The tradition of ‘learned wit’ came down to Sterne from Rabelais and from Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. D. W. Jefferson has written excellently on what such a tradition meant to Sterne, with its mockery of mustiness, its half-loving ridicule of learning run mad, its profane zest for theological speculation. Hence Sterne’s delighted proffering of documentation: the legal argument about where Tristram’s mother would have to lie in; the medical-cum-theological arguments about whether or not a child can be baptized before it is born; the gigantic curse of Bishop Ernulphus. All this, with a battery of learning (real and fake), with translations on facing pages, and with contemptuous gusto.
Another tradition – the book as a physical object, with all the conventions and paraphernalia of printing – has been well commented on by Hugh Kenner. It is Jonathan Swift who stands behind the brilliant versatility and trickery of Sterne’s juggling with the book itself. As Kenner has pointed out, you can’t say a footnote. Sterne exploits just this gulf, so that, although his style is superbly conversational, a reader is continually being teased into realizing that writing is not, after all, the same as conversation. When Dr Slop crosses himself, a cross () suddenly pops up in print – how do you speak that? Or indicate by an inflection of the speaking voice that such-and-such is in square brackets? Sterne took all such jokes and precisions as far as they can go: his black page when Yorick dies; his squiggly graphs to show the narrative line which he had accomplished; the blank page for a chapter torn out, and the blank page (very different) upon which the reader may inscribe his own description of Widow Wadman’s beauty; the chapters misplaced but turning up in the end – all this is a serious reminder of the difference between literature and life; but it is first and foremost superbly funny. We are never allowed to forget that a book, among other things, is a solid object:
WE’LL not stop two moments, my dear Sir,—only, as we have got thro’ these five volumes, (do, Sir, sit down upon a set——they are better than nothing)…
It was Sterne who saw the possibilities of combining ‘learned wit’ and book-making with the ordinary novelistic pleasures, often thwarted in Tristram Shandy but not invariably.
Not that it is easy to define Sterne’s originality. Wayne C. Booth, in a very important study, has shown that the novels of the 1750s made many attempts at self-conscious narration, with a comically intrusive writer preoccupied by the problems of writing. Just as Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads were not in fact revolutionary but rather a late indemnifying of some feeble predecessors, so Tristram Shandy is the culmination of a decade of such experiment.
Sterne was fascinated by the problems which have come to dominate our recent art, especially the problems about deception in a work of art, about what kind of credence we are to place in art itself. He would have been amused at a recent development, the paintings of Jim Dine, who – as John Richardson has said –
is obsessed with problems of art and illusion, shadow and substance, image and reality. In his earlier pictures he contrasted different kinds of reality. He would take an actual shoe and set it off against its painted image and its name – SHOE… And to give this assemblage an extra degree of reality Dine has embedded a real light-switch in the canvas and plugged a real lamp into it.
For any critic confronted with such heterogeneous material it is natural to murmur ‘I don’t know where to begin.’ But then, that, Sterne insisted, was exactly the problem, whether in writing or in anything else: where do you begin? And at once we come up against the central paradox about his novel: that it hugely widened the potentialities of the novel-form and yet that, unlike most novels, it is concerned explicitly with reminding us that there are things which you cannot expect a novel to do. The greatness of Sterne is that, with humour and sensitivity, he insists all the time that novels cannot save us. In other words he never used his gifts without recalling to our attention the limitations of all such gifts. He has, for example, a wonderful gift for characterization – one thinks of Walter Shandy, with his bizarre theories on names and on noses, or of Uncle Toby, who combines the most gentle of temperaments with an unceasing preoccupation with war. Certainly Sterne is able to let us know a very great deal about these people, but his unusual strength lies in the fact that at the same time he insists – without getting either mystical or servile about it – that in the end everybody is unknowable.
Certainly the rise of the novel was a great achievement, but Sterne seems to have been one of the first to realize that a novelist, just because he was indeed creating, might be tempted to think himself endued with godlike powers of scrutiny. So instead of the omniscient, omnipotent narrator humorously deployed by Fielding, Sterne substitutes the vague half-knowledge and frustrated impotence of Tristram. Of course the result is very funny and not at all despairing; the book has an unquenchable optimism and vitality, despite all the sufferings of Sterne’s own life. But all the same the limits of a novelist’s (and indeed any man’s) knowledge and power are wittily, and resolutely, insisted on. The novelist, like the rest of us, is committed to the idea of getting to know people, but he must not get too confident about his ability to know what makes so-and-so tick. Sterne (‘Alas, poor Yorick!’) returned again and again to echoes of Hamlet; he may have remembered Hamlet’s remonstrance when Guildenstern treats him as a simple musical instrument: ‘Why looke you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me: you would play upon mee; you would seem to know my stops: you would pluck out the heart of my Mysterie.’ That is any man to any man – and particularly any character to his creator. These days, Sterne is often reproached for immorality, but he seems to me triumphant in this most basic morality of all. He neither despairs nor anatomizes. In Tristram Shandy we hear Sterne’s voice behind Tristram’s in the discussion of ‘Momus’s glass in the human breast’, by which we should be able to gaze into people:
had the said glass been there set up, nothing more would have been wanting, in order to have taken a man’s character, but to have taken a chair and gone softly, as you would to a dioptrical bee-hive, and look’d in.
(Notice ‘taken a man’s character’, as casual as ‘taken a chair’.) ‘But’, he adds drily, ‘this is an advantage not to be had by the biographer in this planet.’ Sterne, whatever his faults of taste, was never guilty of reducing men to bees, of believing that we can pluck the heart out of their mystery, of becoming a private detective spying on his own characters. ‘Taking a man’s character’ is not something that much resembles the Day of Judgement.
Needless to say, Sterne’s humorous humility wouldn’t be worth much if it weren’t combined with its opposite: a determined ability to show us as much about his characters as can truly be shown. Tristram may make, and with truth, a disclaimer:
As many pictures as have been given of my father, how like him soever in different airs and attitudes,—not one, or all of them, can ever help the reader to any kind of preconception of how my father would think, speak, or act, upon any untried occasion or occurrence of life.
And of course this is a good joke. But it is more than a joke, since it doesn’t merely mock a novelist’s pretensions. What it does is insist on setting limits to a novelist’s optimism. The novel may have been for Sterne and his contemporaries an excitingly new form, but Sterne manages to bring home to the reader what a novel could not do as well as what it could. Which is why the best criticism of Sterne’s characters is that which brings out, very simply, how real and how incomprehensible they are. Particularly Coleridge’s account of Walter Shandy’s character,
the essence of which is a craving for sympathy in exact proportion to the oddity and unsympathizability of what he proposes; – this coupled with an instinctive desire to be at least disputed with, or rather, both in one, to dispute and yet to agree.
Sterne achieves what this kind of novel can achieve, and insists on the limits of such an achievement. And this was noted, in a way, by even as unsympathetic a critic as the Victorian, Walter Bagehot. Bagehot complains of Sterne’s characters that th
ey are ‘unintelligibilities, foreign to the realm of true art. But’ – he goes on, contrasting other characters – ‘as soon as they can be explained to us…’ Yet that is exactly the point of view which Sterne writes against: that the novel can simply ‘explain’ people to us, that it has no truck with unintelligibilities, that there is such a thing as what Bagehot here called ‘the optional world of literature, which we can make as we please’. Walter Shandy and Uncle Toby, like all people, imaginary or otherwise, are in some ways intelligible (Sterne shows us that), and also ultimately unintelligible (he shows us that too).
There is a similar dilemma in literature itself. From one point of view, to the writer nothing matters more than writing. From another, writing is ultimately as nothing compared to living. Sterne belonged to an age which was increasingly tempted to look upon literature as an ultimate good, and he was writing in a form – the novel – which quite rightly thought that it was fitted to accomplish literary tasks in some ways more profound, more true and more complete than any literature that had preceded it. But Sterne, with a comedy that is a million miles from preaching or sententiousness, manages to bring out, simultaneously, that we must hold to two opposing points of view.
Yeats said that ‘words alone are certain good’, and there is a sense in which every writer would have to agree. But Sterne’s brilliant tactic was to bring out all the time how severe the limits of words are. The potential arrogance of literature – in its relations to the other arts, to the sciences, to religion, to life – is put wittily before us, and by a man who writes so well that he can hardly be suspected of denigrating a skill which he himself lacks.
It is this which is the serious reason for the wonderfully comic pages that are given to the other intellectual disciplines: the pages about the law, science (particularly medicine), religion, history, psychology, even psychiatry. All of these are presented to us in the book, and in every case we cannot help reflecting that despite their excessesor absurdities they do embody truthful and essential ways of dealing with life that are not the way of literature. Law, history, psychology, science – they are in their turn judged by literature, and their limits, the potentialities and even the actuality of their arrogance, are all the time insisted on. The juxtaposition of literature with all those other ways of understanding humanity performs the two-fold task: it shows that literature can never be the be-all and end-all of human existence, and it shows that there is no substitute for literature.
And despite the affectionate ridicule of the absurdities of them all, there is no suggestion in Tristram Shandy that we can dismiss them as a waste of time. In this Sterne is very different from a writer to whom he owed a great deal: Jonathan Swift. To Swift the scientific experiments of the Royal Society, the cogitations of philosophers and theologians, were more or less a waste of time. To Sterne, they are for one thing more genially comic; for another, they are shown to minister to permanent human needs. There is a magnificent saying of St Augustine, one which a modern writer influenced by Sterne, Samuel Beckett, has quoted with particular relish and sadness: ‘Do not despair, one of the thieves was saved; do not presume, one of the thieves was damned.’ Admittedly those words speak of a world very different from Sterne’s, and if Beckett were not an important heir of Sterne it would be altogether far-fetched to quote them. And yet there is a sense in which Sterne’s great comic novel urged his exasperated readers: ‘Do not despair, do not presume’ – and that at the moment in history when literature, particularly the novel, was becoming much tempted to presume.
Hence Sterne’s delighted use of the other arts in his novel. The theatre is present in the repeated stage directions, and in the vocabulary which speaks all the time of the ‘stage’, of ‘lifting the curtain’ and so on. Often with invocations to Sterne’s friend, the greatest actor of his day, David Garrick. Once again, though, the effect is many-sided. By speaking of the drama, Sterne not only reminds us of the essential limitations of the novelist’s method – even one who takes as many liberties as he does. We cannot help being reminded that if the intention really is to set figures unmistakably before us in the flesh, then the novel just cannot do it as well as the drama. Even when Sterne lavishes all his skill on a minute description of Trim’s physical posture. On stage, Trim would simply stand there. But conversely, the inherent limitations of the drama are not forgotten in Tristram Shandy – as soon as Sterne modestly invokes the dramatist’s art, we are reminded of how superbly the novelist, and the novelist alone, can make us aware of the faintly tenuous and hesitating currents of internal thought and emotion.
There is a similar reminder in Sterne’s incorporation of the pictorial arts. He himself painted, and it is not surprising that again and again he resorted to the vocabulary of drawing, sketching, and so on. His allusions to Hogarth, to Raphael, to Sir Joshua Reynolds, are all deliciously comic – there is a fetching lunacy about trying to rival the brush with the pen. Sterne played the violin and the cello, and that vocabulary too he employed continuously. Throughout the novel there is a consistent use of musical metaphor and of music, and in particular there is Uncle Toby’s habit of whistling Lillabullero whenever something particularly tries his temper or understanding. Of course, like the painting analogies, all this has a broadly comic effect – it allows Sterne to show off outrageously, and it makes his novel delightfully encyclopedic. But basically there is the same concern to praise literature for what it alone can do, and to insist at the same time that literature is only one among many arts.
But let me get back to the idea ‘I don’t know where to begin.’ Tristram is setting out to record ‘the life and opinions of Tristram Shandy’. But where ought he to start? At birth? No, because much of his life was shaped before then. For one thing, Tristram shares his father’s notion (widely held in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) that the moment of conception affects the embryo. So we need to know about Mr Shandy and his notions. For another thing, Tristram’s whole life has been affected by the fact that his nose was crushed at birth by Dr Slop’s forceps. So we need to know how this came about. That is why the famous and unforgettable first chapter of Tristram Shandy begins and ends like this:
I Wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider’d how much depended upon what they were then doing;…
Pray, my dear, quoth my mother, have you not forgot to wind up the clock?——Good G—! cried my father, making an exclamation, but taking care to moderate his voice at the same time,—— Did ever woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question? Pray, what was your father saying?——Nothing.
And there we are – Mr Shandy’s animal spirits dispersed just at the vital moment. Such was the price he paid for his habit of winding the family clock on the first Sunday night of each month, and taking care of ‘some other little family concernments’ at the same time. Already on the first page, Sterne’s themes are fairly before us. Association of ideas as the cause of folly and peril; the comic frustrations caused by time (it would be a clock); our unwary habit of thinking that communication means speaking (‘Pray, what was your father saying?——Nothing’). That mention of the creation of the world, and the oath (‘Good G—’), bring already into focus Sterne’s curious interpenetration of the sacred and the profane. But then Mr Shandy, in his way, was creating a world – and later in the novel we hear, again with the same double entendre, that the first Sunday of the month was always ‘a sacrament day’.
Sterne’s first page, in fact, alerts us to almost all his concerns, and it does so with a technical audacity that matches its subject-matter. Plus the fact that it is also, at the same time, about writing a novel (or autobiography). This witty trick has now gone stale on us, simply because it has been so often done. I, for one, groan when I find Alexander Trocchi’s novel Cain’s Book is about a man who is writing a novel called Cain’s Book, and that Nathalie
Sarraute’s novel The Golden Fruits is about a novel called The Golden Fruits. But we cannot blame Sterne, we must not visit on the father the sins of the children. Sterne tells us these anecdotes, and he tells us about telling them, which is why the opening is perfectly apt. The conception of Tristram is the conception of the book, and when Mr Shandy mentions the creation of the world, we are indeed in at the creation of a world: the creation of Tristram leads to the creation by Tristram of the world of Tristram Shandy. Indeed, as Sterne brings out at one point by a sly emphasis on a Latin quotation (‘Quod omne animal post coitum est triste’), Tristram’s name is to be connected with the idea that ‘After coition every animal is sad.’ The joke is that poor Tristram is sad for the rest of his life, not because of his own but because of his parents’ coition.
For Tristram (as for us), the concatenation of circumstances, the pressure of a million imponderables, is such that life is a gigantically tangled skein. The problem of where his life and opinions really begin continues to dog him; after about three hundred pages, he decides that it really begins with the death of his brother:
FROM this moment I am to be considered as heir-apparent to the Shandy family—and it is from this point properly, that the story of my Life and my Opinions sets out; with all my hurry and precipitation I have but been clearing the ground to raise the building—and such a building do I foresee it will turn out, as never was planned, and as never was executed since Adam.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman Page 2