In Defence of the Long Way Round

Some years ago a student wrote one word in the margin of my favourite paragraph. The word was "relevance?" and it had a question mark and a small, unmistakable air of triumph. The paragraph was a digression, three hundred words on the history of a single comma, and I had loved writing it. It was, in fact, the only part of that essay I still remember.

I have been composing my reply ever since. Here it is.

Four wanderers

The first thing I'd say to the student is that the great essayists did not think a straight line was the same as a good argument. Montaigne let his essays go where his mind went, and kept adding to them for the rest of his life.[1] Robert Burton set out to anatomise one affliction and ended by anatomising nearly everything within reach.[2] Swift, who knew precisely what he was doing, put a "Digression in Praise of Digressions" into the middle of a satire, as a man might hang a mirror in a corridor.[3]

And Sterne, who surely took the whole question further than anyone, needed the better part of three volumes to arrange for his narrator to be born.[4] The delay was the book. If he'd got to the birth quickly, we'd have lost the thing itself, which was the sound of a mind that cannot stop noticing.

None of these writers was careless. Each was making a claim about thought: that it moves sideways as often as forward, and that an honest account of it must show the sidestepping.

What the straight line leaves out

My student's instinct, I should say, was a good one. A digression can be self-indulgent, and I have written plenty that deserved the question mark. The test, I tell my seminars, is not whether the detour is short but whether the road looks different when you rejoin it.

A straight argument gives you the conclusion and hides the route. A winding one gives you the country. You may arrive later, but you know what lies on either side of the path, and you can find your own way back.

It's worth remembering how Bacon sorted books into those to be tasted, swallowed and chewed.[5] Digression is a kind of chewing. The writer slows down over something that could have been swallowed whole, and in doing so lets the reader taste it.

A rule of thumb for the wanderer

I've settled on a modest rule. A digression earns its place if it does at least one of three things: it changes how the main point sounds, it shows the writer's mind at work, or it is simply so pleasing that the reader would regret its removal. If it manages none of these, cut it, and keep it in a drawer for another day.

By that rule my comma paragraph survives on the third count alone, and I have told the student so, in a note of my own.[6]

Notes

1. Michel de Montaigne, Essais (Bordeaux, 1580), the first two books. Further additions followed in his lifetime.

2. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford, 1621).

3. Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub (1704), the section headed "A Digression in Praise of Digressions".

4. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, the first volumes published in 1759; Tristram is born in the third.

5. Francis Bacon, "Of Studies", in The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral (1625 edition, spelling modernised): "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested".

6. From my own seminar notes, autumn term, written in pencil under the word "relevance?" and not yet answered.