'The Soul of Reading!'

Don’t invariably mistake a digression for sloppy storytelling. True, a clumsy storyteller will digress out of sheer rambling confusion and indifference to his audience. My father was like that. We arrived at some destination and he would promptly relate the details of the journey, correcting himself along the way: “We turned left at the gas station and then . . . no, we turned right . . .” and so on. It was insufferable. 

Well-done digressiveness, circling back in the narrative to relate a tangentially linked bit of story – sometimes returning to the original thread, sometimes not -- is usually comic in effect. Digressions within digressions can proliferate. Almost by definition, digressions in fiction, as in jokes, are comical. This is characteristic of much Irish storytelling, as in Joyce, Beckett and Flann O’Brien – a variation on the shaggy-dog story. Other gifted deployers of digression include Erasmus, Montaigne, Cervantes, Robert Burton, Swift and Melville. Perhaps the master of the device is Laurence Sterne, who was born in County Tipperary.

 

A reader tells me he has tried again – his third attempt -- and failed to read Tristram Shandy. “There’s no plot. Nothing happens,” he writes. “I know you like the book but he keeps digressing and it goes nowhere.” True, but that’s the idea. No one has so pointedly made a stalled, endlessly deferred narrative the object of his comedy. If you don’t get it, don’t feel bad. Some people are immune to certain approaches to humor. Tristram digressively celebrates his love of digressions in Book I, Chapter 20:

 

“Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, the life, the soul of reading! Take them out and one cold eternal winter would reign in every page. Restore them to the writer -- he steps forth like a bridegroom, bids them all-hail, brings in variety and forbids the appetite to fail.”