A hot Chestnut in the open Fly – Laurence Sterne

 

As a reader, I am just like everybody else. I hate it to be getting bored. I like reading page-turners, whether SF, crime or mystery, whatever floats the boat. What I don’t like is the hyped up lemon, thundering down on me because some critic is dragging a living out of doing the hyping. Sometimes these critics seem to come in hordes. They have PhDs front and aft and call themselves scholars. They are in the academic business of mutual masturbation. Nothing personal; we all have to pay our mortgage, but I find it annoying getting caught in a battle of books over homespun “anatomies” of “archetypes” and “modes.”

So, when I read The Life and Opinions of Tristram Schandy, Gentlemen, for the first time, because it was supposed to be the crown jewel of English literature, I was certainly not the only one chewing with dull determination my way through never ending sentences that insanely exceeded every normal person’s attention span. “Normal,” that is, for our generation of the thirty-second television commercial! Clearly, from cover to cover, this author was flowery and rambling away in an unbearable archaic diction. Let’s face it, like Diogenes in search of a fellow human being, I would have to go out with a lantern in open daylight to find somebody reading the Tristram for nothing but his reading pleasure. That James Joyce mentions him on the first page of Finnegan’s Wake is not exactly a recommendation. Not in my book!

In other words, it took me some time to get over the hump, but the moment I stopped listening to the bull on the back of the dustcover and in the editor’s foreword, and began making up my own mind, things became interesting, and I mean really interesting.

Only a complete oaf could be immune against the charm of the following scene, Sterne’s take on a ‘damsel-in-distress’ situation, where the protagonist approaches a lady, with a face "not critically handsome,” (thank you very much) but with something in it, “which, in the frame of mind I was in, attached me much more to it – it was interesting." (If you listen to advise, don’t tell “her” that. Instead, do what Voltaire on such occasion used to recommend: “give it five minutes and I have talked away my ugly face.”  Of course you would have to be a talker – like this fellow here:

"This certainly, fair lady!” he begins, “raising her hand up a little lightly as I began, must be one of Fortune's whimsical doings: to take two utter strangers by their hands – of different sexes, and perhaps from different corners of the globe, and in one moment place them together in such a cordial situation as Friendship herself could scarce have achieved for them had she projected it for a month" – a neat pickup line old sport, but it seems to backfire.

"Your reflection upon it,” the woman says, “shews how much, Monsieur, she [the goddess of friendship – whoever she was] has embarrassed you by the adventure. – When the situation is what we would wish, nothing is so ill-timed as to hint at the circumstances which make it so: you thank Fortune, continued she – you had reason – the heart knew it, and was satisfied; and who but an English philosopher would have sent notice of it to the brain to reverse the judgment? In saying this she disengaged her hand with a look which I thought a sufficient commentary upon the text." Oh dear! The man is mortified, because “with the loss of her hand, and the manner in which I had lost it carried neither oil nor wine to the wound: I never felt the pain of a sheepish inferiority so miserable in my life,” yet “the triumphs of a true feminine heart are short upon the discomfitures. In a very few seconds she laid her hand upon the cuff of my coat, in order to finish her reply; so some way or other, God knows how, I regained my situation.” (Lucky you!) “I forthwith began to model a different conversation for the lady, thinking from the spirit as well as moral of this, that I had been mistaken in her character; but upon turning her face towards me, the spirit which had animated the reply was fled – the muscles relaxed, and I beheld the same unprotected look of distress which had first won me to her interest – melancholy! to see such sprightliness the prey of sorrow – I pitied her from my soul; and though it may seem ridiculous enough to a torpid heart” – not at all Sir, we all have our moments – “I could have taken her into my arms, and cherished her, though it was in the open street, without blushing.”

"The pulsations of the arteries along my fingers pressing across hers, told her what was passing within me: she looked down – a silence of some moments followed,” our hero says, still fishing for clues. "There wants nothing, said I, to make it so, but the comic use which the gallantry of a Frenchman would put it to – to make love the first moment, and an offer of his person the second. It is supposed so at least – and how it has come to pass, continued I, I know not: but they have certainly got the credit of understanding more of love, and making it better than any other nation upon earth; but for my own part, I think them arrant bunglers, and in truth the worst set of marksmen that ever tried Cupid's patience. – To think of making love by sentiments! I should as soon think of making a genteel suit of cloths out of remnants: – and to do it – pop – at first sight by declaration – is submitting the offer and themselves with it, to be sifted with all their pours and contres, by an unheated mind." I can’t help wondering whether this came out right at all, yet surprise, surprise, "the lady attended as if she expected I should go on.”

All right then, now shoot straight and don’t make a mess of it:

"Consider then, madam," continued I, laying my hand upon hers – "that grave people hate Love for the name's sake – that selfish people hate it for their own – hypocrites for heaven's – and that all of us, both old and young, being ten times worse frighten'd than hurt by the very report – what a want of knowledge in this branch of commerce a man betrays, who ever lets the word come out of his lips, till an hour or two at least after the time, that his silence upon it becomes tormenting. A course of small, quiet attentions, not so pointed as to alarm – nor so vague as to be misunderstood – with now and then a look of kindness, and little or nothing said upon it – leaves nature for your mistress, and she fashions it to her mind." Okaaay … bull’s-eye!

"Then I solemnly declare, said the lady, blushing – you have been making love to me all this while" (Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey).

I don’t know about you, but here is a true writer! All he needs to get a scene on the paper are two strangers of the opposite sex – naturally – and a locked door to which the key is missing. No special effects, no props, no makeup artistry, just the magic of the word and imagination.

Laurence Sterne (1713 – 1768) had his appointment with destiny rather late in life. Living the dissolute existence of a man of the cloth with friends in the gentile establishment, he’d earned himself the reputation of a conversationalist and wit. At the age of forty-nine, he offered his first and only novel to a publisher who of course knew better than to risk his money and reputation on this nonsense. Publishers think they know everything. So, Sterne pitched himself the costs for printing and publishing. Publishers know nothing. And authors usually have neither the money nor the necessary publicity machine to properly launch their product. In Sterne’s case it was all word of mouth and the old boys network; and that turned out to be working amazingly well. The book gained instant popularity and the proceeds paid for a new home in Coxwold. Sterne christened it "Shandy Hall," a lovely cottage but deficient in plumbing. Sterne enjoyed every bit of his fame; he had tuberculosis and he knew his days were numbered. Book five to nine of his novel were written under the shadow of the ultimate deadline. Pressed for time, the arguably most eloquent of all English authors began recycling his old love letters for the benefit of an increasing number of groupies in his fan mail. When his only daughter inherited her father’s considerable debts she sold these letters for one thousand guineas. As was to be expected, this ruined Sterne’s reputation with the Victorians.

We know his last words. The moment his heart was about to stop, Sterne suddenly looked up, stretched out his hand and said, "there it is!" The inevitable resurrection man exhumed the corpse and the sudden realization on whom the royal surgeon was just performing a postmortem made a close friend faint in the operating theater. A scene Sterne himself could have invented. He had a knack for looking at things from a strange angle.

"Mr. Shandy, my father, Sir, would see nothing in the light in which others placed it; – he placed things in his own light; – he would weigh nothing in common scales; – no, he was too refined a researcher to lie open to so gross an imposition, – to come at the exact weight of things in the scientific steel-yard, the fulcrum, he would say, should be almost invisible, to avoid all friction from popular tenets; – without this the minutiae of philosophy, which would always turn the balance, will have no weight at all. Knowledge, like matter, he would affirm, was divisible in infinitum and the grains and scruples were as much a part of it, as the gravitation of the whole world. – In a word, he would say, error was error, – no matter where it fell, – whether in a fraction, – or a pound, – 'twas alike fatal to truth, and she was kept down at the bottom of her well, as inevitably by a mistake in the dust of a butterfly's wing, as in the disk of the sun, the moon, and all the stars of heaven put together" (Tristram Shandy, Book 2, Chapter XIX).

Even the great Dr. Johnson (1709 – 1784) confessed being baffled and failed to appreciate the depth and structure, which underscores the seemingly motley surface of Sterne’s novel. In 1776 his verdict was: "Nothing odd will do long. 'Tristram Shandy' did not last" (Boswell, Life of Johnson). Yet despite this verdict of the pundit’s pundit, Sterne had it all put together with extreme care.

How meticulous he was one can gather from a seemingly apropos remark in the first volume of the novel: "And I think, continued he, that the shock I received the year after the demolition of Dunkirk, in my affair with widow Wadman; – which shock you know I should not have received, but from my total ignorance of the sex, – has given me just cause to say, that I neither know nor do pretend to know any thing about 'em or their concerns either" (Tristram Shandy, Book 1, Chapter XXXII). Apparently just a loose piece of conversation, soon to be forgotten over other, no less anecdotal matters and over Uncle Toby's hobby-horse – hornworks and curtains – yet believe it or not, it already ties the knot for the climax of Uncle Toby's story in Book IX, some 450 pages later. So, all the ingredients are measured and in the right place, like the dough of a good pastry ready to be kneaded and punched into shape. But before we roll over the dough and press it with the heel of our hand, and do so again and again, we shall place a raisin right in the center. After some kneading and rolling – nothing that Newton’s laws couldn’t explain down to the last detail – it will no longer be possible to assert the raisin's actual position, despite an exhaustive knowledge of all the inertia and variables of the physics involved. Sterne had single-handedly invented ‘chaos theory’ long before anybody else would think of the ‘butterfly effect.’

“Kneading” here means, you make a meticulous exposition of your story before breaking up the plot and reassemble the pieces in a different order, designed to mislead the reader with mirrors and tobacco smoke. Things may appear chaotic and confused, but I can assure you, there is probably not a single sentence in Tristram Shandy that could pass as a random caprice.

The proof is in the statistics. From 1759 to 1767, it took Sterne eight years to publish nine very slim sequels of this product of "whim and tomfoolery," averaging some sixty pages each. Even Gustave Flaubert (1821 – 1880), a notoriously meticulous and slow composer, has produced more written copy in less time – about one hundred pages a year. Sterne spent two seasons of the year at the desk – writing by longhand of course. In Book 4, Chapter XXV, the author is quite explicit about his care and craft. Tristram Shandy is the realization of a plan, a very careful plan. Yet all this labor over the dash and the exclamation mark raises a fair question:

"Good Lord! said my mother, what is all this story about? – A Cock and a Bull, said Yorick – And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard."

Given the fact, that this is the final sentence and a verbatim quote from Rabelais (1495 – 1553, part 4 in Motteux's translation) this is a declaration of artistic pedigree. Sterne is telling us with whom he wishes to be compared. The other, quite often mentioned forerunner is Cervantes (1547 – 1616), but to get the idea what Tristram Shandy is all about we need to look somewhere else: "It is about an hour and a half's tolerable good reading since my uncle Toby rung the bell, when Obadiah was ordered to saddle a horse, and go for Dr. Slop, the man-midwife; – so that no one can say, with reason, that I have not allowed Obadiah time enough, poetically speaking, and considering the emergency too, both to go and come; – though, morally and truly speaking, the man perhaps has scarce had time to get on his boots.”

“If the hypercritick will go upon this; and is resolved after all to take a pendulum, and measure the true distance betwixt the ringing of the bell, and the rap at the door; – and, after finding it to be no more than two minutes, thirteen seconds, and three-fifths, – should take upon him to insult over me for such a breach in the unity, or rather probability of time; – I would remind him, that the idea of duration, and of its simple modes, is got merely from the train and succession of our ideas – and is the true scholastic pendulum, – and by which, as a scholar, I will be tried in this matter, – abjuring and detesting the jurisdiction of all other pendulums whatever.” “Pendulums?” What is he talking about? “I would therefore desire him to consider that it is but poor eight miles from Shandy-Hall to Dr. Slop, the man-midwife's house: – and that whilst Obadiah has been going those said miles and back, I have brought my uncle Toby from Namur, quite across all Flanders, into England: – That I have had him ill upon my hands near four years; – and have since traveled him and Corporal Trim in a chariot-and-four, a journey of near two hundred miles down into Yorkshire – all which put together, must have prepared the reader's imagination for the entrance of Dr. Slop upon the stage, – as much, at least (I hope) as a dance, a song, or a concerto between the acts" (Tristram Shandy, Book 2, Chapter VIII).

In other words, to the great distress of Tristram's father "the ideas of time and space – or how we came by those ideas – or of what stuff they were made – or whether they were born with us – or we picked them up afterwards as we went along – or whether we did it in frocks – or not till we had got into breeches – with a thousand other inquiries and disputes about Infinity Prescience, Liberty, Necessity, and so forth, upon whose desperate and unconquerable theories so many fine heads have been turned and cracked" (Tristram Shandy, Book 3 Chapter XVIII).

You heard him right! It is all about time – measured by the movements of that particular pendulum with which nature has endowed half of the human race, the half, that according to the divine author “pisses against the wall” (I Sam. 25: 34). Sterne’s book is a forerunner to Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu – in both instances a story of past erections and missed opportunities, but, in my opinion, infinitely more witty and insidious than Proust’s take on the subject, although certainly not on a par with Proust's meticulous visuals for which Sterne and his readers were still lacking the impressionistic eye of a later era. Sterne was a writer of the Rococo, for him nature is a French garden with boxwood shrubs trimmed to form geometrical brain teasers; the only wild beast is a cow causing mayhem among the scaled models of fortifications on Uncle Toby's bowling green. Most of the visuals are close-ups and portrait shoots, vivid enough but not exactly a picture of God's plenty.

The people in Sterne's book talk and think, they don't move a lot. Knowing his limitations, Sterne gives the reader the benefit of a "torn out" chapter at the beginning to Book IV, and he wouldn't be Sterne, if he didn't follow up immediately with a chapter on torn out chapters.

I recommend making use of a loose calendar sheet as your bookmark in order to keep taps on the actual chronology of every incident. Eventually you may notice that the widow Wadman affair is actually the beginning of the whole story that precedes even the narrator’s own birth, yet Sterne has put it at the end as the conclusion to his story. Time, Sternian time, in an anticipation of the multiplying universe of Everett, is constantly pursuing alternative directions; every anecdotal turn takes on a life of its own, seemingly disjoined from the rest. The interactions between Mr. and Mrs. Shandy, Tristram's parents, always end in a split of worlds mutually ignorant of each other and completely out of sync. So the reader follows the discourse, is going places and travels present, past and future, back and forth, north by north-west, and all the time the protagonists just sit in the parlor and waffle away over puffs of tobacco smoke, while Mrs. Shandy writhes in labor. "It is two hours, and ten minutes – and no more – cried my father, looking at his watch, since Dr. Slop and Obadiah arrived – and I know not how it happens, Brother Toby – but to my imagination it seems almost an age" (Tristram Shandy, Book 3 Chapter XIII).

Eventually, long after the reader has finished reading, the "hero" will come to light, but we are already informed that it will be, to his father's great distress, with a nose squashed by Dr. Slope's forceps. Bad news! Not just for the poor babe, but it stirs unwelcome memories and continues a family tradition of – well what? The men of the Rococo wore breaches, codpieces had come out of fashion, but the trousers were still tight and the ladies, when keeping their eyes level, still correlated a man's nose to the size of the bulge going down on one of the inner thighs. And why on Earth does Mr. Shandy agree to have his son baptized under the single one name he seems to be hating most: "Tristram?" A question that starts niggling the reader from the very beginning ­– but for more than three whole books it is never to be addressed again.

Sterne performs a truly astonishing trick. The whole novel, which appears to be all over the place, is actually folded like a telescope into the space of one afternoon at Mr. Shandy's parlor. Well almost!

By then the very same publisher who had rejected the submission of the first volume, beseeched Sterne to accept a handsome contract for the sequels. Publishers know nothing. The author became the lion of London society; he supped with the Prince of Wales, befriended the celebrated actor David Garrick and in his own carriage would return in triumph to Coxwold with a purse full of guineas from the Bishop of Canterbury. The annual revenues of a parson under Lord Fauconberg's patronage feathered him nicely.

We use to give James Joyce credit for the innovation of his time-management in the Ulysses. Joyce himself of course knew better. In the opening paragraph and in the gatekeeper scene of Finnegan's Wake he says so himself, albeit in his typical fashion by “confessing in foreign tongues” (Stanislaus Joyce, Diaries). Underneath all this pseudo-mythological mummery Joyce gives us a scene from his time in Triest, when his brother Stephen had grabbed him at the door, before James could escape to the pubs. So, of course, Tristram Shandy is neither an exercise in stream of consciousness nor of some or other postmodern claptrap. The hot chestnut dropping from Dr. Phutatorius’ napkin into the open fly of his breeches is frying his dick for real.

What a modern reader may fail to realize is the author's consummate familiarity with the conventions of an ancient science – the art of delivering a speech. Sterne's artistic pedigree goes all the way back to Cicero and Horace. Mr. Shandy's parlor is Sterne's vehicle for the Aristotelian three unities of space, time and character. The novel, by and large, is a three-act drama. Act one: birth; act two: frailty and death; act three: courtship, which would open a new chapter in the eternal cycle of life and death had Uncle Toby not been afflicted by that hideous wound in his groin. Sterne is not a clairvoyant like Mr. Joyce & Company; the characters in Sterne's Novel still need to actually tell each other what they think and feel. Yet the incidents are not exactly in sync with the verbal exchanges. It is all about the way our mind is working, Freudian slips and all. Mr. Shandy tries to explain it to his brother: "To understand what time is aright, without which we never can comprehend infinity, insomuch as one is a portion of the other – we ought seriously to sit down and consider what idea it is we have of duration, so as to give a satisfactory account how we came by it.” But uncle Toby is not convinced, “what is that to anybody? quoth my uncle Toby. For if you will turn your eyes inwards upon your mind, continued my father, and observe attentively, you will perceive, brother, that whilst you and I are talking together, and thinking, and smoking our pipes, or whilst we receive successively ideas in our minds, we know that we do exist, and so we estimate the existence, or the continuation of the existence of ourselves, or any thing else, commensurate to the succession of any ideas in our minds, the duration of ourselves, or any such other thing co-existing with our thinking. Now, whether we observe it or no, continued my father, in every sound man's head, there is a regular succession of ideas of one sort or other, which follow and succeed one another in our minds at certain distances, just like the images in the inside of a lanthorn turned round by the heat of a candle. – I declare, quoth my uncle Toby, mine are more like a smoke-jack."

Never did an author know the rules so well in order to break them all. A very talented scriptwriter might be able to catch one and the other of the many threads in this tightly woven tale. However it is my impression that on the silver screen every flashback weakens the overall impact of a film using that ploy. I don’t complain. Tristram Shandy is living proof for the power of the written word; it can accomplish things no other medium could even hope to emulate.

In the end, all things considered, the book turns out to be one humongous slab of penis-talk which in an age where we have "vagina talk" on the stage seems no longer so terribly risqué. So maybe it is not such a mystery after all, that most women wrinkle their noses in disgust and declare not to like the book. Well, what do they know anyway? This is a book for the guys. “It is curious to observe the triumph of slight incidents over the mind. What incredible weight they have in forming and governing our opinions, both of men and things – that trifles, light as air, shall waft a belief into the soul, and plant it so immoveable within it – that Euclid's demonstrations, could they be brought to batter it in breach, should not all have power to overthrow it.”

© – 1/9/2009 – by michael sympson, 4,250 words, all rights reserved