On literary bullshit: discursive wrongdoing and modernity in Fray Gerundio de Campazas

ABSTRACT

José Francisco Isla’s Fray Gerundio de Campazas is one of the first and most complete accounts of the insidious omnipresence of bullshit in modern culture. Drawing on recent debates on bullshit as well as ordinary language philosophy, this paper conceives of bullshit as both a language game and a form of life. Bullshitting alters linguistic exchanges, moral standards and social relations in decisive and unsettling ways. Relating bullshit to ignorance, self-interest, the bewitchment of language and the individual’s emancipation from authority, Fray Gerundio warns us of the dangers lurking behind bullshit by uncovering its condition of possibility, its lexicon, its grammar and its pragmatics. Isla denounces the problems that arise when words are taken out of their ordinary context. In its final chapter, Fray Gerundio playfully acknowledges itself to be an instance of bullshit, thereby hinting at a crucial dimension of this phenomenon, namely the points of overlap between fiction and bullshit. Ultimately, this paper hopes to shed new light on bullshit as well as on Fray Gerundio by treating this novel as a lesson in moral philosophy that relates to present concerns about the pervasiveness of dishonesty, concealment and deceit in personal relations as well as public discourse and institutions.

KEYWORDS:

• Bullshit theory
• literary bullshit
• Fray Gerundio de Campazas
• bullshit and the Enlightenment
• genealogy of bullshit

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Nil Santiáñez is a Professor of Spanish and International Studies at Saint Louis University. His books include Topographies of Fascism (University of Toronto Press, 2013), Goya/Clausewitz (Alpha Decay, 2009), Investigaciones literarias (Crítica, 2002), Ángel Ganivet: Una bibliografía anotada (1892–1995) (Diputación Provincial de Granada, 1996), De la Luna a Mecanópolis (Quaderns Crema-Sirmio, 1995) and Ángel Ganivet, escritor modernista (Gredos, 1994). In addition to scholarly critical editions of works by Lope de Vega and Ramón J. Sender, he has authored numerous articles, prologues and book chapters on eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spanish and European literature and culture. He is currently writing a book titled Signaturas del mal (Alpha Decay) and working with Justin Crumbaugh on a book titled Spanish Fascist Writing (University of Toronto Press). His latest book, Wittgenstein’s Ethics and Modern Warfare, is forthcoming from Wilfrid Laurier University Press in fall 2018.

Notes

1 Representative scholarly works on bullshit are Babbitt (2013), Black (1983, 115–143), Eubanks and Schaeffer (2008), Frankfurt (2005), Hardcastle and Reisch (2006) and Penny (2005). The publication in 2012 of Aaron James’s provocative philosophical account of “assholes” (2014) may be considered an aftereffect of the heightened scholarly attention paid in the previous 10 years to matters related to bullshit.

2 The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, for instance, was preceded in the United States by unusual amounts of political and journalistic justificatory bullshit.

3 In these pages, I use the notion of genealogy as employed by Michel Foucault. For a quick introduction to Foucault’s concept of genealogy, see Foucault (2001, 1: 1004–1024).

4 Modernity is used here as a periodological term that describes the historical era that runs approximately from the eighteenth century to the present. The so-called age of globalization is not a new epoch in history, but rather a transitional period.

5 See, among other studies, Chen Sham (2002), Haidt (2002) and Jurado (1989).

6 I am thinking, for instance, of Aradra Sánchez (1999), Briesemeister (1986), Chen Sham (1990, 1991, 1992, 1994, 1995, 2002), Haidt (1994, 2002), Helman (1955), Martínez Fernández (1999), Palmer (1973) and Sebold (1958).

7 On the preponderance of bullshit in present-day discourse, see Black (1983, 115–143), Frankfurt (2005, 1–2), Penny (2005, 1–2), Hardcastle and Reisch (2006, xiii–xiv) and Richardson (2006, 87, 90–95).

8 On this prologue, see Chen Sham (1990, 1991) and Smith (1995).

9 See Chen Sham (1994), Haidt (2002, 25–45) and Scherer (2005).

10 The study of the rules underpinning the language game “to bullshit” is still a pending task in specialized scholarship.

11 On this score, see Haidt (1994).

12 See Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont’s (1998) book on the “fashionable nonsense” produced by several extremely influential contemporary thinkers. This important work has much in common with the scholarship devoted to studying bullshit.

13 Compare with Chen Sham (1995).

14 Although modernity proper emerges in Spain in the eighteenth century, there are earlier instances of modern attitudes. A Cartesian doubt of sorts and empiricism had already been deployed by the Spanish philosopher Francisco Sánchez in his book Que nada se sabe, published in Latin in 1581, while Francisco Gutiérrez de los Ríos y Córdoba argued, in El hombre práctico (1680), that the direct observation of nature is the only criterion for certainty. See Pérez-Magallón’s (2002) important book on the novatores for an exploration of early modernity in Spain. For other treatments of the origins of modernity in Spain, see Iarocci (2006) and Santiáñez (2002).