Writing the Early Americas

A History of the Writerly Pox in the Eighteenth-Century Hispanic World

Juan Carlos González Espitia

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780813943169
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

Syphilis was a prevalent affliction in the era of the Americas' colonization, creating widespread anxiety that is indicated in the period's literature across numerous fields. Reflecting Spaniards' political prejudices of the period, it was alternately labeled "mal francés" or "el mal de las Indias." Sifilografía offers a cultural history that traces syphilis and its consequences in the transatlantic Spanish-speaking world throughout the long eighteenth century. Juan Carlos González Espitia charts interrelated literary, artistic, medical, and governmental discourses, exploring how fears of the disease and the search for its cure mobilized a transoceanic dialogue that forms an underside of Enlightenment narratives of progress.

Through a narrative revealing the transformation and retooling of ideas related to syphilis as a bodily contagion, González Espitia demonstrates the Spanish-speaking world's crucial relevance to a global understanding of the period in the context of current reassessments of Enlightenment thought. Broad in its scope, the book incorporates an extensive corpus of medical treatises, literary essays, poems, novels, art, and governmental documents. The rich overlapping matrix of authors and texts broached subvert the idea of a homogeneous interpretation of syphilis and contributes to the rediscovery of the wide-ranging historical, cultural, and philosophical impact of this disease in the Spanish-speaking world. Sifilografía seeks to open a productive dialogue with other area studies about the disparate meanings of science and Enlightenment.

1

This Book Is (the Back of) a Tapestry

Let me use the image of a tapestry to explain the objectives and structure of this book. Francisco de Goya, the most iconic artist of eighteenth-century Spain, painted between 1775 and 1792 a group of about sixty cartones for the Real Fábrica de Tapices de Santa Bárbara (Royal Tapestry Factory of Santa Bárbara) in Madrid (Arnáiz 15). The cartón, or cartoon, was an oil painting made on canvas that served as a model for woven tapestries. Tapestries were both beautiful adornments and useful objects: they covered dull walls, created dignified spaces for the itinerant court, and protected the king and his entourage from the cold weather. Flanders had been the main provider of tapestries for the king until 1714, but after the War of the Spanish Succession and the Peace of Utrecht the monarch lost the Netherlands. As a solution, Philip V (1683–1746) installed the Real Fábrica in 1721 under the direction of Jacob Vandergoten, a tapestry master from Antwerp. The tapestries made from the cartones painted by Goya were used to furnish royal chambers and salons in the palaces of the Escorial and the Pardo.

The most important technical change in the production of Spanish tapestries during the eighteenth century was the introduction in 1727 of high-warp weaving from the French factories, especially that of the Gobelins, which allowed for better copying of the cartoon model and the crafting of bigger pieces (Tomlinson 8). Artistically, the most important change of the time was the incorporation of everyday elements in the paintings and tapestries by Francisco Bayeu y Subías (1734–95)—Goya’s brother-in-law—and Goya himself. Even if the images developed by Goya for the Real Fábrica were based on daily life, they are highly aestheticized and do not reflect the crude or grim themes evident in his Los caprichos (The caprices, 1799)—which I will study later—or Los desastres de la guerra (The Disasters of War) (1810–15).

Although many of the cartoons present a detached reality that mirrors the activities of the few people in the higher echelons of Spanish society—hunting, picnicking, strolling around, playing childish games—others, like El ciego de la guitarra (The Blind Guitar Player), reveal moments of interaction among Spain’s multiple social levels (see fig. 1). The blind musician and his young guide share the space with well-dressed women and a foreigner; the cloaked men see and hear the same things as the black water seller or the horse rider who returns the viewer’s gaze. I like to imagine that one of the figures in this painting—perhaps the individual in the background buying the watermelon—is that of an indiano, a well-off man born on the New Continent, or a Spaniard who has brought riches and new visions from the other side of the Atlantic.

Figure 1. El ciego de la guitarra, Francisco de Goya, 1778. Oil on canvas. (© Photographic Archive Museo Nacional del Prado)

Combined into a tapestry in the chambers of the Prince and Princess Royal, the many threads used to replicate a Goya image in the Real Fábrica present a homogeneous surface, with no gaps or bumps between characters, colors, or textures. But if one were to flip the tapestry, one would see its underside, where uniformity becomes inconsistency, transitions turn into abrupt chasms, and the smooth fabric disappears beneath loose ends and free-floating strands (see fig. 2). Cervantes had used this image to criticize the way translations, in the same way as the back of a tapestry, were like obscuring strands, imperfectly rendering the smooth beauty of the original work (Don Quijote II, 62:1143–44).

Figure 2 Abraham Entertaining the Angels, from the Story of Abraham. Front and underside of tapestry, ca. 1600. Wool, silk, silver-gilt thread. (Metropolitan Museum of Art; gift of George Blumenthal, 1941)

Cervantes uses the image to illustrate a process of artistic production in which the goal of recasting the original work is always in peril of failure, therefore showing an unfinished, unpleasant face. My own approach reads the image in the opposite direction. My goal is to reveal the imperfections that are part and parcel of representations that only appear to be smooth on the surface. Sifilografía is a study of Hispanic society’s underside during the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, from the 1700 death of Charles II—the last Habsburg monarch of the Spanish Empire—to the 1810 independence of Spanish colonies on the American continent. My proposal to supplement a reading of the smooth surface of sanctioned themes and images—the kind of texts imbued with reason and reasoning that since the nineteenth century and until recently had been considered as lesser and less meaningful, as irrelevant and minor in comparison with the previous Golden Age—with the assessment of less Panglossian texts, palpitating with passion and kindled with vital pulse or vital mortality, follows the same route as that announced by Guillermo Carnero in his Juan March Foundation conferences, published in 1983 under the title La cara oscura del Siglo de las Luces (The dark face of the age of Enlightenment) (25–29). This is the same methodological interest that accompanies David Gies’s work, as attested in the trajectory of his writings published in Eros y amistad (Eros and friendship), or in Irene Gómez Castellano’s La cultura de las máscaras (The masked culture).

From a political standpoint, the beginning of the conformation of ideas of self-rule in the Spanish colonies on the American continent has usually been considered a thing of the nineteenth century, not a consequence of radical reassessment in regard to identity deeply rooted in the eighteenth century. Through the study of the seemingly unlikely catalyst of venereal disease, Sifilografía’s approach offers a perspective on the consequential changes in this period. This study aims to connect the smooth and sometimes seemingly irrelevant surface of social behavior with the unwoven threads of meaning behind it, deemed by some as unsightly, lesser, morally dubious, or crude and usually kept out of sight. Nonetheless, and more importantly, the threads on the front and the back of the arras are one and the same. What appears only as a hint of color on one side may show all of its intensity on the other; when we see how tightly woven, very well placed threads on the front become less refined, freer threads on the underside, it challenges our perceptions of both reasoned discourse and decorative excess and forces us to reformulate our interpretations of the Hispanic eighteenth century. For example, as I will later show, Nicolás Fernández de Moratín urged his muse Dorisa to spend her time crafting poetry in poised and prim admonitions that would seem to be the opposite of the libertine and even obscene treatise on sexual satisfaction he composed as his Arte de las putas (The art of whoring), but the discursive material with which both the admonitions and treatise are made and the didactic aim that imbues them are exactly the same.

The tapestries woven in the Real Fábrica were not made with just one type of thread or just one single color. Each image on the front or back is the combination of threads of different provenance. Although they may appear dissimilar if studied in isolation, they make sense as a whole. In the same way, this study weaves together threads related to literature, medicine, public policy, and the plastic arts to render an encompassing portrayal of social life in the Hispanic world. At the same time, I single out powerful threads of signification in the sidebars on these pages. Seen in these ways, the authors we usually study as paragons of aesthetic accomplishment, and the names we are used to reading as signposts of science, medicine, or public policy, become connectors of meaning that are as central or as ancillary—“importance” and “preeminence” are paradoxical and ambivalent categories when viewing a tapestry or confronting a terrible disease—as the history behind a word or the origin of the medical use of a plant: all are threads that define an image only when entwined in a certain way. The singled-out threads in the margins of this book may seem to be included simply as colorful instances, but they in fact underline the pervasive nature of language and the shaping of history through occurrences that look merely anecdotal at first sight. The aim of my work has been to weave together these discrete significations to form a tapestry about the writerly manifestations of syphilis: a syphilography. Beyond this overarching theme of imbricated discourses related to the disease, I have avoided interpreting the presence of the malady or its writerly manifestations with my own metaphors or metonyms. Instead, I have focused on describing the threads, the tapestry, and the images on it in a clear, direct, and nuanced way. With this simple, even humble, exercise of judicious description alone, I have been able to uncover several veiled features of the meanings of gálico during this period. In this sense, I have followed an exegetical method—the text and its context—and shied away when possible from the many temptations of developing an approach where my own subjective set of tropes could skew contextual interpretation. My goal is to offer readers from multiple disciplines a base they can use to develop perspectives related to their own specific fields of study and to initiate new exercises in discourse interweaving, with their own threads, images, and interpretations. This effort to follow and connect threads while avoiding reading into them my own ideas is not to be understood as rendering a simple sequence of anecdotes. The ordering of the threads to form the images on the tapestry produces its own meaning, renewed again and again by each reader and each reading.

To extend the metaphor I have allowed myself, the warp and weft of this study are, of course, gálico. Gálico was a disease that touched all levels of society, and it was the ailment that broached virtually every single discourse of the time and linked, in the same pervasive way as commerce or imperial administration, the territories in the New Continent with the peninsula. Another goal of Sifilografía is to show the deep and undeniable connections between both sides of the Atlantic, such as those suggested by the indiano in Goya’s depiction. In many ways, disease levels the playing field. In order to better understand that the reality of sickness escapes traditional approaches—those that differentiate colony and metropolis—a study that encompasses the experience and meanings of the disease on both sides of the Atlantic is required. The eighteenth century is the peak of the Spanish Empire’s cycle of rule in the American colonies, and a study that spells out the experience of the disease and its social consequences in a singular context may seem cogent and clear, but it risks being one-dimensional. Sifilografía, like the threads of the back of the tapestry, risks an apparent unevenness but gains in depth and perspective because it shows connections and correspondences that would otherwise be lost or downplayed.

Gálico is a disease that binds together seemingly disparate territories or social constructs. At its core, this is a border-crossing disease that breaks walls and reveals what is behind them. The distinction between public and private can be strongly demolished by its presence. Gálico, along with its derivative discourses, is so transgressive, yet so unifying, that every region has fought to avoid being named as its point of origin. No stratum of society can deny its rampant incidence, as its victims ranged from the lowly soldier to the rich noblewoman, from the self-assured criollo (creole) in a Spanish colony to the indigenous woman or the working slave, from the gambler who curses in the tavern to the pope who counts his beads in the cathedral, and from the artisan and the farmhand to the maid and the learned poet who pensively holds his quill: by the end of the eighteenth century, gálico was in fact as democratic and egalitarian as the American, French, and Latin American revolutions dreamed of being.1

In 1782, when Goya was painting his cartoons and slowly becoming favored by the court elite, Dr. Joseph Flores published his Especifico nuevamente descubierto en el reyno de Goatemala para la curacion radical del horrible mal del cancro, y otros mas frecuentes (Newly rediscovered specific treatment for the radical cure of the chancre). Flores’s treatise, one of many texts written about the treatment of syphilis at the time, might have been unexceptional were it not for three distinguishing details: (1) the author was from Guatemala, one of the remote colonies of the Spanish Empire; (2) the book was published in Mexico instead of in the Spanish metropolis; and (3) the proposed cure was not the inveterate use of mercury ointments, but the methodical ingestion of the raw, warm, essentially throbbing flesh of a large lizard found in the remote village of San Juan de Amatitán. While Flores bolstered his endorsement of the reptilian treatment with the arguments of eminent European authors entrenched in Enlightenment circles (Le Gendre, De Sault, Boerhaave), he also turned Western rationalism on its head by underscoring the importance of traditional Native American knowledge, asserting that “if we were not condescending of learning from this simple people, and tried to treat them with familiarity, we would be able to discover specific remedies more important than the most eloquent dissertations or the most curious discoveries in anatomy” (1).2

With its emphasis on empirical knowledge and its revision of medical dogma, Flores’s defense of the lizard cure for gálico illustrates the reappropriation and relocation of the Enlightenment in Latin America. His gesture becomes even more complex if one considers that Flores’s book was rapidly translated and republished in Madrid, Cadiz, Turin, Rome, Lausanne, Warsaw, and Halle. The circulation of Flores’s text indicates the extent to which the Age of Reason incorporated inquiries beyond European modes of thinking, and shows that the Americas in fact played a crucial role in a global Enlightenment movement. Discourses on disease—syphilis in particular—became sites of scholarly contention that reveal alternative incarnations of “Enlightenment” beyond the North Atlantic. Through these discourses, one can perceive the way in which the relationships between empires and their colonies animated intellectual exchange. This is especially true in the case of Spain, a power that wielded the largest colonial administrative apparatus in the eighteenth century.

In this sense, Sifilografía is a cultural history of discourses about syphilis in the Spanish-speaking world on both sides of the Atlantic. By studying overlapping discourses of medicine, literature, and public policy, the book explores how fears of the disease and the search for its cure mobilized a transoceanic dialogue that remains on the underside of Enlightenment narratives of progress. With its protean identity—it was constantly rebranded as the French, Spanish, Indies, or Neapolitan disease—syphilis serves as a vehicle for following the transformation and retooling of ideas related to bodily contagion,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: In the Beginning, It Was Not Syphilis
• 1 This Book Is (the Back of) a Tapestry
• 2 A Mysterious Disease Changes the Political Map of the World
• 3 Judging Books by Their Covers
• 4 The Awakening of Reason Produces Befuddlement
• 5 Inhospitable Hospitals
• 6 The Transformation of the Medical Understanding of Gálico
• 7 Naming the Disease: The French Malady
• 8 Naming the Disease: Mal americano
• 9 The Rejection of the Origin of Gálico as a Nucleus of Self-Identity in the Spanish Colonies
• 10 José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi’s Diseased Characters
• 11 Sick Humor
• 12 Moratín’s Arte de las putas, or the Distorted Art of Avoiding Gálico
• 13 An Epic Chant to the Syphilitic Bubo
• 14 Samaniego’s Sticky Fable
• 15 Gálico, Prostitution, and Public Policy
• 16 The Future in Jeopardy
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index