The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

by Laurence Sterne

  And there we are, back at the first page and ‘the creation of the world’. It is, after all, a time-honoured analogy that sees God as the great architect or the author of our being (Tristram himself refers to ‘the Supreme Maker and Designer’), and which therefore sees a human creator as sharing in the great act of creation. Sterne thought that authors might get above themselves. Coleridge, in all solemnity, was to speak of the Imagination as ‘a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM’.

  Sterne was already aware of the novelist’s predicament – one which touched all artists but pressed particularly on those who claimed with more emphasis that they showed life in all its circumstantiality. As Henry James said in his preface to Roderick Hudson:

  Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so. He is in the perpetual predicament that the continuity of things is the whole matter, for him, of comedy and tragedy; that this continuity is never, by the space of an instant or an inch, broken, and that, to do anything at all, he has at once intensely to consult and intensely to ignore it.

  Tristram Shandy certainly looks delightfully unkempt beside the elegance of James’s classic formulation. But Sterne confronts the problem, not – as James recommends – by drawing the circle within which relations ‘happily appear’ to come to an end; but, on the contrary, by bringing out how indisputably they do no such thing. The innovation and the value of Tristram Shandy – and it is a comically artistic value as well as a moral one – are that it reminds us of what novelists may, too single-mindedly, insist that we utterly forget. (If it is the novelist’s duty to posit a beginning and an end, it is also his antithetical duty to keep before us some sense of life’s multifariousness, life’s difference from art.) Sterne reminds us that there is no such thing as a beginning, middle and end. That, even in a minutely faithful novel, we cannot find out enough about people to be sure how they would behave. That all art is artifice. That a conversational styleis not a conversation. And –most important – that words cannot do nearly as much as we should like to think. The influence of Locke was here very strong, though Sterne is a light-hearted plagiarist rather than a disciple. ‘What little knowledge is got by mere words,’ says Sterne cheerfully – and it is, in a way, an odd thing to say since it is said with words. When Corporal Trimflourishes his stick, we are given not words but a twirling line on the page:

  Whilst a man is free—cried the Corporal, giving a flourish with his stick thus——

  A thousand of my father’s most subtle syllogisms could not have said more for celibacy.

  A fine comic stroke, and of course the flourish shows that ‘a man is free’, because to incorporate such a diagram is in itself an act of unexpected freedom by the writer.

  Even Sterne’s notorious habits of obscenity and sentimentality often have the same foundation in a sense of the limits of language. Most of the time his obscenity seems to me wonderfully comic, and it could be argued that one of his most important innovations was that he made bawdy jokes at home in the novel. But in any case a remark by Mr Shandy makes explicit the connection between the subject of sex and the scepticism about language. More thanonany other subject, the vocabulary of sex is impoverished, inadequate, or laughable:

  for what reason is it, that all the parts thereof—the congredients—the preparations—the instruments, and whatever serves thereto, are so held as to be conveyed to a cleanly mind by no language, translation, or periphrasis whatever?

  Of course Sterne also took pleasure in obscene puns for their own sake. But their sake often coincided with the sake of his novel. And so did his sentimentality, which is perfectly at one with the capacious generosity of his novel’s structure:

  Here,——but why here,——rather than in any other part of my story, ——I am not able to tell;——but here it is,——my heart stops me to pay to thee, my dear uncle Toby, once for all, the tribute I owe thy goodness.

  Amusingly handled, but aptly too–because the tribute to Toby’s spontaneous and impulsive goodness must itself be spontaneous and impulsive. ‘But why here?’ – because the heart has its reasons which the reason knows nothing of. ‘My heart stops me.’ Such a moment is itself an example of what it is writing about, and such a device – wheels within wheels – goes to make up the intricate structure of Tristram Shandy and is a major technical innovation in itself.

  Take the moment (only a few pages from the end of the book) when Uncle Toby learns a truth about womankind. He has been courting Widow Wadman while Corporal Trim courts Bridget. Bridget never takes the least interest in the terrible wound which Trim had in his knee – whereas Widow Wadman is solicitude itself when it comes to inquiring about the wound which Toby had – in the groin. For Toby, what could be clearer proof of Widow Wadman’s loving compassion? ‘WasIherbrother, Trim, a thousand fold, she could not make more constant or more tender enquiries after my sufferings——though now no more.’ But Trim strips him of the illusion:

  The Corporal had advanced too far to retire——in three words he told the rest——

  My uncle Toby laid down his pipe as gently upon the fender, as if it had been spun from the unravellings of a spider’s web———

  ———Let us go to my brother Shandy’s, said he.

  This is beautifully done, with all Sterne’s perceptiveness about the way in which an ordinary gesture (laying down a pipe) can be charged with feeling and with character (and with innuendo). Notice, too, the comic but touching modulation by which we pass from the sexual innocence of ‘Was I her brother’, to ‘Let us go to my brother Shandy’s, said he’. Toby does not reel at the shock, he simply becomes even more gently courteous than ever, so that one remembers Hazlitt’s praise of Toby’s characterization as ‘one of the finest compliments ever paid to human nature’. But this mention of the spider’s web does even more than that – more than catch delicately a physical gesture, an innuendo, a man’s character, and a fine-spun illusion. The unravellings of a spider’s web: that applies, too, to the incident itself. Trim has unravelled for Toby the web of female solicitude, and so Toby escapes from Widow Wadman’s invitation to come into her parlour. It is not an accident that one of the most famous moments in the book shows us that Toby would not hurt a fly; he lets one out of the window exclaiming ‘This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me.’

  Sterne’s greatness is not simply that he wrote a novel about writing a novel; his triumph is due to the fact that (unlike most of his imitators) he gave as much of his genius to his invented world (the characters of Mr Shandy and Toby) as to the theme of inventing it. Wheels within wheels – but each as well-made as the others, and none buckled. So that the final threads of that wonderfully suggestive ‘spider’s web’ touch the writing of the book itself. Trim unravels the web of Toby’s amours, and it is this unravelling itself which unravels the whole novel and brings it – a few pages later – to an end. The dénouement–that is, literally, the unravelling. To think, or to write, is both to spin and tounravel. As Tristram says of his father’s book, the Tristrapaedia, ‘My father spun his, every thread of it, out of his own brain, – or reeled and cross-twisted what all other spinners and spinsters had spun before him.’

  All the implications of Uncle Toby’s spider’s web, then, are delightfully apt, and handled with a correct self-consciousness that never becomes inhibiting. Sterne’s whole attempt was to create a web as beautifully wrought, as strong, and as delicate – one which, in catching the consciousness of the characters, would at the same time express the consciousness of their creator. He is fascinated by the fluctuating and undulating impulses of thought and feeling. In The Art of Fiction, Henry James said:

  Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness and catching eve
ry airborne particle in its tissue.

  Sterne takes all such patterns of wheels-within-wheels as far as they can go. There is his outcry against plagiarism and the making of books:

  Shall we for ever make new books, as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another?

  Are we for ever to be twisting, and untwisting the same rope?

  But the joke – as John Ferriar pointed out one hundred and fifty years ago – is that Sterne has himself lifted all this from Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. Sterne plagiarizes in order to speak against plagiarism – and in any case Burton himself, it seems, had borrowed most of it. There could hardly be a more witty, or more telling, illustration of the point which Sterne was so concerned to make: that, at every moment, an infinite regression lies in wait for the unwary. Such vertiginous regressions, mirrors reflected in mirrors, are a characteristic anxiety of modern literature. There is William Empson’s poem ‘Dissatisfaction with Metaphysics’:

  Two mirrors with Infinity to dine

  Drink him below the table when they please.

  There are the Chinese-boxes of guilt and self-reproach which trap Patrick Standish, the hero of Kingsley Amis’s Take a Girl Like You:

  But I’m not trying to get credit with you by saying I know I’m a bastard. Nor by saying I’m not trying to get credit. Nor by saying I’m not trying to by saying… trying… you know what I mean. Nor by saying that. Nor by saying that.

  There is Thom Gunn’s poem, ‘Carnal Knowledge’, with its regressive refrain: ‘I know you know I know you know I know’. Sterne seems to have been one of the first to catch this glimpse of a comic situation of which we can also say, that way madness lies. His vitality creates from these wheels-within-wheels a sense of dizzying but comic speed. There are, for instance, all the hitherto unpublished books which Tristram keeps mentioning: his father’s life of Socrates, or his system of education for his son Tristram, the Tristra-paedia (rivalling Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, the training of Cyrus the Great). The Tristra-paedia is a perfect example of the perils of regression, since Tristram grows faster than the book. Mr Shandy

  was three years and something more, indefatigably at work, and at last, had scarce compleated, by his own reckoning, one half of his undertaking: the misfortune was, that I was all that time totally neglected and abandoned to my mother; and what was almost as bad, by the very delay, the first part of the work, upon which my father had spent the most of his pains, was rendered entirely useless,——every day a page or two became of no consequence.—

  Farfetched? But it is uncommonly like the parent who is so interested in reading about the duties of parenthood that he never has time actually to speak to his children. In this doomed and heroically absurd battle against time, the Tristra-paedia is of course the brother to Tristram Shandy itself. Tristram’s appalled glee when he realizes the real predicament of an auto-biographer anticipates the best of Lewis Carroll’s philosophical paradoxes:

  I am this month one whole year older than I was this time twelve-month; and having got, as you perceive, almost into the middle of my fourth volume—and no farther than to my first day’s life—’tis demonstrative that I have three hundred and sixty-four days more life to write just now, than when I first set out; so that instead of advancing, as a common writer, in my work with what I have been doing at it—on the contrary, I am just thrown so many volumes back—was every day of my life to be as busy a day as this—And why not?—and the transactions and opinions of it to take up as much description—And for what reason should they be cut short? as at this rate I should just live 364 times faster than I should write—It must follow, an’ please your worships, that the more I write, the more I shall have to write—and consequently, the more your worships read, the more your worships will have to read.

  Will this be good for your worships eyes?

  Sterne’s courageous humour keeps these wheels as circles of the happy, but it would not take much change of perspective to see them as circles of the damned – as they become in Samuel Beckett. What Beckett calls ‘the poisonous ingenuity of Time in the science of affliction’ might be viewed by Sterne as the delicious ingenuity of Time in the science of entertainment.

  This is why Tristram Shandy is full of incidents or images which relate, at one and the same time, to the characters and to the novel itself. When Dr Slop’s obstetrical bag has been trussed with a dozen knots so that it won’t rattle, and then poor Dr Slop has to wrestle hurriedly with them (the baby is being born), we are aware not only of Dr Slop, but of the fact that Tristram has created – as part of the novel – exactly this ‘multiplicity of round-abouts and intricate cross turns, with a hard knot at every intersection or point where the strings met’. The incident within the novel (for Dr Slop) acts just as it does in the novel (for the reader). The greatness of Sterne is in his doing justice to both, with equal fidelity and awareness. It is not that he pretends to gaze on them both but is really interested only in the knots of his novel-writing; no, his gaze is genuinely bifocal even if that often means a comic squint. When Corporal Trim hands Toby a book, a sermon drops out of it – in exactly the same way as it drops out of the book Tristram Shandy itself. (A further spin is given to the wheels by the fact that it was a sermon which Laurence Sterne had already published.) The neatest triumph comes for both Tristram and Sterne when Tristram exclaims, ‘For in talking of my digression——I declare before heaven I have made it!’ And a similar point is made by the mysterious appearance, from time to time, of an editor of the book, whose footnotes correct Tristram and open up yet another vista of regression.

  When we hear how ‘the learned Peireskius’ walked five hundred miles to see a sailing chariot, the book itself trudges off as valiantly and absurdly as did Peireskius. When we are told that the parson Yorick (i.e. Sterne) once wrote the word ‘Bravo’ at the foot of one of his sermons, but in a later ink crossed the word out – then we see in a flash that the word ‘Bravo!’ is in effect being written at the foot of the telling of this anecdote: and then retracted? When Corporal Trim tries, again and again, to tell Toby the story of the King of Bohemia, only to be foiled and finally left to a series of false starts – we think too of Tristram Shandy itself, a book which promised us his life and opinions and which finally back-pedals so that it concludes four years before Tristram was born. The frustrating of the story of the King of Bohemia – like that of Tristram Shandy – is incomparably comic. But here too it is easy to be reminded of the pain and even madness which Sterne’s humour fends off. When Sterne’s wife temporarily went out of her mind, she believed that she was the Queen of Bohemia.

  Goethe praised Sterne’s ‘contentedness’ – a quality which we are now likely to regard with some suspicion. Surely the writer’s business is not to be contented, but to rouse us to discontent? But this is another place where modern literature has tended to throw all its weight on one arm of the paradox about literature, dangerously one-sided. Yes, from one point of view, we do ask that literature will make us more aware, more sensitive about the suffering of the world. But if thoughtlessness, lack of imagination, callousness – if these are an enemy of literature and of life, they are not the only enemy. What about madness? What about being so sensitive to the suffering of the world that you in effect opt out of the world? No, Sterne’s ‘contentedness’ may be attacked as complacency, but it is something very different: a necessary resilience. When Mr Shandy hears of the death of his son Bobby, it is not long before the exhilaration of making a flowing speech on death has allowed him to forget the actual death. Sterne does not snicker at the ability of the human mind to behave in such a way – on the contrary, he finds it something to admire and to be grateful for. And if Sterne’s writing seems unthinkably far from the world of madness, we have only to think of how Uncle Toby behaves – and of how Sterne’s wife went mad. Dr Johnson thought Sterne a sordid writer, but Sterne’s work bears out Johnson’s magnificent judgement that ‘The only end of writing is to enable the reader
s better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.’ Tristram Shandy enables us to do both.

  1967

  Editor’s Introduction

  by Melvyn New

  The reader who demands to know exactly what Sterne really thinks of a thing… must be given up for lost.

  Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

  Thirty years have passed – a generation – since Christopher Ricks wrote his fine introduction to the first Penguin edition of Tristram Shandy (1967), and it is a mark of its worthiness that it can be reprinted without apology. As Sterne himself well knew (‘Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world… the cant of criticism is the most tormenting’ [III.xii]), criticism, whether of literature or painting, music or dramatic performance, can only rarely hope to survive its hour. Thirty years is a lifetime for almost all artistic endeavours, ample time to be born and to die; for critical endeavours, and especially in this present age of frenzied academic commentary, thirty years might well seem an eternity.

  The enduring masterpieces of literature, the classics of any tradition, find their power not in some mystical transcendence of the fugacity of critical commentary, but, quite the contrary, in their capacity to relish the rapid succession of ideas about themselves, much as a fire feeds upon – even as it destroys – whatever fuels its existence. The smaller but no less difficult accomplishment of literary criticism is to survive long enough to be a moment – to change my metaphor – in the collective train of witnesses to that endurance, even while succumbing to those changes in times, tastes and temperaments that announce a commentary’s individual demise.

  It is no coincidence, then, that in the list of Further Reading following this Introduction only four of thirty titles are dated earlier than 1967. Unlike some who would despair over this evidence of criticism’s short life-span, I see in the currency of my list no cause for complaint. Indeed, one might rather suggest a small celebration is in order, for the list assures us that the critical conversation accompanying Tristram into the twenty-first century is spirited and plentiful: a ‘classic’ ought not to hope for a better complement/compliment from its commentary. More than either complaint or celebration, however, this fecundity of commentary calls for our need to acknowledge the unending process of change by which one generation’s insights become another generation’s blindness.