of the animal nature of the body and the products of bodily
impulses and forces. A rethinking of the body would incorporate an understanding of its role
as a physical and social phenomenon in the constitution of the subject. Following on from
Paul Ilies concept of counter-rational Reason, which he denes as the opposite of a uniform
centre of rationality in representative thought, the rst half of my paper will consider Goyas
problematization of representation. My analysis of a selection of drawings from the collection
Los Caprichos (1799) will focus not just on the representation of bodies in the painters work
but on his exploration of bodies in their material varietycongurations of modes of
constructing the body. This examination of Goyas prolic pictorial negotiations and
adaptations of esh and world will draw upon contemporary approaches to theorizing the
body, namely the theories of Julia Kristeva and Elizabeth Grosz.
r 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
The year 1793 is generally regarded as a turning-point in the work of the Spanish
painter Francisco Jose! de Goya (17461828). Following his near-fatal illness the
previous year, Goyas art assumed signicant technical and thematic shifts as he
embarked on what Paul Ilie describes as an increasingly less rational and more
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Fig. 1. Francisco Jos!e de Goya: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (1799).
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B.M. Stafford, Body Criticism. Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine, The MIT
Press, Cambridge, MA, 1991 (repr. 1997).
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subject, not only created truths but also administered the powers of exclusion and
control. If for 18th-century aesthetics the body is both the site of ideal beauty and the
limit of what can and may be represented, then Goyas panoply of monsters provides
a way of understanding other modes of reason(ing), other ways of representing the
body and its function(s) within culture. Goya dissects the Enlightenment way of
looking at and explaining the body; his representations of the body disrupt
Enlightenments congurations of the corporeal. In his work after 1793 there is a
recuperation of those elements that seem to lie outside the ken of the Enlightenment
project: animality, hybridity, physicality, the grotesque, the popular; a recognition of
the animal nature of the body and of the products of bodily impulses and forces.
The theme of the asinine in the Caprichos, directed to exposing and condemning
the Spanish nobility at the end of the century, lends itself most obviously to a social
and moral reading. Education and ignorance, social abuse and oppression, or the
genealogical obsessions of a sector of the population are among Goyas ostensible
targets in the drawings devoted to the asinine subject. As a metaphorical
representation of popular sayings, No seas burro (Dont be an ass) and el muy
burro (the great oaf) the etching can be understood within a tradition that partakes,
in Teresa Lorenzos words, of the symbols and peculiar logic of Carnival language.9
On the other hand, it depicts in a metaphorical and satirical way how people
understand reality in accordance with their own assumptions. Let us focus on
Capricho 39 (Fig. 2), entitled Asta su Abuelo (Back to His Forebear), resisting
however the invitation to take the literal meanings offered by the manuscript
captions and explanations: This wretched animal has been driven mad by
genealogists and kings at Arms [heraldic ofcers]. He is not the only one and Asses
that pride themselves on their noble lineage are in fact asses back to their most
remote lineage [Pe! rez Sanchez and Sayre, 1989, p. 102].
Such scriptorial pointers do not contain or exhaust the scope of Goyas dispute
with the institutional preoccupations of his time. In particular, I wish to argue that
the 17th-century and early to mid-18th-century concept of representation
(Foucaults classical episteme) is being potentially challenged. The drawings,
preparatory drafts, and nal etching of Capricho 39, which details a mule in human
attire uncomfortably seated in his study reading a book might be linked back to
conventional portraits of contemplative gures in conventional settings for
meditation and reection. The nal version of the drawing, as in several of the
early drafts, depicts the mule looking out towards the viewer. The continuity
between the donkeys eye and the page, between vision and text, is broken by the
momentary pose of the model. The only exception to this pose is the preparatory
drawing of 17971798, in which the anthropomorphic gure, hooves on text as if
reading braille, is shown in prole. This scene of self-absorption, with its hint at the
9
According to T. Lorenzo, p. xciii (Carnival traditions in Goyas Iconic language, in: A.E. P!erez
S!anchez, E. Sayre (Eds.), Goya and the Spirit of the Enlightenment, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1989),
the language of folly, buffoonery, and Carnival remained in the 18th-century the only possible voice to
express a moral judgement freely and without concessions The translation of proverbs or colloquial
expressions into visual forms, then, will have a moral and satirical value.
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blindness of the reader (the pages of the pictured text are blank), is in keeping with
the theme of ignorant self-assurance running through the compositions. In the (nal)
1799 etching, the book held open to view displays a pictorial taxonomy of asinine
gures. The mimetic relationship established between the pictured reader and the
words in the text corresponds to 18th-century assumptions on the nature of the sign
and signication. It does not only correspond, then, to genealogy in its obsessive
courtly guise of pure lineages and noble roots (the heraldic emblem gured on the
study desk suggests as much), but also to a discursive organization symptomatic of
the logocentric drive towards uncontaminated, unproblematized categories. Like the
bats morphological ambiguity in The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, the
hybrid creature disrupts the continuity of identiable categories. Identifying itself in
the book, performing the cognitive operation of reading for identication, the
anthropomorphic gure seems assured of the semiotic transparency of language. The
gure of Capricho 39 is looking for sameness and difference which suggests
Foucaults thesis concerning the altered representation of reality in the 18th century
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M. Foucault, Les mots et les choses, The Order of Things. An Archaelogy of the Human Sciences,
Gallimard, Paris, 1966 (translated), Routledge, London, 1997 (reprint).
11
P. Ilie, El Templo de Minerva en la Espana del XVIII, Hispanic Review 59 (1991) 123.
12
The Caprichos belong, of course, to a long tradition of poking fun at mans foibles and pretensions.
Thus the gures and themes treated by Goya populate texts of the period.
13
In Spanish the word losa also means burden, which brings into the etching another meaning: the
crushing burden of human mortality.
14
J. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, Columbia University Press, New York, 1982.
15
E. Grosz, The body of signication, in: J. Fletcher, A. Benjamin (Eds.), Abjection, Melancholia and
Love, Routledge, London, 1990.
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fragile force. An old woman cowers in fear; amidst gaping eyes and mouths, a
convulsing body lies on the grounda corpse? It is as if the bodies had crawled out
from under this rock; yet it is unclear whether the stone is being raisedalong with
the resurrected guresor dropped. There is no epitaph written on this stone, no
! no se van (And Still They
engravings on its surface, but there is a caption: Y aun
Dont Go). Roberto Alcala! Flechas Vampirism in the work of Goya is an example
of a reading of Capricho 59 as a satirical commentary on contemporary beliefs in
vampireshence a reading which takes for granted the resurrection of the gures.16
16
R. Alcal!a Flecha, Vampirism in the Work of Goya, Goya 233 (1993) 258267. See also R. Alcal!a
! General de Aragon,
! Zaragoza,
Flecha, pp. 255257 (Literatura e ideolog!a en el arte de Goya, Diputacion
1988).
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He situates and reads the etching within the periods intellectual and popular
consideration of the vampire in Europe and its reception in Spain in the works of the
Benedictine scholar Feijoo, Jose! Cadalso, and Leandro Ferna! ndez de Morat!n.
According to Alcala! Flecha, the ambiguity of the title might be claried by the titles
of preparatory drafts, La Trampa (The Trap) and Salga lo que saliere (Whatever
May Emerge), which draw attention to the huge slab. This would be a reference to
the belief of cultivated minds in the impossibility of a dead body rising from the
grave and then coming back to it without removing the gravestone. Alcala! Flecha
admits that, although Goyas ultimate intention is out of our reach, the artists point
of departure is the visualization of a graphic joke [Alcala! Flecha, 1993, p. 263].
Goyas etching, then, would be an illustration of this absurd belief. Alcala! Flecha
traces the literature and the cultural ideas of Goyas contemporary milieu in order to
nd a rational and cohesive explanation for the vampiric gures: the origin, the point
of departure, for Capricho 59 would respond to a graphically literal and
metaphorical use of the word vampire in reference to political and religious
classes. To follow this line of argument would be to miss the caprichos interrogation
of representation itself. Alcala! Flechas concern with the genealogy of the work xes
its scope and its boundaries. How are we to view the deliberate ambiguity of the
Goyaesque vampire as well as the caption? The discontinuity between picture and
text is arguably an instance of Reason and its alter-ego Unreason.
The spine of the BookSymbolic order, religious discourse, discursive rectitude,
the scientic lexiconwould bind the body, delimiting its boundaries. Abjection is a
relationship to a boundary and represents what has been jettisoned out of that
boundary, its other side. In Kristevas words, abjection is:
[a] weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignicant, and
which crushes me. On the edge of nonexistence and hallucination, of a reality that,
if I acknowledge it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safeguards.
The primers of my culture. (1982, p. 2)
What threatens the clean and properthe paradigm of the clean and proper
bodymust be cast out, excluded. For Kristeva, the symbolic order, and the
acquisition of a sexual and psychical identity within it, can only exist by delimiting
the body. The activity of exclusion is necessary to guarantee that the subject takes up
his or her proper place in relation to the symbolic. The impossibility of purity is the
paradox of the abject: what you seek to exclude is constitutive of you. In Groszs
words, abjection is a reaction to the recognition of the impossible but necessary
transcendence of the subjects corporeality, and the impure, deling elements of its
uncontrollable materiality [Grosz, 1990, p. 108]. The body is a neglected entity in
that its nature is cleared of the dung of life, and it is divorced from any sense of the
eshed natural body [Stafford, p. 108].
The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters provides Ilie with a starting point and a
thread with which to weave his interdisciplinary study of 18th-century culture and
science. If, according to Ilie, the gure of Minerva is anything but transparent, her
disappearance or vanishing brings back the unsightly underside of Reason. Against
the ideal or conscious Minervan form, Goya invokes dreams, superstitions,
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fanaticism, and occultism: the elusive and monstrous subject of irrationality. Goyas
portrayal of the body in its grotesque and monstrous materiality, though generally
read as a satire on the vices of Spanish society, may also, I have argued, be
considered as an antidote to Enlightened congurations and aspirations. As Grosz
has shown, the body has suffered under Reason. By countering Reason and its
modes of representation, the Goyaesque body upsets the frameworks by which
binary thinking conventionally represented the corporeal. Goyas depiction of bodies
as bodies urges us to rethink the body. This rethinking would involve a reconnection
of the formally separated body and mind, and an investigation into the relationship
of the body to its culture. This article takes the rst steps towards an examination of
the Goyaesqueor grotesquebody as the site of that crisis in representation.