Flesh in the Age of Reason (44 page)

A classic of that kind, however, was Laurence Sterne’s immortal comic inquiry into what it was to be a homunculus.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent
. was itself the testament of a dying man whose ‘leaky bellows’ had long before fallen victim to consumption (tuberculosis). Sterne had his first ‘bed full’ of blood while still a Cambridge undergraduate in the 1730s (he almost overlapped at Jesus College with David Hartley). By the late 1750s, when he embarked on his masterpiece, his condition was worsening, and he was eventually to suffer ‘the most violent spitting of blood mortal man experienced’. Tortured by ‘long and obstinate coughs and unaccountable haemorrhages’, he fled from Yorkshire, where he was by now an Anglican clergyman, to France, in quest of health, hoping that air, mildness and asses’ milk would preserve ‘this weak taper of life’. France unavailing, he returned ‘like a bale of cadaverous goods consigned to Pluto’, finally succumbing to the disease in 1768.

Sterne’s wasting constitution served as a
memento mori
. But
reminders were hardly needed, for afflication and death pursued him constantly. All but one of his children were stillborn or died shortly after their birth, and his sole surviving daughter, Lydia, suffered from asthma and epilepsy. Moreover, his wife, Elizabeth, from whom he grew estranged, became disordered in her wits, probably spending some time in a private lunatic asylum. Small wonder that Sterne viewed life as a knot of fatalities (‘Alas poor Yorick!
Remember thee
! pale ghost!’, he wrote to his beloved mistress, Elizabeth Draper).

A man of griefs, Sterne took refuge, over many years, in writing
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent
. Although his hero feared ‘my Opinions will be the death of me’, literary jesting was Sterne’s prophylactic against calamity, his way (as he framed it in the dedication he penned to that great and gouty invalid, William Pitt the Elder) ‘to fence against the infirmities of ill health, and other evils of life, by mirth’. Yet mishap and mayhem, disease and death scar the novel: the mirth is black of hue. As we obliquely discover, all the hero’s family and familiars – his father and mother, brother and uncle, Aunt Dinah and Parson Yorick – have already been buried by the time Tristram, last of his line, comes to compose his life and those opinions which might be ‘the death’ of him too. ‘Lean’, with ‘spider legs’ and a ‘vile cough’, Tristram is himself the ‘sport of small accidents’. He can ‘scarce draw [breath] at all’, due to a tubercular condition inherited from his father (himself a ‘little phthisical’), and all is compounded by another kind of shortage of breath:

To this hour art thou not tormented with the vile asthma thou gattest… in Flanders? and is it but two months ago, that in a fit of laughter, on seeing a cardinal make water like a quirister (with both hands) thou brakest a vessel in thy lungs, whereby, in two hours, thou lost as many quarts of blood.

Although on a ‘milk and vegetable diet’ of the kind commended by Cheyne – the standard regimen for consumptives – the hero’s health declines so alarmingly that, on reaching Book
VII
of his memoirs, ‘D
EATH
himself knocked at my door’: ‘had I not better, Eugenius, fly for my life? ’Tis my advice, my dear Tristram, said Eugenius – Then my heaven! I will lead him a dance he little thinks of.’

Book
VII
then charts the hero’s attempt to give death the slip. But, victim more than victor, his whole life has been a ‘farce’, one ‘chapter of accidents’ – which might explain this bizarre travesty of an autobiography in which the hero never progresses beyond his eighth year, and which regresses to conclude before his birth. Even his origin, he reveals, was misconceived in the toils of his parents’ monthly ‘little family concernments’. ‘
Pray, my dear
, quoth my mother,
have you not forgot to wind up the clock
?’ – his mother is interrupting – ‘
Good G—
! cried my father, making an exclamation, but taking care to moderate his voice at the same time, ——
Did ever woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question
? Pray, what was your father saying? —— Nothing.’ His father suffers an involuntary emission (one ejaculation brings on another), which ‘scattered and dispersed the animal spirits, whose business it was to have escorted and gone hand-in-hand with the
HOMUNCULUS
, and conducted him safe to the place destined for his reception’. Our hero thus originated from a conception when ‘the few animal spirits… with which memory, fancy, and quick parts should have been conveyed, —— all dispersed, confused, confounded, scattered, and sent to the devil’ – causing, according (as we have seen) to Thomas Willis and other best medical authorities, impairment of concentration, energy and virility. Further ‘disgrazias’ dog not just his conception but his entry into ‘this scurvy and disastrous world’. Mrs Shandy’s marriage articles guarantee her the right to be delivered in London, though that privilege is forfeit for this particular pregnancy, following a false alarm during the previous one. So she is brought to bed in rural Yorkshire, attended by the local midwife. The labour proving slow, that old worthy is pushed aside by Walter Shandy’s accoucheurcrony, Dr Slop, who, incapacitated by a thumb cut to the bone in a previous mishap, extracts the hero clumsily with his patent forceps, with the result that his nose was ‘squeezed as flat to my face, as if the destinies had actually spun me without one’. Though a certain Pamphagus, so Tristram volunteers in one of many ventures into misplaced erudition, judged ‘
Nihil me paenitet hujus nasi
… that is, my
nose has been the making of me’, his own nose’s abridgment is the
marring
of Tristram – particularly galling as the maxim that to get ahead you needed a noble one was Walter Shandy’s pet theory, backed up by his reading of scholarly authors’ ‘solution of noses’ (‘ “Can noses be dissolved?”, cried Uncle Toby, awakening’).

‘Begot and born to misfortunes’, a ‘child of… interruption’, he was next misbaptized, losing his name and so symbolically his self. A critical fit which leaves him as black as the maid’s shoe had necessitated that he be baptized without further ado. In transmission from Walter to the curate, his intended name, ‘Trismegistus’, gets abridged (like his nose) to ‘Tristram’, a melancholy misnomer, evoking as it does the Latin for ‘sad’, destined to blight its bearer still further, since Walter, slave to his system of names, was convinced that ‘Tristram’ must cast an evil spell.

Cursed in ‘geniture nose and name’, and robbed of his animal spirits, those superfine fluids essential for vitality and intelligence, Tristram then suffers further physical disaster, losing his foreskin (at least), and being circumcised – or perhaps castrated? – by the guillotine of a descending sash window:

The chamber-maid had left no ******* *** under the bed: – ‘Cannot you contrive, master,’ quoth Susannah, lifting up the sash with one hand, as she spoke, and helping me up into the window-seat with the other, – ‘cannot you manage, my dear, for a single time to **** *** ** *** ******?’

Finally, in this fragmentary autobiography of loss and finitude (‘nothing was well hung in our family’), Tristram loses his education. To remedy his son’s afflictions, Walter had resolved to write for him the definitive education tract, the ‘Tristrapaedia’. Unfortunately, the treatise grows more slowly than his son – foreshadowing
Tristram Shandy
itself: like father, like son, and, Walter being thus counterproductively engrossed, Tristram is left entirely to the devices of his bovine mother, who has ‘no character at all’. Had he been able to go on to trace his life beyond his eighth year, well might Tristram have echoed Pope’s complaint: ‘this long disease my life’:

from the first hour I drew my breath in it, to this, that I can now scarce draw it all, for an asthma I got in skating against the wind in Flanders; – I have been the continual sport of what the world calls fortune;… the ungracious Duchess has pelted me with a set of as pitiful misadventures and cross accidents as ever small Hero sustained.

This contagious morbidity infects not just Tristram but the entire body corporate of the Shandy household. Besides being ‘phthisical’ and racked with a ‘sciatica’, Walter is a crack-brain (the meaning of ‘Shandy’ in Yorkshire dialect), compulsively intellectualizing, and a dupe to the half-baked speculations of every sciolist from Descartes down to ‘Coglionissimo Borri’, and a pack of other dunces,
*
a man who, perennially prating, fuming and thwarted, will ‘twist and torture everything in nature to support his hypothesis’.

Tristram’s booby brother Bobby (‘a lad of wonderful slow parts’) expires in his youth. Their uncle Toby, blessed with preternatural modesty (he does not know ‘the right end of a woman from the wrong’), has been wounded in the groin in service at the siege of Namur. Captain Shandy’s willing servant Corporal Trim has likewise been ‘disabled for the service’ by a knee wound got at Landen. And few of the supporting characters escape unscathed. The midwife is widowed, as is, of course, Widow Wadman, whose husband, like Walter, had suffered from sciatica. Le Fever, whose wife was a war casualty at Breda, has a sentimental deathbed; the Abbess of Andouillets darkly suffers from a ‘stiff joint’; the guileless grenadier in Mackay’s regiment is mercilessly whipped; Amandus and Amanda, the lovers of Lyon,

calling out aloud,

fly into each other’s arms, and drop down dead for joy. Parson Yorick, another man racked by a tubercular cough, dies, and is
commemorated by a black memorial (two black pages in the novel): ‘Alas, poor YORICK!’ Trim’s brother Tom (‘poor Tom’), married to a sausage-making Jewess whose husband had died of a ‘strangury’, is a prisoner of the Portuguese inquisition.

It is, in short, beyond question a ‘dirty planet’, with ‘strange fatalities’ raining down body blows against the ‘delicate and fine-spun web’ of life, all stage-managed, it seems, by a ‘malignant spirit’; a world where, in anthropomorphic parody of human disasters, window sashes lack counter-weights, knives sever thumbs not string, parlour doors creak on their hinges, medical bags, mimicking their owners, get tied up fast in knots, and parsons’ horses are forever ‘clapped, or spavined, or greazed… twitter-boned, or broken-winded’: trains of ‘vexatious disappointments’ – literally

VEXATION
upon
VEXATION

– curse Tristram the archetypal human homunculus – ‘skin, hair, fat, flesh, veins, arteries, ligaments, nerves, cartilages, bones’ and so forth. Indeed, rather like Gulliver in Brobdingnag, Sterne’s characters, to a man, shrink to mere homunculi, dwarfed and defenceless manikins, ill-starred and impotent, overgrown children strong only in the never-never land of their wishes – wishes upon which Tristram promises us an unwritten chapter (wishful thinking). Born under a ‘retrograde planet’, all the Shandy males are mutilated in some way, doomed to frustration. Toby is psychologically if not physically unmanned. Fortified by syllogisms and questing ‘the North-west passage to the intellectual world’, Walter has high hopes of turning knowledge into the power to fend off destiny, but falls victim to his hubris. Tristram himself is childless, his ‘virility worn down to a thread’, and even the Shandy family bull disgraces himself.

Combating this battery of infirmity and injury is a Sisyphean labour. Uncle Toby spends four years recuperating from his war wound, and all for what? Only to end ‘wounded… to his heart’, ‘love-sick’ for Widow Wadman. The lusty widow herself agonizes
over the location of Toby’s groin wound, anxiously boning up on anatomical tomes on the organs of generation. For his part, Walter is a tireless medical theorist, seeking the elixir of life, and stung by Hippocrates’ mocking aphorism,
ars longa, vita brevis
(life is short, but the labour is tedious). Tristram offers regular health bulletins on himself, promising – or threatening – one volume a year for forty years should his ‘vile cough’ spare him. And even the reader is implicated in this deluge of diseases and hypochondria:

– B
ONJOUR
! – good morrow! – so you have got your cloak on betimes! – but ’tis a cold morning, and you judge the matter rightly – ‘tis better to be well mounted, than go o’ foot – and obstructions in the glands are dangerous – And how goes it with thy concubine – thy wife – and thy little ones o’ both sides? and when did you hear from the old gentleman and lady – your sister, aunt, uncle, and cousins – I hope they have got better of their colds, coughs, claps, tooth-aches, fevers, stranguries, sciaticas, swellings, and sore eyes.

Of course, traditional medicine lent itself to humour. Gross slapstick centres on the squat Dr Slop, with his ‘sesquipedality of belly’ – Sterne’s malicious caricature of the real Dr John Burton of York – who waddles in, all caked in mud, proceeds to reduce Toby’s knuckles ‘to a jelly’ in demonstrating his obstetric instruments, and ends up duelling with the maid Susannah, slinging insults and cataplasms. It is a farce rooted in the Rabelaisian and Swiftian traditions of learned wit and Menippean satire. Dr Slop and Walter Shandy, a man ‘given to much close reasoning upon the smallest matters’, are both oblivious to reality through being possessed by their own pet medical theories, canting on in the old, exploded scholastic manner, about ‘
consubstantials, impriments
, and
occludents
’: ‘You puzzle me to death,’ bewails Uncle Toby, on the receiving end one of Walter’s lectures.