“The king’s highway”

“The king’s highway” is the figure for a direct, uninterrupted course through a narrative, set against the inevitable deviations of writing history. In Tristram Shandy, the phrase turns a road into a measure of narrative form: a mule may be driven straight ahead, but a writer with curiosity, judgment, and a world of material to investigate cannot keep to the route.

The Straight Route and Its Limits

The narrator imagines a muleteer travelling from Rome to Loretto without turning aside. Such a journey, if it could be matched by the writing of a history, would let its author predict the hour of arrival. But the analogy immediately breaks down: a person with even a little spirit encounters prospects that solicit attention and cannot simply be passed by. The route is a useful fantasy of orderly progress, not a viable account of how narration proceeds.

Why Histories Deviate

The obstacles are not merely private whims. A historiographer may have to call on personages, paste up panegyrics at one door, and encounter pasquinades at another. At every stage, archives call for inspection: rolls, records, documents, and seemingly endless genealogies summon the writer back and delay forward movement. The history becomes answerable to material that the straight route leaves out; its detours arise from the work of attending to people, public claims, and evidence.

Digression as Narrative Method

The book makes the contrast explicit when it calls for heterogeneous matter to balance wisdom and folly. A timid diversion would not suffice: a proper digression must be lively, concerned with a lively subject, and capable of catching horse and rider only by rebound. The image recasts deviation as energy rather than simple failure to advance. “The king’s highway” is the road the narrative cannot—and does not wish to—follow, while its departures keep the work in motion and prevent it from settling into a single straight account.

The Unfinished Journey

The narrator applies the problem to his own history. After six weeks of making all possible speed, he has managed to say when an event happened but not how; he is still not born, and the history remains far from accomplished. That comic delay gives the road image its consequence: narrative time and the time needed to tell a life do not align. The highway promises a calculable arrival, whereas this history proceeds through diversions whose accumulation postpones its own beginning.