Fictions of the Heart: Sterne, Law, and the Long Eighteenth Century

Fictions of the Heart: Sterne, Law, and the Long Eighteenth Century Robert A. Erickson The early modern anatomical representation ofthe human heart stressed the power of the heart as the source ofheat, and heat, along with pneuma, or breath, was thought to be the source oflife.1 This view of the heart was based on centuries of Galenic medical tradition. Another tradition, going back to the Hippocratic writings and Aristode, stressed that the heart was the source of intelligence, sensation, memory, and imagination, what I call "the cognitive heart." These two traditions originating in Greek antiquity emphasize the human heart as a source ofvitality and creativity.Joined with them in Western thought about the body is the biblical notion ofthe heart as the inner core or resources ofa person, especially die mind, will, and imagination. In scripture, die heart is a symbol ofthe ambivalence of human existence because it can represent both the source of all human wickedness (Genesis 6:5-6) and the source oftruth, rectitude, understanding, and sincerity, and the story of David's affair with Bathsheba is a complex exploration of the evil and ameliorative motions of the heart in one character (2 Samuel 11-12). In the Psalms, the heart is at once the source and instrument of language: "My heart is inditing a good matter ... my tongue is the pen ofa ready 1 See Nancy Siraisi, Medieval andEatly RenaissanceMedicine: An Introduction to Knoivledge and Practice (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1990), perhaps the best recent introduction to earlyWestern medicine; see also Everett Mendelson, Heat andLife: VieDevelopment oftlie Tliemy ofAnimal Heat (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964). EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 15, Number 3-4, April-July 2003 560 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURYFICTION writer" (Psalm 45:1). What I wish to highlight at the start is that both the classical and biblical notions of the heart place particular importance on the creative power of the heart. This emphasis was given even greater impetus with William Harvey's revolutionary discovery of blood circulation and the heart's propulsive power in creating and maintaining diat circulation. For Harvey, the heart itself was a creative organ or agent oflife, constandy in motion, constantly moving the blood through the body, constandy making and maintaining life in the body. He went so far as to characterize the heart as a "familiar house-hold god [who] doth his duty to the whole body, by nourishing, cherishing, and vegetating, being the foundation oflife, and the author ofall."2 The heart partakes of the God-like power of creation, ofauthorship, offiction-making. In this essay, I would like to explore the fiction-making powers ofseveral literary and religious authors (ranging from Boehme to Wordsworth but focusing on Sterne, Law, and the eighteenth century) who characterize and imagine the heart as an agent of creation. 1 first encountered the seventeenth-century German mystic Jakob Boehme in Norman O. Brown's Life against Death, which I read in 1961 in my impressionable early twenties. I was fascinated by Boehme's account of the divine "love play," and the androgynous Adam. I had always planned someday to study Boehme, and like many erstwhile projects, the plan was never fully realized. So it was that coming to the new British Library last summer for the first time, after a Fulbrightyear in the religious studies department at the University of Helsinki, I decided to go back to Boehme, and I ordered a fourvolume eighteenth-century edition of his complete works. I had not gone very far into the first volume, returning to Boehme's first work, 2 Robert A. Erickson, The Language of the Heart ¡600-1750 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), p. 82. I discuss the "cognitive heart" tradition further in "Ethnography and the Theater of the Body" in Ethnography Is a Heavy Rite: Studies in Compaiative Religion in Honor ofJulia Pentikäinen (Turku: Abo Academy Press, 2000), pp. 91-92. Other recent and relevant studies of the representation of the heart include Eric Jager, TheBook oftlielleait (Chicago and London: University ofChicago Press, 2000), which focuses primarily on the medieval period, and Scott Manning Stevens, "Sacred Heart and Secular Brain" in TheBody in Paits: Fantasies ofCmporealily in Early Modem Europe...