Flesh in the Age of Reason (45 page)

Walter views life’s journey as one prolonged health hazard. Even the urge to reproduce can seem to him a sickness, which, with his habitual prudery, he declines to discuss: ‘Nor is it to be imagined, for the same reason, I should stop to enquire, whether love is a disease, – or embroil myself with Rhasis and Dioscorides, whether the seat
of it is in the brain or liver.’ But he does, nevertheless, do so, countered by repeated doses of anti-aphrodisiac herbs to cool the blood. Once Venus has exercised her sway, the next health risk is birth. The normal birth position – head-first presentation – is, according to Walter, lethal; the laws of mechanics and hydraulics convince him that the pressures of head-first delivery are damaging to the intellectual parts, as was evidently true in Bobby’s case:

the lax and pliable state of a child’s head in parturition, the bones of the cranium having no sutures at that time, was such, – that by force of the woman’s efforts, which, in strong labour-pains, was equal, upon an average, to a weight of 470 pounds averdupoise acting perpendicularly upon it; – it so happened that, in 49 instances out of 50, the said head was compressed and moulded into the shape of an oblong conical piece of dough, such as a pastry-cook generally rolls up in order to make a pie of.

That explained Walter’s hankering after Caesarian section (was not that, together with the name, the clue to Hermes Trismegistus’s greatness?) – at which Mrs Shandy blanched ‘as pale as ashes’. Or, failing that, Dr Slop’s pet hobby-horse, ‘podalic version’, bringing the child into the world ‘topsy-turvy’ or feet first. Next, once – if! – birth had been successfully negotiated, the soul needed protecting; though where its seat lay perplexed Walter: ‘from the best accounts he had been able to get of this matter, he was satisfied it could not be where Des Cartes had fixed it, upon the top of the
pineal
gland of the brain’ – yet another dissenter. But perhaps more crucial even than the soul was the duty of safeguarding the noble asset of a great nose – of that such learned authorities as Prignitz and Slawkenbergius convinced Walter. Walter’s medical diagnoses and therapeutic endeavours knew no bounds.

Indeed, most of the Shandys’ other hobby-horsical foibles were also ultimately addressed to infirmities of the flesh. To speed his convalescence, indicate to well-wishers where he got his wound, and satisfy himself whether the offending rock afflicted him by its projectile force or by gravity merely, Uncle Toby took up the science of fortifications, soon becoming engulfed to the point of monomania:

— stop! my dear uncle Toby, — stop! – go not one foot further into this thorny and bewildered track, – intricate are the steps! intricate are the mases of this labyrinth! intricate are the troubles which the pursuit of this bewitching phantom, Knowledge, will bring upon thee. – O my uncle! – fly – fly – fly from it as from a serpent. – Is it fit, good-natured man! thou should’st sit up, with the wound upon thy groin, whole nights baking thy blood with hectic watchings? – Alas! ’twill exasperate thy symptoms, – check thy perspirations, – evaporate thy spirits, – waste thy animal strength, – dry up thy radical moisture, — bring thee into a costive habit of body, impair thy health, – and hasten all the infirmities of thy old age. – O my uncle! my uncle Toby!

Sterne delights in this absurd paradox of man: such a tender piece of flesh, harbouring such fantasies of omniscience, self-knowledge (
nosce teipsum
) and physical wholeness; and he burlesques the delusion of medical Prometheanism – mirages of health themselves become pathological. Time and again, he calls into question the quest for ultimate physical truth. ‘The whole secret of health’ – Walter yet again is button-holing – depends on the equipoise of ‘radical heat’ and ‘radical moisture’, plunging into the thickets of these medical arcana, only to be punctured by the humble homespun wisdom of Corporal Trim (ever ‘corporeal’), who had seen the light at the siege of Limerick: ‘I infer, an’ please your worship, replied Trim, that the radical moisture is nothing in the world but ditch-water – and that the radical heat, of those who can go to the expence of it, is burnt brandy.’

Sterne goes well beyond satire against prating doctors and medical pedantry. He was uncommonly sensitive to the conundrum of embodiment. In flesh and blood lay the self and its articulations. With its own elaborate sign-language of gesture and feeling, the body was the inseparable dancing-partner of the mind or soul – now in step, now a tangle of limbs and intentions, mixed emotions. Organism and consciousness,
soma
and psyche, heart and head, the outer and the inner – all merged, and all needed to be minutely observed, if the human enigma were ever to be appreciated:

Zounds!… cried Phutatorius, partly to himself – and yet high enough to be heard – and what seemed odd, ’twas uttered in a construction of look, and in a tone of voice, somewhat between that of a man in amazement, and of one in bodily pain.

That blameless clergyman had been sitting harmlessly at the Visitation dinner. Whatever has happened? He has no idea – except that his linguistic reflexes tell him it is more
wounds
: ‘Phutatorius was not able to dive into the secret of what was going forwards below, nor could he make any kind of conjecture, what the devil was the matter with it.’ Sterne unveils the mystery, revealing the physiological circuits, culminating in
Zounds
!, which have been triggered by a hot chestnut plopping down through his fly:

The genial warmth which the chestnut imparted, was not undetectable for the first twenty or five-and-twenty seconds, – and did no more than gently solicit Phutatorius’s attention towards the part: — But the heat gradually increasing, and in a few seconds more getting beyond the point of all sober pleasure, and then advancing with all speed into the regions of pain, — the soul of Phutatorius, together with all his ideas, his thoughts, his attention, his imagination, judgment, resolution, deliberation, ratiocination, memory, fancy, with ten battalions of animal spirits, all tumultuously crowded down, through different defiles and circuits, to the place in danger, leaving all his upper regions, as you may imagine, as empty as my purse.

Adopting a mock-scientific detachment, Sterne contrasts Phutatorius’s instant ejaculation (matching the reader’s intuitive flash of recognition) with the psycho-physiological drama, tantalizingly protracted in the minute and delaying fullness of physical detail. It is yet more pillorying of that noble piece of work, another roasting for the genitals. But the incident is not isolated.

For the intricate life-world of the novel ceaselessly parades, parodies, yet engages our sympathies with the incongruities of the homunculus, the embodied self, probing the secret (and often meaningfully hidden) interplay of match and mismatch, a mishmash ironically mirrored in the obliquities of words and things. And Sterne
makes the reader his accomplice in these disjunctions by raising anticipations: when Toby promises Widow Wadman he will reveal where he got his wound,
she
expects he will unbutton his breeches,
he
sends for a map of Namur. But Sterne no less frequently discomfits – nay, embarrasses – the reader, by slyly inveigling him in complicity with the unwelcome vulgar connotations of scatology and sexual
double entendre
, daring him to see the dirty meaning, until the entire novel becomes a sewer of fiddlesticks, sausages, noses, whiskers, buttered buns, yards, spouts, asses, cabbage-planters, whim-whams, pipes, organs, holes, crevices, breaches, wind, battering-rams and horn-works (‘“high! ho!”, sighed my father’).

Nudging, bawdy, smutty allusions and free-associative punning are only the tip of an iceberg of innuendo and imbroglios, leading us invariably back to a body which never lets the mind forget its presence. One word leads to another: words stir associations, associations disturb our bodies, and before we know it – Sterne might have it, before we
refuse
to know it – we are reacting and responding in ways proud reason would disown. Hearts throb, cheeks blush, pulses race, tears well, blood boils. The fuming Walter snaps his pipe – his body-wisdom’s way of enacting anger while releasing ‘heat’; Toby whistles
Lillabullero
, embarrassedly trying to drown unwanted sounds, the
Argumentum Fistulatorium
(argument of the windpipe) being the channel through which
his
passions ‘got vent’. Time and again, Sterne, that grand frontiersman of the unconscious, demands by his wordplay that we rediscover, and own up to, those obscure, unwanted and frequently suppressed liaisons which animate the body and incorporate the soul.

Sometimes his characters are themselves all too little aware of the tricks of fate in a physical world beyond conscious control. Pious Toby, for example, launches into a dissertation denying the empire of chance, at the very instant that he lands Walter a blow on the shin with his crutch. Yet they also have their own oblique and sometimes scandalized presentiments of these demeaning sympathies of the flesh. The Abbess of Andouillets recognizes that only by uttering the obscenities ‘bou-ger’ and ‘fou-ter’ will her mule (her what?) be made
to budge. Walter for his part knows the truth of physiognomy: the nose has it. And he at least comes clean on the magic of names. You may all mock and snigger but, Walter ripostes, ‘your B
ILLY
, Sir! would you, for the world, have called him J
UDAS
?’ Walter keeps the Anglo-Saxon cleric Ernulphus’s dread curse against the body handy on his parlour shelf, for emergency use. All this is of course ludicrous, partly because it backfires. After all, at Walter’s encouragement, Dr Slop gives the coachman Obadiah the full works of the Ernulphusian anathema:

May he be cursed in eating and drinking, in being hungry, in being thirsty, in fasting, in sleeping, in slumbering, in walking, in standing, in sitting, in lying, in working, in resting, in pissing, in shitting, and in blood-letting! May he (Obadiah) be cursed in all the faculties of his body!… May he be damned in his mouth, in his breast, in his heart and purtenance, down to the very stomach. May he be cursed in his reins, and in his groin, (God in heaven forbid, quoth my uncle Toby) — in his thighs, in his genitals, (my father shook his head) and in his hips, and in his knees, his legs, and feet, and toe-nails.

Yet, cursed genitals and all, it is only this servant who seems capable of procreating.

Try as they might, Sterne’s characters cannot escape being made aware that man is incorporated, even if the body often seems at cuffs with the will. They also know that, as Walter notes, the
separation
of the soul from the body is death. Yet the implications of this carnal knowledge are forever being blotted out. They do not want to feel polluted by the flesh, they want to know no more about it than their ‘backsides’. Fearful and puritanical, seeking to be stoical, and desperately dousing himself against the flames of passion, Walter struggles to keep the flesh under his thumb. His advice to Toby, inflamed by ‘the backslidings of Venus’, is that he must master his flesh, his passions, or what he was pleased to call ‘his ass’: ‘It was not only a laconic way of expressing – but of libelling, at the same time, the desires and appetites of the lower part of us; so that for many years of my father’s life, ‘twas his constant mode of expression – he
never used the word
passions
once – but
ass
always instead of them.’ A chip off the old block in this as in so many other matters, Tristram applauds the self-control of the Stoics and admires ‘the Pythagoreans (much more than ever I dare tell my dear Jenny) for their… “
getting out of the body in order to think well
.” No man thinks right, whilst he is in it.’

And of course the novel proves him right: people
don’t
think right in their bodies – though they don’t think right in any other way. And yet, however much he trumpets the Stoics, Tristram cannot believe that mind can declare unilateral independence from the body. They are but two faces of the same coin; or rather ‘a man’s body and his mind, with the utmost reverence to both I speak it, are exactly like a jerkin, and a jerkin’s lining; rumple the one – you rumple the other.’ ‘The soul and body, in short, are joint-sharers in everything they get: A man cannot dress, but his ideas get cloathed at the same time.’ The human animal needs to be accepted, not denied: Sterne writes not as a stern moralist but in the comic vein.

Tristram sets himself the task of understanding the understanding. Attempts to reason about consciousness were, as we have seen, basic to the scientific movement and to the Enlightenment goal of a science of man. Yet such inquiries could also readily be regarded – Swift and Johnson hint as much – as symptomatic of the itch of Unreason. Introspection had always been regarded as a mark of the melancholic, and the Augustan fear of uncontrolled imagination could be so intense as to question the very wisdom of probing the mechanisms of mind. If, as Locke argued, right thinking hinged on something so potentially tenuous as habitual associations of ideas composed of atomized sensations, then wrong thinking lay but a step away, in their mismatch. Sterne’s playful literary experiment sets Tristram’s sanity in question precisely through documenting his attempts to probe this great issue.

Sterne of course makes his hero hyper-aware – at times at least – of the intimacy of mind and body, intention and action: ‘I said, “we were not stocks and stones” – ’tis very well. I should have added, nor are we angels, I wish we were – but men cloathed with bodies, and
governed by our imaginations.’ Tristram flatters himself he can take such intricacies in his stride: after all, has he not pored over the best literature on the subject?

These little and hourly vexations which may seem trifling and of no account to the man who has not read Hippocrates, yet, whoever has read Hippocrates, or Dr James Mackenzie, and has considered well the effects which the passions and affections of the mind have upon the digestion, – (Why not of a wound as well as of a dinner?) – may easily conceive what sharp paroxysms and exacerbations of his wound my uncle Toby must have undergone upon that score only.