`The Thin Juice of a Man's Understanding'

Something I read in Religio Medici last week sent me forward a century to The Dunciad, where I didn’t find what I was looking for, which probably didn’t exist in the first place, but I did find this:

“Nonsense precipitate, like running Lead,
That slip’d thro’ Cracks and Zig-zags of the Head.”

Almost 40 years ago I had a professor of English literature who read aloud long passages from Pope, laughing all the while. Pope was her Groucho Marx, and that’s how I’ve read him ever since. The “Lead”/”Head” rhyme cracks me up and I like the conceit of nonsense flowing like molten metal from the skull. These thoughts in turn sent me back to Tristram Shandy, or rather to the notebook I kept during my most recent rereading of Sterne’s novel.

The first time I read Tristram Shandy, with the professor mentioned above, I saw mostly sex and death – hardly a novel reading for a 19-year-old. Since then I’ve come to see him as a master of comedy and metaphor – and sex. It remains a deliciously dirty book. I also see him as the progenitor of Joyce, Beckett, Flann O’Brien – the usual suspects – but also of Coleridge, Lamb, Melville, Tolstoy and others with an expansive, elastic, limits-defying sense of what prose can do.

During this most recent rereading, I paid closer attention to Sterne’s borrowings from and parodies of John Locke, and the way he depicted the workings of the brain – consciousness, in a word. I don’t plan to read Proust Was a Neuroscientist but I would like to borrow and amend the title: Laurence Sterne Was a Neuroscientist. Tristram Shandy is consigned to the sanitarium of “experimental” fiction, though I’m convinced Sterne as a writer never once had an experimental impulse and was, in fact, a genuine eccentric with utter confidence in his own eccentricity. He regularly extrapolates his own cognitive eccentricity (“like running Lead”) onto the human mind in general:

“-- the thought floated only in Dr. Slop’s mind, without sail or ballast to it, as a simple proposition; millions of which, as your worship knows, are every day swimming quietly in the middle of the thin juice of a man’s understanding, without being carried backwards or forwards, till some little gusts of passion or interest drive them to one side.”

The maritime metaphor is comically sustained and “thin juice” is awfully good.

“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 each other in train just like –A train of artillery, said my uncle Toby.--train of a fiddle stick!—quoth my father,--which follow and succeed one another in our minds at certain distances, just like the images in the inside of a lanthorn [lantern] turned around by the heat of a candle.—I declare, quoth my Uncle Toby, mine are more like a smoak-jack.—Then, brother Toby, I have nothing more to say to you upon the subject, said my father.”

Typically, Sterne ends the chapter there, only to resume the conversation between Tristram’s father and Uncle Toby. Tristram says of Toby: “his head like a smoak-jack:--the funnel unswept, and the ideas whirling round and round about in it, all obfuscated and darkened over with fuliginous matter!” And another great extended metaphor:

“My most zealous wish and fervent prayer in your behalf, and in my own too, in case the thing is not already done for us, -- is, that the great gifts and endowments both of wit and judgement, with everything which usually goes along with them – such as memory, fancy, genius, eloquence, quick parts, and what not, may this precious moment, without stint or measure, let or hindrance, be poured down warm as each of us could bear it – scum and sediment and all (for I would not have a drop lost) into the several receptacles, cells, cellules, domiciles, dormitories, refectories, and spare places of our brains – in such sort, that they might continue to be injected and tunned into, according to the true intent and meaning of my wish, until every vessel of them, both great and small, be so replenished, saturated, and filled up therewith, that no more, would it save a man’s life, could possibly be got either in or out.”

This sort of thing is not for every reader, I’m certain. For an earnest lover of the linear, Sterne must be infuriating. But if you trust him, as he trusts his own waywardness, and if the infinite digressiveness of the internet is part of its appeal, Tristram Shandy is, as Sterne reminds us in the novel’s final sentence, “A COCK and a BULL…And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard.”