Flesh in the Age of Reason (46 page)

But there’s the rub. If the filiations are indeed so convoluted, how can we really map life’s twists and turns, that ‘junketting piece of work… betwixt [our bodies] and our seven senses’? Isn’t it all ‘something more inexpressible upon the fancy, than words can either convey – or sometimes get rid of’? Herein lies the core of both the comedy, yet also the agony, of the enterprise, the yawning gulf between the plethora of academic furniture available to Walter, Dr Slop and Tristram for unravelling the human condition, and their pitiful limitations when actually applied to the job in hand. The protagonists, Walter in particular, are forever tying themselves in knots with those very ideas they hope will unsnarl the tangled skein of life:

we live amongst riddles and mysteries – the most obvious things, which come in our way, have dark sides, which the quickest sight cannot penetrate into; and even the clearest and most exalted understandings amongst us find ourselves puzzled and at a loss in almost every cranny of nature’s works.

If only we had Momus’s glass, affording us a window into men’s souls! It would then be child’s play, as Tristram recognizes, to take a man’s character:

nothing more would have been wanting, in order to have taken a man’s character, but to have taken a chair and gone softly, as you would to a
dioptrical bee-hive, and looked in, – viewed the soul stark naked; – observed all her motions, – her machinations; – traced all her maggots from their first engendering to their crawling forth; – watched her loose in her frisks, her gambols, her capricios.

But, he ruefully concludes, ‘this is an advantage not to be had by the biographer in this planet’, for ‘our minds shine not through the body’. Hence we must advance by stealth, by roundabout means – there are, so Tristram insists, no straight lines to wisdom: biographizing is not like cabbage-planting. The clues to truth are at a remove; they need to be reconnoitred, subjected to ‘translation’. Drawing on physiognomy, musical and acting theory and Hogarth’s analysis of the line of beauty, Tristram tries to read the sign-language of movement and posture, gesticulation and response, adumbrating a semiology of pose, composition and attitude, both moral and physical. He seeks keys to resolve the glitches of fractured communication. Noting how, when expounding an abstruse point to Uncle Toby, his father adopts the same stance as Socrates in Raphael’s
School of Athens
, he seizes this hermeneutic clue to the outer garb of man, and recognizes Wisdom.

A deeper puzzle still endlessly nags away at his consciousness, however, that of identity: ‘And who are you, said he – Don’t puzzle me; said I.’ And behind that lurks the question:
why
? Tristram needs an
explanation
of his tormented life, of the ‘thousand weaknesses both of body and mind, which no skill of the physician or the philosopher could ever afterwards have set thoroughly to rights’. Tristram knows
he
is not responsible; the cause does not lie within himself. The reason must be biological, physiological and ultimately embryological: the culprits are his parents:

I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing… Had they duly weighed and considered all this and proceeded accordingly, — I am verily persuaded I should have made
a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me.

And, returning to the womb, the key (as by now we might guess) is in Locke and his theory of the (mis)association of ideas. It was misconceptions in his mother’s head at the moment of conception, precipitating spillage of the animal spirits, which spelt his misconception and blighted his life.

Locke’s theory, Tristram is confident, further explains the familial chaos and domestic turmoil into which he was born. Why are Walter’s and Toby’s heads abuzz with such obsessional schemes, obliterating more pressing matters? Why, in the household, are there such crossed wires and cross purposes? Why do his family constantly misread each other’s words, gestures, meanings? Why is it that when Obadiah announces Bobby’s decease (‘My young master… is dead!’), the maid Susannah becomes possessed of a quite disgraceful idea: ‘A green satin night-gown of my mother’s, which had been twice scoured, was the first idea which Obadiah’s exclamation brought into Susannah’s head. – Well might Locke write a chapter upon the imperfections of words.’

Worse still, Walter’s head at this point gets filled, to Toby’s utter befuddlement, with Cicero. The reason, explains Tristram, lies in Locke’s epistemology of mental (mis)association, the way sensations and ideas, first casually bobbing about, establish their own rutted paths of connection and come to programme consciousness. The mind, tells Tristram, getting into his stride, receives, retains, or loses impressions like sealing wax:

Call down Dolly your chamber-maid, and I will give you my cap and bell along with it, if I make not this matter so plain that Dolly herself should understand it as well as Malebranch. — When Dolly has indited her epistle to Robin, and has thrust her arm into the bottom of her pocket hanging by her right side; – take that opportunity to recollect that the organs and faculties of perception, can, by nothing in this world, be so aptly typified and explained as by that one thing which Dolly’s hand is in search of. –
Your organs are not so dull that I should inform you – ‘tis an inch, Sir, of red seal-wax.

When this is melted and dropped upon the letter, if Dolly fumbles too long for her thimble, till the wax is over hardened, it will not receive the mark of her thimble from the usual impulse which was wont to imprint it. Very well: If Dolly’s wax, for want of better, is bees-wax, or of a temper too soft – though it may receive, – it will not hold the impression, how hard soever Dolly thrusts against it: and last of all, supposing the wax good, and eke the thimble, but applied thereto in careless haste, as her Mistress rings the bell: — in any one of these three cases, the print, left by the thimble, will be as unlike the prototype as a brass-jack.

Thus, Locke has impressed himself indelibly upon Tristram’s (generally too soft) sealing-wax, as he did his father’s before him: ‘Pray, Sir, in all the reading which you have ever read, did you ever read such a book as Locke’s
Essay upon the Human Understanding
?’ This literary hero-worship is not surprising, perhaps, because Tristram sees the solution to his personal psychological dilemma in Locke’s ‘history’: ‘ – A history! of who? what? where? when? Don’t hurry yourself. — It is a history-book, Sir, (which may possibly recommend it to the world) of what passes in a man’s own mind’; for Locke’s history resolves his tragedy:

the effects of which I fear I shall carry with me to my grave; namely, that from an unhappy association of ideas which have no connection in nature, it so fell out at length, that my poor mother could never hear the said clock wound up, — but the thoughts of some other things unavoidably popped into her head – &
vice versa:
— which strange combination of ideas, the sagacious Locke, who certainly understood the nature of these things better than most men, affirms to have produced more wry actions than all other sources of prejudice whatsoever.

But this by the bye.

And yet the joke, of course, is also on Tristram. Little can he see that he, in turn, just like his father, is trapped within his own pet explanations, a dupe of regression. Trapped in a jumble of blame,
opinionated confidence, solipsism and digressions, his
apologia
does not truly unravel the knots of his existence, but spins further ‘negations’, still more
explicanda
. Perversely, the work proliferates. Resembling his tragic double, Hamlet the procrastinator, Tristram discovers he is taking far longer to explain his life than to live it; he has more and more to explain:

I am this month one whole year older than I was this time twelve-month; and having got, as you perceive, almost into the middle of my fourth volume – and no farther than to my first day’s life – ‘tis demonstrative that I have three hundred and sixty-four days more life to write just now, than when I first set out; so that instead of advancing, as a common writer, in my work with what I have been doing at it – on the contrary, I am just thrown so many volumes back – was every day of my life to be as busy a day as this… I should just live 364 times faster than I should write. – It must follow, an’ please your worships, that the more I write, the more I shall have to write – and consequently, the more your worships read, the more your worships will have to read.

The medical consequences, as always, are dire: ‘Will this be good for your worships’ eyes?’

The point is, there is no way out, no solution, no biomedical panacea to settle the traffic of mind and body. Yet, we need not despair, the jest is a happy one. Sterne’s characters are in search of their own ‘North-west passage’ to illumination, some resolution to their anxieties, yet it lies under their noses all the time; they are living it out, silently co-operating with the cunning of nature.

Sterne’s characters are, no doubt, laughable, but they are not grotesque like Swift’s dehumanized Cartesian machines. Sterne feels sympathy, not Swiftian misanthropy or Johnsonian despair. Sterne’s characters ache and agonize with desire and suffering, even if these are usually expressed in fraught and unsatisfactory ways, or not at all. Sterne was a great man of feeling. He was, moreover, in touch with many of the new currents in the biomedical sciences. He was aware of a fresh emphasis upon nature as living and active, and of the new physiological importance of the nerves, organization,
sensitivity and sexuality. The naturalists of his day were speaking less in terms of the machine models discussed in
Chapter 3
and more in respect of process, change, ‘animated nature’.

Tristram Shandy
is a remarkable document. It is the first novel to bear the weight of a major philosophical shift. Its comedy made the new interiority of Lockean and Humean man – a creature of confused subjectivity – seem normal, and even sympathetic. The old regime of the self – that ordered hierarchy which housed the separate soul – was rendered a thing of the past.
Tristram Shandy
was a book whose moment had come, it caught on. ‘Nothing odd will do long,’ dogmatized Johnson: ‘
Tristram Shandy
did not last.’ But he was so wrong. Thereafter, what lasted was what Johnson would have damned as odd.

Late in the eighteenth century the British mad-doctor William Pargeter thus conjured up an image of the maniac:

Let us then figure to ourselves the situation of a fellow creature destitute of the guidance of that governing principle, reason – which chiefly distinguishes us from the inferior animals around us.… View man deprived of that noble endowment, and see in how melancholy a posture he appears.

Implicit in this moving depiction is, of course, the noble ideal from which the madman had fallen: the paragon of
homo rationalis
now reduced to one of the ‘inferior animals’. In one way or another, all accounts of the self formulated in the transition to modernity took it for granted that man was a rational being, even if, as for Swift, the race was only
homo capax rationis
. But there was always, waiting in the wings, the negation of that ideal: irrational man, the madman or lunatic, the dread warning of what was in store were man to divest himself of the use of his noblest gift – or, in the hands of satirists and print-makers, the mortifying critique of the abuses actually wrought by
soi-disant
rational man himself. So how did the age of reason explain the man without reason?

The eighteenth century inherited various models of madness, medical, philosophical and religious. In the Reformation era, insanity had often been diagnosed as preternatural in origin, whether divine or diabolical. Madness thus revealed an affliction of the soul or possession of the Devil; loss of reason and free will implied that salvation was jeopardized.

A major thrust of enlightened thinking lay in the questioning and condemnation of traditional beliefs about witchcraft and other supposed interventions of the Devil in human affairs. All that was
now dismissed as superstition and priestcraft, and in this new thinking new theories of madness played a major part. If the supposed manifestations of diabolical possession – trances, shrieking, coma and convulsions – were neither fraudulent nor truly the work of supernatural spirits, then what else could they be but sickness and therefore the responsibility of the doctors?

From the mid-seventeenth century, criticism mounted of the self-styled saints and prophets accused of creating civil chaos. Such religious fanaticism was, it was now widely claimed by physicians and by critics such as Hobbes, symptomatic of mental disorder: self-styled saints and puffed-up prophets were literally brain-sick. Medical men would point to clear affinities between the manifestations of the religious lunatic fringe and lunatics proper: convulsions, seizures, glossolalia, visions and hallucinations, psychopathic violence (as with regicides), weepings and wailings. Hence charismatic individuals and entire religious sects might now be demonized on medical authority: ‘enthusiasm’ and ‘zeal’ could be psycho-pathologized. In France, Jansenist convulsionaries were singled out, while in Britain such doctrines were used against the significantly named Quakers, Shakers and Ranters and then, in the eighteenth century, against Methodists – ‘Methodistically mad’ became a favourite insult.

While in some parts of Europe demonological debate continued among academic physicians well into the eighteenth century, in Britain all prominent physicians dealing with madness from 1700 onwards interpreted religious melancholy wholly naturalistically, indeed somatically. Referring to the ‘visions’ of early Quakers, the Newtonian Robinson insisted they were ‘nothing but the effects of mere madness, and arose from the stronger impulses of a warm brain’. Richard Mead’s
Medica Sacra
(1749), a commentary on diseases occurring in the Bible, provided rational explanations for cases of possession and other scriptural diseases traditionally regarded as proofs of possession. Such beliefs were ‘vulgar errors… the bugbears of children and women’.