#tristram-shandy — Public Fediverse posts

"A tide of little evils and distresses"

Watching his father in his mind beset by microscopic torments and fears, every one of them produced by his own pseudoscientific superstitions, Tristram begins to observe his own melancholic behaviors--the sad slow dipping of his pen and the abatement of his own pulse. Vol III is--I think--the most challenging part of the book for this reason; its slow pulse attempts to put off doom.

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"crush'd his nose, Susannah says, as flat as a pancake"

With all the setup about names and pineal glands ominously whirling around in our expectations for young Tristram, nothing yet has been said about noses, which will be one of the most potent and penetrating signifiers in the text. To have a crushed nose, and need a bridge to lift it up, bodes so ill for the baby that Walter silently wanders off to oomph on his bed.

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"naturally as soft as the pap of an apple"

Somehow I missed this chapter, and in my Shandean way, I allow myself to return to it. How could I have missed Toby getting his knuckles crushed to a jelly by Slop's hideous forceps? This is a crucial passage that reveals to Walter that his trust in the man-midwife may be tragically misplaced.

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"Had my uncle Toby's head been a Savoyard's box"

Toby hears that Slop is making a bridge and, imagining it is related to his own bridge repair problem, thanks him for doing so. Tristram imagines his father seeing the train of associations that resulted in this action as clearly as if looking into a diorama at a peep show, with every thought acted out for him. (How I long to be able to do this!)

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"it would but perpetuate the memory of the corporal's misfortune"

In deciding how to remake the bridge, Toby begins by considering whether in the future there would be a need for an Italian bridge, as threats of war emerge in that region, but Walter talks him into a Flanders-style one. But how should it function? turning open? standing up straight? thrusting forward? All suddenly have sexual connotations because of how the bridge fell.

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"But what are these, he would say, to the destructive machinery of Corporal Trim?"

We learn that, although Toby is sexually modest and abruptly ended his courtship of Mrs Wadman, Trim did not end his courtship of Bridget, Mrs Wadman's maid. In fact, he brought her into the bowling green one night for a private rendez-vous that ended in the total destruction of a drawbridge. Walter teases Toby about this event to embarrass and confuse him.

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"Ye, who preside over this vast empire of biographical freebooters"

Slop has slipped away while Toby and Walter were sleeping to do something, and has ended up in the kitchen making a "bridge." A bridge, for Toby, is part of fortification architecture, and he gets excited. Tristram begins panicking about a digression he wants to make about Trim so we can understand his character better, but worries it might be premature.

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"his anger at the worst was never more than a spark"

Trim's sudden entrance into the parlor, squeaking the ungreased hinges, awakens Walter and reveals that Trim had taken his great-grandfather's jackboots and made mortars out of them for Toby's project in the bowling green, where he has been, since his recovery, reenacting battles, often by recycling materials from Shandy Hall without permission. This will, like everything, have consequences.

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"his rhetoric and conduct were at perpetual handy-cuffs"

A new source of misery is abruptly introduced--a door whose hinge needed oiling, was never oiled, and still has not been oiled at the time of composition. Walter is especially eloquent in speaking about the need for door-hinges to be in good form, but it seems to be impossible for him to take action--"his whole life a contradiction to his knowledge!"

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"so are farting and hickuping"

His characters fast asleep in the parlor, Tristram is free to write his preface on wit and judgment. Horace wrote of delight and instruction, and Swift of sweetness and light; Sterne enters this discourse in defense of wit, which has sadly fallen into disrepute compared to judgment. His cane-chair metaphor declares there must be symmetry between them--though symmetry is violated as an aesthetic value throughout.

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"all obfuscated and darkened over with fulginous matter"

Tristram laments the interruption of his father's explanation of time and eternity, which might have pierced through the perpetual confusion of Toby's mind with one little ray of clear knowledge--except nothing Walter said in ch. 18 could have done any such thing--empiricist accounts of time and duration being notoriously complicated and unpleasant to follow.

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"You puzzle me to death"

Two hours and ten minutes after Dr Slop arrived, Toby is getting restless--not knowing how babies are born, but concerned that time itself seems to have expanded while they wait. Walter begins to explain Locke's succession of ideas as a way to think about the duration of time and our continued existence within it, and Toby's misunderstanding of "a train of ideas" deflates him.

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"---there is a possibility (if it is a boy) that the forceps * * * * * * * * * * *"

Slop warns Walter that the forceps method of extraction works much more safely on the head than on the hip of the child, and reduces the likelihood of accidental * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *. To Walter, such an accident would be worse than the death of the child. These modern methods sound less and less like obstetrical progress.

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"are children brought into the world with a squirt?"

The * * * * * * could either be F O R C E P or S Q U I R T, and, Slop's rhetorical flourish going astray as it does, he accidentally pulls out both. Toby, who, as we know, has not the barest idea of the right or wrong end of a woman, and supposes the child must be... squirted out. We know, of course, that the squirt is there in case of the need for in utero baptism, as Slop is Catholic.

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"hid his BAMBINO in his mantle"

This puzzling little aside about Roman oratory will make no sense to the first-time reader, but it will all become clear soon. To hide a symbolically rich object, such as an infant, in one's mantle so as to produce it at the peak of the argument might be a thrilling and transformative flourish, but the risks are very high, especially if the object is a stinky baby.

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"subordination of fingers and thumbs to * * * * * *"

The midwife upstairs must be in some terrible trouble, as she is reduced to calling for help from Dr Slop, who irrationally demands that she come downstairs if she wants his attention, since she is naturally subordinate to him. But what is the * * * * * *? We might go back to the list of what is in Slop's instrument bag.

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"give up the reins of his imagination"

There are many who will say that the dominant aesthetic of the mid 18th century is order, clarity, and balance--everything in its place and reflecting a Providential purpose. Tristram shows through several examples how works of genius in any of the arts must suffer by this standard, which allows for no variety, digression, obsession, passion, or idiosyncracy. Shouldn't we be changed by witnessing genius?

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"quiescendo, mingendo, cacando, flebotomando"

The excommunication and its translation, with Toby whistling Lillibulero and whispering to himself, is one of the most satisfyingly musical scenes in the novel. If you haven't read the English pages aloud, standing in the middle of your own living room, preferably with a loved one whistling the entire time, I invite you to try it. Walter has invited Slop to satirize himself unwittingly.

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"-----pugh!---psha!---Lord! I have cut my thumb quite across to the very bone!"

An apostrophe from Dr Slop pierces through Tristram's narration. Walter, offended by Slop's disturbingly fierce cursing of Obadiah, proposes that, instead of lessening his curses, perhaps Dr Slop would get more satisfaction from cursing much more deeply and systematically, offering him a volume of Ernulphus's excommunication, to be performed in ch. 11 on facing pages.

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"swiming quietly in the middle of the thin juice of a man's understanding"

Dr Slop idly expresses gratitude to God that Elizabeth's labor is taking so long, so that there is more time to solve the problem of the bag tied up too tightly. Tristram implies that many of our thoughts might be self-interested and uncompassionate, but without really meaning any harm to someone else, "without any sail or ballast to it."

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"Sport of small accidents, Tristram Shandy!"

The bag, tied up with twenty hard knots, full of instruments "obstretical,--scrip-tical,--squirtical--papistical" is to be the cause of one of Tristram's most cursed losses, that of his nose. Eventually we will get Walter's theory of noses, which, like his theory of names attributes far too much to something arbitrary, but more on that all too soon.

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"the vile sin of swearing"

I remember the first time I got to the curse (upcoming) in Vol. III as the most powerless I'd ever felt to resist the joys of literature. As usual, we get the effects before the cause--Slop stomping and swearing about the knots that Obadiah tied when fetching his bag of obstetrical instruments to keep them from jingling so he could hear himself whistle while riding back to Shandy Hall.

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