ILLEGIBLE BODIES:
ON NOT SEEING GOYA’S
DISASTERS OF WAR

Lela Graybill

Doctoral Candidate,
Department of Art and Art History,
Stanford University

The images which I will be discussing here, taken from Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War series, occupy a key position in the history of representations of violated and vulnerable bodies. Produced during the Napoleonic invasion of Spain and the drawn-out Peninsula War of 1808-1814, Goya’s images of violent exploitation emerged at a moment when the moral status of violated and vulnerable bodies had been radically destabilized by the dramatic upheavals of contemporary history, when the meanings of physical violence were no longer securely anchored by the political and religious order of the Old Regime. 1 The trajectory of the Peninsular War, known in Spain as the War of Independence, opened the way to a series of rapid and sweeping liberal reforms in Spain; the abolition of the Inquisition, the dismantling of Church authority, the proclamation of the equality of all male citizens before the law and the replacement of monarchial power by a parliamentary system based on popular sovereignty–all these had been accomplished by 1843. 2 The pictures in Goya’s Disasters of War series trace one of the shifts in cultural attitudes towards the body which attended these political reforms: the rejection of an epistemology of pain wherein truth was seen to be lodged in the physical body, where meaning was thought to be discoverable by a mastering gaze attuned to reading the language of the suffering body. 3

Consider, to start, the paradox presented by plate number 26 of the series (figure 1). In this print Goya describes an execution scene, using a well-balanced composition which both accommodates and encourages our gaze. Figures are arranged in a frieze that maximizes our ability to read each individual’s response to the situation. Note, for example, how carefully Goya arranges the foremost figure so that he fits into the scene without blocking our view. We are, moreover, invited into the image by the placement of the leg of that foremost figure, which reaches out to the edge of the plate, acting as a formal bridge between our viewing space and that of the scene itself. Our accommodated and integrated gaze is furthermore engaged by the dramatic play of light and shadow that focuses our attention on the emotional reactions of the victims. It is, however, in this engaged mode of looking that the paradox arises, for Goya titled this print "This is not to be looked at." The image, it seems, simultaneously invites and denies our look.

We can now note a number of ways in which looking is made problematic by this image. The scene is truncated and partial; the cluster of bayonets on the right inform us that there is more to be seen while denying the possibility of direct apprehension of the larger setting. The people visible to us are, in effect, our surrogate eyes, since their reactions provide interpretive clues to the larger scene. But they are surrogate eyes that refuse to look. Our gaze, locked into its contingent view of the scene, is mirrored only in the pointing bayonets that evince a gaze as focused and as partial as our own. If we are not the executioners we are, nonetheless, their counterparts: we are the witnesses.

Our "witness" to violence in the Disasters of War series is certainly not literal, but it is present. Although what we see are representations, the way we see is with the eye of a witness. The view of a witness, like ours before the image, is a conscripted one. A witness is the guarantor of a scene, and thus the look of the witness becomes integral to the action it confirms. It is a present, active, and engaged gaze. But the terms of that engagement also locates it in an important way outside of the viewer’s body, rendering that body infinitely replaceable. The witness does not define but is rather defined by the field of vision. Placed in the witnessing position, the viewer becomes aware that what is seen is always subject to a multiplicity of looks and never wholly visible to his or her own contingent field of vision. The viewer’s look, although providing an essential confirmation that the scene happens, can never fix its meaning.

The witnessing gaze has specific implications for the violent content of Goya’s images. By inviting and conscripting the viewer’s look Goya makes violated bodies easy to look at but impossible to see. Our view is always a mediated one, it can be sustained, even in the face of the most violent atrocities. But sustained looking does not allow a deeper contemplation of the violence depicted, for the conscripted view is not a mastering one. There is a fundamental invisibility which operates in Goya’s descriptions of violated bodies. Such a tension between looking and invisibility, I will argue, is enacted in terms of mediated sight, first through Goya’s own role as interlocutor and second in the function of spectators pictured within certain images in the series. Mediated sight engages our looking while unhinging its control; we are made witnesses to a violence which remains–however precisely seen–non-locatable by its very ubiquity.

Plates number 44 and 45 are titled "I saw this" and "And this too" (figures 2 and 3). By so captioning them, Goya establishes the images as testimonies to specific events. Their specificity is not, however, a historical one. The scenes are placed in vaguely rendered landscapes and the "events" pictured are commonplace. These are not scenes of heroic action linked to a specific place and time. Their importance seems instead to lie in their link to the artist. It is Goya’s role as eyewitness that legitimates their existence.

Goya’s position as not only creator but viewer of the Disasters series is not, however, limited to claims of eyewitness. It is unlikely that Goya literally saw all the scenes he depicts in the series. But he nonetheless hinges the images to his own presence in several ways. First, Goya does not depict sweeping scenes but rather up close situations seen from a personalized viewpoint. Consider, for example, plate number 7, titled "What Courage!" (figure 4). This image is the only one in the series which depicts a historic figure: it is Agustina Aragón, the heroine of a battle in Zaragoza, a city which was an early rallying point for the Spanish resistance in the Peninsula war. 4 Comparing Goya’s image to a contemporary print by Juan Galvez (figure 5) underscores the contingency of the viewpoint Goya provides. While Galvez’s print gives narrative and architectural clues that locate the scene in its historical context, Goya’s image operates primarily in relation to his viewpoint. Despite the fact that Goya could not have been a literal eyewitness to the event he depicts here, he insists upon his presence in the scene through a lack of descriptive detail. In the absence of historical specificity we fall back on the sense that this is an event witnessed in order to anchor its meaning.

Goya’s caption, "What Courage!," further establishes his mediating presence. While Galvez’s print contains a lengthy caption which describes and contextualizes the scene, Goya’s caption only serves to document his response to the image. Where Galvez’s caption narrates our view of the scene, Goya’s mediates it. He remains a viewer, and our gaze is necessarily filtered through his.

Eleanor Sayre points out that there are more working states for the Disasters of War series than for any of Goya’s other print sets, reminding us that the artist did indeed repeatedly view the images in their making. 5 The captions then mark a "final" view in which Goya would have simply looked at each print in order to provide a response. These captions do not tell us what the images are but they do tell us how they have been seen. By insisting on his own presence Goya confirms and legitimates our look, in a sense he says "this is an image to be seen." But by emphasizing a responsive view he complicates what we see, for we are reminded that the scene is always subject to a multiplicity of looks and is thus never wholly visible to our own contingent sight.

Goya’s role as viewer of his images, and our successive occupation of that position, provides an important anchoring to their content. Violated and vulnerable bodies are multiplied and reiterated across the 85 images which comprise The Disasters of War. Despite their associations with a specific historical situation, the Peninsula War of 1808-1814, the sheer multiplicity of images foregrounds the seriality of violence, and invests the prints with a continuing presence. In the absence of descriptive anchoring, it is the viewer’s look that becomes the essential confirmation of the scene. It is less important that these events happened then that they are seen. In fact we might say that they happen because they are seen.

Nowhere is the importance of the witnessing gaze more evident then in public executions. In plates number 34 and 35 (figures 6 and 7) Goya deals with the Spanish practice of garroting, where the accused is fixed to a post by an iron collar which is then tightened to strangle him or her. Adding to his own role as viewer and interlocutor, in number 34 Goya invokes a second layer of mediating sight in the form of the spectating crowd, while in number 35 he implies such a viewing scenario by lowering the viewpoint to crowd-level. But though our look is in this way doubly mediated and doubly legitimated, thus intensely engaged, the scenes fail to produce the legibility public executions presume.

Foucault observes that in the ceremony of public punishment,

The idea of the legible body is all the more relevant to the scenes Goya depicts, since the accused wear placards around their necks that describe their crimes. Such a practice of public display was used frequently in the Spanish Inquisition, and in Goya’s drawing journals we find a series of images devoted to such "legible" bodies. Yet however similar the content of the drawings and prints may be, the type of view which operates in each image is entirely different. Where the drawing produces a legible body, the print complicates it.

The distinction arises first of all from a difference in working process. The drawings are in ink and thus necessarily rendered with a confident hand since each line, once laid down, is fixed. In contrast, Goya’s preparatory sketches for the Disaster prints were done in red chalk, which allowed a for a more hesitant working of the compositions. Those preliminary sketches were then taken over onto the plates, where further working of the composition would occur. The ink drawings were actualized in one session and stood as completed works, while the prints bear the mark of a continuous process of multiple stages. 7

These distinctions in working process bear a relation to the type of view that operates in the images. Where the drawings formed a part of Goya’s private sketch albums, the prints by their reproducible medium suggest a more public venue. One is created for a singular mastering gaze, the other for a diffused, replaceable one. What emerges from this distinction is a difference in the ways the images can be read.

Number 87 (figure 8) of the drawing journal bears a similar content and structure to plate number 34. Both present an accused body that is centrally placed and viewed from the platform, with crowds pictured behind. In the drawing, however, the inscription on the body is entirely legible, whereas in the print the only discernable word is "Por." What is written on the body in the drawing is actually Goya’s own description of the scene. It reads, "They put a gag on her because she talked. And hit her about the head. I saw her in Zaragoza, Orosia, Moreno. Because she knew how to make mice." Contrastingly, the caption of the print simply reads "For a penknife." The caption does not reproduce the inscription on the placard, which, though illegible, clearly contains more than three words. Where in the drawing we can read the body directly, in the print our look must be filtered through Goya’s caption before returning to the scene. Seeing the image requires an engaged and active gaze which can only indirectly "read" the scene.

The spectating crowds in each image also underscore that difference. In the drawing we are given a suggestion of a crowd but can read no individual faces. The crowd is mere background, not a distraction for our focused read of the body. In the print, by contrast, faces are legible. Most do not look at the scene but rather react to it, covering their eyes, bowing their heads or looking upwards. Their reactions form an important part of the image given to us, and their presence complicates our desire to read the situation. Like that earlier print, these figures seem to say "this is not to be looked at." They, moreover, cannot see the placard on the accused, nor his fixed expression. We do not share the view of the spectators, but they do mediate our look, providing a second indirect venue into reading the scene. Our view is thus doubly diffused, and though the content of the image invites a search for legibility, its structure undermines such a possibility by splintering our look.

Print number 35 (figure 7) further complicates our desire for legibility in these scenes, for though we are now "in" the crowd and looking up at the victims, our gaze is no less diffused. The repetition of accused bodies undermines a focused look, for we move from victim to victim to grasp the scene, but only find the illegibility of the previous scene repeated eight times over. The caption confirms that sense of illegibility with the phrase "Nobody knows why." In the absence of legible bodies these prints become scenes not to be read but rather to be looked at. That witnessing gaze confirms the scene, but it cannot provide it with meaning. In the face of violent spectacle, our gaze seems redundant–a look which is merely repeatable.

Such redundancy is prolonged when we turn the page in the series to number 36 (figure 9). The image is titled "Nor this," referring back to the previous caption "Nobody knows why." Here we are pushed right up to the scene of violence, a once again ambiguously located scenario. The head of the hanged man bows toward the soldier who leans back to gaze up at him, their two bodies forming a triangle which is closed by the trajectory of the soldier’s look. The soldier’s gaze is gratuitous, repulsive even, but so perhaps is our own. Our gaze triangulates into the scene as we pass from hanged man to soldier, but this is not a public execution. What we witness is not so much a violent act as a violent look. The soldier’s gaze seems to prolong the violence of the execution by dwelling upon it needlessly. He confirms the act and extends its duration, as we confirm and extend his look. Our look is conscripted by the very structure of the scene, we close the triangle of looks but defer the completion of sight.

In the Disasters of War series it is that soldier’s gaze which most closely approximates our own condition of looking. The look is a witnessing one which both confirms the scene and defers its completion. The repeatability of the gaze of a witness is matched by the repeatability of the violence seen. In this series Goya encourages a sustained look at violated bodies, enacted across 85 prints. But that look, in its very continuation, is not focused but diffused; violence is seen but non-locatable, ubiquitous and invisible.