ABSTRACT
Writing against the spleen to extend, in the process, his own life, Sterne, through exertion, comes up against the very problem he is trying to solve, for in exercising his vital animal spirits, he is also, in his rash transactions, spurting his ink, his energy, his life's blood about the room. 'In writing,' Ramazini noted, 'the whole Brain with its Nerves and Fibres are highly tense, and a Privation of their due Tone succeeds.'2 Writing, like study, is, after all, bloody work. Witness the trials of Uncle Toby, displacing his wound through hard study guaranteed to feed the flames of melancholia as he pursues the intricate mazes of the labyrinth promis ing 'this bewitching phantom, knowledge . . . O my uncle! fly-fly-fly from it as from a serpent. - Is it fit, good-natur'd man! thou should'st sit up with the wound upon thy groin whole nights baking thy blood with hectic watchings?' (i: 103-4).3 And how can Toby fly from the knowledge threatening to consume him, a knowledge, not of javelins and bridges and sentry boxes, but the deeper knowledge of 'whole nights baking thy blood with hectic watchings' after death? In the text, the answer is clear. Toby must mount his hobbyhorse and ride away from the wound itself.
