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In these worthy circumstances, I entered the secret order of Shandeans

~ Walter Shandy ~ 1 Comment

From Ernst Junger’s The Adventurous Heart: Figures and Capriccios (pg. 8, Telos press edition), a further elaboration of the episode mentioned at the end of Storm of Steel

During the skirmishes near Bapaume, I had Tristram Shandy in a handy little volume in my map case, and it was still with me when we stood ready by Favreuil.  Since we were kept waiting back at the artillery placements from morning until late afternoon, things soon got very boring, though our position was not without danger.  So I began to turn its pages, and before long the entwined style, riddles with an assortment of lights, established itself as a secret accompanying voice in a chiaroscuro harmony with the outer circumstances.  After having read a few chapters with many interruptions, we finally got the order to attack; I put the book away and by sunset I already lay wounded on the ground.

I picked up the thread again in the field hospital, as if all that lay between had been a dream or belonged to the content of the book itself, as the activation of some extraordinary mental power.  I was given morphine, and I continued reading, at one moment awake, at the next in a half-twilight, so that a variety of different mental states chopped up and re-parceled the myriad layers of the text one more time.  Fever attacks combated with Burgundy and codeine, artillery barrages, and bomb-droppings over our zone, through which a streaming retreat had already begun, during which we were sometimes completely forgotten – all this only increased the entanglements, so that today I am left with only a blurred memory of those days, of a half-sensitive, half-frenzied agitation in which even a volcanic eruption would not have astonished me, and during which poor old Yorick and honest Uncle Toby were the most trustworthy characters that presented themselves.

In these worthy circumstances, I entered the secret order of Shandeans, to which I have remained loyal to this day.

Some Galled Goose of Winchester

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The concluding lines of Pandar’s epilogue from Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida:

As many as be here of panders’ hall,
Your eyes, half out, weep out at Pandar’s fall;
Or if you cannot weep, yet give some groans,
Though not for me, yet for your aching bones.
Brethren and sisters of the hold-door trade,
Some two months hence my will shall here be made:
It should be now, but that my fear is this,
Some galled goose of Winchester would hiss:
Till then I’ll sweat and seek about for eases,
And at that time bequeathe you my diseases.

The jokes all aim for the audience, either their venereal diseases and accompanying pains (“eyes, half out”, “aching bones”, “galled” as OED’s “affected with galls or painful swelling”) or their status as pimps and prostitutes (“brethren and sisters of the hold-door trade”, “galled goose of Winchester”).

This latter phrase is the only one not generally clear from the context alone, but it turns out the term ‘Winchester goose’ has its own OED entry with eight examples dating from 1598-1751.  One of these, Stephen Whatley’s 1751 England Gazetteer records the origin in its entry for Southwark:

“In the times of popery, here were no less than 18 houses on the Bankside, licensed by the Bps. of Winchester…to keep whores, who were, therefore, commonly called Winchester Geese.”

Although prostitution was not legal in the city proper, Southwark wasn’t brought under London jurisdiction until much later and instead fell to the charge of the Bishops of Winchester who owned much of the area’s land.  The bishops licensed the prostitutes of the area, who then became playfully known as his geese.  Unfortunately, I can’t quickly find anything on the rationale behind the choice of ‘geese’ – it seems too convenient for it to be a sort of pun on the bishop’s flock (which is usually referring to sheep anyway).

He was quite brutally sent off

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From Memoires of the Duc de Saint-Simon, who always took the time to record some good banter.  We are early in 1695 here.  The edition on my phone is different from my paper copy – the Pleiade set edited by Yves Coirault – but this is somewhere around pg. 215 in volume 1 of that edition.

Harlay had gone to Maestricht to sound the Dutch; but these approaches only puffed up the enemy and drew them the further from peace in proportion as they judged it more necessary for us … They even had the impudence to insinuate to Harlay, whose thinness and paleness were extraordinary, that they took him as a sample of the reduced state in which France found itself.  He, unphased, answered pleasantly that if they would give him the time to send for his wife, they would be able to conceive of another opinion of the state of the realm.  In fact, she was extremely fat and very high in color.  He was quite brutally sent off …

Harlay était allé à Maestricht sonder les Hollandais; mais ces démarches ne firent qu’enorgueillir les ennemis et les éloigner de la paix à proportion qu’ils nous la jugeaient plus nécessaire …. Ils eurent même l’impudence de faire sentir à M. d’Harlay, dont la maigreur et la pâleur étaient extraordinaires, qu’ils le prenaient pour un échantillon de la réduction où se trouvait la France. Lui, sans se fâcher, répondit plaisamment que, s’ils voulaient lui donner le temps de faire venir sa femme, ils pourraient en concevoir une autre opinion de l’état du royaume. En effet, elle était extrêmement grosse et était très haute en couleur. Il fut assez brutalement congédié, et se hâta de regagner notre frontière.

Bacchus looks after his own

~ Walter Shandy ~ 2 Comments

From Ernst Junger’s Storm of Steel (pg 183, Penguin edition)

When I was back in the trench, my comrades Voigt and Haverkamp suddenly appeared.  They had obviously been celebrating, and had had the bizarre idea of leaving our cosy reserve camp behind, walking through the pitch-black wood to the front line, and, as they said, go on patrol.  It’s always been a principle of mine that a man should be responsible for himself, and so I let them climb out of the trench, even though our opponents were still agitated about something.  Their patrol, admittedly, consisted of nothing beyond looking for the silk parachutes of French rockets, and swinging these about their heads, chasing one another back and forth under the enemy’s noses.  Of course, they were fired at, but after a long time they returned happily enough.  Bacchus looks after his own.

The only humor in Storm of Steel comes from moments where the contrast between the deadly seriousness of the setting and the responding behavior of the characters is so marked that it all tips over into a sort of absurdity, a point where cause and effect just don’t correspond.  But there’s more of it than you would expect given the setting – which I think is what lifts this above other such narratives.  There’s a consistent pushback to rehumanize everyone:

Nothing is ever so terrible that some bold and amusing fellow can’t trump it. (pg 237)

There’s even a subtle recasting of the war itself as a second-tier interruption to other more pleasurable matters

The wild drive to the hospital the next day was the last difficult challenge to my powers of survival [after being shot through the chest].  Then I was in the hands of the sisters, and was able to carry on reading Tristram Shandy, from where I had had to put it down for the order to attack. (pg 288)

 

It was like a dream of impotence

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From Ernst Junger’s Storm of Steel (pg 87-88 of the Penguin Classics edition).  Dreams are – towards the back half of the work especially – one of his favored metaphors for battlefield experiences:

In quick time, we had crept up to the enemy barrier…. With a shout of ‘ You are
prisoners!’ we launched ourselves like tigers into the dense white
smoke. A desperate scene developed in fractions of seconds. I
held my pistol in the middle of a face that seemed to loom out of
the dark at me like a pale mask. A shadow slammed back against
the barbed wire with a grunt. There was a ghastly cry, a sort of ‘Wah!’ – of the kind that people only produce when they’ve seen a ghost….After one shot, the magazine had clicked out of my pistol grip. I stood yelling in front of a Briton who in his horror was pressing his back into the barbed wire, and kept pulling the trigger.
Nothing happened – it was like a dream of impotence. Sounds
came from the trench in front of us. Shouts rang out, a machine·
gun clattered into life. We jumped away. Once more I stopped in
a crater and aimed my pistol at a shadowy form that was pursuing
me. This time, it was just as well it didn’t fire, because it was
Birkner, whom I had supposed to be safely back long ago.

A mysterious thing, this branching structure of life

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From Nabokov’s The Eye (pg27?)

It is silly to seek a basic law, even sillier to find it. Some mean-spirited little man decides that the whole course of humanity can be explained in terms of insidiously revolving signs of the zodiac or as the struggle between an empty and a stuffed belly; he hires a punctilious Philistine to act as Clio’s clerk, and begins a wholesale trade in epochs and masses; and then woe to the private individuum, with his two poor u’s, hallooing hopelessly amid the dense growth of economic causes. Luckily no such laws exist: a toothache will cost a battle, a drizzle cancel an insurrection. Everything is fluid, everything depends on chance, and all in vain were the efforts of that crabbed bourgeois in Victorian checkered trousers, author of Das Kapital, the fruit of insomnia and migraine. There is titillating pleasure in looking back at the past and asking oneself, “What would have happened if …” and substituting one chance occurrence for another, observing how, from a gray, barren, humdrum moment in one’s life, there grows forth a marvelous rosy event that in reality had failed to flower. A mysterious thing, this branching structure of life: one senses in every past instant a parting of ways, a “thus” and an “otherwise,” with innumerable dazzling zigzags bifurcating and trifurcating against the dark background of the past.

An eccentricity of the Marquis de Rambouillet

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From a biography on the original salonniere, Madame de Rambouillet (by Nicole Aronson) in the brief chapter on the character of her mostly forgotten husband:

He was secretive and so wary ‘that it was said of him that when someone asked what time it was he pulled out his watch and showed them the dial.’

Il etait secret et si mefiant, “qu’on disait de lui que quand, on lui demandait quelle heure il etait, il tirait sa montre et montrait le cadran.” (pg 65)

Aronson connects this anecdote – for which she provides no source or context, unfortunately – and other odd social habits with his role as a diplomat.  Maybe – only my own perversity of humor prefers to imagine some of what was read as his prickliness as instead his way of amusing himself when, for instance, a guest of his wife’s, after hours of conversation never involving him, turns and acknowledges him only to ask the time.  Not everyone can take being a non-entity in his own home with as much grace as Monsieur Verdurin.

 

Then you must be content to be helped

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From Williams’ Descent Into Hell (pg 106-107):

“If you want to disobey and refuse the laws that are common to us all, if you want to live in pride and division and anger, you can. But if you will be part of the best of us, and live and laugh and be ashamed with us, then you must be content to be helped. You must give your burden up to someone else, and you must carry someone else’s burden. I haven’t made the universe and it isn’t my fault. But I’m sure that this is a law of the universe, and not to give up your parcel is as much to rebel as not to carry another’s. You’ll find it quite easy if you let yourself do it.”

“And what about my self-respect,” she said.

He laughed at her with a tender mockery. “O, if we are of that kind!” he exclaimed. “If you want to respect yourself, if to respect yourself you must go clean against the nature of things, if you must refuse the Omnipotence in order to respect yourself, though why you should want so extremely to respect yourself is more than I can guess, go on and respect. Must I apologize for suggesting anything else?”

 

To know whether I am a monster more complicated and more furious than Typhon

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From Plato’s Phaedrus:

Socrates: But I have no leisure for [this subject] at all; and the reason, my friend, is this: I am not yet able, as the Delphic inscription has it, to know myself; so it seems to me ridiculous,  when I do not yet know that, to investigate irrelevant things. And so I dismiss these matters and accepting the customary belief about them, as I was saying just now, I investigate not these things, but myself, to know whether I am a monster more complicated and more furious than Typhon or a gentler and simpler creature, to whom a divine and quiet lot is given by nature. [Fowler translation]

[229ε]… ἐμοὶ δὲ πρὸς αὐτὰ οὐδαμῶς ἐστι σχολή: τὸ δὲ αἴτιον, ὦ φίλε, τούτου τόδε. οὐ δύναμαί πω κατὰ τὸ Δελφικὸν γράμμα γνῶναι ἐμαυτόν: γελοῖον δή μοι φαίνεται. [230α] τοῦτο ἔτι ἀγνοοῦντα τὰ ἀλλότρια σκοπεῖν. ὅθεν δὴ χαίρειν ἐάσας ταῦτα, πειθόμενος δὲ τῷ νομιζομένῳ περὶ αὐτῶν, ὃ νυνδὴ ἔλεγον, σκοπῶ οὐ ταῦτα ἀλλ᾽ ἐμαυτόν, εἴτε τι θηρίον ὂν τυγχάνω Τυφῶνος πολυπλοκώτερον καὶ μᾶλλον ἐπιτεθυμμένον, εἴτε ἡμερώτερόν τε καὶ ἁπλούστερον ζῷον, θείας τινὸς καὶ ἀτύφου μοίρας φύσει μετέχον

They don’t know the palace – they’ve only seen the toilets

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Chamfort – Maximes 14

There are two sorts of moralists and political theorists – those who have seen only the hateful or ridiculous side of human nature (and this is the greatest number: Lucian, Montaigne, La Bruyere, La Rochefoucauld, Swift, Mandeville, Helvetius, etc.) and those who view it only from its good side and in its perfections (such are Shaftesbury and some others).  The first group do not know the palace, of which they’ve only seen the toilets.  The second are enthusiasts who turn their eyes from what offends then – but which exists no less for that.  There is truth in the middle.

Il y a deux classes de Moralistes et de Politiques, ceux qui n’ont vu la nature humaine que du côté odieux ou ridicule, et c’est le plus grand nombre : Lucien, Montaigne, La Bruyère, La Rochefoucauld, Swift, Mandeville, Helvétius, etc. Ceux qui ne l’ont vue que du beau côté et dans ses perfections ; tels sont Shaftersbury et quelques autres. Les premiers ne connaissent pas le palais dont ils n’ont vu que les latrines. Les seconds sont des enthousiastes qui détournent leurs yeux loin de ce qui les offense, et qui n’en existe pas moins. Est in medio verum.

or, as Pascal says of things generally (Sellier 479), ‘et même à la fin de chaque vérité il faut ajouter qu’on se souvient de sa vérité opposée’