Homunculus: The example of Laurence Sterne

Laurence Sterne never intended Tristram Shandy to be read front to back, beginning to end--or at least so it seems to one reading Tristram Shandy--though Sterne must have written it that way.  

Sterne once called digression the "sunshine" of reading, though it's almost impossible to to be sure that he said this and that it was not what someone else said about his book, Tristram Shandy.

The same thing can almost be said of William Gaddis and his book, The Recognitions. Although the narrative thread in Gaddis is slightly more discernible than in Sterne, both books are brilliantly unreadable by any strategy other than digression.

In the sea, Bicayne, there prinks/The young emerald, evening star,/Good light for drunkards, poets, widows,/And ladies soon to be married, begins the poem Homunulus Et La Belle Etoile by Wallace Stevens.

It is a good light, then, for those/That know the ultimate Plato,/Tranquilizing with this jewel/The torments of confusion, the poem ends.

In literature of this nature, the homunculus prinks and the reader either laughs or crys.