Disfiguring the Body of Knowledge: Anatomical Discourse and Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy

Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting. ¹

Burton scholarship has always recognized that The Anatomy of Melancholy exceeds the bounds of a medical treatise, straying from its nominal aim to study a disease. The Anatomy encompasses such a vast wealth of Renaissance learning that less than a quarter of it actually deals with medicine, physiology, psychology, and psychiatry. ² Its strong polymathic impulse explains why Paul Jordan-Smith referred to it as an "omnium gatherum," and why Northrop Frye regarded it as a prose-fiction genre characterized by an encyclopedic range of subject matter. ³ Although critics rightly question the centrality of melancholy in Burton's text, they have not yet questioned the process by which Burton approaches knowledge, simply accepting the title's announcement of an anatomical operation. Ever since Frye chose to replace the cumbersome term "Menippean satire" with a more "convenient name," critics have been inclined to consider The Anatomy as a prototype for an anatomical genre--an intellectual or an encyclopedic dissection. ⁴ And more recently, escalating interest in early modern medicine and cultural materialism has given new life to the old commonplace of The Anatomy as an anatomy. ⁵

If the mere visibility of the sign "anatomy" is all the proof a reader needs, then nothing could be more preposterous than to argue that Burton approaches knowledge with a different cut. Besides the title page's apparent announcement, Burton's preface lists a selection of "Presidents," whose titles earmark them as anatomies. ⁶ But if the reader makes the effort to examine how anatomical discourse rhetorically opens up knowledge, then matters are not so semantically clear-cut. My epigraph "knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting" implies that there is more than one way to skin a cat. In Burton's polymathic text, his particular cut actually disfigures the body of knowledge. Whereas anatomical discourse enables a subject to project onto textuality a corporeal order and thereby to gain an imaginary mastery over knowledge, disfiguration brings out the monstrous condition of textuality, which does not permit the subject any imaginary identification. By comparatively tracing the anatomical cut with Burton's, I will explain how disfiguration produces the epistemological aberration known as The Anatomy. ⁷

A body of knowledge participates in a systemic misrecognition, what Vico, the famous eighteenth-century rhetorician, aptly calls an axiomatic ignorance through which man establishes an "imaginative metaphysics." ⁸ When discussing the ancients' predisposition for using corporeal tropes, Vico contends that man, in seeing himself as "the rule of the universe," becomes all things by not understanding them. ⁹ Marvelously anticipating Lacanian psychoanalysis in its sensitivity to the link between the imaginary and symbolic orders, Vico's observation applies just as much to anatomical as to microcosmic discourse. No matter how progressive for the history of science, Renaissance anatomical discourse is founded upon an axiomatic misrecognition--the notion that the body, an a priori structure, can make known the self and the world. ¹⁰ One compelling example is Helkiah Crooke's Microcosmographia, a medical compilation that celebrates the anatomical procedure by vaunting its transdiscursive application. Because "man is the rule and square of all bodies," an adage reiterated by Crooke, "whosoever dooth know himselfe, knoweth all things." ¹¹ And thus because anatomizing is the "most sure guide to the knowledge of ourselves," it is logically the most sure guide to knowledge in general, including, for Crooke, cosmology, politics, theology, and natural and moral philosophy. ¹² Because the human body, "the rule and square of all bodies," measures every disciplinary object as a unified corporeality, the anatomical cut, by revealing design, can comprehend any body of knowledge. ¹³

Since for Lacan, as for Vico, corporeal unity constitutes an epistemological misrecognition, the anatomist is susceptible to the lure of the imaginary order--the subjective realm responsible for narcissistic functions. ¹⁴ Praised as...