The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

  Reading and writing seem to have been activities Sterne delighted in, not as epistemological experiences, but ontological ones. He was not, that is to say, as concerned as we are today with knowledge and ignorance, certainty and indeterminacy, because truth (the Truth, the Word, the Logos) was already known (revealed). The human problem he confronted was that our path to this Truth is littered with fictions and follies, and that, far from allowing these scatterings to discourage us, we must accept that they are the sole contents of truth’s discourse in the human condition – beginning with the scattering of ‘animal spirits’ that announces Tristram’s begetting. The point of validation by which this babel of competing visions and visionary constructs is to be evaluated is found within Sterne’s Christian faith, which explained for him the origins of human folly and failure, the fragmentary and unfulfilled nature of all human endeavour; and which offered, by the sacrifices of redeeming charity and love, a plan of human reconciliation with the divine, but never here and never now: ‘Hope springs eternal in the human breast / Man never Is, but always To be blest.’

  Tristram Shandy is neither parable nor allegory, but it shares with these older (and enduring) modes of fiction a belief that fictions can ultimately represent elements of Truth, and not merely other fictions. As a satire, however, another older (and equally enduring) mode of narrative, Tristram rides athwart this belief, much as Don Quixote tilts at windmills, and Pantagru-elians set forth for the oracle of the bottle: reality – precious and beautiful precisely because it is not autonomous, not indeterminate, not existential – is found in the impossible journey of postlapsarian humanity towards truth.

  The questions we ask about a text are rarely if ever generated solely by the text itself; indeed, before we read the first page, we are enmeshed in a web of preconceptions and preconditions from which our questions emerge. The length of the work, the appearance of the printed page, the date, the author’s name and the information we associate with it, the publisher, the prefatory materials such as Professor Ricks and I are supplying all play a part in weaving that web, as do the conditions under which we read, the book(s) we read just prior to this one, and, of course, such personal factors as age, education, disposition, experience. Finally, and overarching all these considerations, is the era in which we live. One hundred years ago, for example, questions about the indecency of Sterne’s fiction were uppermost in readers’ minds; today, we actually compel students – for educational purposes – to read Tristram Shandy.

  Prefacers can hope to influence the construction of this web, but they weave only one strand of many. Surely, however, the important point is for readers to learn to recognize the pretextual nature of their questions; and, equally important, to reject the most fundamental pretext of literary commentary, that a text generates its own valid questioning. Good reading, it might be suggested, is as much an examination of origins as of conclusions; in this light, the origins of an author, of a work of art, and of a critic’s questions are intricately intertwined, and asking ourselves about the origins of an author’s preconceptions leads us to the origins of our own. Hence, when we contemplate the possibility of Tristram Shandy’s originsin Sterne’s clerical career and his invocations of Horace and Rabelais, Swift and Pope, we may find ourselves in a better position than heretofore to investigate our own origins as readers. As twentieth-century readers, for example, it is difficult to escape the fact that many of our critical questions originate in our secular outlook, which, in academic circles at least, often takes a strong anti-clerical hue, an implicit belief that intelligent people cannot sincerely hold to an organized religious faith. Or, from a different tack, we might come to recognize what Northrop Frye has labelled our mistaken novel-centred view of the fictional universe, that we tend to define our expectations for any long prose work by its relationship to Dickens, Flaubert, Henry James. In both instances, we can immediately note in our ‘origins’ the makings of some significant conflicts with Sterne’s.

  The most interesting readings of Sterne in the past quarter-century, to my mind, are readings against the grain of these two dominant preconceptions of many twentieth-century readers. In recent years, the approaches of criticism, whether new historicist or feminist, Marxist or postmodernist, have all encouraged reading against the formerly prevailing tendencies, ‘suspicious’ or ‘anti-authoritarian’ or ‘revolutionary’ readings that tend to discover a complicity in repression among all previous writers and critics alike. The readings produced by this viewpoint are in many ways numbingly similar: works of art are all culpably less ‘radical’ than the commentator, with radicalism (anti-establishmentarianism, not quite to revive an old shibboleth) taken as the sine qua non of achievement. But precisely because Sterne in earlier criticism was the ‘radical’– the disrupter of the ‘novel form’, the lewd cleric, the promoter of theories of life, language and narrative that connected him to the most avant-garde thought and practice of western culture – to read Sterne against the grain at the end of this century means to read him in alternative contexts, and the best criticism in recent years has done just that. Put another way, the universal scepticism undergirding criticism in the past quarter-century has everywhere challenged ‘received wisdom’, and since the received wisdom about Tristram Shandy had to do with its radicalness, the ‘new’ wisdom argues the traditional nature of Sterne’s enterprise, his embeddedness in his own time and place. It is a paradox he might have enjoyed.

  None of this is to deny, of course, that among eighteenth-century English fiction writers, Sterneis perhaps the most important figure in terms of influence on modern writers. When James Joyce wanted to explain Finnegans Wake, his most experimental fiction, he invoked Sterne:

  Time and the river and the mountain are the real heroes of my book. Yet the elements are exactly what every novelist might use: man and woman, birth, childhood, night, sleep, marriage, prayer, death. There is nothing paradoxical about this. Only I am trying to build as many planes of narrative with a single esthetic purpose. Did you ever read Laurence Sterne?

  And when Thomas Mann tried to explain the achievement of his great Joseph saga, he also invoked Sterne:

  There is a symptom for the innate character of a work, for the category toward which it strives… : that is the reading matter which the author prefers and which he considers helpful while working on it… Well then, such strengthening reading during the last Joseph years was provided by two books: Laurence Sterne’s ‘Tristram Shandy’ and Goethe’s ‘Faust’… and in this connection it was a pleasure for me to know that Goethe had held Sterne in very high esteem.

  More recently, Salman Rushdie in Midnight’s Children, Juan Goytisolo in Juan the Landless and Carlos Fuentes in Christopher Unborn have all written major fictions of national identity, the roots of which are buried in Tristram Shandy. No other eighteenth-century fiction can claim so specific, so glorious, a progeny. But even when one can agree that these authors were all influenced by Sterne, one can also dispute, as I have been doing, the notion that Sterne’s achievement was to herald our secular, existential, autonomous world, or to ‘create’ a new shape to the ‘novel’. What, alternatively, might be Sterne’s purchase on modernity?

  I would begin a brief answer with the notion that Sterne reinforces a great Renaissance tradition of ‘unknowingness’ (with roots deep enough to touch Solomon and Aristophanes), a tradition under dire challenge in his century, and in ours until quite recently – the challenge of rationalism. For the rationalist, the possibility that one can encounter a problem or contradic-tion and fail to resolve it is most unsettling; reason, logic, human progress and mental well being all suggest the need to resolve contradictions, make determinations, reconcile all conflicts as part of some larger and better design. This faith in the systematic resolution of problematic conflicts (the practice of science) became the dominant mode of thinking in Europe during the eighteenth century and continued to dominate western civilization until, perhaps, the devastations to notions of human progress
made evident by twentieth-century totalitarianism. Sterne’s importance, I suspect, is that he offers a lively, witty, joyous opposition to this new drummer, a stubborn way of looking at contradictions within a context of human limitations and worldly complexities that modern authors, in full retreat from nineteenth-century notions of secular progress, find both instructive and appealing. It is the same world-view (sceptical and Christian, as each seeks reinforcement from the other) that emerges in Rabelais and Montaigne, in Erasmus, Robert Burton and Cervantes, and in the Augustan satirists, particularly Pope and Swift, for whom Cervantic ‘gravity’ was a fundamental mask. Resolution and positiveness are the tempting and inevitable vices of this shared world-view; suspension and doubt, its difficult, if not impossible, virtues.

  And it is not merely contradictions and puzzlements in character or subject-matter that Tristram Shandy illustrates; indeed, far more important is the contradiction of Sterne’s artistry, the carefully crafted impression of carelessness and abandon. Sterne is the eminently ‘sane’ writer pretending to be ‘mad’ (a formal lesson he learned from Cervantes and Swift, and helped pass on to Joyce and Mann, Rushdie and Fuentes), one of the primary aesthetic defences of modern art and artists against an insane world insisting on its own ‘rationalities’. In a world gone mad with the infinite hypocrisies of ‘problem-solving’ (which Sterne characterizes as gravity, Swift as hypocrisy, but totalitarians as final solutions), the artist must insist, in John Keats’s famous formulation, on the vast energies and joys to be found in the infinite contradictions of ‘negative capability’: ‘At once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously– I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.’ Because every fibre of our being cries out to resolve the painful and threatening mysteries surrounding us, the artist whose work embodies a countervailing tendency has much to teach us. Sterne’s ever-increasing reputation strongly suggests that modern readers and writers alike feel an urgent need to understand and cultivate Sterne’s anti-rationalism as this most rational – and murderous – century draws to a close.

  To remain undecisive in our interpretations is the most difficult goal we can set for ourselves, one we violate with almost every word we speak, just as Christians directed by Jesus’s revision of the Ten Commandments may be found to violate their moral goals with almost every thought they have (the lesson, as Sterne the preacher might have pointed out, of Matthew 5:21–48). Virtue and undecisiveness are defined by the human inadequacy in achieving either, and to elide that difficulty in the latter instance by suggesting an idealistic embrace of scholarly impartiality or universal tolerance of all ideas is simply the opening gambit of an often successful (but always deceptive) rhetorical strategy in defence of one’s own convictions and interpretations. Friedrich Nietzsche, who called Sterne ‘the most liberated spirit of all time, in comparison with whom all others seem stiff, square, intolerant and boorishly direct’, comments in the same work, Human, All Too Human, that ‘It is not conflict of opinions that has made history so violent but conflict of belief in opinions, that is to say conflict of convictions.’ Readers of Tristram Shandy will immediately recognize the sentiment as an offspring of Sterne’s motto, via Epictetus, to Volumes I and II of Tristram Shandy: ‘We are tormented with the opinions we have of things, and not by things themselves.’ Donald Greene, observing the play in the original Greek between pragmata and dogmata, has suggested a more telling translation: ‘Human beings are not troubled by practicalities, but by their dogmas concerning them.’ The temptation is, of course, to draw a straight line between Sterne and Nietzsche, between Sterne and the father of modern scepticism; surely, we would argue to ourselves, this neat concurrence of views, along with Nietzsche’s great enthusiasm for Sterne, suggests the ‘way’ to read Tristram Shandy, indeed, quite the way I have all along been suggesting, is the way I read the work.

  But the straight line of conviction, as Sterne illustrates at the conclusion of Volume VI, is always the danger we must most fear, even when – especially when – we are on the verge of embracing, wholeheartedly, the notion that, again quoting Nietzsche, convictions ‘are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies’. It is far better, but also far more difficult, not to be convinced by that argument either. One would like, in brief, to write a commentary (by way of introduction, after word or exegesis) that would leave the reader, as Toby leaves the Widow Wadman, completely unsatisfied. Toby’s motives for doing so, however, are as suspicious as are the Widow’s for wanting to charge, helter-skelter, pell-mell, into the very ‘curtin of the place’ (IX.xxxi), to attack the unknown and render it her own. We are too much like the Widow, each and every reader; every text is, for us, a fortress to be penetrated, a mystery revealed, a riddle solved. Then again, Toby’s ‘virginity’ may people heaven, but it leaves the world unpopulated and Mrs Wadman very unhappy. Another modern enthusiast of Sterne, Milan Kundera, in Testaments Betrayed (1995), points towards one way to balance Toby’s accounts with all others (though he is writing here not about Tristram Shandy but about Stravinsky’s so-called ‘poverty of heart’): ‘Are not vile acts committed as often with the heart’s help as without it?… Will we ever be done with this imbecile sentimental Inquisition, the heart’s Reign of Terror?’ Only another Nietzschean aphorism, from the voice of Zarathu-stra, can rescue us and Tristram Shandy at this critical juncture, when even dear uncle Toby comes under question: ‘That I have to be struggle and becoming and goal and conflict of goals; ah, he who divines my will surely divines, too, along what crooked paths it has to go!’

  1997

  Further Reading

  Entries marked with an asterisk are collected in Tristram Shandy: Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. Melvyn New (Macmillan, 1992).

  *Booth, Wayne C., ‘The Self-Conscious Narrator in Comic Fiction before Tristram Shandy’, PMLA 67 (1952), 163–85.

  Bowden, Martha, ‘Guy Fawkes, Dr. Slop, and the Actions of Providence’, Philological Quarterly 76 (1997), 437–61.

  *Brady, Frank, ‘Tristram Shandy: Sexuality, Morality, and Sensibility’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 4 (1970), 41–56.

  *Burckhardt, Sigurd, ‘Tristram Shandy’s Law of Gravity’, ELH 28 (1961), 70–88.

  Cash, Arthur H., ‘The Birth of Tristram Shandy: Sterne and Dr. Burton’, in Studies in the Eighteenth Century, ed. R. F. Brissenden (Australian National University Press, 1968), 133–54.

  ——, Laurence Sterne: The Early and Middle Years (Methuen, 1975).

  ——, Laurence Sterne: The Later Years (Methuen, 1986).

  Ehlers, Leigh A., ‘Mrs. Shandy’s “Lint and Basilicon”: The Importance of Women in Tristram Shandy’, South Atlantic Review 46 (1981), 61–75.

  Fanning, Christopher, ‘On Sterne’s Page: Spatial Layout, Spatial Form, and Social Spaces in Tristram Shandy’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 10 (1998), 429–50.

  *Harries, Elizabeth W., ‘Sterne’s Novels: Gathering Up the Fragments’, ELH 49 (1982), 35–49.

  *Jefferson, D. W., ‘Tristram Shandy and the Tradition of Learned Wit’, Essays in Criticism I (1951), 225–48.

  Keymer, Tom, ‘Horticulture Wars: Tristram Shandy and Upon Appleton House’, Shandean, 11 (1999–2000), 38–47.

  Kraft, Elizabeth, Laurence Sterne Revisited (Twayne/Simon & Schuster Macmillan, 1996).

  Lamb, Jonathan, ‘Sterne’s Use of Montaigne’, Comparative Literature 32 (1980), 1–41.

  ——, ‘Sterne’s System of Imitation’, Modern Language Review 76 (1981), 794–810.

  ——, Sterne’s Fiction and the Double Principle (Cambridge University Press, 1989).

  Loscocco, Paula, ‘Can’t Live Without ’em: Walter Shandy and the Woman Within’, Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 32 (1991), 166–79.

  McMaster, Juliet, ‘Walter Shandy, Sterne, and Gender: A Feminist Foray’, English Studies in Canada 15 (1989), 441
–58.

  Mullan, John, ‘Laurence Sterne and the “Sociality” of the Novel’, in Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Clarendon Press, 1988).