The End of the Sausage

I finally did it, I finally finished reading The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, originally published in segments from 1759 to 1767. I started reading this book back in 2019. I brought it on the plane with me to Japan. But, while I think it's undeniably brilliant, I found only sporadic pleasure in reading it.

It's not even especially long and in the three years since I started it I put it down to read much longer works many times. I read The Faerie Queene again, Paradise Lost twice, three Horatio Hornblower novels, two Robert Louis Stevenson novels, Moby Dick again, various Lovecraft and MR James stories, Interview with the Vampire, and I don't even remember what. 18th century English novels are known for their ridiculously excessive verbosity but I managed Swift, Smollett, Fielding, DaFoe, and even Richardson without too much trouble. But God. The jokes. Tristram Shandy does not let up with the goddamn jokes.

The novel is deliberately anti-narrative. The author, Tristram himself, proposes to write his autobiography but is continually prevented by his own lengthy digressions. Author Laurence Sterne sought continually to undermine any sense of awe or any impression of one person or situation deserving more attention than another. I think this is perhaps why Karl Marx was such a fan of the book. But it mostly made me think what valuable a thing stories are in giving us narrative respite from the impossible complexity of real life.

Tristram begins with the intention of describing his birth but he cannot justify focusing on it without thoroughly describing his father and Uncle Toby and the conversation they had that night. If the novel truly has a main character, it's Uncle Toby, whose genitals are continually hinted at as having been terribly wounded in battle. Of course, when Tristram sets out directly to discuss his uncle, he's immediately sidetracked by describing his own journeys through France. He even illustrates his tendency:

I am now beginning to get fairly into my work; and by the help of a vegetable diet, with a few of the cold seeds, I make no doubt but I shall be able to go on with my uncle Toby’s story, and my own, in a tolerable straight line. Now,

These were the four lines I moved in through my first, second, third, and fourth volumes——In the fifth volume I have been very good,——the precise line I have described in it being this:

By which it appears, that except at the curve, marked A. where I took a trip to Navarre,—and the indented curve B. which is the short airing when I was there with the Lady Baussiere and her page,—I have not taken the least frisk of a digression, till John de la Casse’s devils led me the round you see marked D.—for as for c c c c c they are nothing but parentheses, and the common ins and outs incident to the lives of the greatest ministers of state; and when compared with what men have done,—or with my own transgressions at the letters A B D—they vanish into nothing.

As I said, the jokes are non-stop. Some of them are funny, but most of them left me feeling exhausted quickly. The double entendre is constant. See this portion of a story told by a character called Trim:

As Tom perceived, an’ please your honour, that he gained ground, and that all he had said upon the subject of sausages was kindly taken, he went on to help her a little in making them.——First, by taking hold of the ring of the sausage whilst she stroked the forced meat down with her hand——then by cutting the strings into proper lengths, and holding them in his hand, whilst she took them out one by one——then, by putting them across her mouth, that she might take them out as she wanted them——and so on from little to more, till at last he adventured to tie the sausage himself, whilst she held the snout.——

——Now a widow, an’ please your honour, always chuses a second husband as unlike the first as she can: so the affair was more than half settled in her mind before Tom mentioned it.

She made a feint however of defending herself, by snatching up a sausage:——Tom instantly laid hold of another——

But seeing Tom’s had more gristle in it——

She signed the capitulation——and Tom sealed it; and there was an end of the matter.

Maybe I'd have enjoyed the book more as it was originally published, in short volumes. In any case, I'm glad I can finally move on.

Twitter Sonnet #1668

For half a minute games can play themselves.
In trouble's eyes, the ship's a bottle first.
With crowded thoughts we filled organic shelves.
Another crash occurs to prompt a thirst.
Absorbent table cloths could answer stains.
Resourceful spoons could serve a crimson punch.
Resentful ladles shake with metal pains.
Revolving legs convene to carry lunch.
Bananas range about the seventh yard.
Resulting heavy pictures build a thirst.
Concise as armies steal a science card.
Replies reveal a single talking burst.
With final pastes imposing pages sleep.
Ingenious jokes compel the board to keep.

The Sea and the Hobby Horse

It's a rainy day here again and seems like a good time to talk about books I'm reading. I feel like it's been a while anyway. Currently I'm reading A Ship of the Line, the second Horatio Hornblower novel by C.S. Forester, and I've also been rereading Moby Dick. It's a pretty instructive contrast for ways to approach stories of seafaring. The Hornblower novel is like an extraordinarily good sandwich while Moby Dick is like a terrific feast prepared by a master chef over the course of a month utilising ultra-rare ingredients. But the stylistic difference could be described in other ways besides quality. A Ship of the Line is plot driven, compulsively readable. Forester does paint a picture but it's so much more about what happens next. Melville, with Moby Dick, is so much more about establishing mood and sensation.

But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through.—It’s the Black Sea in a midnight gale.—It’s the unnatural combat of the four primal elements.—It’s a blasted heath.—It’s a Hyperborean winter scene.—It’s the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time. But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture’s midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain. But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great leviathan himself?

That's the kind of writing that couldn't be taught in a million years. Only instinct could show a writer how to so effectively move from simple descriptive prose to presumptions of instant mental associations, from traditionally composed renderings to colloquial, conversational injections. It has the peculiar sensation of a narrated film in which the pictures and sound are somehow embedded in the words.

Oh, I'm also still reading Tristram Shandy. I guess I've been slowly working my way through it for over a year. That's the real polar opposite of A Ship of the Line. Where the Forester novel is all momentum, Tristram Shandy is a deliberate project against momentum. And I do sort of admire that. Every time I pick the book up I laugh at something but, strangely, however funny it is, it never makes me want to pick it back up. I guess this is the surest sign it is postmodern before postmodernism was codified. When I set out to read what were formerly considered the four great, essential novels of the 18th century--Pamela, Tom Jones, Roderick Random, and Tristram Shandy--I'd never have imagined the last would be the one that would slow me down the most, possible because, of all four, Tristram Shandy was the only one for which I've actually spoken to or heard of currently living admirers.

I have been kind of getting more into it lately. I'm just over halfway through and the protagonist has finally emerged from his mother's womb. An argument has ensued about the accident of him being baptised "Tristram"--his father wanted "Trismegistus" but the housemaid who was supposed to communicate this to the priest forgot the full name by the time she reached Mrs. Shandy's bedchamber. There's also some hints that the boy's nose may have been crushed by experimental forceps. My pace at reading has picked up a little bit lately now that I've started to suspect the author, Laurence Sterne, basically decided to role play as a man who has no penis. The fundamental joke of the novel is that it presents the symptoms, preoccupations, and desires of an intelligent author writing in such a condition. He never explicitly invites the reader to contemplate the possibility that he has no penis, but he does talk a lot about his Uncle Toby whose genitals were crushed by shrapnel from cannonfire and who, for the rest of his life, has a "hobbyhorisical" fixation on diverting all conversations to the subject of battlefield artillery or fortifications. Shandy, the fictional author, meanwhile, devotes whole chapters to button holes and an embarrassing accident with a chestnut and then separate chapters justifying the others. I feel like I get the joke and the intricacy of its execution is fascinating but, even so, I feel like I could zip through a dozen Hornblower novels before I finally finish Tristram Shandy.