'Down Into Their Duodenums'

“If ’tis wrote against any thing,—‘tis wrote, an’ please your worships, against the spleen! in order, by a more frequent and a more convulsive elevation and depression of the diaphragm, and the succussations of the intercostal and abdominal muscles in laughter, to drive the gall and other bitter juices from the gall-bladder, liver, and sweet-bread of his majesty’s subjects, with all the inimicitious passions which belong to them, down into their duodenums.” 

That’s Laurence Sterne’s Shandean way of saying he writes to make you laugh. All the trademarks of his style are there – metastasizing digressions, eccentricity of punctuation, pseudo-science and pseudo-medicine, the puncturing of authoritative expertise. The only thing missing, I think, are the usual double entendres. Anything for a laugh. Sterne is the tummler among novelists. In his Life of James Boswell (Yale University Press, 2000), Peter Martin cites the passage above from the fourth volume of Tristram Shandy as evidence that, “Here was a literary sensation which proved that laughter and merriment were cathartic, central to the good life, as Sterne explains in his novel.”

 

Boswell met Sterne once, in 1760, the year he turned twenty, three years before he met Dr. Johnson. Boswell was an ambitious young Scot, impressionable, eager for celebrity, whether by writing or practicing law. A year earlier, Sterne had published the first two volumes of his novel, and overnight became the star of literary London, “partly because the writer’s personal and literary style perfectly suited [Boswell’s] own ascendant capricious, light, fanciful temperament.” Martin goes on:

 

“Here was a parson who had emerged from obscurity in Yorkshire to literary fame in London. Was he not a model of how Boswell’s own genius could carry him to fame? Even more encouraging was the fact that Sterne could play the part of the fool and get away with it in respectable London society.”

 

Looked at coolly as individuals, not as writers, Sterne and Boswell both were often contemptible – sycophantic, craving approval, performing, manipulating those in a position to further their careers. Martin tells us that when Boswell returned to Edinburgh the following year, he imagined himself a “straitjackected genius.” He wrote a ridiculous verse, “A Poetical Epistle to Doctor Sterne,” which includes the couplet “Who has not Tristram Shandy read? / Is any mortal so ill bred?” After meeting Sterne, Boswell commenced his serious apprenticeship in drinking and whoring, a pattern of behavior uninterrupted even after his 1763 meeting with Johnson, who confidently dismissed Sterne: “Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.” In 1791, against all odds, Boswell published the greatest biography in the language.

  

[Back to the passage from Tristram Shandy quoted at the top: The OED defines succussation as “shaking up, violent shaking, jolting,” and cites Sterne’s usage. Inimicitious is “unfriendly, hostile, adverse.” Again, Sterne gets credit.]