In Part 3 of the Reading Bodies takeover, Nicolás Fernández-Medina examines the Spanish avant-garde’s response to the biomedical sciences through the lens of Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s pioneering avant-gardism.
Rebellion, revolt, dissent, opposition, heresy, protest, absurdity. These words are often used to define the historical avant-garde’s commitment to radical cultural renewal between 1900 and 1940. As Renato Poggioli (1968, 30) once put it, avant-gardists upheld anarchic anti-traditionalism as a matter of principle since it was “the single political ideal that the avant-garde artist sincerely [felt].” A claim undergirding historical avant-garde studies is that, despite avant-gardists’ anarchic anti-traditionalism and deep-rooted suspicion of science and reason, they often celebrated forms of scientific rationality that readily translated into productive improvements in design, machine-driven industries, and other cutting-edge technologies. We are reminded of Marinetti’s (2005, 28) worship of “the great discoveries of science,” by which he meant automobiles, airplanes, dirigibles, war machines, and the increasing speed with which they reconfigured modern life. While a handful of first-rate studies have surveyed the avant-garde’s fascination with various forms of scientific discovery (e.g. Richardson 1971; Herbert 2001; Fountain Eames 2023; Vöhringer 2023), the biomedical sciences rarely, if ever, figure in these critical assessments.
A question that remains fundamentally unasked in contemporary accounts of modernity and the biomedical transformation of society, and which the Reading Bodies project has brought to the fore, is: how did artists, writers, and thinkers of the avant-garde bridge the growing divide between the arts and sciences during a period of intense cultural change in the early twentieth century? Narratives of illness and the biomedical sciences, particularly as inflected through the work of the avant-garde, have a great deal to offer in this respect, since they can uncover the cultural mechanisms by which perceptions of infirmity and therapeutics were mainstreamed or subverted at a given historical juncture. In so doing, they can shed new light on the historical debate concerning the complex rapport between the health/pathology continuum and modernity that lies at the heart of the medical humanities today. Indeed, the regulatory discourses and practices of modern biopower take root precisely at the intersection of the socioeconomic, scientific, and political to “incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize” life to thereby continually (re)define the interconnections between health and illness (Foucault 1978, 136).
Irrationality, absurdism, and humor: Gómez de la Serna and the medicalization of society
The Spanish avant-garde, and in particular the oeuvre of Ramón Gómez de la Serna, opens a unique and fascinating window on these revealing topics. Aside from being a charismatic agent-provocateur on issues of morality and tradition, Gómez de la Serna was Spain’s most gifted avant-gardist with more than a hundred titles to his name. His influence in Spain and across the globe was profound, and his avant-gardism is second to none in its quality and creative response to the revolutionary breakthroughs of the biomedical sciences. A great many of his works published between 1905 and 1948 confirm how profoundly disease and the biomedical sciences informed his ever-evolving avant-gardism. What readers have overlooked is that while he was not trained as a scientist or a physician and had no specialized medical training (he studied law but never practiced), he was conversant with the medico-scientific theories of his day. Among other things, his voracious reading and the popular salons he organized in Madrid’s Pombo Café, with artists, academics, physicians, and scientists, brought him into contact with everything from radiography and evolutionism to germ theory and psychoanalysis. A little-known and relevant fact is that he also suffered from diabetes, which made him acutely sensitive to the touchpoints between therapeutics and avant-gardist practice.
Gómez de la Serna’s critical appraisal of modern medicine and its engagement with pathology offers a more complex account of not only Spanish avant-gardism, but also his own creative response to modernity’s scientific rationalization of the body. Ironically, this scientific rationalization, at least in his estimation, amounted to a type of compulsive irrationality, given its zeal to quantify and regulate what he believed remained beyond all quantification: the embodied psychic being. Through an absurdist and humoristic vision of science and its modernizing ideals, he exposes what we could call the therapeutic authority underwriting medical discourse and practice and its ever-deepening engagement with the body. What appears as a haphazard assortment of motifs about medicine and therapeutics running throughout Gómez de la Serna’s oeuvre is really a sustained critique of the fundamental epistemological claims propelling the progressive medicalization of society.
By addressing these claims—and by weaving his autobiographical persona into his work (a persona who textualizes the bodily experience from an intimate and oftentimes phenomenological point of view)—Gómez de la Serna articulates a demythicizing break with what these claims signify (or might signify). In its trenchant appraisal of scientific knowledge, this demythicizing break represents his own type of anti-logic—or what he labels an “implausible science” in his experimental novel The Unlikely Doctor—that offers a multiplicity of contending perspectives on a whole order of normalized beliefs about the health/pathology continuum and the body within society. What is more, he exposes not only the impossibility of generating a totalizing knowledge of the body, but also the limitations and vulnerabilities of modern medical science with respect to the individual, bodily self; limitations and vulnerabilities, it should be noted, that the medical establishment takes great pains to sublimate and conceal.
The shifting contours of health and pathology: wellbeing and the body in The Unlikely Doctor
The Unlikely Doctor, Gómez de la Serna’s most significant work on medicine, is filled with vignettes in which a whole host of new medical practices are interrogated and critiqued. It is the dissentient Dr Vivar, or “El Doctor Inverosímil” [The Unlikely Doctor], who throws into relief the objectivist claims of the master narrative of biomedical progress and the powerful disciplinary apparatuses involved in its development. In demonstrating the effectiveness of Dr Vivar’s holistic therapeutics, Gómez de la Serna establishes in what sense biomedicine manifests itself in its most contradictory and limiting forms whenever the question of health/pathology continuum arises. By articulating what, at first glance, appears to be an absurd and implausible holism through Dr Vivar’s “nueva medicina” [new medicine], Gómez de la Serna in fact exposes the glaring vulnerabilities of biomedicine when faced with the fundamental body-mind relationship of the individual, bodily self that lies at the heart of effective therapeutics. In so doing, the vignettes in The Unlikely Doctor reveal the oftentimes adverse and detrimental effects, including psychological trauma, of cutting-edge biomedicine on the individual’s health.
From the outset Dr Vivar is fashioned as an outcast physician. His idiosyncratic new medicine, often absurd and humorous, marginalizes him within mainstream medico-scientific circles, yet it also allows him to achieve something extraordinary, far beyond the most advanced biomedicine: the breakthrough discovery of life-saving cures for the most obstinate and chronic diseases. In various vignettes in The Unlikely Doctor, especially those in which the modern physician is at a loss on how to diagnose or treat a mystery ailment, the vitalist question of life energy remains essential in the debate on the health/pathology continuum. For Dr Vivar, this question is irreducibly bound to the stresses and strains of modern life and to the individual’s potential for liberating action within society.
In the case of “La luz amarilla” [The Yellow Light], for example, Dr Vivar discovers that a particular type of light bulb used throughout a house drains the life energy of its occupants and generates a pathological alteration in their bodies: “No hay nada que mate más que esas luces amarillas, mortecinas, en las que la vida siente deseos de morir” [There is nothing more deadly than those lifeless, yellow lights, in which life feels like dying] (61). The solution to the problem is simple enough: replace the light bulbs throughout the house to restore the occupants’ health.
In “La casa de la ignorancia” [The House of Ignorance] he ascertains that a girl’s life-threatening ennui is associated with the new cutting-edge medicines forced upon her: “Aquella niña no tenía ninguna defensa para la vida, y en la vida hay que defenderse desde dentro” [That girl had no way to defend her life, and in life one has to defend oneself from within] (78). To cure the girl, Dr Vivar resists the modern pharmaceutical practice of medicating her. Instead, he educates her on the labeling of common medications so she herself can determine which ones, if any, are appropriate and necessary for restoring her health.
A pair of spectacles serves as the source of a life-draining pathology in “Los lentes” [The Spectacles]. The bespectacled patient is a listless, emaciated boy, suffering from what appears to be a metabolic disorder, yet Dr Vivar intuits through various comical observations that the boy’s malady is not biological in origin. Rather, it originates in his new spectacles that alter his perception of the world: “[E]sos lentes le absorben el seso y le van desarraigando por completo […] Sus lentes consumen la vida artificialmente” [Those spectacles are absorbing his brain, uprooting him completely […] His spectacles are artificially consuming his life] (52).
The threat of biomedicine
As Gómez de la Serna challenges modern medical perspectives in his oeuvre, he showcases how narratives of illness can be creatively reframed and recast to lend a new understanding of wellbeing and disease. By bridging avant-gardist aesthetics and emerging biomedical discourses and practices and linking the health/pathology continuum to other forms of radical (and holistic) therapeutic measures, he suggests that modern medicine perfects and normalizes mechanisms of bodily control that impinge directly upon the healthy body. The point he returns to repeatedly in his avant-gardism, when dealing with narratives of illness, is that bodily health—the bedrock of all emancipative action in modern society—requires much more than pioneering science to comprehend its subtleties and significance. That is to say, it requires a broader analysis of the individual and the individual’s contingent relationship with a shifting, technological, and many times irrational world. Researchers and theorists from Merleau-Ponty (1962) and Foucault (1978) to Sontag (2013) and Charon (2006) confirm that this approach to health and therapeutics has been instrumental not only in raising awareness of how modern healthcare is delivered and experienced, but also in defining major concepts associated with the rhetoric of illness within the medical humanities field today. To be sure, pioneering avant-gardists like Gómez de la Serna offer an incisive and early account of what Pellegrino (2008, 106) labelled biomedicine’s “threat” to human values and autonomy and the systemic depersonalization inherent in modernity’s increasing dependence on “the institutionalization and bureaucratization of the medical encounter.”
About the author
Nicolás Fernández-Medina is Professor of Spanish and Iberian Studies at Boston University. He holds PhDs in Spanish Literature and Humanities from Stanford University. His research and teaching interests focus on Spanish and Iberian literature and culture between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Enlightenment thought, Romanticism, interdisciplinary nineteenth-century studies, the history of medicine, the fin de siglo, decadence, women’s literature, modernist studies, and the avant-garde. His books include Morbidities and “The Concept of the New Literature” by Ramón Gómez de la Serna (2024), Life Embodied: The Promise of Vital Force in Spanish Modernity (2018), Modernism and the Avant-garde Body in Spain and Italy (co-edited, 2016), and The Poetics of Otherness in Antonio Machado’s ‘Proverbios y cantares’ (2011).
References
Charon, Rita. 2006. Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness. Oxford University Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. Translated by Robert Hurely. Vintage.
Fountain Eames, Rachel. 2023. Physics and the Modernist Avant-garde: Quantum Modernisms and Modernist Relativities. Bloomsbury.
Herbert, Christopher. 2001. Victorian Relativity: Radical Thought and Scientific Discovery. Chicago University Press.
Marinetti, F. T. 2005. “Destruction of Syntax—Imagination without Strings—Words-in-Freedom.” In Modernism: An Anthology, edited by Lawrence Rainey, 27–34. Wiley-Blackwell.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. Routledge.
Pellegrino, Edmund. 2008. The Philosophy of Medicine Reborn. A Pellegrino Reader. Edited by H. Tristam Englehardt Jr. and Fabrice Jottrerand. University of Notre Dame Press.
Poggioli, Renato. 1968. Theory of the Avant-garde. Belknap.
Richardson, John A. 1971. Modern Art and Scientific Thought. University of Illinois Press.
Sontag, Susan. 2013. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors. Penguin.
Vöhringer, Margarete. 2023. Avant-garde and Psychotechnics: Science, Art, and Technology in the Early Soviet Union. Routledge.
