Anxieties of Interiority and Dissection in Early Modern Spain by Enrique Fernández

Reviewed by: Anxieties of Interiority and Dissection in Early Modern Spain by Enrique Fernández Or Hasson Anatomy, Dissection, Renaissance Medicine, Medical-Literary Relations, Medical Culture, Cervantes, Quevedo, María De Zayas, Luis De Granada, Gracián, Medical Humanities, Interiority, Subjectivity, Gender, Early Modern Spain, Cultural Studies Enrique Fernández. Anxieties of Interiority and Dissection in Early Modern Spain, U of Toronto P, 2015, 273 pp. In his recent study, Enrique Fernández explores a central yet unattended chapter in the history of the relation between medicine and literature in early modern Spain: the rise of anatomy and the ways dissection—a technology, a social practice, and a source of widely disseminated images of the human interior—informed and shaped contemporary literary modes of expression. In four condensed chapters, Fernández argues that the influence of dissection on literature was not limited to the use of anatomical vocabulary or explicit references to bodies cut open, and that the meaningful dialogue between the two domains can be observed in the literary construction of inner psychological and corporeal spaces. In his readings of Fray Luis de Granada's devotional literature, Quevedo's satire, Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares, and María de Zayas's horror stories, Fernández identifies and reflects on what he calls "dissective narratives." According to the critic, while no single intentionality or poetics can be assigned to such narratives, they all "create a sacrificial Other endowed with a complex interiority that is exposed by methods akin to those of contemporary anatomical dissection" (166). These dynamics, according to Fernández, are to be read as attempts to appease a profound anxiety of early modern Spaniards, deriving from the "awareness of having unfathomable interiors capable of harbouring dangerous contents." In chapter 1, "Dissection and Interiority: The Case of Spain," Fernández lays the historical and theoretical foundations for his argument. He begins by reviewing the principal milestones in the trajectory of this technology in the pan-European context, and the specific meanings assigned to it in Spain. Of particular interest in this section is Fernández's analysis of an autopsy that was performed on conjoined twins born in Hispaniola in order to determine whether they were to be treated as one or two independent souls. This case enables Fernández to show how dissection was construed as if it could answer questions beyond the realm of the corporeal. The rest of the chapter is dedicated to a theoretical discussion of interiority and the particular social, religious, and political circumstances that—in the Spanish case—gave rise to the aforementioned anxiety associated with having a private interior. Fernández's working definition of interiority—"a series of psychological and physiological processes that have been traditionally considered as taking place inside the body" (25)—consciously avoids treating psychological processes and corporeal ones as pertaining to different orders. This theoretical choice is a useful one insofar as it permits an extrapolation of the anatomical field to the mental, or spiritual [End Page 243] domains, whose social, religious, and political significances are more immediate. It does, however, distance Fernández's analytic framework from central medico-psychological theories predominant in early modern Spain (e.g., Huarte de San Juan's Examen de ingenios), which, albeit not related directly to dissection, are key to understanding the scientific construction of interiority in early modern Spain. Chapter 2, "Fray Luis de Granada's Ill-fated Defence of the Inner Man," examines the encounter between traditional Christian topoi of interiority (e.g., the homo interior or that of the body as a house) and the new anatomical discourse, read here in light of the religious, social, and political dramas in which Granada found himself playing a central role. Fernández develops in his readings the existing ideas regarding the affinities of anatomical illustrations and Christian models of suffering, and reflects on the manner in which the self-dissecting bodies dialogue with the image of the martyr, informing thereby Granada's texts. Of special interest in this chapter is the scandalous case of Sor María de la Visitación, a Portuguese visionary who had claimed to have stigmata on her hands, only to confess a few years later...

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