by Steven Moore
Here―and I should have explained this much earlier; nay, I should have done so in my previous volume―it’s important to distinguish between a novel’s plot and its story. The story consists merely of the events in a novel as they would occur in chronological order; the plot refers to the novelist’s particular arrangement of those events.254 If the story-events of Tristram Shandy were to be arranged chronologically, they would fall into three blocks of time, each focusing on one of the three principal characters (paired with a minor female character):
1690–1713: beginning with Toby’s military service and his wounding at the battle of Namur (1695), continuing with his recuperation and growing interest in fortifications and building large-scale models with the help of his servant Trim, and ending with his aborted courtship of his next-door neighbor, the widow Wadman.
1718–1723: beginning with Walter’s impregnation of his wife Elizabeth, continuing with his reaction to the baby’s botched birth (broken nose and broken name—Walter’s choice of Trismegistus is chopped down to Tristram), and ending with his despair after five-year-old Tristram is accidentally “circumcised,” the straw that breaks Walter’s back.
1759–1767: beginning and ending with Tristram’s composition of his memoirs in his 40s, interrupted by a trip to France for his health, but otherwise conducted in his study in England, in the company of his beloved Jenny.
These events are scattered throughout the novel in achronological order as they occur to Tristram, for the main story concerns his trip down the stream of consciousness. That’s the real show: “a tragicomic performance,” as Keymer bills it, “of digressive writing and progressive disease, with Tristram struggling to record his life while watching it waste away.”255 In a parody of the conventional, linear novel, Tristram pretends to begin with his birth―or more specifically, with his conception (as in A Voyage round the World and Martinus Scriberus)―but within a few paragraphs he begins digressing, back-filling, fast-forwarding, and following his thoughts wherever sudden gusts of passion or interest drive them. Although he feigns difficulty controlling his narrative, he tells us in no uncertain terms that he sacrilegiously plans to ignore Horace’s Ars Poetica (the bible of every Western novelist before him) and “confine himself neither to his rules, nor to any man’s rules that ever lived” (1.4), asking his reader to “bear with me―and let me go on, and tell my story my own way” (1.6), hoping by the end of the novel that he has taught “a lesson to the world, ‘to let people tell their stories their own way’ ” (9.25).
As with his typographical devices, Sterne didn’t discover the subconscious, even though he seems to anticipate modern psychological concepts such as Pavlovian conditioning, Freudian slips and word association, the relativity of time, repression, and the tricks of memory. Most of this he got from Locke―whose influence on Sterne has been exaggerated; as one Sterne specialist wittily put it, “Locke may not be the key”―and the rest from Burton, Montaigne, and others going back to Lucian and Plato. His originality lay in introducing subconscious matters into fiction in the first place—aside from the occasional symbolic dream, earlier novelists didn’t delve that deeply—and then letting them determine the form of his novel. That is, Sterne not only brings subconscious processes to the surface, but allows them to dart about as Tristram imagines his childhood, jumping from an anecdote about his father before Tristram was born, to a quotation from Erasmus, to a memory of his travels in France later in life, to a document he once came across among his father’s papers, to an opinion on current events, to a description of his mother’s eyes, to his plans for future chapters, to a remark made to Jenny―a stream of consciousness that pours through Tristram’s pen without apparent editorial intervention. (He’s artfully artless.) Gradually we realize that Tristram’s adult personality is a winning combination of the best elements of his father and uncle―he is as erudite but not as pedantic as Walter, as humane but not as naïve as Toby―a conclusion the reader arrives at by focusing as much on how he thinks as on what he thinks about.
Like most people, Tristram Shandy thinks a lot about sex, and is amused by those Tartuffes who pretend they don’t and at their unwillingness to talk like adults about a basic human function. In Shandean fashion, let’s start at the rear end: on the penultimate page of the 600-page novel, Walter launches into an unoriginal diatribe against sex, asking “for what reason is it, that all the parts thereof―the congredients―the preparations―the instruments, and whatever serves thereto, are so held to be conveyed to a cleanly mind by no language, translation, or periphrasis whatever?” (9.33, my italics).256 The narrator, obviously a sex-positive guy, relentlessly teases those of “cleanly mind” who refuse to speak or listen to frank talk about sex by goosing them with innuendos, double entendres, censored words in asterisks, confusing pronoun antecedents (“it” refers to two different things in the hilariously euphemistic conversations between Uncle Toby and Mrs. Wadman), and words that have both denotative and connotative meanings, as when the narrator warns his female readers repeatedly against imagining that huge noses on men represent any other protuberant part of the male anatomy. A recurring ploy, played often on the long-suffering reader Tristram addresses as “Madam,” is to begin to say something that seems sexually suggestive, only to finish with something quite innocent. (I always picture leering Groucho Marx and stately Margaret Dumont during those exchanges.) Tristram satirizes a class of people who insist there is no acceptable language for sex, and who even seem to believe that unmarried women and men should be sexless. (The lower classes in Tristram Shandy, like Toby’s servant Trim and Wadman’s maid Bridget, are much more comfortable talking about and apparently engaging in sex.) On the other hand, those same clean-minded people speak openly and honorably about death: in his diatribe against sex, Walter goes on (unwittingly?) to expose the hypocrisy, if not insanity, of denigrating coitus but glorifying “The act of killing and destroying a man” in the name of war, further noting “the weapons by which we do it are honorable,” paraded in public, whereas the “instruments” by which we create a man are dishonorable and kept in darkness. If any attitude should be deplored as indecent, depraved, and obscene―accusations flung against Sterne in his own day and still heard today on occasion―it’s Walter’s and Toby’s conviction that it is “glorious” to kill others for what politicians call “the good of the nation” (3.22). Parson Yorick―like Tristram, one of Sterne’s personae―“was rising up to batter the whole hypothesis to pieces” when the family servant Obadiah rushes in to complain of the Shandy bull’s impotence, giving liberal-minded Yorick an opportunity to conclude the novel by replying to Mrs. Shandy’s straight line “what is all this story about?”― [¶] A COCK and a BULL, said Yorick―And one of the best of its kind I ever heard”―a final knowing wink at those clean-minded prigs too prim to use the word cock, much less to admit **** **** ******** *** ********** ***.
For Sterne, sex is healthy, natural, life-affirming―witness the rapturous concluding chapter of volume 7―and in one sense Tristram Shandy is about the protagonist’s escape from the atmosphere of sexual shame and impotence that hangs over Shandy Hall like a gravid cloud. He enjoys good-natured bawdiness, but Tristram distances himself from those with smutty, misogynous attitudes, such as a minor character he calls Phutatorius (“Fucker”), author of a “filthy and obscene treatise de Concubinis retinendis” (On Keeping Whores). Fearing that book “had done hurt in the world,” Yorick during a supper flips a hot chestnut into Phutatorius’s pants, then sarcastically advices him to treat his scalded dick by swaddling it in the newly printed sheets of a second edition of his book. In recounting the scene, Tristram takes another poke at those clean-minded people who have no language for sexual matters: the hot chestnut “fell perpendicularly into that particular aperture of Phutatorius’s breeches, for which, to the shame and indelicacy of our language be it spoke, there is no chaste word throughout all Johnson’s dictionary” (4.27).257
Tristram Shandy is all about sex―from th
e opening sentence’s reference to Walter’s monthly marital maintenance to the closing sentence’s double entendre―but it’s also about writing, to which Sterne brings a similar unbuttoned attitude, and in this regard it’s not an exaggeration to say that he “made a more original contribution to the technique of fiction than any other single author has ever done” (Stevenson, 129–30). It remains an open question whether Sterne deliberately set out to revolutionize the novel, or to revamp the genre of learned wit as practiced by Erasmus, Rabelais, Montaigne, Burton, and Swift, but he clearly invented “a new species of writing”―“my work is of a species by itself,” Tristram boasts (1.22)―and introduced radically new innovations in style, character, structure, and fictional time. The fresh style jumps out from the first page―especially if read on the heels of Johnson’s stodgy Rasselas―as the narrator jokes about prenatal influences while his parents engage in sex:
Believe me, good folks, this is not so inconsiderable a thing as many of you may think it;―you have all, I dare say, heard of the animal spirits, as how they are transfused from father to son, &c. &c.―and a great deal to that purpose:―Well, you may take my word, that nine parts in ten of a man’s sense or his nonsense, his successes and miscarriages in this world depend upon their motions and activity, and the different tracks and trains you put them into; so that when they are once set a-going, whether right or wrong, ’tis not a halfpenny matter,―away they go cluttering like hey-go-mad; and by treading the same steps over and over again, they presently make a road of it, as plain and as smooth as a garden-walk, which, when they are once used to, the Devil himself sometimes shall not be able to drive them off it.
Pray, my dear, quoth by 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.
Note the breezy address, the “&c. &c.” and extralong dashes, the slang, the hey-go-mad paratactic sentence structures, the baffling conversation at the end between mother, father, reader, and author. Did ever author, since the creation of the world, conclude an opening chapter thus? Though there are a few precedents for the style―Urquhart’s Rabelais, Dunton’s Voyage, Voltaire’s Candide (mentioned in 1.9)―no previous English novelist made such elastic use of the language, put it through so many hoops, or used as many registers, from Augustan formality to kitchen informality, from Church Latin to French slang. He uses every rhetorical trick in the book, and even names many of them for us: epiphonema, erotesis, apostrophe, aposiopesis, catachresis, &c. &c. He turns nouns into verbs―“she would not heroine it” (1.18); “depress’d and Nicodemus’d into nothing” (1.19)―nouns into adjectives―“bleak and decemberly nights” (8.9)―and turns almost any word into a metaphor, then plays upon its literal and figurative senses. Sterne’s style is a textbook example of what Cyril Connolly described as the “Mandarin dialect”: “It is characterized by long sentences with many dependent clauses, by the use of the subjunctive and conditional, by exclamations and interjections, quotations, allusions, metaphors, long images, Latin terminology, subtlety and conceits” (18). Tristram speaks of “the precise line of beauty in the sentence” (2.6) and gives us more distinctive sentences per page than almost any other novelist. They range from onomatopoeic silliness like this―
Ptr . . r . . r . . ing—twing—twang—prut—trut―’tis a cursed bad fiddle.—Do you know whether my fiddle’s in tune or no?—trut . . prut . . —They should be fifths.―’Tis wickedly strung—tr . . . a.e.i.o.u.-twang.—The bridge is a mile too high, and the sound-post absolutely down,—else—trut . . prut—hark! ’tis not so bad a tone.―Diddle diddle, diddle diddle, diddle diddle, dum. (5.15)258
―to heartrending sentences like this (which Thomas Jefferson loved):
Time wastes too fast: every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity Life follows my pen; the days and hours of it, more precious, my dear Jenny! than the rubies about thy neck, are flying over our heads like light clouds of a windy day, never to return more―every thing presses on―whilst thou are twisting that lock,―see! it grows grey; and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, and every absence which follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are shortly to make.― (9.8; Sterne died a year and a half after writing that passage)
Despite the improvisatory feel of the style, Tristram chooses his words carefully, as Sterne indicates early on in what might be a parody of Richardson’s “writing to the moment”; mark below how Tristram writes the word current then becomes distracted as he continues to paraphrase his father’s views because he realizes that’s not the word Walter would have used:
[My father] was very sensible that all political writers upon the subject had unanimously agreed and lamented, from the beginning of Queen Elizabeth’s reign down to his own time, that the current of men and money towards the metropolis, upon one frivolous errand or another,—set in so strong,—as to become dangerous to our civil rights;— tho’, by the bye,―a current was not the image he took most delight in,—a distemper was here his favourite metaphor, and he would run it down into a perfect allegory, by maintaining it was identically the same in the body national as in the body natural . . . (1.18)
Tristram never lets us forget he’s writing this memoir: he often stops to address the reader, explain why he’s telling the story the way he does, and sometimes even notes the exact date on which he is writing. In one dizzying instance, he notes how his writing self simultaneously occupies several moments in time, anticipating Marcel’s revelations at the end of In Search of Lost Time: “I am this moment walking across the market-place of Auxerre with my father and my uncle, in our way back to dinner―and I am this moment also entering Lyons with my postchaise broke into a thousand pieces―and I am moreover this moment in a handsome pavillion . . . where I now sit rhapsodizing all these affairs” (7.28). No novel is so ostentatiously performed as this one, starring a narrator wearing a fool’s cap and bells who cracks wise and juggles words for us, keeping several narrative lines going simultaneously like those performers who spin plates on the top of poles, filling his foolscap with bells and whistles and the encyclopedic contents of his mind. (For Walter, erudition provides rules for living; for Tristram, it provides straight lines for satire.) Backstage, however, the jester weeps:
Every line I write, I feel an abatement of the quickness of my pulse, and of that careless alacrity with it, which every day of my life prompts me to say and write a thousand things I should not.―And this moment that I last dipp’d my pen into my ink, I could not help taking notice what a cautious air of sad composure and solemnity there appear’d in my manner of doing it.―Lord! how different from the rash jerks, and hare-brain’d squirts thou art wont, Tristram! to transact it with in other humours,―dropping thy pen,—spurting thy ink about thy table and thy books,―as if thy pen and thy ink, thy books and thy furniture cost thee nothing. (3.28)259
For most novelists, “action is character,” as F. Scott Fitzgerald said, but Tristram rarely acts in the literal sense in Tristram Shandy. He appears briefly in 5.17 at age 5 during “the misadventure of the sash,” even more briefly in 1.11 around age 23 in Denmark, and throughout volume 7 in his mid-40s as he flees “Death himself” by traveling in France. His principal action is writing, and his manner of writing―as much as his matter―characterizes him for the reader. Along similar lines, Walter, Toby, and Yorick are characterized almost entirely by their obsessions and opinions, not by their actions. And what characters! While earlier novelists created admirable, ridiculous, or detestable characters, Sterne was the first to create lovable ones, which is not as inconsequential as it sounds, especially in a novel that strikes many readers as forbiddingly intellectual. Walter is the kind of undisciplined thinker Swift reviled, Toby is dumb as a post, and Yorick is self-destructively irresponsible, yet Sterne infuses them with such humanity that
even the king of Brobdingnag would be charmed. They grow on us, as apparently they grew on Sterne during the course of composition.260 Tristram finds the fun in dysfunctional family even as he deals with the damage done to him, one of the many reasons Tristram Shandy feels so modern.261 I calculated earlier in a footnote that 90 percent of the characters in 18th-century British novels are detestable, and most of the 10 percent who are aren’t aren’t all that appealing. I wouldn’t want to spend five minutes with Robinson Crusoe or Lemuel Gulliver or David Simple or Clarissa Harlowe, or even Parson Adams―Fanny Hill is a different matter―but I could live forever in Shandy Hall, listening to Walter dissertate on whatever, Toby reenact the siege of Namur, Yorick scatter his wit and humor, and to Trim finish his “Story of the King of Bohemia and His Seven Castles.”262 Upending yet another fictional convention, Sterne reverses those percentages: only about 10 percent of his characters are detestable―Phutatorius, Dr. Slop, Yorick’s nameless enemies―and while Sterne’s female characters are rather sketchy―as though Tristram agreed with Pope that “Most women have no character”―this is a novel about hobbyhorses, which most women are too sensible to mount.
