Long before Derrida or deconstructionism troubled the study of rhetoric and literature, a precursor was at work; long before current critical practice got enmeshed in matters of indeterminacy, there came a voice laughing in the wilderness of eighteenth-century rationalist gravity, a master of ambiguity: Laurence Sterne, speaking in the guise of Tristram Shandy. Among its other games, Sterne’s novel exploited certain problems of language. Appearing to celebrate a scholarly faith in systematic reason, and in John Locke,1 England’s prophet of empiricism, Tristram Shandy actually questioned rationalism’s premises, and confirmed many of Locke’s in the process. Much of Tristram Shandy frolicked with Locke’s treatise, Essay Concerning Human Understanding. If Tristram Shandy unsettled the virtuous regime of reason, it disturbed even more our sense of its straightforward, common-sense vehicle: language. What an unholy mess.
Shandy,2 the steadfastly unreliable narrator, foregrounds the troublesome nature of meaning, demonstrating indeterminacy by asserting determinacy where it can’t stand up, or pretending to elliptical modesty where contextual clues guarantee an “indecent” meaning. Shandy revels in equivocation, tautology, double entendre, nebulous references, ambiguity, sophistry, and even condemns plagiarism by resorting to plagiarism, so that at times a reader could almost despair of knowing what he does mean. Yet, the novel hardly results in meaninglessness. Ultimately, for all its seemingly determined indeterminacy, Sterne’s text comes across clearly: regardless of specific textual meaning, it works at effect, one of stubborn vitality, resisting explicit, rationalist conviction. Hold fast the handrails in this hall of mirrors.
The No, I’ll not say a word about it,—here it is;——in publishing it,——I have appealed to the world,——and to the world I leave it;——it must speak for itself. (III.xx/157).
Author’s PREFACE.
The statement brims with contradiction and ambiguity. How can this be a preface, an aforesaid introduction to the work, when it appears twenty chapters into the third volume, a year after volumes I and II had already been published and sent into the world? Yet the very question provokes a further question: is its informative value diminished for coming in the midst of the work? Long before this point, however, readers have learned not to expect “proper” narrative order. The reader’s sense of narrative proportion has been so buffeted already, that the preface showing up where it does hardly comes as a surprise. But, concerning the preface, other questions remain.
“No, I’ll not say a word about it,—here it is” (III.xx/157). Not say a word about what?—here what is?; the preface?; the work as a whole? Since Shandy habitually backs up to comment on his topics and tactics, it might conceivably be anything that “[he]’ll not say a word about.” And if he will “not say a word about” the novel as a whole, does that not negate the only “prefac-ical” validity of the preface? In a rational world, from which the reader has long since been unmoored, not only does a preface come “pre-“ the work, but a pronoun refers to a specific referent. Not here. Shandy continually defies, not just grammatical convention, but reason itself. The statement’s referent-less, ambiguous “it” renders the sentence meaningless. Although, strictly speaking, if Shandy means not to speak a word about “it,” he can justifiably say he has not, if “it” refers to nothing—which makes the statement extraneous, but that would fit the logic of a work composed mostly of material that is extraneous by conventional standards. Of course “it” could also, perhaps, refer back to the “it” in the previous sentence, which is separated from the ambiguous one by only a blank space and the words, “The Author’s PREFACE,” (a claim already suspect by definition). In the last sentence, “it” refers to—but the reader who investigates meaning at this level, expecting to find any worth salvaging, will have long since been hauled off in a strait-jacket.3
1 Whether Sterne reveres or reviles Locke has been argued incessantly, and evidence throughout the novel indicates that both are true (Loveridge 129-31). That his position would even seem equivocal would surely delight Sterne.
2 Attempting to distinguish between the mind of Laurence Sterne and his personae Tristram Shandy and Yorick is pointless. For more on this see: Gibson, 69-70.
3 Considering, however, that the Russian structuralist critic, Victor Shklovsky, apparently checked the outlandish, cartoon diagrams of story-line at the close of volume VI and found that “Sterne’s diagrams are approximately accurate,” no amount of textual scrutiny can be deemed excessive (Sterne VI.xl/391-92; Shklovsky 56-57). Shklovsky maintained the diagrams are “accurate, but they do not call attention to the crosscurrent of motifs” (57).
Such indeterminacy would seem to scorn the trust and respect of the reader, who has labored twenty chapters into the third volume of this work, and thus has some investment at stake and might reasonably expect from the text meaning of some sort.4 But, such common-sense reasoning, in Tristram Shandy, leads nowhere; Shandean text “lies” to us repeatedly. The text repeatedly confirms that the narrator can’t be trusted, that nothing he says can be taken at face value. So why do readers continue? Sterne’s readers have, by now, revised their expectations and been “trained” by the text to expect inconsistency, ambiguity, illogic, contradiction, etc. The reader has internalized Shandean logic. Where other novelists strive to order their details for consistent verisimilitude, Sterne aims, instead, for coherent disorder, for likely-seeming chaos. Shandy’s equivocal voice achieves a disheveled yet coherent “reality,” what one commentator calls “carefully controlled defects” (Gibson, 62).
Returning, for a moment, to the indeterminate pronoun “it,” there is a subtle moral component here, too. Conventions of grammar acknowledge, implicitly, some authority that prescribes the grammar. To renounce that authority, and especially to flaunt the game, is to undermine the regime of authority in general, and such defiance is just one aspect of Shandy’s linguistic subversions.
Not only does Shandy forsake common logic, but he flaunts his game continually; his story is a happy romp outside sound reason. Contradiction runs rampant. Seeming to promise a complete story—The Life and Opinions of . . .—he does not deliver. Calling his father “an excellent natural philosopher,” he reveals him instead as a fatuous, pedantic bumbler (I.iii/7). In one place Walter Shandy is “one of the most regular men in every thing he did . . . that ever lived”; in another place:
[nothing] 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.——There was that infinitude of oddities in him, and of chances along with it, by which handle he would take a thing,—–it baffled, Sir, all calculations. (I.iv/9; V.xxiv/315).
Early on, Tristram says demurely, “Sir, as you and I are in a manner perfect strangers to each other, it would not [be] proper to have let you into too many circumstances relating to myself all at once,” and then, twenty-one pages later says, “I need not tell your worship, that all this is spoke in confidence” (I.vi/11; I.xii/32). Given their context, each of the two statements is ludicrous on its own, and, taken together, their contradictory nature only grows. And, supposing that “my life and opinions are likely to make some noise in the world, and . . . be no less read than Pilgrim’s Progress itself,” Shandy reverses himself just three pages later, saying he is “a mortal of so little consequence in the world, it is not much matter what I do” (I.iv/8; I.viii/13).
He makes oxymoronic claims such as: “but I would not shake my credit in telling an improbable truth, however indisputable in itself,” all the while filling his narrative with improbable people and events (I.xi/21). Shandy rebukes “Madam,” one of several imaginary personified readers, for the “vicious” habit of reading for plot rather than for “the deep erudition and knowledge which a book of this cast, if read over as it should be, would infallibly impart” (I.xx/48). Madam’s “fault”—to have missed an inference so impossibly and comically obscure that no reader would have caught it—leads to Shandy’s specious lament:
this self-same vile pruriency for fresh adventures . . . has got so strongly into our habit and humours,——and so wholly intent are we upon satisfying the impatience of our concupiscence that way,——that nothing but the gross and more carnal parts of a composition will go down:——The subtle hints and sly communications of science fly off, like spirits, upwards;——the heavy moral escapes downwards; and both are as much lost to the world, as if they were still left in the bottom of the ink-horn.6 (I.xx/49)
Ostensibly, he resents the spirit of his work being taken for anything less than pure.
5 Whether or not this is a novel has been argued over at length—one could make a case for its being a series of essays, since Sterne’s topics wander and vary so—yet such determination seems irrelevant. For the purpose of discussion, “novel” makes a nice word to hang one’s hat on.
6 Given Sterne’s idiosyncratic spelling and punctuation, I hereby pledge to reproduce it exactly, to be a stickler, yet without resorting to dozens of distracting “sic”s. Trust me.
Shandy claims to value “the utmost chastity and decorum of expression” (III.xxxviii/191). Such “sentimental” expression prevailed in the English theater and poetry of Sterne’s time (New 6). The ribald, Restoration-era comedy of Wycherley and Congreve had been replaced in the mid-eighteenth century by “incredibly pious young men and women, their sexual appetites effectively buried under layers of heartfelt verbiage” (6). Sterne, as a clergyman, would have been expected to conform to this “moral” line. Yet, despite superficial claims to propriety, Shandy’s oblique prose calls much into question. By creating suggestive dual contexts, it pretends to resist bawdy meaning, while actually substantiating it and calling attention to its very game. Relating his father’s “first Sunday night of every month” routine of winding “up a large house-clock . . . with his own hands,” Shandy says his father “gradually brought some other little family concernments” to the evening’s duty. Shandy follows this modest-seeming euphemism with the news, in the next paragraph, that his mother “could never hear the said clock wound up,—but the thoughts of some other things unavoidably popp’d into her head,—–& vice versâ:——” (I.iv/9). The reader’s imagination has been primed for the double entendre, two pages earlier, when Shandy’s mother “knew no more than her backside” her husband’s meaning in an offhand remark (I.iii/7). And running through the novel is the motif: “which is the right and which the wrong end of a woman, is the thing to be concealed” (II.v/83; IV.xxxii/278; et al). Italic font highlights the deliberately risque meaning.
Rather than obscure his meaning, Shandy’s rhetorical hijinks call attention to his bawdy constructs. Consider, in abbreviated form, the elaborate preparation for the subject of noses:
to avoid all confusion in what will be said upon [noses], . . . it may not be amiss to explain my own meaning, and define with all possible exactness and precision. . . . In books of strict morality and close reasoning, such as this . . . depending so much as I have done, all along, upon the cleanliness of my reader’s imaginations. (III.xxxi/177-78)
Then, following “Eugenius[’s]” forefinger pointing (pointedly) at the word “Crevice, in the fifty-second page of the second volume of this book of books,” and a discussion of “two roads, . . . a dirty and a clean one,” Shandy presents a baroque, paragraph-long tautology, crowned with: “I declare, by that word I mean a Nose, and nothing more, or less” (III.xxxi/178). This circumlocution actually does “avoid all confusion” and does “define” meaning, firing the reader’s imagination, in the same way as, nine pages later, “a long nose . . . will do excellently well, ad excitandum focum, (to stir up the fire)” (III.xxxvii/187). Essentially winking from behind his equivocation, Shandy knows quite well how clean his readers’ imaginations are, and he rubs their noses in the truth of the matter.7
Moreover, Tristram purports to invert the roles of author and reader, and affects to be the victim of his reader’s imagination:
“Fair and softly, gentle reader!—–where is thy fancy carrying thee? . . . What a life of it has an author, at this pass!” (III.xxxiii/180). And again, Mrs. Shandy, passes by the parlor door and hears the word “wife,” which “caught her by the weak part of the whole sex:——You shall not mistake me,—I mean her curiosity” (V.xii/303).
In some instances, Sterne further emphasizes double entendre with ostentatious typography. “The chamber-maid had left no ******* *** under the bed:——Cannot you contrive, master, quoth Susannnah, lifting up the sash . . . cannot you manage . . . to **** *** *** ******?” (V.xvii/310). The context leaves no possible meaning other than chamber pot, for the first series of asterisks, and piss out the window for the second. In another passage, the asterisks’ meaning seems more elliptical, and yet: “He died, said my father, as * * * * * * * * * * * * *——And if it was with his wife, said my uncle Toby–—there could be no harm in it.—–That’s more than I know—–replied my father” (V.iv/294). Uncle Toby’s remark about “wife” and “no harm” fires the imagination, and Walter Shandy’s reply fans the flames: his singular disdain for sex makes his reply ambiguous—it could refer to either “was with his wife,” or “no harm in it.” The ambiguity creates a focus, bringing the reader back to further examine the otherwise innocuous thirteen asterisks. A catalogue of double entendre in Tristram Shandy would make a small book, in itself.
So what is there in noses and crevices; in button holes, placket-holes, pockets, bridges and Bridgets; in cabbages, whim-whams, hobby-horses, and right and wrong ends of women; in instruments, organs, &c.s, and ****s; in curtins, covered ways, ditches, flanks, battering rams, half-moons, horn-works, petards, and portcullises—what makes these common items such uncommonly fertile ground for the imagination? In making sense of perception, the mind sorts and organizes the world, tucking any given thing into several diverse categories; thus it manages to lump together battering-rams with penises, crevices with vaginas, and cabbage leaves with labia, as John Locke intimated in his Essay on Human Understanding.
Locke explained that it would be an insurmountable task to distinguish and label every specific thing in the world, each with its own name; so human communication depends on the mind’s ability to discriminate, compare, and classify objects and ideas (Jenkins 167). For instance, this particular piece of paper with words on it would need its own name (griffilob), as would the following page (anglotorb) and every other page ever written (etc., etc.), as would the top corner of the page and the bottom half of the page, and so on. Instead, the human mind classifies things according to their “universal” or “general” qualities (166). So, using general terms that can apply equally—and economically—to myriad other objects, we can refer to this particular piece of paper as: “this,” “white,” “8 1/2 by 11,” “printed,” “page number four”; and we can refer to its parts in terms of: “top,” “middle,” “bottom,” “left,” “right,” “corner,” and so on.8 Locke further realized that how we identify objects and ideas and people, by what criteria we group things, makes all the difference; it is hardly a simple matter (Jenkins 168-72). Even the simplest things can be classified according to numerous traits (especially if one denies essential qualities to things, as Locke’s empiricism does). Again, this page, for instance, can be considered by its weight, its color or shade of color, or its size in each of three dimensions; it can be considered clean or dirty, dry, wet, smooth, crumpled, new, old, or infinite other traits. We can also consider this page as a representation of the information written on it, or, inevitably, as a representation of its author’s understanding and application of what he learned in a certain university course. Each context entails different criteria.
And within this flexible system of classification, a penis and a battering ram can be found to share general features of: hard, long, round, insistent on breaching an entrance through repeated thrusting, and so on. Once the mind connects the two, it would be difficult to imagine dissolving the link. Although, considering that polite society tends to disapprove of such double entendre, its source is curious. To whatever extent society replaces candid talk about sexuality with euphemism, as apparently it did in Sterne’s time, it invites double entendre. Two sides of the same coin, each is a metaphor that pretends to effect ambiguity. The two work for dichotomous ends: one, to suppress and disempower sensuality; the other to re-appropriate it.
When it comes to the “whiskers chapter,” however, neither euphemism or double entendre applies. In the whiskers chapter, Sterne sets up the appearance of sexual innuendo where there is none and creates a context in which “the word was ruined . . . [it] became indecent, and . . . absolutely unfit for use” (V.i/287). Borrowing from Locke’s “train of ideas,” Shandy says:
There are some trains of ideas which leave prints of themselves about our eyes and eyebrows; and there is a consciousness of it, somewhere about the heart, which serves but to make these etchings the stronger——we see, spell, and put them together without a dictionary. (V.i/286-87)
In the context of Tristram Shandy, precede a word—whiskers—with asterisks, and accompany it with “thin gauze . . . desire . . . [a] voice . . . naturally soft and low . . . [and] whiskers, said La Fosseuse, with infinite modesty,” and the world will have “given it a wound” (V.i/285, 287). Readers and characters alike can make no meaning of the word in this context: “There is not a cavalier . . . that has so gallant a pair—Of what? cried Margaret, smiling——Of whiskers, said La Fosseuse, with infinite modesty” (V.1./285). Here is true ambiguity; whiskers—especially “a pair” of them—corresponds to nothing. Yet the word is ruined for its associations.
In a concept that Locke labeled the “association of ideas,” he discerned that the arrangement of ideas in the mind can take natural and unnatural forms. Water and wetness, pain and injury, and cotton and cloth, are natural associations, for they conform to universal experience (Jenkins 39). Unnatural associations, however, can happen by “chance” or by “custom”: a person’s fear of blue clothing resulting from painful experience with police, or linking Armani suits to prestige or intelligence. Locke realized that faulty connections can substitute for impartial reasoning and lead to ideological error. Such irrational association of ideas, he said, ‘gives sense to jargon, demonstration to absurdities, and consistency to nonsense’ (qtd. in Jenkins 40-41). This potential for misinterpretation is Tristram Shandy’s playground.
8 Despite talk of the English language’s huge and specific vocabulary, it actually operates with remarkable economy, considering what truly specific terminology could demand of it.
Shandy gives sense to jargon and demonstration of absurdity, conspicuously, in rendering Ernulphus’s Curse (III.x/139-47), which emphasizes the inherent contradiction of associating intense, dogmatic hatred with ecclesiastical virtue. No thinking reader can fail to see that, although the Bishop Ernulphus’s priestly jargon alleges morality, the curse effects malignity.
Another, albeit subtle, absurdity is demonstrated by the abbess of Andoüillets and a convent novice who find themselves unable to goad an obstinate mule-team without resorting to “horrid words” (VII.xxiv, xxv/420-21). The pious women’s aversion to the muleskinners’ terms “bouger” (bugger) and “fouter” (fuck) alludes to another Lockean notion: that words—articulated sounds—signify their meanings arbitrarily; words alone have no essential meanings. Bouger and fouter would carry “horrid” meaning only if a speaker intended it, only if spoken in a context that conveys such meaning. The abbess and novice crying “bouger” and “fouter” at the mules, for the purpose of rousing them to movement, would carry no more “horrid” meaning than whistling, stamping their feet, or cracking a whip. Words depend on context for their meaning.
Relevant context leads to other linguistic matters. Sterne exploits principles of communication that late-twentieth-century linguists, psychologists, anthropologists, neurologists, and philosophers are still coming to grips with. Cognitive neuroscientist Steven Pinker explains, in The Language Instinct, that human language normally depends on certain underlying conventions, for instance:
The speaker, having made a claim on the precious ear of the listener, implicitly guarantees that the information to be conveyed is relevant: that it is not already known, and that it is sufficiently connected to what the listener is thinking that he or she can make inferences to new conclusions with little extra mental effort. Thus listeners tacitly expect speakers to be informative, truthful, relevant, clear, unambiguous, brief and orderly. (emphasis added, 228)
It is precisely these qualities that Tristram Shandy delights in withholding from readers. To illustrate, when skilled authors write dialogue, they do it elliptically, knowing that real speakers inevitably abbreviate what they say, depending on their listeners’ reciprocal efforts to fill in what is missing. Cooperative listeners “help to winnow out the inappropriate readings of an ambiguous sentence, to piece together fractured utterances, to excuse slips of the tongue, to guess the referents of pronouns and descriptions, and to fill in the missing steps of an argument” (Pinker, 228). This explains why a computer can decode a forty page document in roughly a second, but can never decode “time flies like an arrow,” without falling over meanings like “fruit flies like a banana” that human readers would glide over and never consider (Pinker 209). It is this open space between speaker and listener, writer and reader, where they normally cooperate, that Sterne exploits. Tristram Shandy capitalizes on the notion that, rather than a mere transfer of data, language is the complex interplay of “sensitive, scheming, second-guessing, social animals” (Pinker 230), (a notion that may have caused many of Sterne’s “sentimental” contemporaries to squirm). And Sterne refers specifically to his elliptical style, to the information he withholds, although his rationale is perverse:
Writing, when properly managed, . . . is but a different name for conversation: As no one, who knows what he is about in good company, would venture to talk all;——so no author, who understands the just boundaries of decorum and good breeding, would presume to think all: The truest respect which you can pay to the reader’s understanding, is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine. . . . I am eternally paying him compliments of this kind, and do all that lies in my power to keep his imagination as busy as my own. (II.xi.88)
—as busy and as flummoxed, he might have said.9
Sterne also capitalizes on the human desire to know, the urge to categorize and determine meaning, even at great cost. Throughout the novel, conflicts turn on inadequate knowledge, and on characters’ attempts to find or determine meaning. Walter Shandy wants to know if Tristram can be rechristened; the “criticks” and “connoisseurs” want to determine whether Garrick’s performance—and Sterne’s book, by implication—conforms to their rules and compasses; Shandy wants to know whether to proceed or digress in his narration; the widow Wadman longs to know the exact location and effect of uncle Toby’s groin wound. And knowledge gained becomes a precious commodity; Tristram says of his father: “like all systematick reasoners, he would move both heaven and earth, and twist and torture every thing in nature to support his hypothesis” (Ixix/45). As Melvyn New points out: “One of Sterne’s shrewdest insights . . . is to recognize . . . [that] as interpretive beings we are unable to establish certainty, but equally unable to rest without assigning meaning” (122-23). This is perhaps best illustrated in “Slawkenburgius’s Tale,” where unresolved curiosity over the stranger’s nose drives the “Strasburg” townspeople to “catastrophe” (IV/200-22); “The less they understood of the matter, the greater was their wonder about it—–they were left in all the distresses of desire unsatisfied” (IV/216).
Also in volume IV, a scene at the bishop’s visitation dinner examines dubious efforts to determine meaning, resulting in comedy rather than disaster. In the midst of Didius and Yorick’s “scholarly” dispute, Phutatorius exclaims, “Zounds!”; Shandy then goes round the table citing each party’s conception of how this response relates to the topic at hand. These assumptions grow more elaborate up to:
[the] oath, as my father philosophized upon it, actually lay fretting and fuming at that very time in the upper regions of Phutatorius’s purtenance; and so was naturally, and according to the due course of things, first squeezed out by the sudden influx of blood, which was driven into the right ventricle of Phutatorius’s heart, by the stroke of surprize which so strange a theory of preaching had excited. (IV.xxvii/263)
Shandy follows this parody of 18th-century mechanismic theorizing with: “How finely we argue upon mistaken facts” (the oxymoron sharpening his point), before telling us that the exclamation actually resulted from a hot roasted chestnut that had rolled off the table into Phutatorius’s open fly. A fallacious train of ideas beguiles the assembled scholars to explain Phutatorius’s exclamation, each according to his lights, although “with all their knowledge, they could not tell what in the world to make of it” (IV.xxvii/263). Sterne satirizes the rationalist impulse to banish uncertainty in other passages as well: considering some obscure notion of “Prignitz and Scroderus’s doctrines,——I say not,—–let school-men—scullions, anatomists, and engineers, fight for it amongst themselves” (III.xxxix/192; et al).
Authority, in general, takes a beating in Tristram Shandy. The narrator repeatedly disparages authority, either overtly or by flattery with a mocking voice—–Horace, Dr. Slop, critics, connoisseurs, “John de la Casse, the archbishop of Benevento,” Locke, “a day-tall critick,” “Pythagoras . . .Plato . . . Solon . . . Licurgus . . . Mahomet,” “great wigs or long beards,” “Didius the great church lawyer,” the abbess of Andoüillets (III.xii/148; III.xx/158, 165; V.xvi/308; IV.xiii/234; IV.xvii/241); and Sterne’s jabs—direct or indirect—come particularly when the high and mighty purpose to unambiguous certainty of any kind. Shandy facsimiles the esoterically-worded two pages of “the article in my mother’s marriage settlement,” with its magisterial font—“And this Indenture further witnesseth”—and its:
grant, covenant, condescend, consent, conclude, bargain, and fully agree to. . . . together with all rents, reversions, services, annuities, fee-farms, knights fees, views of frank-pledge, escheats, reliefs, mines, quarries, goods and chattels of felons and fugitives, . . . and all and every the tenths, tythes, glebe-lands”——In three words,——“My mother was to lay in, (if she chose it) in London.” (I.xv/33-35)
Sterne concludes this lengthy parody of jurisdictive diction with the pointed inference that, for all its attempted unambiguous certainty, “three words” (or twelve) would say it just as well. Ernulphus’s curse, the “MEMOIRE presenté a Messieurs les Docteurs de SORBONNE,” Slawkenburgius, and the “TRISTRA-pœdia,” and others all parody “authoritative discourse,” which Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin defines as: “privileged language that approaches us from without; it is distanced, taboo, and permits no play with its framing context” (424). In discussing “The Functions of the Rogue, Clown, and Fool in the Novel,” Bakhtin says, “they see the underside and the falseness of every situation” (159). In Tristram Shandy, Sterne illuminates the “underside and the falseness” of certainty, unambiguousness; he upends the serious, eighteenth-century faith in rationalist certainty. As Bakhtin says of the rogue:
they grant the right not to understand, the right to confuse, to tease, to hyperbolize life: the right to parody others . . . the right not to be taken literally . . . the right to act life as a comedy and to treat others as actors, the right to rip off masks . . . [and] to betray to the public a personal life, down to its most private and prurient little secrets. (163)
Sterne was a deconstructionist long before the practice became common.
If Tristram Shandy traffics in ambiguity, what about indeterminacy? In several places Shandy seems to make a case for indeterminacy: “Observe, I determine nothing in this” (I.xxi/54); and: “whether they were above my uncle Toby’s reason,——or contrary to it,——or that his brain was like damp tinder, and no spark could possibly take hold,——or . . . I say not,—let school-men—scullions, anatomists, and engineers, fight for it amongst themselves” (III.xxxix/192); and: “But mark, madam, we live amongst riddles and mysteries—the most obvious things, which come our way, have dark sides, which the quickest sight cannot penetrate into; and even the clearest and most exalted understandings amongst us find ourselves puzzled and at a loss in almost every cranny of nature’s works” (IV.xvii/241). And again: “which of all these was the cause, let the curious physiologist, or the curious any body determine” (V.x/301). Does Sterne assert indeterminacy as it is known today?
Gerald Graff explains the current critical perspective that “literary texts possess a radical ‘indeterminacy’ that makes the possibility of a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ interpretation of any work impossible” (163). Literature has long been thought to possess a quality of ambiguity, “a dimension that resists the grasp of everyday rational understanding,” a je ne sais quoi (163). Plato considered the poet “inspired and . . . out of his senses,”—inferior, in other words, to the rational philosopher, of the “scientist” (164). Longinus, however, approved the sublime and considered it “emotional transport” beyond ordinary reason. But the categories, rational and irrational, seemed fixed, seemed to define two poles, and to demand categorization of texts. In the eighteenth-century, with its prevailing esteem for empiricism and rational thought, the purely logical propositions and explicit statements associated with math, science, and engineering—with their clear and practical efficiency—came to be more privileged still over poetry and imaginative writing. The “more shadowy, undefined, elusive realms of consciousness” that science and commerce sniffed at, remained in the hands of poetry and literature (164).11 Skipping through critical genealogy to the present, we find the concept of ambiguity has evolved:
Whereas “ambiguity” stood for a positive and valued attribute of richness in a literary text, “indeterminacy” bespeaks a limitation or failure of a text to fulfill its purpose . . . [and] The concept of indeterminacy proposes that a radical limitation is built into the activity of literary interpretation. (Graff 165)
So, does this kind of indeterminacy apply to Tristram Shandy?
Sterne himself posited a correct interpretation of his novel, or sensed an incorrect reading, anyway: “There is so little true feeling in the herd of the world, that I wish I could have got an act of parliament, when the books first appear’d, ‘that none but wise men should look into them.’ It is too much to write books and find heads to understand them” (Curtis 411). Which leads, of course, to the question of “correct” interpretation. Can it be determined? Given the ample range of eighteenth-century “understandings”—from Johnson’s “Nothing odd will do long,” through fifteen published editions of The Beauties of Sterne: including all his pathetic tales, and most distinguished observations on life. Selected for the Heart of Sensibility—there exists a substantial middle ground, a range within which one can “safely” assume understanding. I would confer understanding on the reader (armed with suitable annotation) who equates Warburtons with Tartuffes; the reader whose ear catches “my father persisted in not going on with the discourse,” and who appreciates “virtue. . . . known by the name of perseverance in a good cause,—–and of obstinacy in a bad one” (Sterne III.xx.157, emphasis added; I.xvii/38). The sublimely perverse logic of Sterne’s text produces a particular effect, in the right reader.
No less a reader than Nietzsche agrees. In Human, All Too Human (1886), he writes: “Thus [Sterne] produces in the right reader a feeling of uncertainty” (emphasis added, qtd in New 16). The right reader being what kind? Shandy says, “I would go fifty miles on foot . . . to kiss the hand of that man whose generous heart will give up the reins of his imagination into his author’s hands,——be pleased he knows not why, and cares not wherefore” (III.xii/149). The right reader, then, would accept ambiguity, would be un-threatened by it; the right reader would be tolerant, indulgent, undogmatic, generous, and generally ambivalent. Sterne, agrees with Locke that, having no ‘uncontestable Evidence of the Truth,’ we must tolerate others who differ from us in their beliefs or understanding (Gibson 65). Sterne clearly rejects the “belligerence of the convinced mind” (Gibson 64), although Shandy, in typically dubious fashion, claims otherwise:
It is a singular blessing, that nature has form’d the mind of man with the same happy backwardness . . . which is observed in old dogs,——“of not learning new tricks.” What a shuttlecock of a fellow would the greatest philosopher that ever existed, be whisk’d into at once, did he read such books, and observe such facts, and think such thoughts, as would eternally be making him change sides! (III.xxxiv/181)
This “shuttlecock” describes perfectly the character of Sterne’s right reader.
Returning to Nietzsche, the specific meaning of a Shandean passage may be (or may seem) indeterminate, but the overall effect is clear. Again, Nietzsche:
“What is to be praised in [Sterne] is . . . . an artistic style in which the fixed form is constantly being broken up, displaced, transposed back into indefiniteness, so that it signifies one thing and at the same time another. Sterne is the great master of ambiguity. . . . The reader who demands to know exactly what Sterne really thinks of a thing, whether he is making a serious or a laughing face, must be given up for lost; for he knows how to encompass both in a single facial expression . . . [and to] be in the right and in the wrong at the same time, to know profundity and farce. (qtd. in New 16)
Tristram Shandy makes a string of disingenuous claims from start to finish, many of which call themselves into question. The work’s ambiguity creates a contextual focus on questions of sex, gender, authority, dogma, government, the church—is there any significant area of life that the novel leaves untouched? It continually exploits the power of suggestion and associations, so that certain words are suspect, and a series of asterisks creates an overall effect. Tristram Shandy’s destabilizing effect may seem to diminish meaning, but actually expands it, complicating matters, creating further possibility rather than less. When Nietzsche writes, “That I have to be struggle and becoming and goal and conflict of goals,” he sounds like Nietzsche, but when he continues, “ah, he who divines my will surely divines, too, along what crooked paths it has to go!”—it sounds like Tristram Shandy speaking (qtd in New 134). A text with indeterminate meaning, then, is not a meaningless text. “Sterne’s text,” as Melvyn New says, “is richly determined” (122-23), acutely aware of meaning.12
Eighteenth-century England, influenced by such thinkers as Newton and Locke, is enthralled with the notions of secular progress. This dominant and dogged faith in systematic approach to life —rationalism— challenges the “great Renaissance tradition of ‘unknowingness’” (New). Tristram Shandy speaks up in dissent, and resists rationalism’s hegemony. Shandy is a playful, unrestrained advocate for tolerance, and againstany and all systems. Even Locke, regardless of how much Sterne receives from him, seems to buy heavily into the power of reason. Tristram Shandy, however, maintains a “stubborn way of looking at contradictions within a context of human limitations and worldly complexities” (New, Sterne, introduction xxxviii-xxxvix).
Reason becomes every bit as dictatorial as the authority of revelation that it replaces. Reason seems to liberate us from the old moral regime of revelation, but its demands are no less stringent, no less strident or confining than those it replaces. Rationalism expects too much of the individual, demanding a consistency of response that Tristram Shandy refuses to accede to. This is its appeal. Even Sterne’s narrative structure breaks free of rational demands. “I will conform to no man’s rules,” —Horace or whoever. Shandy’s logic seems to argue for reasonable reason, for a balance between head and heart, although it will consent to no “systematickal” approach.
Rather than limiting meaning to something fixed, and thus subject to analysis, Tristram Shandy’s ambiguity expands it, highlighting contradictory notions without subordinating one to another. Bawdiness and morality coexist. Rather than find meaning in boxes—“right,” “wrong,” or “none of the above”—find it instead somewhere, or everywhere, on a continuum.
“And so long as a man rides his HOBBY-HORSE peaceably and quietly along the King’s high-way, and neither compels you or me to get up behind him,——pray, Sir, what have either you or I to do with it?” (Sterne I.vii/13).
Works Cited
Curtis, Lewis Perry, ed. Letters of Laurence Sterne. Oxford: Clarendon, 1935.
Gibson, Andrew. Reading Narrative Discourse: Studies in theNovel from Cervantes to Beckett. New York: St. Martin’s, 1990.
Graff, Gerald. “Determinacy/Indeterminacy.” Critical Terms for Literary Study. Ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. 2nd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. 163-76.
Jenkins, John J. Understanding Locke: An Introduction to Philosophy through JOHN LOCKE’S Essay. Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P, 1983.
Loveridge, Mark. Laurence Sterne and the Argument About Design. Totowa: Barnes & Noble, 1982
New, Melvyn. Tristram Shandy: A Book for Free Spirits. Twayne’s Masterwork Studies. 132. New York: Twayne, 1994.
– – – . Introduction. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. By Laurence Sterne. 1759-67. Ed. Melvyn New and Joan New. New York: Penguin, 1997.
Pinker, Steven. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. New York: Harper, 1994.
Shklovsky, Victor. “Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: Stylistic Commentary.” Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1965. 25-57.
Sterne, Laurence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. 1759-67. Ed. Melvyn New and Joan New. New York: Penguin, 1997.
This paper concerns itself with epistemology throughout—yet never resorts to the term itself. It can be done.
— CB Bassity, Czar,