The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

  It will be useful to begin this acknowledgement with two contributions to Sterne scholarship since 1967 that may have somewhat longer ‘shelf-lives’ than most commentaries. The first is Arthur H. Cash’s monumental two-volume biography of Sterne (Methuen, 1975, 1986), replacing the biography by Wilbur Cross, first written in 1909, revised in 1925, and again in 1929. Biography, too, is subject to tastes and times; questions we ask about a writer’s life today are different in many respects from those asked by Cross. Still, as one reads Cash’s account of Sterne’s life, so carefully and minutely chronicled as to event and environment, there develops a strong sense that additional information and new perspectives will not alter greatly the biographical information we have now accumulated about Laurence Sterne. The story will be retold for future generations, but these retellings will, without doubt, rely heavily upon the work of Cash; and while new materials may continue to appear – as, for example, political and other ephemeral writings possibly by Sterne, as suggested by Kenneth Monkman in issues of The Shandean: An Annual Volume Devoted to Laurence Sterne and his Works from 1989 to 1992 – they will almost certainly not change in significant ways the broad outlines of Sterne’s life story. One simply expects Cash’s splendid biography to suffice for much of the next century.

  I must be far more careful in my claims concerning the second commentary; as Sterne warns us, quoting Bishop Joseph Hall, ‘it is an abominable thing for a man to commend himself’. Let it simply be noted that the text of Tristram Shandy in this edition is taken from the Florida Edition of The Works of Laurence Sterne (Vols. I and II, 1978), the result of an extensive study of the textual history of the work; this Penguin edition is the first trade edition to make a fully acknowledged use of the information garnered by that study. It is, as well, the first trade edition able to rely on the 500 pages of annotations that comprise the third volume of the Florida Tristram Shandy (1984).

  Since James A. Work’s valuable textbook edition published in 1940, subsequent annotators, prior to the Florida Edition, have in large measure merely duplicated his work (often with inadequate credit), scattering a new finding here and there, but, presumably for reasons of space, skimping elsewhere. Work’s annotations, another instance of a more enduring scholarly effort, in themselves or their reappearance in other textbook editions, have served Tristram readers for more than half a century; indeed, as the Florida annotators (myself, Richard A. Davies and W. G. Day) pointed out, few if any eighteenth-century fiction writers have been better served in being made available to a general reading audience than Sterne. Without doubt, Work’s influence continues to be felt throughout the Florida Notes, and hence again in these new Penguin annotations. Still, Work’s primary efforts were historical and pedagogical: he identified historical and contemporary personages mentioned by Sterne, defined ‘difficult’ and foreign words and phrases, and elucidated allusions that a modern audience could not be expected to grasp. The Florida Notes serves several additional purposes.

  Most important, perhaps, the Florida Notes provides the full text of passages from which Sterne borrowed, so that comparisons can conveniently be made, without recourse to sources available only in the largest libraries. Sterne’s manipulation of the borrowed materials that constitute so significant a portion of Tristram’s texture is one key to understanding the work. Although it was impossible to proffer all of the Florida materials in this edition, significant and sufficient examples are provided, so that general readers may explore for themselves this important aspect of Sterne’s creative process.

  The Florida Notes also expands the list of Sterne’s borrowings, helped immensely by generations of scholars, from the first serious inquirer into Sterne’s borrowings, John Ferriar in 1798, to Theodore Baird, who in 1936 uncovered Sterne’s source for most of his historical and military details (Nicolas Tindal’s translation and continuation of Paul Rapin de Thoyras’s Histoire d’Angleterre, a source surprisingly ignored by Work, and hence by subsequent editors as well), to the important discovery of Sterne’s use of Pierre Charron’s De la Sagesse ( Of Wisdome ) by Françoise Pellan in 1972. As in the Florida Notes, every effort has been made in my notes herein to acknowledge previous scholarship, although limitations of space may perhaps have led to some unfortunate lapses. In that I opened this Introduction with a discussion of criticism’s evanescence, let me note here that one may also argue that nothing written about a classic work ever completely disappears. Certainly from the annotator’s viewpoint, an awareness that one is building on the work of others, named or unnamed, is paramount. All annotated editions, in this regard, are variorums, celebrating the enterprise of commentary almost as much as the work on which they comment; every annotator, in brief, is a ‘dwarf’, standing on the shoulders of the ‘giant’ of accumulated commentary.

  The Florida Notes also offers many ‘parallel’ passages from sources contemporary to Sterne, where no single source could be identified, but where it was felt to be unwise to label an image, topic, method, or discussion as ‘uniquely’ Shandean. Here annotation serves not so much to elucidate a text as to put in question readings that claim a work is sui generis, a label that bespeaks a reader’s lack of knowledge more frequently than it records the true status of the work. Readers for whom any critical restraint is an unfair imposition on the career of their hobby-horses will find all annotation irksome, and these ‘parallels’ particularly so; on the other hand, the old-fashioned study of ‘analogues’ can often forestall inept commentary, particularly of the sort that insists an author’s sole significance comes from being uniquely out of joint with his or her own time or place, and hence, uniquely, one of ‘us’ and not one of ‘them’.

  Two illustrations will suffice. In Volume IV, chapter xvii, Sterne writes: ‘But mark, madam, we live amongst riddles and mysteries—the most obvious things, which come in our way, have dark sides, which the quickest sight cannot penetrate into; and even the clearest and most exalted understandings amongst us find ourselves puzzled and at a loss in almost every cranny of nature’s works…’ Perhaps no other passage in Tristram Shandy has been more often invoked by critics over the past twenty-five years, as they have applied various postmodern theories of indeterminacy to Sterne’s eighteenth-century novel. The typical argument moves in this direction: Fielding and Richardson lived in an essentialist world of certainty, dominated by Christian absolutes; Sterne, on the other hand, lived in the modern solipsistic world where there are no absolutes, where all value is created by the human being. His world is, in short, a confusion of ‘riddles and mysteries’, akin to our own indeterminate and undecidable universe. What then, the annotator may ask, are we to make of the fact that the ‘riddles and mysteries’ passage very closely echoes two of Sterne’s sermons, in both of which the context clearly suggests Sterne is restating a commonplace Christian belief in the limitations of the postlapsarian human mind? One year after the Florida Notes appeared, it was pointed out that a passage in Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (IV.3.22) underlies all three passages; and more recently, while annotating the sermons, I located Sterne’s actual verbatim source in the theologian John Norris of Bemerton, a passage in his Practical Discourses upon Several Divine Subjects, Volume Two (1691). In each instance, from Locke to Norris to Sterne, the context of the passage is not postmodern angst, but 1Corinthians 13:12: ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly: but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.’ Perhaps there has never been a period in history in which the human mind has not confronted the limitations of knowledge; perhaps – as twentieth-century intellectuals – we are unique only in believing we are unique.

  A second illustration comes from the final chapter of Tristram Shandy, Walter’s lament over human sexuality. In annotating the passage, I have quoted Sterne’s source, Pierre Charron’s Of Wisdome, at length, because both the passage and its source seem of great importance for our understanding of Sterne. Professor Ricks also singles out Walter’s lament, as have n
umerous modern commentators, most of whom – even after 1972 and Pellan’s recovery of the debt to Charron – still do not account for the fact that the words are not Sterne’s but Charron’s, who was, in turn, rephrasing Montaigne, his mentor. Professor Ricks’s intuitive linking of the passage with ‘scepticism’ takes on important new life when the source is known. That one can comment on the passage brilliantly without knowing of Charron’s influence is not to be gainsaid (though ‘brilliant’ commentary is, indeed, a very rare occurrence). However, since we now know of Charron’s influence on the passage, a reading without acknowledging his presence is equivalent to reading an ‘abridged’ version; good readers, I believe, always prefer the ‘complete’ text – with the understanding, of course, that ‘completion’ is always a grace beyond the reach of criticism.

  Finally, the present notes follow the Florida Notes in providing illustrative passages from Sterne’s other writings, A Sentimental Journey, the forty-five sermons, the correspondence and the minor works, when they seem to contribute usefully to our understanding of Tristram Shandy. Here, too, one is deeply indebted to previous scholarly work, especially Gardner D. Stout’s 1967 edition of the Journey (California), and Lewis Perry Curtis’s 1935 edition of the Letters (Oxford). The sermons are also now available in a scholarly edition (the Florida Edition, Vols. IV and V [1996]) that was not available to the Florida Tristram Shandy editors. Some materials from its 400 pages of annotations have contributed to the present annotations, but the sermons remain a relatively untapped source of insight into Sterne’s fiction. Indeed, one hope in annotating the sermons so extensively – a hidden agenda, except that the purpose is self-evident – was to raise Sterne’s clerical career in the consciousness of literary commentators who have heretofore largely ignored this aspect of his life; the outcome of this endeavour awaits the passage of time.

  If the Florida Sermons has a not-so-hidden agenda, the annotations to Tristram Shandy should also come under suspicion, for few if any ‘novels’ in the short history of the novel (a genre that emerged in western literature only in Sterne’s day and may already be in rapid retreat) require this kind of extensive annotation. When fictional emphasis is on the understanding of character and relationships through the orderly (sequential) enactment of narrated events, when these events establish their own internal context for comprehension, indeed, when authors are guided, consciously or unconsciously, by the drive for the ‘novelty’ buried in their genre’s name, and therefore separate their work from, rather than connect it to, sources of meaning outside its self-creating ‘real’ world, annotation takes on a sparse form. As in modern scholarly editions of Fielding or Smollett, novels require that historical figures be identified and that commonplaces unfamiliar to our age, but not to the author’s, be explained; good narratives eschew additional annotation, and in the best narratives one would actually resent being driven away from the story to a footnote for an explanation. The annotations to the Wesleyan edition of Tom Jones provide a good example, especially because of the disproportionate number of notes required for Fielding’s famous introductory chapters – which have a certain kinship with the self-conscious narration of Tristram Shandy – while the narrative itself is by and large self-explanatory. Maugham’s infamous abridgement of Tom Jones, where he cut the introductory chapters in order to highlight the narrative, comes to mind.

  Sterne’s writing, like Fielding’s introductory chapters, demands a different mode of annotation, one arising from its embeddedness (often masked) in a literary past, the literary existence of its narrator (Tristram’s primary occupation as an adult is to write his book), and its digressive texture, so often consisting of borrowed documents and pseudo-documents, counter-narratives and parodies. Professor Ricks points to the ways in which this structure might serve as a riposte to the developing history of the novel and that is certainly the way many (if not most) readers encounter Tristram Shandy today, that is, as students in a course in the eighteenth-century novel, in which Sterne comes after Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, and before Smollett, sharing with them a chronological time-line and the length of their books – and little else, except by way of contrast.

  Interestingly, Sterne never mentions Defoe, Richardson or Fielding anywhere in his canon, and mentions Smollett only as a miserable tourist, the Smelfungus of A Sentimental Journey. The authors he does frequently cite as his forebears come from another tradition, and Sterne invokes that tradition often enough to put the notion that he was writing a novel or even writing ‘against’ the novel into some question – assuming that we mean something more than ‘a long work in prose’ when we use the generic term. Sterne’s major sources, Rabelais, Montaigne, Burton, Cervantes and Swift, when taken together, reflect a tradition of prose writing I prefer to label satire, especially in so far as these immensely variegated sources indicate that satire is not a mode of writing practised only by cynics and misanthropes. Satire and comedy often march hand in hand, as in the Restoration comedies of Wycherley and Congreve, for example, and in Don Quixote; and satire has also shared a comfortable bed with gentle, though telling, wit and urbanity, as in Horace and Montaigne.

  Sterne consistently singles out Swift among his English-writing predecessors; and when he decided to include a sermon in Volume II, it is important to recognize that he chose one in which significant portions are borrowed from a very similar sermon on the subject of conscience by Swift. Critics intent on separating Sterne from Swift in order to pursue a reading of Tristram Shandy within the novel tradition (or as part of the emerging secularism that the novel heralds) have found it necessary to paint Swift very darkly; his satire – and the author – are painted as the psychological aberrations of a black misanthrope. I find this portrait absurd, if only because Swift – like Sterne – so often makes me laugh at human absurdity (rather, say, than gnash my teeth). More to the point, however one reads A Tale of a Tub, it seems to me a work absolutely central, as both literary and religious satire, to any meaningful reading of Tristram Shandy. As is the case with Tristram Shandy and Charron, I would similarly argue that reading Tristram without Swift’s Tale in mind is equivalent to reading an abridged version. Whatever shape the tree finally took over the nine years of its growth, it is necessary to recognize, I believe, that the seed of Tristram Shandy was embedded in the Augustan satirists of the age preceding Sterne’s own, and not in the mid-century novelists with whom he is too often thoughtlessly contextualized.

  Even before questions of literary influence can be raised, however, a good reader of Tristram Shandy must confront Sterne’s twenty-two-year career as a village vicar. His primary writing during this period, and perhaps his primary reading as well, was of sermons, the predominant reading of much of the mid-century population. In his forty-five sermons which have survived, Sterne demonstrates a commitment to Christian belief as defined by the centrist Anglicanism of his age and taught in the Cambridge of the 1730s, when he was in residence. His sermons are typically balanced appeals to reason and emotion, the head and the heart, and to religion (the institution) and revelation (Scripture). He is rarely if ever innovative, certainly not about doctrine or truth, nor would he have wanted to stray from established positions. He attacks Roman Catholics and enthusiasts (Methodists) with some meanness, but little fire; he celebrates the congregation’s virtues when he seeks charitable contributions, and highlights their vices when he prepares them for Communion. Above all, he denies the possibility of happiness or morality without religion, and asserts again and again the Providential design of the world (and the special Providence accorded England), from the first Adam’s fall to the second Adam’s (Christ’s) redemptive sacrifice. That this preaching follows the lead of the great Restoration preachers, most particularly John Tillotson, in its embrace of plainness, simplicity, practical moral teaching, and a quiet yet sincere emotionalism, has deceived some readers of Sterne (and of Tillotson for that matter) into equating this mode of Anglicanism with socinian-ism, deism, even secularism, but nothing c
ould be further from its own sense of itself as the continuation of Christ’s original Church, now flourishing under His guidance and after a century of bloody Christian warfare, in the growing prosperity and religious peace of eighteenth-century England.

  Had Sterne died in 1758, his forty-fifth year, he would have done so unnoticed by the world then – and certainly unrecognized by it today. But when a silly dispute over Church prerogatives broke out in the York establishment at the end of that year, Sterne was inspired to join the quarrel with a little pamphlet he entitled A Political Romance. It is a reductive satire and echoes two other writers, Rabelais and Swift, who satirized the Church not to bring it down but to reform it. The guiding spirit, however, was a third satirist, Horace, who is given pride of place on the title-page: ‘Ridiculum acri / Fortius et melius magnas plerumque secat Res’ (Ridicule often cuts hard knots more forcefully and effectively than gravity). A link is thus forged between Sterne’s long clerical career and the onset of his nine-year career as a writer.

  The same link is evident in his next creative attempt, his ‘Fragment in the Manner of Rabelais’, two chapters of an aborted parodic work on how to write sermons, modelled, it seems clear, on Pope’s manual of instruction in bad writing, Peri Bathous; or, The Art of Sinking in Poetry. Again, the recourse to Pope seems no stray gesture, but an indication that Sterne’s literary interests were rooted in the same age from which he took his theological direction–and, perhaps, for many of the same reasons. To my mind, these reasons, enormously complex by any measure, may be reduced (and I emphasize that this is a ‘reduction’) to one particular observation about reading Tristram Shandy. The real community of the Shandy world is not, as is so often maintained by the ‘novelistic’ school of criticism, the Shandy brothers or the Shandy household; rather, community in Tristram Shandy is represented by all the authors and books summoned by Sterne, all the documents and cultures and artifacts from which he erects his edifice, in short, all that illustrates to us what it means to live in a world written by God, and hence always approximated – but never finalized – by the same human endeavour. At times the documents are necessarily ludicrous, as is so much human effort in the face of the infinite, but at other times they are useful and perhaps even profound, as human effort can also be. Sterne keeps us aware of both possibilities, and aware above all that while every attempt to create a world of certainty and truth will fail, the attempt is what ties us to the community of humanity, what offers us the equivalent of communion with our legacy. This legacy produces neither God’s world (the theocracies of the seventeenth century) nor a world in which we are God (the novels of the nineteenth century); rather, in its mass of fragments, we confront the world of human endeavours towards truth and certainty (God), we weigh them, and we find them always wanting, at times comically wanting, at times tragically. In thus measuring our legacy (as good a definition of satire as any other), we are inextricably linked to the past, but we are also taught much about the limitations of our future. Birth and death are indeed important subjects in Tristram Shandy, but as markers of the human condition, rather than frames of narration.