The body, real and imaginary

Ross MacFarlane delights in an erudite yet playful exploration of the rebelliousness and unpredictability of the human body

The Body Fantastic

Frank Gonzalez-Crussi

MIT Press 2021

Pb, 264pp, £24, ISBN 9780262045889

Sometimes you can grasp the essence of a book by its cover. Frank Gonzalez-Crussi’s The Body Fantastic is adorned by anatomical drawings – the bones of a human leg, the stomach of a wombat – juxtaposed with illustrations of the natural world, both real and mythic, from a frog to a squid, to a mermaid.

This arrangement might sound peculiar at first, but it proves to be a perfect visual representation of the author’s view that the idea of “the body” flits between the real and imaginary.

Inspired by the ideas of French poet and philosopher Paul Valéry, the author sees the body as more than just something to be gazed on in a mirror (the first body), regarded by others (the second), or probed by doctors (the third).

For Gonzalez-Crussi, the fourth body – “the body fantastic” – is a liminal concept, rich in symbolic meanings.

In its seven chapters, The Body Fantastic sets out to chart this territory in ruminative and inquisitive style, considering how aspects of our bodies have been perceived through time, selecting from the clinical record extreme examples and seemingly strange behaviours. Thankfully, however, Gonzalez-Crussi manages to avoid making the book a collection of factoids, or a salacious rummage for the weirdest occurrences.

He writes: “My purpose is not to compile a collection of medical curiosities or events worthy of a roadside freak show. I wish … to demonstrate the body’s inherent rebelliousness and unpredictability.” Alert to its potential oddities, he manages instead to provide a lively but thoughtful meditation on the subject matter.

He begins his journey with the uterus – “the only organ that has been constituted as an independent being”, as he notes – showing how Græco-Roman medicine envisioned the womb as a mobile part of a woman’s body. For Gonzalex-Crussi even though notions of the “wandering womb” were disproven by the 1700s, the after-effects of the idea – and its marking of the female body as being something inferior to the male – lived on in misogynistic definitions of “the feminine mind” which rose in the 18th century, and of “hysteria” in the 19th century.

“Historical gobbler” Jacques de la Falaise’s performance culminated in swallowing a live eel

From there we move to the second chapter’s explorations of ravenous stomachs, firstly encountering the Rev William Buckland and his son Francis, the latter of whom is partly remembered for his fortean classic, Curiosities of Natural History (1868). What Gonzalez-Crussi focuses on instead, however, are the pair’s omnivorous eating habits; “to them, Noah’s Ark looked like a dining menu”.

The cast of the rest of the chapter includes Roman emperors, deep-sea organisms only consisting of digestive systems and participants in modern-day speed eating contents in the United States.

Such is the way of much of this erudite yet playful book: while you may not always be sure of the destination at the beginning of each chapter, you welcome the journey in the author’s cheerful and knowledgeable company.

In the third chapter we’re ingesting the curative powers of our own bodies from across cultures: whether this be the healing powers of saliva and urine, cures attributable to human corpses, or the symbolism of transplantation.

Gonzalez-Crussi’s criss-crossing of sources and contexts also allows him to ponder the ethics of “the body fantastic”: chapter four asks whether hair is refuse to be discarded or a distillation of the essence of the human, a question brought into focus by debates over displaying the hair of Holocaust survivors in the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum.

The style of the chapters also alters at times. A discussion of aquatic-terrestrial beings in chapter five only focuses on two accounts from Spain and Italy when, as the author, admits, the notion is a near-universal myth.

A range of different sources is offered up in chapter six for a look at how concepts of pain and pleasure play out on the body fantastic’s feet, in notions of both gout and sexual fetishisation.

The book’s last chapter brings us back to the topic of digestion, peering down the throats of those who eat objects without any nutritional benefit. We meet two “historical gobblers” in preRevolutionary France: Jacques de la Falaise, whose performance culminated in swallowing a live eel, and a Monsieur Tarare, whose swallowing abilities were “used to transmit secret war correspondence”.

We also encounter the disorder trichotillophagia – the compulsive eating of hair – the nature of which, Gonzalez-Crussi reminds us, is still a matter of dispute.

The Body Fantastic is a small tome, and there are perhaps topics that the engaged reader would like to see covered in a slightly longer volume.

Crucially, Gonzalez-Crussi fails to ponder how the role of gender affects our conceptualisations; after all, how much of our “second body” might be one viewed through predominantly male eyes? How often is this same gaze viewing the medical “third” body? And how much of a male gaze has perceived and created the many bodies fantastic Gonzalez-Crussi discusses in his book?

On that, our prolix author appears a little tongue-tied.

Nonetheless, for a work of around 250 pages, it is a fine achievement that offers limitless possibilities for further exploration.

After all, is there a part of the body that doesn’t have a symbolic quality attached to it?