Prose of the day
Aug. 25th, 2011 11:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pallas_athenaFrom Tristram Shandy, vol. IX, ch. viii-ix, by Laurence Sterne
The Life And Adventures of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is one of my favourite books. See, already I'm having trouble not adding "and it should be one of yours, too!" That's why I rarely talk about it: my diatribes on the subject tend to end with demands that everyone in the room drink, d--n you, drain your g-dd--ned glasses to the memory of Laurence Sterne. The resulting hoarseness is quite tragically ruinous to the operatic voice-- hence my reluctance to trot out this peculiar HOBBY-HORSE of mine in Publick.
[Seriously, read this book. It will take over your brain, of course, but that's just a side effect.]
Why do I love Tristram Shandy? It's an anti-novel, in which Tristram is conceived wrongly, born wrongly, named wrongly, circumcised extremely wrongly, and spends nine volumes mostly failing to narrate either his life or adventures. It even contains two anti-illustrations: an entirely black page (representing the death of Parson Yorick):
...and an entirely blank one (on which the reader is invited to
sketch his own portrait of that volume's sex-bomb, the widow Wadman).
One of Tristram Shandy's most memorable quotes is not a phrase but an image:
As a person who studied English, I find it sexy when literature gets all meta-- but I don't just love Tristram Shandy for its defiance of expectation. I love it for the love Sterne put into it. He typeset it himself, using four different lengths of dashes (quarter-inch, half-inch, three-quarter-inch, and inch) for the syncopated pauses that make it impossible to mistake his text for anyone else's. I love it for its filth-by-omission humour: Sterne, for example, markedly doesn't tell us we've been witnessing his parents having sex at the beginning of the book; informs us that "there is no chaste word" for the opening in someone's breeches down which a hot chestnut has fallen; and censors himself rigidly in one scene by using exactly enough asterisks to spell "piss out of the window."
Of course the window-pissing goes horribly wrong. Of course it does. No one gets to finish what they start in Tristram Shandy: not the author, not the characters, not the reader. The very orgasm that conceives Tristram is interrupted. Even the parish bull at the end of the book can't seem to get his duty done. The constant dashes punctuate fragmentary thoughts and sentences that change direction in midstream and head off somewhere totally different.
But then, none of us get to see the end of what we start. We all leave our lives, our works, our adventures unfinished. I owe everything I know about Sterne and his works to my revered tutor A. D. Nuttall, whose untimely death hit me hard. I can still hear his resonant voice describing how, if you copy Sterne's description of Trim's reading stance in chapter 17 of volume II, "it turns you into an eighteenth-century person"-- and see him standing in the middle of his study to demonstrate this.
Thomas Jefferson, probably America's most intelligent President, and his wife Martha both loved Tristram Shandy. During Martha's final illness in 1782, when she was just 34, they both copied out the passage quoted at the beginning of this entry:
Martha's hand is above, Thomas's below. The President kept the bit of paper, with a lock of his wife's hair twined around it, for the rest of his life.
I will not argue the matter : Time wastes too fast : every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity Life follows my pen ; the days and hours of it, more precious, my dear Jenny! than the rubies about thy neck, are flying over our heads like light clouds of a windy day, never to return more ---- every thing presses on ---- whilst thou art twisting that lock, ---- see! it grows grey ; and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, and every absence which follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are shortly to make. ----
---- Heaven have mercy upon us both!
Now, for what the world thinks of that ejaculation ---- I would not give a groat.
The Life And Adventures of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is one of my favourite books. See, already I'm having trouble not adding "and it should be one of yours, too!" That's why I rarely talk about it: my diatribes on the subject tend to end with demands that everyone in the room drink, d--n you, drain your g-dd--ned glasses to the memory of Laurence Sterne. The resulting hoarseness is quite tragically ruinous to the operatic voice-- hence my reluctance to trot out this peculiar HOBBY-HORSE of mine in Publick.
[Seriously, read this book. It will take over your brain, of course, but that's just a side effect.]
Why do I love Tristram Shandy? It's an anti-novel, in which Tristram is conceived wrongly, born wrongly, named wrongly, circumcised extremely wrongly, and spends nine volumes mostly failing to narrate either his life or adventures. It even contains two anti-illustrations: an entirely black page (representing the death of Parson Yorick):
...and an entirely blank one (on which the reader is invited to
sketch his own portrait of that volume's sex-bomb, the widow Wadman).
One of Tristram Shandy's most memorable quotes is not a phrase but an image:
"A thousand of my father's most subtle syllogisms could not have said more for celibacy."
As a person who studied English, I find it sexy when literature gets all meta-- but I don't just love Tristram Shandy for its defiance of expectation. I love it for the love Sterne put into it. He typeset it himself, using four different lengths of dashes (quarter-inch, half-inch, three-quarter-inch, and inch) for the syncopated pauses that make it impossible to mistake his text for anyone else's. I love it for its filth-by-omission humour: Sterne, for example, markedly doesn't tell us we've been witnessing his parents having sex at the beginning of the book; informs us that "there is no chaste word" for the opening in someone's breeches down which a hot chestnut has fallen; and censors himself rigidly in one scene by using exactly enough asterisks to spell "piss out of the window."
Of course the window-pissing goes horribly wrong. Of course it does. No one gets to finish what they start in Tristram Shandy: not the author, not the characters, not the reader. The very orgasm that conceives Tristram is interrupted. Even the parish bull at the end of the book can't seem to get his duty done. The constant dashes punctuate fragmentary thoughts and sentences that change direction in midstream and head off somewhere totally different.
A sudden impulse comes across me ----
drop the curtain, Shandy -- I drop it ----
Strike a line here across the paper, Tristram
-- I strike it -- and hey for a new chapter !
But then, none of us get to see the end of what we start. We all leave our lives, our works, our adventures unfinished. I owe everything I know about Sterne and his works to my revered tutor A. D. Nuttall, whose untimely death hit me hard. I can still hear his resonant voice describing how, if you copy Sterne's description of Trim's reading stance in chapter 17 of volume II, "it turns you into an eighteenth-century person"-- and see him standing in the middle of his study to demonstrate this.
Thomas Jefferson, probably America's most intelligent President, and his wife Martha both loved Tristram Shandy. During Martha's final illness in 1782, when she was just 34, they both copied out the passage quoted at the beginning of this entry:
Martha's hand is above, Thomas's below. The President kept the bit of paper, with a lock of his wife's hair twined around it, for the rest of his life.
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on 2011-08-31 03:29 pm (UTC)