Embodying Enlightenment: Knowing the Body in Eighteenth-Century Spanish Literature and Culture (review)

Rebecca Haidt. Embodying Enlightenment: Knowing the Body in Eighteenth-Century Spanish Literature and Culture. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998.

This is a terrific and important book, full of original insights, fresh ideas, and superior scholarship. Haidt has focused on a topic which has substantial implications for our understanding of eighteenth-century literature and culture, but which critics of the Spanish eighteenth century have puzzlingly ignored. She looks at "old" literature and "known" authors from a completely new perspective, and coaxes out of them revealing (and frequently surprising) new insights. Her thinking is clear, her scholarship solid, and her documentation impressive without being excessive or pedantic.

In the Introduction, Haidt spells out the point(s) she will be trying to make, by explaining how the eighteenth century grappled with four ways of "producing bodily knowledge" and how the production of that knowledge grew from classical, medieval, Renaissance and Golden Age sources and precedents. While her book is not a history of this concept, nor a survey of it, she provides excellent historical and contextual information to guide the reader through an often complex morass of information. By looking at Feijoo (who pays much attention to the body in his work) she helps us see that knowledge of the body was a key component of "rational" thinking in the Spanish eighteenth century. Hence, the topic is hardly marginal to the Enlightenment project, but rather, as she will go on to prove over the course of the book, fundamental to the modern world's conception and understanding of itself. Haidt traces the idea that "the body is at the center of a cluster of practices and ideas engaging Enlightenment" (5).

Chapter 1 ("Naming the Body, Knowing the Body: Anatomy, Medicine and the Languge of 'Experience'") demonstrates how the eighteenth century overcame the general ignorance of the body which it inherited from previous centuries. "This abstraction, 'the body,' was a contentious site whose boundaries were being investigated as much by textual debate as by anatomical incision" (15). Haidt deftly guides us through the debates about the body, about knowing the body, and about naming the body, and she brilliantly connects that fragmented knowledge to language, that is, to how the thinkers of the eighteenth century grappled with ways to name what they were discovering with their eyes and scalpels (this is the time when the struggle over definition of such seeing and saying began in earnest). Haidt courageously swims into relatively uncharted waters; she consults un- or understudied texts, and links them to texts we thought we knew well (Feijoo and Torres Villarroel, for example).

That Feijoo supported Bacon's empirical methods rather than relying on received wisdom is hardly a new discovery, but the way Haidt analyzes the way Feijoo applied that method to his study of the human body (what is unseeable is unnameable, and ultimately, unknowable) is sophisticated and fascinating. She is fresh and gusty in her comparison of Torres and Feijoo on the issue of medical knowledge: "But Torres differs radically from Feijoo in the conclusions he draws from this knowledge: whereas Feijoo believed that medical experimentation could provide means for clarifying the workings of disease in the body, Torres takes medicine's fallibility as proof that it is vain, reckless and defiant of God's plans for man" (54). She is right, of course, and it's never been explained with more clarity or concision.

One of Haidt's numerous strengths is her ability to reason carefully and to explicate complex texts based on close readings. She does not wander off into obscurantist rhetoric nor couch her arguments in excessive theoretical musings; this book is fun to read.

Chapter 2 ("Seeing the Body") takes a look at erotic literature, primarily the poetry of the Spanish eighteenth century (Samaniego, Meléndez Valdés, Moratín padre, Iriarte). This section connnects with the section on Feijoo, and his (and his contemporaries') struggle to...