by Steven Moore
Part 2 begins with the startling observation, “When I consider how happy I have been in the married state, and in a succession of seven wives never had one uneasy hour, . . . it amazes me to hear many sensible people speak with abhorrence of matrimony” (1–2). When Buncle follows this with an anecdote about a man who murdered his wife, the nervous reader expects a Bluebeard-type narrative of serial uxoricide, but instead we get the unbelievable story of a man who loses seven wives in 10 years. When Buncle’s first wife dies after two years of marriage, which leaves him as desolate as “a traveler in Greenland who had lost the sun” (19), Buncle sets off like Don Quixote not “in hopes of conquering a kingdom of marrying some great princess, but to see if I could find another good country girl for a wife, and get a little money . . .” (24). As in part 1, Buncle has uncanny luck in stumbling upon isolated houses containing his ideal type: “a lady who had the head of Aristotle, the heart of a primitive christian, and the form of Venus de Medici” (162). Wife #2 is a 20-year-old beauty who wants to remain single, whom he woos by arguing that she has a religious duty to marry and produce a succession of “little christians” (usually lower-case in this Christian novel), and winds up his lecture with one of the oddest proposals a woman ever received: “What do you say, illustrious Statia? Shall it be a succession, as you are an upright Christian? And may I hope to have the high honour of sharing in the mutual satisfaction that must attend the discharge of so momentous a duty?” (48). What girl could resist that? Statia smiles and replies, “I now declare for a succession” and sends for a preacher. She too dies after two years.
Wife #3 likewise survives only two years before succumbing to smallpox like her predecessor (and like Buncle’s college fiancée), and at this point Buncle makes a chilling statement about the results of all this marital successioning: “As I mention nothing of any children by so many wives, some readers may perhaps wonder at this, and therefore to give a general answer, once for all, I think it sufficient to observe that I had a great many to carry on the succession; but as they never were concerned in any extraordinary affairs, nor ever did any remarkable things that I heard of—only rise and breakfast, read and saunter, drink and eat—it would not be fair, in my opinion, to make anyone pay for their history” (137). There’s no mention during the remainder of the novel what became of all these children, or where they lived as he continued to wander the mountains of Westmorland looking for more wives. Nor does he apologize for marrying one wife so quickly after another: indeed, he boasts that, were he to live as long as the patriarchs mentioned in Genesis, “I would with rapture take hundreds of them to my breast, one after another, and piously propagate the kind” (484).
Wife #4 is another math whiz who dazzles him with her mastery of differential equations; she lasts only six months. Wife #5 dies in a carriage accident after only six weeks of marriage. Wife #6 dies two weeks after Buncle abducts her from a tyrannical father, is dug up from her grave and turned over to an anatomist, wakes up on his operating table, marries the doctor, pretends she doesn’t recognize Buncle when he encounters her later at a dinner party, comes clean after her doctor husband drops dead after praising the aphrodisiac Spanish fly, marries Buncle, and dies for real a year later. (I’m not making any of this up!) Between wives 5 and 6 Buncle marries #7, daughter of a physician who teaches Buncle how to become a doctor—during his studies Buncle performs an autopsy on a female cadaver with two vaginae, and remarks, “I should not choose to marry a woman with two vaginas, if it was possible to know it before wedlock” (445)—and of course #7 dies in a boating accident 10 months after their wedding. Unflappable Buncle regards her death, like those of her predecessors, as a lesson from his god: “we ought to learn to give up our own wills, and get rid of all eager wishes and violent affection, that we may take up our rest wholly in that which pleaseth God: Carrying our submission to him so far as to bless his correcting hand and kiss that rod that cures our passionate eagerness, perverseness, and folly” (482). That seems to be the moral of part 2 of this Unitarian fairy tale, which breaks for digressions, lengthy poems, an episode featuring Edmund Curll (the notorious bookseller pilloried in Pope’s Dunciad), a bibliographic essay on medical textbooks, and further “miscellany thoughts upon several subjects.” After the death of wife #7, Buncle sails around the world—details of which he promises in a book entitled The Voyages and Travels of Dr. Lorimer (unpublished)—and returns after nine years to settle down in a cottage outside London, alone (no doubt to the relief of the educated women of Great Britain). The novel ends with an unattributed poem adapted/plagiarized from William Broome’s “The Seat of the War in Flanders” (1710).
Even in a decade crowded with unconventional novels, The Life of John Buncle stands out. At a time when most fictional characters married only once, and remained widows if they should lose their spouse, Buncle’s enthusiastic and legal bedding of one young beauty after another under the cloak of religious duty must have raised eyebrows, and envy in some male readers. While Fielding popularized digressions in fiction, no one pushed them to such extreme lengths. Other novelists were careful not to make their female characters threateningly educated, but not Amory; not only does he fill his novel with brainy young women, he appreciates the sexual appeal of intelligence. In part 1, young Buncle is turned on when his fiancée flaunts her expertise in Hebrew grammar: “my passion had risen so high for such uncommon female intelligence that I could not help snatching this beauty to my arms, and without thinking of what I did, impressed on her balmy mouth half a dozen kisses” (84).
Amory also introduced tones and modes that wouldn’t be seen in novels until later. A pre-Romantic, he dwells on the picturesque and the sublime, admiring wild landscapes that induce “a horror that has something pleasing in it,” and introduces many Gothic elements: skeletons, cadavers, vistas “that harrowed the soul with horror,” tales of premature burial, and a house described as “the most gothick, whimsical, four-fronted thing without that ever my eyes beheld” (1:191)—which is a good description of the novel itself, along with the sentences preceding it: “The mansion had a rusticity and wildness in its aspect beyond anything I had seen, and looked like a mass of materials jumbled together without order or design. There was no appearance of rule in any part, and where a kind of proportion was to be seen, it seemed as a start into truth by the inadvertent head of blind chance.” That’s not necessarily pejorative, for as Moyra Haslett reveals in her voluminous annotations, those sentences are taken from a 1734 book describing Westminster Abbey. The Life of John Buncle is a tapestry of texts, often (as here) unidentified: a description of a garden in northern England is actually taken from a 1752 book on Chinese gardens near Beijing, and a philosophical community’s library is on interlibrary loan from a 1739 book describing the original one in Italy. This is a book based on books, not on life.
Amory deliberately uses old, bookish spellings (like “gothick”) and odd locutions, beginning on the first page when he introduces himself: “About fifty years ago the midwife wheeled me in, and much sooner than half a century hence, in all probability, Death will wheel me out.” (Amory was prescient: he lived to the age of 97). There are some surprisingly frank, even coarse descriptions—he knew Rabelais’ work—as when Buncle says of his fiancée that her smallpox “reduced the finest human frame in the universe to the most hideous and offensive block” (1:88), or when he tells of an “old Irish knight” who married a young woman “when he was creeping upon all-fours, with snow on his head and frost in his bones, that he might lie by a naked beauty, and gaze at that awful spot he had no power to enjoy” (2:185). Buncle’s strident religious beliefs are framed as components of his oddity and can’t be taken seriously, especially when he abandons his considerable scientific knowledge to insist that natural disasters and floods are literally “caused by the immediate finger of God” (1:127). He also can’t explain why an atheistic, libertine friend of his performs more kind, charitable acts than any Christian he knows. As in Don Quixote, there is
tension throughout John Buncle between primitive religion and modern science, between myth and math, two irreconcilable worldviews that have made Buncle, if not mad, decidedly odd. The lengthy religious discourses almost ruin the novel, but perhaps they’re just an act: at one point, when Buncle is trying to ingratiate himself with the guardian of two women he plans to abduct, he “began a story of a cock and a bull and made the old fellow grin now and then” (2:194). Perhaps that’s all Amory intended in The Life of John Buncle: a 500-page cock and bull story, which, though not the best of its kind I ever heard, did make this old fellow grin now and then.
The fad for experimental fiction seems to have peaked with John Buncle, for English writers resumed writing conventional novels until 1759. Two famous novellas appeared early that year, and oh what a difference: first, Voltaire’s Candide—fleet, fierce, and funny—and then Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas—wooden, workmanlike, and woebegone. To alliterate further, Candide is vivid and visceral, Rasselas arid and abstract, and together they furnish a textbook example of the difference between showing and telling, and the difference between a novelist and a polemicist.
Johnson’s tale begins like the legend of Buddha, who at age 29 leaves his luxuriously sheltered life and confronts the miseries of the outside world. Around the same age, the Abyssinian prince Rasselas, bored by his pampered life in an isolated “happy valley” and longing “to see the miseries of the world, since the sight of them is necessary to happiness,”251 escapes with his mentor Imlac and his sister Nekayah (plus her best friend, Pekuah) to visit Egypt and determine the best “choice of life” (which was Johnson’s original title for the novella). Encountering various people high and low, they conclude no particular choice of life guarantees happiness, then decide to abandon their individual ambitions and trudge back to Abyssinia—or so it seems: the conclusion is famously inconclusive.
While Rasselas succeeds as a dour treatise on pessimism, it fails as a novel. It contains many admirable sentiments and aphoristic remarks—“Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful” (41)—but as Stein told Hemingway, remarks are not literature. Johnson’s one-dimensional characters are merely wooden dummies through whom he makes his remarks, and not surprisingly they all sound like the Samuel Johnson of his Rambler essays. Granted, the Oriental apologue genre he adapts doesn’t call for rounded characterization, but none of his faceless characters has the personality of the protagonists of similar fables by Hamilton, Crébillon, Diderot, and Voltaire. Except for the occasional aphorism, the prose is flat, at times reading like a bad translation. (“The princess and her maid turned their eyes towards every part, and, feeling nothing to bound their prospect, considered themselves as in danger of being lost in a dreary vacuity” [15]). Johnson later admitted the novella was written quickly “in the evenings of one week,” and sent “to the press in portions as it was written” (Boswell, 214), and it shows. Like Goodall, he also forces too many unnecessary chapter breaks, sometimes in the middle of conversations.
Worst is Johnson’s disinterest in dramatizing his material. Shortly after leaving Abyssinia, the royal party spots some shepherds and Imlac suggests interrogating them to learn if “pastoral simplicity” is the best choice of life: “The proposal pleased them, and they induced the shepherds, by small presents and familiar questions, to tell their opinion of their own state: they were so rude and ignorant, so little able to compare the good with the evil of the occupation, and so indistinct in their narratives and descriptions, that very little could be learned from them. But it was evident that their hearts were cankered with discontent; that they considered themselves as condemned to labour for the luxury of the rich, and looked up with stupid malevolence toward those that were placed above them” (19). Disgusted, the party moves on. Now imagine how Voltaire would have handled that scene: without making it much longer, he would have individuated a few of the shepherds with telling details, allowed them a few grunts of dialogue, given them some stage business (maybe spitting or rudely eyeballing the ladies), and so on. In a word, he would have novelized the scene, not left it “so indistinct . . . that very little could be learned from” it. Johnson ignores similar opportunities throughout the novel, preferring to get back to his talking-heads discussions. During one of those discussions, Rasselas advices his sister not to use “examples of natural calamities, and scenes of extensive misery, which are found in books rather than in the world” (28), but see what Voltaire does with the Lisbon earthquake in Candide—which happened in the real world, not in a book. And to give further props to the Frenchman, Candide rejects optimism for realism, while Rasselas rejects optimism for pessimism, the other extreme, and concludes with the utterly unrealistic conviction that “the choice of life is become less important [. . . than] the choice of eternity” (48).252
One can make allowances for Johnson: he wrote it quickly, and nevertheless managed some impressive passages, such as Nekayah’s lament for for the abducted Pekuah (35, which probably expresses Johnson’s sense of loss for his mother), a crazed astronomer’s account of how he learned to control the weather (41), and his regret for devoting his life to lonely academic study (41). If you read novels only for their message, Rasselas is a despondent call to abandon hopes, dreams, and ambitions—a kind of anti-Graduation Day speech—but if you read novels for their literary artistry, there’s little on display, which is not surprising from a man who distrusted the imagination. (See chapter 44, “The Dangerous Prevalence of Imagination.”) The astronomer advises Imlac, a former poet, not to “indulge thy pride by innovation” (43); no danger of that here, and fortunately that advice didn’t reach an Irish-born clergyman up north in Yorkshire who, at the end of 1759, published the first two volumes of a paradigm-shifting novel Johnson later dismissed as an ephemeral oddity.
A Brief Digression on the Novel That Changed My Life
Summer of 1972, University of Northern Colorado―After my sophomore year, I switched colleges and switched majors from history to English because of my growing love for poetry, both writing and reading it. I took only poetry classes until the summer session, when none were on offer and I had to settle for a course called “Techniques of the Novel.” Before then I had regarded novels merely as long stories, lacking the “craft or sullen art” of poetry (Dylan Thomas). I can’t remember the first novel we read—either Pamela or Joseph Andrews—but I was impressed when my professor, Neal Cross (1910–79), diagrammed the architectural structure of Tom Jones on the blackboard (which I now realize was based on the blueprint reproduced earlier on p. 752). What, novels have structure, like a sonnet? Next up was Tristram Shandy, and that did it. It blew my mind, as we said in those days, and by the time I finished the rest of the required reading—The Old Wives’ Tale, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, To the Lighthouse, The Sound and the Fury—I decided to bid farewell to Dame Poetry and embrace Lord Novel. I got a B in the course.
Laurence Sterne (1713–68) published The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman in nine small volumes over a period of eight years (vols. 1 and 2, 1759; 3–4, 1761; 5–6, 1762; 7–8, 1765; 9, 1767). If Joseph Andrews is the moment when the English novel switches from black and white to color, Tristram Shandy marks the conversion to hi-def 3D with director’s commentary. I won’t supply a plot summary because I assume anyone reading my eccentric book has read his―what, Madam? you’ve never read Tristram Shandy?―nor you, Sir? Then I insist you lay this book aside and read his instanter―preferably in the Penguin edition (which I cite), the closest affordable replication of the original novel’s special effects―and return when you’ve finished. ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ticktock, ticktock, ticktock ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― Spectacular, isn’t it?! Can you believe this postmodern novel à la lettre was written in the 18th century? If you can’t, you haven’t been paying attention. Most of the novel’s typographical eccentricities, digressive tendencies, and meta
fictional asides were first developed by Rabelais and later French novelists such as Sorel, Scarron, Furetière,253 Subligny, Lesage, Bordelon, Marivaux, and Crébillon; by Sterne’s acknowledged Spanish master Cervantes and the unacknowledged López de Úbeda and Isla; and by Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and in such English novels as Urquhart’s Jewel, Oldys’s Fair Extravagant, Dunton’s Voyage round the World, Swift’s Tale of a Tub, D’Urfey’s Essay towards the Theory of the Intelligible World, Barker’s Galesia trilogy, the Scriblerus Club’s Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, the anonymous History of the Human Heart and Charlotte Summers, Goodall’s Captain Greenland, Fielding and Collier’s Cry, Kidgell’s Card, the anonymous History and Adventures of a Lady’s Slippers and Shoes and The Life and Memoirs of Ephraim Tristram Bates, and Amory’s John Buncle. Sterne outdoes them all in visual gibes and gambols―the black page of mourning, the marbled page (printed in color in the first edition), the blank pages, the torn-out chapter and missequenced ones, bilingual pages en face, diagrams and squiggles, different fonts and point sizes, unconventional spacing―but the startling originality of Tristram Shandy owes more to its radical form than to its typographical whim-whams.
Tristram Shandy is about many things―pedantry, pedagogy, perception, language, sex, writing, obsessions (“hobbyhorses”), obstetrics, warfare and fortifications, time and memory, birth and death, religion, philosophy, the law, politics, solipsism, habits, chance, knots, sash-windows, chambermaids, maypoles, buttonholes, old hats―’twould be simpler to list what it isn’t about―Tristram calls it “a cyclopædia of arts and sciences” (2.17), a Tristrapædia to supplant the one his father aborted―but Tristram Shandy is largely about the nature of consciousness. Over the centuries the novel had been moving from exteriority to interiority, from characters’ public actions and pronouncements to their private thoughts and psychological struggles, though still on the conscious level. Tristram Shandy is the first novel to dive into the subconscious, to reveal how a thought floats in a character’s mind, “without sail or ballast to it, as a simple proposition; millions of which, as your worship knows, are every day swimming quietly in the middle of the thin juice of a man’s understanding, without being carried backwards or forwards, till some little gusts of passion or interest drive them to one side” (3.9). Sterne is less interested in how a man passes his life than “what passes in a man’s mind” (2.2). As though responding to a rhetorical question in John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding―“Who knows not what odd notions many men’s heads are filled with, and what strange ideas all men’s brains are capable of?” (4.5.7)―Sterne not only catalogues the odd notions and strange ideas that fill the heads of his three principal characters (narrator Tristram Shandy, his father Walter, and his uncle Toby) but dramatizes how and “by what mechanism and mensurations in the brain” (3.18) those notions and ideas pass in their minds, which in turn determines the plot of Tristram Shandy. As Kawin observes, “What Sterne presents is a text that behaves like a mind” (243).