The Straight Line

The Straight Line is both an emblem of order and an ideal that Tristram’s narrative can never quite inhabit. He charts his book’s course in squiggles and loops, then imagines a ruler-drawn line as its destination; yet the detours he inventories and the fertile imaginative world he describes expose the contradiction at the heart of the figure. The straight line promises direct progress, but the book finds its life in departures.

The narrator’s chart of digression

Tristram introduces the image while announcing that, with a vegetable diet and a few cold seeds, he expects to continue his own story and Toby’s in a tolerably straight line. The confidence is already comic: he is not simply promising a more orderly narrative but explaining his dietary preparations for writing it. The line becomes an object to draw, inspect, and argue over before it can become a path to follow.

His account of the earlier volumes takes graphic form. Four squiggly lines stand for the first four volumes; the fifth, by contrast, is represented by one line that still loops through the letters A, B, C, and D. Tristram identifies A with his trip to Navarre and B with a short excursion there with Lady Baussiere and her page. The repeated C’s, he says, are only parentheses—the ordinary “ins and outs” of even the greatest ministers of state—while the conspicuous circuit D records the route taken when the devils of John de la Casse led him astray. The diagram does not erase digression; it makes its different scales and excuses visible.

Tristram’s accounting is also a comic act of self-defense. He argues that the parenthetical C’s scarcely count beside the larger departures marked A, B, and D, and compares his own transgressions with what other men have done. The map thus serves two purposes at once: it records the wandering and pleads for the narrator’s acquittal. Its loops turn a claim of improvement into another occasion for storytelling.

A ruler-straight ideal

Tristram says that the latest volume has improved still further: from the end of Le Fever’s episode to the beginning of Toby’s campaigns, he has scarcely strayed a yard. If this progress continues, he hopes eventually to attain a perfectly straight course. To show what he means, he describes a line drawn with a writing-master’s ruler borrowed for the purpose, turning neither to the right nor to the left. The borrowed instrument makes the ideal look less like a natural achievement than a lesson in imposed discipline.

The straight line gathers a succession of authoritative meanings. Divines call it the path for Christians; Cicero treats it as the emblem of moral rectitude; cabbage planters praise it as the best line; and Archimedes defines the shortest route between two given points. These explanations overlap without becoming identical: the line is at once religious direction, moral virtue, practical cultivation, and geometrical economy. Tristram then asks how people of wit and genius came to confuse this straight course with the line of gravitation. The joke unsettles the apparent simplicity of the image: a line may seem self-evident while its meaning shifts according to the system that claims it.

The metaphor also reaches beyond narration. Tristram turns toward women’s birthday dress and suggests that the matter of straight lines deserves their attention there, converting an abstract figure of moral and geometric correctness into a pointed allusion to clothing and the body. The shift is characteristic of the passage: a high-minded emblem is never protected from the physical, comic associations that narrative order tries to exclude.

Why the story will not stay straight

A later reflection returns to the straight-line discussion while Tristram imagines writing about Toby’s amours. He places himself in a country of chivalry and romance, with the meanders of Julia’s pursuit of Diego in full view of his study window. In such a setting, he argues, no cabbage planter could proceed calmly and canonically, planting one cabbage after another in straight rows and at stoical distances. Even if straight planting might be possible in “Freeze-land” or “Fog-land,” it cannot survive the climate of fantasy and perspiration he evokes.

The passage gives digression a cause within its own imagery. Imagination surprises judgment at every step; ideas, sensible and insensible, seek an outlet; and the exposed slits in petticoats make the orderly planter swerve or sidle into a digression. The joke is also a formal argument. Straightness belongs to a fantasy of controlled, repetitive procedure, whereas romance, desire, and the movement of ideas generate departures. Tristram’s narrative does not merely stray from its path; it presents the impulse to stray as inseparable from the world it is trying to describe.

The image therefore holds the book’s progress and its resistance to progress together. A ruler can draw a line without a turn, and a diagram can make wandering legible, but neither can make imaginative narration behave like a shortest route from one point to another. Tristram’s claim to improvement—his promise to go on more directly—becomes most revealing when set against the loops he carefully preserves and the romantic meanders already visible from his window.