{"id":112636,"date":"2017-07-18T11:00:17","date_gmt":"2017-07-18T15:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=112636"},"modified":"2017-07-18T12:10:00","modified_gmt":"2017-07-18T16:10:00","slug":"how-to-read-a-squiggle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/07\/18\/how-to-read-a-squiggle\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Read a Squiggle"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>

William Henry Bunbury\u2019s print The Siege of Namur<\/em>, published in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy<\/em>, Gentleman, by Laurence Stern.<\/p><\/div>\n

Text is composed of lines both literal\u2014the ink on the page\u2014and conceptual\u2014the story line or plotline that, like thread unwinding from a spool, guides us through the turns of a narrative. When we depict someone reading, we tend to signify text with a continuous wiggly line on the pages or the cover of a book. This kind of squiggle, hovering somewhere between text and image, conveys the singular shape of a narrative text. It\u2019s a figure for the act of reading.<\/p>\n

One of the most recognizable literary lines of the eighteenth century is precisely such a squiggle. It occurs in the ninth chapter of the fourth volume of Laurence Sterne\u2019s Tristram Shandy<\/em>, during a conversation between Tristram\u2019s Uncle Toby and his faithful manservant, Corporal Trim, about bachelorhood and celibacy. The corporal, a character usually prone to long, sentimental speeches, declares, \u201cWhilst a man is free\u2014,\u201d and gives \u201ca flourish with his stick thus\u2014\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Sterne\u2019s squiggle breaks through the text, slithering up the page like the words it replaces. It\u2019s continuous with the text but is not, itself, textual. \u201cA thousand of my father\u2019s most subtle syllogisms,\u201d reflects Shandy, \u201ccould not have said more for celibacy.\u201d Translated into a typographic squiggle, the flourish makes a case for a wordless representation. It\u2019s an argument for the unimpeded life of the bachelor or the dandy, free to move and turn however he pleases. It\u2019s also a wry, playful critique of the self-presumed ability of words to represent in a\u00a0straightforward or linear manner. Curiously enough, Shandy introduces Trim earlier in the novel by noting that \u201cthe only dark line\u201d of his character is his propensity for interminable speechmaking: \u201che could not bear to stop his mouth.\u201d Trim\u2019s function in the plot, as the dispenser of rambling advice, might be to show how narrative can lapse into a meandering flourish.<\/p>\n

Tristram Shandy<\/em> is a digressive meditation on storytelling, an autobiography whose protagonist\u2019s birth itself is delayed until its fourth volume. At one point, Shandy pauses to draw out the versions of the plotline articulated in its first five volumes, each one contorted by bumps, twists, and curls. Seen in these terms, the novel becomes a project in interrupting the conventional narrative line, complicating what he calls \u201cthe shortest line \u2026 which can be drawn from one end to another,\u201d the simplest, straightest transfer from A to B, from beginning to end. Life, in this text, is endlessly, hilariously tangled.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Given that Sterne\u2019s squiggle makes trouble of realism, it\u2019s striking that we should encounter it again seventy years later in a novel by Honor\u00e9 de Balzac, one of the nineteenth century\u2019s most prolific realists. That Balzac adopted Sterne\u2019s squiggle as a visual epigraph to his 1831 novel,\u00a0The Magic Skin<\/em>, is well known (see Aaron Schuster\u2019s 2009 essay on the subject<\/a>); so, too, is his misattribution of the figure to a nonexistent chapter (chapter 322) of Tristram Shandy<\/em>. Balzac\u2019s line also suggests the transfiguration of life into writing. This novel, his only truly \u201cfantastic\u201d one, describes a pact in which its protagonist\u2019s life is sacrificed. Raph\u00e4el de Valentin purchases a magic skin, which grants him his every wish but shortens his life in consequence, shrinking as it does so. The squiggle, once a representation of freedom, now begins to look like the tapering out of vital energies, like a life squandered in the name of desire. Balzac was well versed in the drawing out of lifelines, their correspondent knottings-together and untyings. The Human Comedy <\/em>is a vast and impossible work of literature, claiming to represent French society in all its superficial constellations and deeper socioeconomic impulses through the lives of more than seven hundred characters. Its task was the documentation of life in uncountable spatial and typographical formulations\u2014how it begins, continues, finishes, its endless reroutings.<\/p>\n

Balzac rotated Sterne\u2019s squiggle onto its side and unraveled its last curlicue\u2014acts that speak, as critics have speculated, to Balzac\u2019s explicitly \u201cserpentine\u201d conception of life. Certainly this reading was shared by a later publisher, Houssiaux, who coaxed the squiggle into full-bodied snakelikeness:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Indeed, the various transformations of Balzac\u2019s squiggle<\/a>, as of Sterne\u2019s, are numerous and strange. Like the novel it adorns\u2014an Oriental, fairy tale\u2013like piece\u2014this unlikeliest of figures has taunted generations of readers, publishers, and critics, daring them to parse it.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s another, lesser-known chapter to this story: the intervention, between the British Sterne and the French Balzac, of the German E. T. A. Hoffmann. Hoffmann is remembered as the author of the original \u201cNutcracker\u201d story\u2014far more horrible than the version we might know from the ballet\u2014and of the nightmarish \u201cThe Sandman,\u201d which served as the foundation for Freud\u2019s theory of the uncanny. This interim version of Sterne\u2019s line, drawn by that master of the strange and the frightening, appears in \u201cFragment of a humoristic essay\u201d dated at 1795 to 1800, some fifteen years before Hoffmann\u2019s literary career took off in Berlin. The piece is short and strange, with a Jean-Paulesque introductory tableau featuring birds and lilies and stars interrupted by the line \u201cHere, the Corporal Trim asked to insert his system of freedom, and it happens thus:\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

And \u201cthus\u201d emerges Hoffmann\u2019s variation on Sterne\u2019s story line, in a characteristically more fragmented picture, consisting less of curlicues and loops than of edges and what seem to be the outlines of faces. It\u2019s one of Hoffmann\u2019s earliest references to Sterne, whom he admired as the ultimate craftsman of literary form and whose narrative trickery he later assimilated in his own Kater Murr<\/em>: a novel consisting of alternating manuscript fragments, half of them written by the musician Johannes Kreisler, the other half by a cat named Murr.<\/p>\n

Hoffmann enjoyed a star-studded posthumous literary career in\u00a0the Parisian literary journals in which Balzac also published his earliest works, and he inspired countless imitations, translations, and homages among the French literati of the 1830s. Balzac, for his part, denounced Hoffmann in various letters and articles. And yet he simultaneously peppered his own Human Comedy <\/em>with numerous references to him: in the form of crazed German artists (\u201cThe Unknown Masterpiece\u201d), Gothic revenants (\u201cColonel Chabert\u201d), and a frame narrative describing its contents as \u201ca frightening German story\u201d told by \u201ca young person who had read, without doubt, the tales of Hoffmann\u201d (\u201cThe Red Inn\u201d).<\/p>\n

It seems all but impossible that Balzac could have come across this early fragment of Hoffmann\u2019s. And this makes the episode all the more curious. It\u2019s extraordinary to think these two writers\u2014the one an eccentric Gothic Romantic, the other the father of European Realism\u2014should both have independently arrived at the whimsical decision to copy out Sterne\u2019s squiggle. The squiggle, in turn, becomes a wordless comment about lines of influence, shared inspirations, and the wayward directions taken by thought. When a review of The Magic Skin <\/em>declared the novel to be an outright imitation of the kind of tale written by Hoffmann, Balzac denied the charge. But the novel itself, characterized by its intermingling of real and fantastic levels of narrative, might seem to contradict this. And the squiggle, as a strange double of Hoffmann\u2019s, resembles another trace of this contradiction.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

In his early career, Balzac\u2014like Sterne and Hoffmann had done before him\u2014experimented with various typographic variables: the preface, the epithet, the dedication, and even his own name, which moved through a series of pseudonyms until he landed on the invented aristocratic \u201cde\u201d of Honor\u00e9 de Balzac. His authorial identity, which he had also tried to define in a movement away from Hoffmannesque influence, is counterconstituted here by something out of his grasp: the trace of two authors\u2019 independent readings of a third, taking the form of a squiggle, and the tendency of that squiggle to lead a life of its own.<\/p>\n

It is irresistible to think of these three canonical authors\u2014the British, the German, and then the French\u2014each setting himself down to draw out his version of this superfluous thing, the word without letters or form without shape. Did they draw quickly or slowly? In several attempts or in a single stroke? It seems as unlikely that two people might share the same signature that two people might draw the same squiggle. In this way, the squiggle is a remnant of the embodied act of writing, of handwriting, the kind of writing that resists mass reproduction. As handwriting is slowly replaced by typing, and paper by the screen, these squiggles threaten to disappear. They\u2019re lost in the move to the e-page or the kindle. In many modern editions of The Magic Skin<\/em>, Balzac\u2019s epigraph is absent. As for Corporal Trim\u2019s flourish\u2014for which Sterne paid, from his own pocket, for the original woodcut, so concerned was he to preserve his idiosyncratic typography\u2014it is replaced, in the online Gutenberg version, by an ungainly note: \u201c(squiggly line diagonally across the page).\u201d<\/p>\n

Squiggles thus present a challenge to the reproduction of text. And yet the bachelor\u2019s squiggle is cast here as an unlikely father: one to have inspired a progeny taken up by hand, in imitation, imperfectly and improbably, in two separate countries. The squiggle persists, then, at the very limits of literary copy. Such a line is not just a replacement for text, for writing, but an emblem of reading: the figure for a three-way encounter between Sterne, Hoffmann, and Balzac. Their squiggles, then, aren\u2019t conclusive so much as disruptive, excessive\u2014a descriptive flourish at most; otherwise, a reminder that literary lines, like literary histories, do not always follow a predictable course.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\n Polly Dickson is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Cambridge, currently based in Berlin. She tweets at @pollyletitia.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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