Corporeal Similitudes and Freaks

While making a few notes in preparation to talk about Ramon Lull tomorrow I came across some interesting things in Yates that we had already discussed but were revealed to me in a new light. Also, I managed to abscond with a large stack of books from a very magnanimous and well-read couple last weekend. One of which included was Freaks, by Leslie Fiedler, which relates back to corporeal similitude, a matter which I am now going to divulge.

In making the distinctions between Ramon Lull's art of memory and that of the classic memory of art as outlined by Tillius in the Ad Herennium (chapter 3), a primary difference is that Lull's memory system is void of "corporeal similitudes" (which, if you refer to the index, is mentioned a number of times). Essentially, Ramon Lull excludes images as part of the artificial imagination, whereas people like Acquinas used often grotesque and bodily ("corporeal") images ("similitudes") as a way of inciting a visceral action towards remembering. Instead of these corporeal similitues, Lullism is more scientific, algebraic, and mechanical. For the classical memory systems, the creation of a corporeal similitude is also the creation of memorable images in accordance with the rules of artificial memory. Ramon only includes the fourth rule in is memory system, describing the artificial memory as either drug induced or practiced through repetition, as a "cow chewing on his cud". Thomas Aquinas's rules for the artificial memory are on pages 85-86, and they are

1)the first is that he should dispose those things which he wishes to remember in a certain order.

2)The secod is that he should adhere to them with affection

3)The third is that he should reduce them to unusual similitudes

4)The fourth is that he should repeat them with frequent mediation.

So what does this have to do with Freaks? On page 104 of Yates, I quote "Can memory be one possible explanation of the mediaeval love of the grotesque, the idiosyncratic? Are the strange figures to be seen on the pages of manuscripts and in all forms of mediaeval art not so much the revelation of a tortured psychology as evidence that the Middle Ages, when men had to remember, followed classical rules for making memorable images?"

Leslie Fiedler's book talks about a culture's fascination with the maligned, deformed, obese, hairy, mutated, etc. In the chapter entitled "Freaks and the Literary Imagination", Fiedler says that the "improbable and marvelous" are "embodied not in Freaks but grotesques...exploited to titillate the reader." Just like the corporeal similitudes meant to titillate the imaginer to heightened senses of memory. Fiedler also talks about Victor Hugo's obsession with Freaks (hence Quasimodo), which implies an inherent connection to the concept of freaks and corporeal similitudes as Kevin cited that Victor Hugo recognizes that the book will destroy the memory palace. Hugo knew the importance of corporeal similitudes, the utterly grotesque, as a method of memorization.