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1. DIAGNOSING GENIUS
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ONE DIAGNOSING GENIUS The Tropic Body and the Constitution of the Man of Letters [I]t is possible, in general, to establish that a brilliant and lively imagination requires either currently existing nervous concentrations or, at least, a disposition that is very close to their formation. This disposition itself would consequently seem to have to be regarded as a sort of illness. —Pierre-Jean-George Cabanis BEFORE I CAN TURN TO THE RHETORICAL STRATEGIES USED BY MEN of letters to “diagnose” Scott and Byron, the two poets who were consistently seen as the opposing possibilities for poetic genius in the late Romantic period, and before I can begin to demonstrate the connection between each poet’s poetry and politics, I need to clarify the historical conditions that drove critics in the Romantic period to adopt a rhetoric of health and disease in the first place.This chapter examines the medical work from approximately 1725 to 1825 that diagnosed both the reader of romance and the man of letters as subject to nervous disease.A new way of thinking about both the human and the social body came to the fore in the eighteenth century, one that then facilitated the figuration of Britain as an analyzable and diagnosable whole. In this figuration, civilization itself was seen as a sign of ill health—and learning of all sorts was thus characterized as a potentially unhealthy pursuit. To be civilized was a mark of both distinction and threatened extinction, a figuration that grew out of not only the ancient tradition of the melancholic great man but also a new rhetoric of nerves that was applied equally to the man of letters and to the woman of sensibility in the period. It is out of this conflation of traditions and tropes that the new figure of the man of genius emerged. Although at first lauded, genius was by the end of the eighteenth century a rather fraught category, conferring both authority and infirmity.1 By the Romantic period, the physician needed, then, to find a way to claim the authority of genius while extricating himself from the charge of disease, thus charging himself with the authority to make prognostications about the English social body at large. He did so by setting the profession of medicine 13 14 the perversity of poetry against both the dispossessing emotions of the literary imagination and the possessions of a luxury market, both of which were represented as contributing to civilization’s continuing corruption. The figure of the masturbator was particularly important for the emergent doctor, who pathologized this figure for the first time in the eighteenth century as a way to attack not just the sexual act but also the textual act of imaginative creation and reception. By pathologizing the imagination and its mass-market products, the late-eighteenthcentury medical researcher was able to distinguish his own professional activities from those of the hack writer, though, as we will see, he was still threatened by the analogous maneuvers of the quack doctor. It was this earlier model of medical professionalization that provided the Romantic man of letters with an idea of how to create the tropic body of high “culture” (in our modern sense) out of the earlier definition of “culture”: the husbandry of the human and animal body.The critic learned from the medic that the best way to safeguard his own form of genius from the charge of disease was by pathologizing both the market and the imagination. MAKING EVERY BODY NERVOUS For the eighteenth century, knowledge was not only power but also weakness.2 Increasingly throughout the period, the alarm was sounded about the dangers of scientific advancement and scholarly learning. As Samuel Cheyne puts it in his influential The English Malady (1733), “[S]ince this present Age has made Efforts to go beyond former Times, in all the Arts of Ingenuity, Invention, Study, Learning, and all the contemplative and sedentary Professions, . . . the Organs of these Faculties being thereby worn and spoil’d, must affect and deaden the whole System, and lay a Foundation for the Diseases of Lowness and Weakness” (37–38).3 Cheyne even offers himself up as characteristic example, finishing his treatise with “The CASE of the Author,” in which he attributes his health problems and his need for a special dietary regimen to his being part of “the thinking, speculative, and sedentary Part of Mankind” (246).According to Cheyne, the very markers of English civilization (improved...