by Steven Moore
Sterne’s characters reveal themselves more by words than actions, but to avoid the static talking-heads mode, he pays comically close attention to their body language as well. No previous novelist, as Shklovsky noted (152), devoted as many words to describing gestures, postures, and physical movements as Sterne. He spends a page and a half describing the position Trim assumes to read one of Yorick’s sermons aloud, “otherwise he will naturally stand represented, by your imagination, in an uneasy posture,—stiff,—perpendicular” (2.17).263 Tristram spends four chapters describing his father’s contorted effort to reach with his left hand a handkerchief in his lower right coat pocket, using the awkward gesture to illustrate the philosophical relation between mind and body. After Walter learns that baby Tristram’s nose has been crushed during childbirth, he throws himself in despair facedown on his bed, and after Tristram describes the exact position of his face and limbs, he writes “I must leave him upon the bed for half an hour” to explain the cause of his father’s despair, not allowing him to rise until 55 pages later, at which point we get another detailed description of his rising, for “Attitudes are nothing, madam,—’tis the transition from one attitude to another—like the preparation and resolution of the discord into harmony, which is all in all” (4.6). We can restate Fitzgerald’s axiom as “gesture is character.” Tristram assigns so much importance to gestures and nonverbal forms of communication that when Trim represents the freedom of bachelorhood by “a flourish with his stick thus—
Tristram avers, “A thousand of my father’s most subtle syllogisms could not have said more for celibacy” (9.4). When Walter laughs he “clapp’d both hands upon his cod-piece” (7.27), and a thousand of his syllogisms could not have said more about the relationship between joy and sex. Sterne is not privileging body language over spoken, but closely observed gestures are among the circumstantial details that make Tristram Shandy so richly realistic, far more so than other so-called realistic novels of the time. “It records the play of mind of one man living in eighteenth-century England, and those objects—fiddles, ditties, clocks, door-hinges—which have chanced to impinge on his awareness,” Stephen Werner notes in his richly detailed arabesque on Tristram Shandy (89). Note the physical details here as the brothers Shandy wait downstairs while upstairs Mrs. Shandy is in labor:
―I wonder what’s all that noise, and running backwards and forwards for, above stairs, quoth my father, addressing himself, after an hour and a half’s silence, to my uncle Toby,―who you must know, was sitting on the opposite side of the fire, smoking his social pipe all the time, in mute contemplation of a new pair of black-plush-breeches which he had got on;—What can they be doing brother? quoth my father,—we can scarce hear ourselves talk.
I think, replied my uncle Toby, taking his pipe from his mouth, and striking the head of it two or three times upon the nail of his left thumb, as he began his sentence,― (1.21)
What novelist before this would have shown a character “in mute contemplation of a new pair of black-plush-breeches which he had got on,” or detail how many times and upon which fingernail he taps his pipe? (Not to mention have Walter complain “we can scarce hear ourselves talk” after “an hour and half’s silence” and “mute contemplation.” Hilarious.) What novelist before this went into anatomical detail about childbirth, including a black-comic demonstration of the use of forceps to extract a baby’s head? Such details are common enough nowadays in fiction that we read right past them in Sterne without realizing how uncommon they were in his day.
And what novelist before this would interrupt a character midsentence and not let him complete it until 30 pages later, only to have him say “it would not be amiss, brother, if we rung the bell” (2.6). Plot-time and story-time run on separate tracks at different rates of speed as Tristram jumps back and forth between the two, attending to various narrative matters as his fancy takes him, explaining that “my work is digressive, and it is progressive too,—and at the same time” (1.22, my italics). That is, the plot progresses even as the story seems to regress or go into a narrative cul de sac. Tristan compares his method to the apparent retrograde motion of certain planets, which from our perspective seem to be moving backward only because some orbit more slowly around the sun than the earth does. It’s a matter of perspective, and just as the Copernican system forced people to look at the universe in a new way, what Tristram proudly calls “the Shandean System” forces us to look at narrative in a new way. It doesn’t have to be linear; story events can be taken out of chronological order and be resequenced thematically, or psychologically, or geographically, or alphabetically, or per any other other system.264 At the end of volume 6, Tristram pretends to apologize for his narrative drunk driving and states that “by the help of a vegetable diet, with a few of the cold seeds, I make no doubt but I shall be able to go on with my uncle Toby’s story [the long-delayed account of his courtship of Mrs. Wadman], and my own, in a tolerable straight line” (6.40), like a sober-minded conventional novel. He sheepishly apologizes for the reckless narrative lines of his first four volumes, which he diagrams for us:
Like a recovering alcoholic, he claims to have walked a straighter line in volume 5, falling off the narrative wagon only a few times:
With a new sponsor, he hopes “by the good leave of his grace of Benevento’s devils” that his narrative line will be as straight as a ruler by the end of the novel, and while volume 7 is tolerably linear, Tristram admits at the beginning of volume 8 that he just can’t keep to the straight and narrow, and starts hitting the bottle of frisky digressions and “fresh experiments” (8.6), relying on his “religious” method of composition: “I begin with writing the first sentence―and trusting to Almighty God for the second” (8.1). The narrative line thereafter weaves back and forth—Trim’s flourish appears in book 9, summing up the zigzagging movement of the entire novel—and the bender finally stops at a point before the first page of the novel. The novel ends in 1714, four years before Tristram is conceived.
The sheer novelty of the first two volumes made Tristram Shandy a hit when they were reprinted in London in early 1760—the first edition was published by a small press in York after a London publisher rejected it as commercially unfeasible—and as with Pamela 20 years earlier, copycats from the back alleys of Grub Street pounced on its most superficial features and rushed imitations into print. A guy named John Carr published a fake volume 3 of Tristram Shandy four months before Sterne published the real one, and in 1766 another hack published a volume 9 nearly a year before Sterne’s final volume appeared. Other parodies, imitations, and rip-offs continued to appear until the end of the century.265 Legitimate novelists were slower to appreciate Sterne’s innovations in style, character, and structure, and adapt them for their own aesthetic purposes. The earliest appeared not in England but in Europe: after Voltaire read the first volumes of Tristram Shandy in 1760 and pronounced it “a very unaccountable book; an original,” he went on to write some quirky novellas following the “Shandean System” such as Potpourri (1765, though this one owes more to A Tale of a Tub), The Man with Forty Crowns (1768), and especially Lord Chesterfield’s Ears (1775). In the 1770s Denis Diderot, who had met Sterne in Paris in 1762, began writing Jacques the Fatalist and His Master, the first major novel inspired by Tristram Shandy, and in the final decade of the 18th century Xavier de Maistre took the reader on a Shandean Voyage around My Room. By then a number of German novelists had written Sternean novels—Wieland, Nicolai, Hippel, Wezel, Richter—along with the American novelist Hugh Henry Brackenridge.
Beginning in the 19th century, the trickle turned into a stream: the Shandy family genes can be detected in Charles Lucas’s Infernal Quixote (1801), Nicolai Wergeland’s Petty Incidents in the Life of Haldor Smek (1805–10), Washington Irving’s History of New York (1809), Ferenc Verseghy’s Merry Life and Ridiculous Opinions of Gergely Kolomposi Szarvas (1814–15), Thomas Love Peacock’s Headlong Hall (1815), Lord Byron’s verse-novel Don Juan (1818–23), which he ca
lled “a poetical T Shandy,” E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr (1820–22), several of American John Neal’s novels (Randolph, Errata, Authorship), Yakov de Sanglen’s Life and Opinions of a New Tristram (1825), Charles Nodier’s Story of the King of Bohemia and His Seven Castles (1830), 19-year-old Karl Marx’s Scorpion and Felix (1837, unfortunately incomplete), Robert Southey’s Doctor (1834–47), Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1836), Nicolai Gogol’s “Nose” (1836; Pushkin called Gogol “the Russian Sterne”), Søren Kierkegaard’s Either-Or/Stages on Life’s Way diptych (1843–45),266 Almedia Garrett’s Travels in My Homeland (1846), Herman Melville’s Mardi (1849) and Moby-Dick (1851), Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865, 1871), Ippolito Nievo’s Castle of Fratta (1867) and earlier novels; Júlio Dinis’s English Family (1868), Carlo Dossi’s Life of Alberto Pisani (1870), Gustave Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet (1881), and in Joaquim Machado de Assis’s later novels. By the end of the century, Sterne’s spawn could be found throughout continental Europe, Scandinavia, and Russia.267
In the 20th century,
the stream widened into a river,
beginning with Natsume Soseki’s
I Am a Cat,268 and including Miguel
de Unamuno’s Mist, Andrei Bely’s
Petersburg, James Joyce’s Ulysses
and Finnegans Wake (he cited Sterne
when describing the latter), Viktor
Shklovsky’s Sentimental Journey, Italo
Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno, Andre Gide’s
Counterfeiters, Luigi Pirandello’s One, No
One, and One Hundred Thousand, Alfred Döblin’s
Berlin Alexanderplatz, Stanislaw Witkiewicz’s
Insatiability, Miklós Szentkuthy’s Prae, John Dos
Passos’s USA, Juan Filloy’s Op Oloop and Faction,
Philip Wylie’s Finnley Wren and Opus 21, Witold
Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke, Vladimir Nabokov’s Real
Life of Sebastian Knight, Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-
Birds, Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, Macedonio
Fernandez’s Museum of Eterna’s Novel, Kenneth Patchen’s
Journal of Albion Moonlight, Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus,
Felipe Alfau’s Chromos, Louis Paul Boon’s Summer in Termuren,
Günter Grass’s Tin Drum and The Flounder, Jack Kerouac’s Old
Angel Midnight (“And Tristram Shraundy Shern, marvelous book”),
Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s Three Trapped
Tigers, Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, William H. Gass’s
Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife and The Tunnel; Steve Katz’s Exagggerations
of Peter Prince, Venedikt Erofeev’s Moscow to the End of the Line, Ronald
Sukenick’s Up, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Donald Harington’s Some
Other Place. The Right Place., Chandler Brossard’s A Chimney Sweep Comes Clean,
Severo Sarduy’s Cobra, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Augusto Roa Bastos’s I the
Supreme, José Lezama Lima’s Paradiso, Raymond Federman’s Take It or Leave It, Juan
Goytisolo’s Juan the Landless, Fernando del Paso’s Palinuro of Mexico, Arno Schmidt’s
Evening Edged in Gold, Portuguese collaborators Manuel da Silva Ramos and Alface’s
experimental novels, David Markson’s Springer’s Progress, Georges Perec’s Life A User’s
Manual, Ignácio de Loyola Brandão’s Zero, Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler,
Alfredo Bryce Echenique’s A World for Julius, Gilbert Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew, Alexander
Theroux’s Darconville’s Cat, D. Keith Mano’s Take Five, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children,
Genichiro Takahashi’s Sayonora, Gangsters, Julián Ríos’s Larva, Alasdair Gray’s 1982, Janine
and Old Men in Love, Aldo Busi’s Standard Life of an Ordinary Pantyhose Salesman, George
Garrett’s Poison Pen, Carlos Fuentes’s Christopher Unborn, Jacques Roubaud’s Great Fire of
London, Fernando Arrabal’s Extravagant Crusade of a Castrated Man in Love, Thomas
McGonigle’s Going to Patchogue, David Foster Wallace’s novels and some of William
T. Vollmann’s, Héctor Abad Faciolince’s Joy of Being Awake, Javier Marías’s Dark Back of Time
(written after he had translated Tristram Shandy into Spanish), Haruki Murakami’s Wind-up
Bird Chronicle, Matthew Remski’s Silver, Walter Moers’s 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear, Joseph
Heller’s Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man, several of Percival Everett’s novels, Daniel Sada’s
Porque parece mentira la verdad nunca se sabe, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, Robert
Juan-Cantavella’s Otro, Per Højholt’s Auricula, Robert Coover’s Lucky Pierre, Steve Tomasula’s
VAS, Enrique Vila-Matas’s Montano’s Malady, Jasper Fforde’s ffictions, Gordon Sheppard’s
Ha!, Paul Anderson’s Hunger’s Brides, Adam Thirwell’s Politics,269 Jeff VanderMeer’s
City of Saints and Madmen, James McCourt’s Now Voyagers, Joshua Cohen’s Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto, Evan Dara’s Easy Chain, Lee Henderson’s Man Game, Benjamin Zucker’s talmudic trilogy, Matthew Roberson’s Impotent, John McGreal’s Book of It, Lawrence Sutin’s When to Go into the Water, Adam Levin’s Instructions, Arthur Phillips’s Tragedy of Arthur, Sergio De La Pava’s Personae, Tom Carson’s Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter, Jan Brandt’s Gegen die Welt, Mark Leyner’s Sugar Frosted Nutsack, Will Self’s Umbrella, Chris Eaton’s Chris Eaton―I’ll stop there, for as Calvino wrote in 1981, Tristram Shandy is the
“undoubted progenitor of all avant-garde novels of our century.”270
All these novels exhibit various features of Tristram Shandy—nonlinear structure, heterogeneous textual matter, self-reflexive narration, linguistic flair, intertextuality, sometimes its “Mandarin” style and/or eccentric typography—but before them other, more mainstream novelists such as Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy, Eliot, and Twain were influenced by Sterne’s less obvious but equally important innovations in characterization, tone, realistic detail, body language, and psychological motivation. And virtually all literary novelists since then have built upon those writers. In 1831 Balzac adopted Trim’s squiggly flourish as the epigraph to his novel The Wild Ass’s Skin, and after that date there are few Western novelists who can’t be linked by three degrees of separation or fewer to Laurence Sterne.
If not by way of his masterpiece, then via the short novel he published three weeks before his death, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768). If Sterne had never written Tristram Shandy, he would deserve to be celebrated for this cunning little masterpiece. A minimalist companion volume to the maximalist earlier novel, it concerns a trip Parson Yorick makes to France about two years after Tristram’s headlong tour in volume 7 (though the time-schemes of the two novels make this impossible; Sterne doesn’t care), beginning in Calais in May and concluding near the border of Italy that autumn during vintage season. But where Tristram raced, Yorick idles, enjoying idyllic moments that further his sentimental education. As in Tristram Shandy, Sterne dramatizes the relativity of time: it comes as a surprise both to Yorick and the reader that the first 17 chapters occupy only an hour’s time, and the novel is made up of similar brief encounters in which Yorick’s inherent sentimentalism is put to the test, meaning his capacity for empathy.271 Yorick fails the first test when he rejects a monk’s request for alms with sarcasm; he quickly repents, admitting “I have only just set out upon my travels; and shall learn better manners as I get along.”272
Yorick passes his next test, largely because it involves an attractive young woman rather than an old monk, and throughout the short novel he seeks out pretty women to administer further tests. Adam Thirwell puts it too bluntly when he says that A Sentimental Journey is about “sexual tourism,” abo
ut “knowing which girl to pick up” (172), but he’s not completely off base. After all, in a 1764 letter Sterne did refer to France as “foutre-land” (Fuckland). Shortly after arriving in Paris, Yorick decides to visit the Opéra Comique, and stepping outside his hotel, he casts his “eye into half a dozen shops as I came along in search of a face” to give him directions, and stops at the first one with a pretty face. Over the next three chapters, he stiffens his sentiments with delicious flirting, taking the pulse of “the beautiful Grisset” and slipping his hand into her proffered glove; she’s married, and they agree not to literalize the symbolic gesture: “She held it open—my hand slipp’d into it at once—It will not do, said I, shaking my head a little—No, said she, doing the same thing” (78). The sexual frisson sizzles in a longer encounter with a young woman he had spotted in a bookstore buying Crébillon’s Wayward Head and Heart: after he flirts with her and suggestively inserts a coin into her open purse, she visits him in his hotel room; she again suggestively offers to hold an inkpot while he dips his pen in, and when Yorick notes he has nothing to write upon, “Write it, said she, simply, upon any thing.— [¶] I was just going to cry out, Then I will write it, fair girl! upon thy lips” (129). As he attempts to buckle her shoe he accidentally tumbles her back onto his bed, “and then—” the chapter breaks off (130). The next chapter is entitled “The Conquest,” and it’s deliberately ambiguous whether it refers to a sexual contest or a moral one. Tiring of Paris, Yorick heads south for a “riot of the affections” similar to those Tristram experienced in the concluding chapter of volume 7, and in fact Yorick seeks out the beautiful but mad girl named Maria that Tristram had encountered (9.24), empathizing with her problems even as he admires how hot she is. The novel ends with a final test of Yorick’s sentiments when he is forced to share a room at night with yet another attractive woman and her prettier fille de chambre, a farcical face-off between ethics and erotics with no indication which side wins—or rather, which sides dominates, for the point of the novel is that they’re both on the same side in a maturely sentimental person.