Chapter 6
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent. (1759–1767)
“Tristram Shandy is the most typical novel in all literature.” So said Viktor Shklovsky in Theory of Prose (1921). This is decidedly not the reaction of most people encountering the novel for the first time. Anyone looking for a conventional plot, or even a picaresque series of episodes such as we find in Moll Flanders, will be disappointed. Such story as there is circles around a set of misfortunes that Tristram presents as a series of obscene disasters unique to him; but they are the ones that happen to us all, and that we are helpless to prevent or change: our conception, our birth, our names, our sexual attractions, our accidental injuries, our declining health and death. It is around these misfortunes that Sterne spins one of the funniest books ever written.
Structure
The usual terms for understanding the plot of a novel and its representation in ordered language simply do not work for Tristram Shandy, a text that takes for granted the constructional principles of the novel created in the 1740s by Richardson and Fielding only in order to work against them. That was what Shklovsky meant when he said that Tristram Shandy was “typical”: “By violating the form, [Sterne] forces us to attend to it.” By 1759, when the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy appeared, readers would expect the circumstances of the narrator/hero’s birth to be mentioned briefly, after which there might be some background about his or her education, with the narrative slowing down and dilating as he or she reached the threshold of adulthood, when one falls in love or becomes the object of desire, and when the emplotted events would truly begin.
Sterne does the opposite: he chooses to start at the very beginning, before the hero’s birth, with the act of coitus in March of 1718 by which he was conceived – disastrously conceived, according to Tristram’s father, because of the damage to the “homunculus” caused by an inopportune question posed by Mrs. Shandy.1 After four chapters on Tristram’s conception, the focus shifts to his birth, which occurs in Volume III. Tristram is christened, equally disastrously, on the very day of his birth, in Volume IV. In Volume V, Tristram suffers an accident to his private parts caused by a falling window‐sash, but in Volume VI his parents decide to breech him – that is, to have breeches made for him instead of his wearing the gowns that young boys wore then. That is all we hear about Tristram’s youth, and we hear nothing of his young manhood. We learn that Tristram the middle‐aged narrator is not well – he speaks of a “vile asthma” that he got “skating against the wind in Flanders,” and of coughing up quantities of blood, and Volume VII consists of a trip to France in the hope of outrunning Death. Finally, Tristram shifts his focal topic to what he calls his “choicest morsel,” the “amours” of his uncle, Captain Toby Shandy, specifically Toby’s courtship of the Widow Wadman, a development that begins in Volume VI and is continued through Volumes VIII and IX. And that is where the novel ends: since Toby’s amours conclude in the summer of 1713, the novel ends chronologically five years before it began. And Sterne plays the same game of countering our expectations with the standard authorial apparatus: for example, the author’s preface appears, not at the beginning of Volume I, but following chapter 20 in the middle of Volume III, and the “invocation” to Sterne’s muse shows up in the middle of Volume IX, a volume in which chapters 18 and 19 are placed after chapter 25.
In a sense, though, the major “events” of the story as outlined here are a mere scaffolding secondary to another plot, which we might call “the story of the struggle to get the story told.” Our primary focus is not on whether Tristram will succeed in getting born – he has after all been talking to us nonstop since page 1 – but on whether he will succeed in telling the story of his birth. Tristram’s writing is far from transparent: he not only tells us what happened, but how he came to know it, and as soon as he reaches a situation that seems to call for expansion and rumination, all chronological movement ceases as the explanation dilates and proceeds. He is, furthermore, highly aware of the presence of his readers: early on in the book he sends us back to re‐read a previous chapter, where we had missed some subtle implication.
But the writing Tristram does takes time from the living of his life, and drawing out the full implications of a single event may take a year. Tristram’s father, Walter Shandy, has a similar difficulty; in V.16, he decides to “write a TRISTRA‐paedia, or system of education” for Tristram. But writing takes time and whilst Walter is a‐writing, Tristram is busily growing older. “In about three years, or something more, my father had got advanced almost into the middle of his work …. The misfortune was, that I was all that time totally neglected …. By the very delay, the first part of the work … was rendered entirely useless. – every day a page or two became of no consequence.” Earlier on, chapter 13 of volume IV, in a brief interval between Tristram’s birth and his christening, Tristram makes us very aware of the similar paradox of autobiography:
The mathematical calculation is pretty close to exact, for the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy, which begin the saga of Tristram’s birth, had come out in December of 1759; the passage above was published thirteen months later in January of 1761 with volumes III and IV. Other novels, like Richardson’s Clarissa, had come out in stages rather than all at once, but Richardson from the beginning had his end in view. To the contrary, Sterne’s intention from the first was to spin out Tristram Shandy, writing two volumes a year, for as long as the public demand continued and as long as his health permitted. Sterne’s contemporaries might have likened it to the satires of Jonathan Swift, particularly the free‐wheeling Tale of a Tub, or to François Rabelais’s episodic narratives about Gargantua and Pantagruel. Today we might compare Tristram Shandy to a television comedy series, perhaps one like Seinfeld, where our pleasure has nothing whatever to do with where the story is going – if indeed it is going anywhere – and where we take pleasure in the local effects: the interactions of a set of diverse eccentric characters who get into situations that exploit the wacky humor of their eccentricities. Tristram Shandy is a bit more complex in its texture than Seinfeld, though, because it has a narrator whose relationship to the reader arches over the interactions of the characters.
Sterne’s third installment (volumes V and VI) came out on schedule, in December 1761, but while celebrating and enjoying his fame in London, Sterne had a serious hemorrhage, and was advised to seek his recovery in a gentler climate than that of rural Yorkshire. Like Tristram fleeing Death, Sterne went to the south of France, his writing slowed down, and the fourth installment (Volumes VII and VIII) was not published until January 1765. Sterne concluded his story of the Shandies with a single ninth volume in January 1767. Critics have at times wondered whether Tristram Shandy was really concluded, whether Tristram actually did get his story told, or whether, like Sterne’s second novel, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, it remained unfinished owing to Sterne’s death in March 1768.2 But the last chapter of Tristram Shandy seems as conclusive as any conclusion could possibly be to a text of this sort. All the digressive chapters Tristram has promised (on Noses, on Chambermaids, on Buttonholes) have been either written, or conclusively reneged upon (like the chapter on Whiskers, promised at the end of volume IV and defaulted upon at the beginning of volume V). And the discussion at the Shandy family fireside, coming right after the anticlimactic conclusion of Uncle Toby’s “amours” with the Widow Wadman, brings together in one place all the novel’s continuing characters (except for Tristram, who is narrating the dialogue that took place five years before his birth): Walter and Elizabeth Shandy, Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, Parson Yorick, Doctor Slop, even Susannah the chambermaid and Obadiah the manservant, and Yorick’s final joke about Obadiah’s “cock and bull story” applies to the whole of the novel as well as the specific episode.
Texture: The Local Effects
Attempting to supply an exhaustive list of the “themes” of Tristram Shandy would be insane, since there is almost no topic eighteenth‐century people talked about that Tristram and his cast of characters fail to touch upon. World trade? Almost too easy: Walter Shandy was a “Turkey merchant,” now retired. The industrial revolution? Well, the novel is set in the early part of the century, before the spinning jenny and power loom revolutionized the wool trade, but Tristram talks in I.23 about the “pentagraph,” a mechanical device for reproducing drawings or writing, similar to the auto‐pen Thomas Jefferson employed. Racism and the slave trade? Chapter 6 of the final volume is taken up with Trim and Uncle Toby discussing the plight of an African slave girl, within Trim’s story about his poor brother Tom:
So the very selective list that follows is chosen with an eye toward textural elements that inflect our sense of the novel as a whole.
The Hobbyhorse
Originally a child’s toy, a stick with a carved horse’s head at one end, which one could pretend to ride, Sterne re‐coined the word as an adult’s fixation or obsession, one that can become a lens through which one views the world. For Toby Shandy, the retired captain of infantry, everything reminds him of military matters: let Walter Shandy mention the word “train” (as in one’s “train of thought” – Walter is discussing John Locke’s theory about the association of ideas), and Toby thinks of “a train of artillery,” the complicated logistics by which heavy cannon were moved around a battlefield. Trains get derailed more often than not. Most of the other characters have similar obsessions: Doctor Slop is fascinated by the medical instruments he has developed for the, then, new medical field of obstetrics, while Susannah the chambermaid is always thinking of Mrs. Shandy’s wardrobe, and the dresses that might descend to her own use.
Walter Shandy doesn’t have a single hobbyhorse but a whole collection of interconnected fixations. Deeply learned in the classical languages, he assumes that ancient texts generate theories that can give him control over the world as a whole. The joke, repeated over and over throughout the novel, is that relying on his theories gives him no control even over his own household, so that he is frustrated and disappointed again and again. In relation to the narrator, Walter fears that his son will be scatter‐brained because Mrs. Shandy’s question about the clock wrecked his own concentration; he hopes for a Caesarian section or a breech birth – either of which in the eighteenth century were usually fatal to the mother – because he is sure that the infant’s brain is injured by the trauma of pushing through the birth canal; he wants his son to have a huge nose, which he is sure is connected with great virility; and he wants him to be named “Trismegistus” (“thrice‐greatest” in Greek, and connected with the god of mystical and magical knowledge) and is overcome with depression when he learns that the curate has instead christened him “Tristram” (which Sterne probably thought came from “triste”, sad, in French).
The origin of Uncle Toby’s hobbyhorse explains why they are so significant in the novel. Toby was a captain of infantry in the army of King William III until he was wounded in battle by shrapnel: “a stone, broke off by a ball … at the siege of Namur, which struck full upon my uncle Toby’s groin.” It is a serious wound, Toby is confined to his bed or his room for four years, receiving visits from kind friends. Normally, “the history of a soldier’s wound beguiles the pain of it,” telling the story of his wound would bring about his recovery – at least so we learn from Doctor Freud. But for Toby, telling the story “brought him into some unforeseen perplexities”; instead of helping him they are retarding his cure. What his visitors ask, of course, is precisely where Toby was wounded, and Toby is too delicate and refined to suppose that they are merely asking where on Toby’s body the wound is, and with what functions of male physiology it might interfere. He supposes instead that they are asking precisely where on the Namur battlefield he was wounded. There is a perfectly proper answer to that – it was “in one of the traverses, about thirty toises from the returning angle of the trench, opposite to the salient angle of the demi‐bastion of St. Roch” – but how could he explain what that meant to a noncombatant? His first solution is to get himself a map of Namur; to learn the theory – an elaborate one in that day – of offensive and defensive siege warfare; and the mathematical theory of gunnery, which would explain how the cannonball had come to strike the stone that struck his groin.
But going deeper does not make Toby better; the mathematics in fact throws his recovery into a tailspin. He gets better only after his servant, Corporal Trim, suggests that, instead of working with flat maps, Toby should go up to his own little estate near Shandy Hall in Yorkshire and there with Trim’s assistance build in three dimensions an exact scale model of the siegeworks. And Toby and Trim not only recreate Namur, they go on to recreate all the sieges and battles in the continental wars of King William and Queen Anne: it becomes Toby’s replacement occupation. The hobbyhorse is thus a defensive maneuver: life throws unexpected surprises at us, like random cannonballs, it wounds us in our most private selves, eventually it will kill us. And we must create something, it hardly matters what, to give ourselves the illusion of control.
Satires on Learning
Like Swift’s Tale of a Tub, Tristram Shandy is riddled with outlandish parodies of the discourse of the learned professions including (in Uncle Toby’s case) military architecture and the mathematical science of projectiles. Doctor Slop speaks a good deal of medical jargon himself, but we get this equally from Walter Shandy, as he worries about the effects of the pressures in the birth canal on his son’s cerebral cortex, reads up on the history of the Caesarian section:
Mrs. Shandy is not at all amused by these speculations, when she learns about them: she turns pale and Walter drops the subject. Apropos of Mrs. Shandy’s pregnancies, Sterne also includes a thick dollop of legal jargon representing a compromise between Tristram’s parents: Elizabeth Shandy could give birth in London if she chose, except that, if she caused Walter the expense and trouble of a London journey for a false pregnancy, she would lose her right the next time and must give birth at Shandy Hall. The delicious legal prose of the marriage articles meanders like a burbling brook, declining to actually get anywhere:
But of course Sterne is most delighted with the absurd excesses of his own profession – he was an Anglican clergyman. Perhaps predictably, several of the theological quotations included in Tristram Shandy ridicule Roman Catholic sources. Book III, chapter 11 contains the magniloquent excommunication formula of Ernulphus, an early twelfth‐century bishop of Rochester: over five hundred words of choice church Latin curses, translated verbatim by Doctor Slop. Book I contains the query of an obstetrical surgeon asking whether, in cases of a difficult birth, he could perform a conditional baptism of the fetus in utero before birth with the aid of “a little injection‐pipe and causing no harm to the mother”; and there follow seven hundred abstruse words of dense argumentation by the scholars of the Sorbonne tentatively assenting but ultimately referring the question to the local bishop and the Pope.
But when Walter’s son is christened Tristram rather than Trismegistus, Walter and Toby travel to York to consult the Anglican canon lawyers at the cathedral as to whether the previous christening can be annulled. In the old days when christenings were in Latin, says one, the ceremony could be annulled if the Latin were faulty. Only if it were very faulty indeed, corrects another canonist: if the priest said, “in nomino patriae,” which has grammatical errors, the christening would stand, but if he said “in gomine gatris,” which is utterly meaningless, the christening would have to be done over. None of this is to the point, of course: Yorick’s curate christened Tristram in English. But when Toby asks the canonists about the harm to the feelings of the child’s closest kin, the poor parents, the clerics prove elaborately, and with precedents, that the parents are not, by church law, either of them, “akin to the child.”
We could call this satire, and indeed it is, but it is very gentle satire, akin to the hobbyhorses of the Shandean character. Learning in Tristram Shandy is always a good thing, even when it goes over the top as it so frequently does, and Sterne presumes that the reader is as learned as he is. For example, in discussing his decision to begin his “Life and Opinions” with the act of coitus that begat him, Tristram says: “[R]ight glad I am, that I have begun the history of myself in the way I have done; and that I am able to go on, tracing every thing in it, as Horace says, ab Ovo. Horace, I know, does not recommend this fashion altogether: But that gentleman is speaking only of an epic poem ….” What Horace actually says in his Ars Poetica is precisely the opposite, he praises Homer for beginning the Iliad ten years into the Trojan War, with the incident in which the wrath of Achilles is kindled, instead of going all the way back to the swan’s egg out of which Helen of Troy was hatched. The reader who already knows this – or is reading Tristram Shandy in a well‐annotated edition – can chuckle at Sterne’s playful jest, and jokes of this sort come up on pretty much every page.
The Bawdy Asterisk
Along with its satire on learning, Sterne shares with Rabelais a taste for the tasteless, for bawdy jokes and potty humor. Aside from its beginning in a marital bedchamber, there isn’t very much sex in Tristram Shandy, since all the Shandy males are as far from Richardsonian predatory gentlemen as one could imagine: the occasionally impotent Tristram, the utterly innocent Toby, and Walter who, though married, strictly limits his marital duties to the first Sunday night of each month, provided that his health is equal to it. But the narrative is always skating on the edge of the sexual or the scatological, but instead of coming out with it, the narrator usually enlists the aid of the reader to supply mentally what the novel itself refuses to explicitly say. The book has a dirty mind, but to know that the reader needs to have a dirty mind as well.
For example, as Mrs. Shandy’s labor with the yet unborn Tristram begins, Doctor Slop is by Mrs. Shandy’s insistence to drink a bottle of wine with the men downstairs and not get involved with the accouchement unless there is a medical difficulty the midwife cannot handle. Walter wonders aloud why his wife has taken this position:
The reader is asked to supply the gap – if it is indeed a gap – indicated by the four asterixes at the end of Toby’s sentence, but there are two possibilities, both of them with four unprintable letters,4 corresponding to “the right end of a woman” and “the wrong”. But as Toby confesses his utter ineptitude and ignorance about women, his fixed stare at the crack in the chimney‐piece suggests that perhaps he does actually know after all.
Toby’s naiveté reappears later in the same sequence when Doctor Slop, once arrived in possession of his full bag of medical gear, announces that henceforth fingers and thumbs – the midwife’s only tools – will be subordinate to ******. Slop intends to bring forth his newly invented forceps from his bag to end his sentence, except that “his forceps unfortunately drew out the squirt [syringe] along with it. When a proposition can be taken in two senses – ’tis a law in disputation, That the respondent may reply to which of the two he pleases, or finds most convenient for him. – This threw the advantage of the argument quite on my uncle Toby’s side. – ‘Good God!’ cried my uncle Toby, ‘are children brought into the world with a squirt?’” The gentle reader, prodded by the six asterisks, knows that this is exactly how children are begotten, though not how they are delivered.
Carefully spaced asterisks represent words with the same number of letters, which normally are easy to supply, but not always. The most difficult of Sterne’s puzzles requiring the reader to translate the asterixes is in VII.29, when Tristram recalls being impotent when attempting to have sex with Jenny, his lover:
There are many possible translations of the eight words for which Tristram substitutes carefully spaced asterisks, but one unprintable guess that makes sense both of the situation and of Tristram’s reply, is “Fuck me with thy tongue; – lick my cunt.”5
Asterisks sometimes represent lengthier gaps than single letters, depending on how they are spaced. When Trim is explaining in VIII.22 his intense emotional relationship with the young Beguine who nurses him for the wound in his knee that disabled him at the battle of Landen:
There the evenly spaced asterisks do not represent recoverable words but a sentence, perhaps more than one, conveying the proposition that something expected did not happen, apparently, from the conclusion of the corporal’s amour in the following chapter, something akin to Tristram’s failure. These omitted chunks of discourse occur frequently in this book and most often in book IX, where we are invited to reconstruct entire dialogues between Toby Shandy and the Widow Wadman.
In addition to marking Sterne’s insistence on the active participation of the reader in recreating the lives and opinions of his characters, the bawdy asterisk is one of many instances of the dependence of Tristram Shandy on the developing print culture in England. Others include the death of Yorick, as signaled by an entirely black page in the text, while a blank page is provided for the reader to sketch the face of the Widow Wadman, using the most beautiful woman the reader knows as the model. A set of squiggly‐line diagrams of the progress/regress of the novel itself is provided the reader in VI.40, while in IX.4, Trim’s flourish with his cane representing the joys of bachelorhood appears in the novel as the following upward swoop of graphic line:
The Sentimental Moment
Sentimentality is a pejorative term today, but the last third of the eighteenth century saw a growing cultural fashion for displaying the tenderest of feelings – particularly on the part of men. And a literature of sentiment grew up that men could use, somewhat like exercise equipment, to train their emotions to a fashionable pitch. In a sense we see the beginnings of this vogue in Tom Jones, whose eponymous hero feels such pleasure in benevolence, in being able to save or assist others, that he not only refuses repayment but considers himself already repaid sevenfold. Tristram Shandy also somewhat anticipates the height of the vogue for the sentimental, which was marked by Henry Mackenzie’s novel The Man of Feeling (1771). But Sterne is, unlike Fielding or Mackenzie, quite ambivalent: on the one hand he sees the enormous value of inculcating the Christian virtues of charity and patience, but on the other he sees how ridiculous a figure the sentimental man can cut. Nevertheless, many of Sterne’s contemporary readers who were repelled by his bawdy jokes were very attracted by his presentation of Toby Shandy as the man of feeling; the following passage, about Toby and the fly, was perhaps the most often‐quoted passage in the novel:
Sterne means what he says here, but there is also something slightly ridiculous in an oration made to a fly, however “over‐grown.”
This is a brief example; a more extended one runs through chapters 6–10 of Book VI, on Toby’s benevolent relationship with Le Fever, a former fellow‐soldier who fought three campaigns with Toby, but who is now dying at an inn near Toby’s country house in Yorkshire, accompanied by his little son Billy. Toby is deeply moved by his plight, sends for medical aid (in vain), and promises to raise and educate Billy Le Fever as though he were his own son. And he indeed does as he promises, helps out when young Le Fever is in the army, and gets Walter Shandy to employ him as a tutor for Tristram. Nevertheless, there is something strange and occasionally ridiculous hovering about the edges of the story in the description, first of the death of Le Fever’s wife and then of Le Fever himself: Le Fever tells Trim to let Toby know:
And the death of Le Fever:
Le Fever is never characterized except as the object of Toby’s benevolence; his name and his death (from a fever) are sufficient to characterize him as Anyone. And Billy Le Fever, who must have lived in his memory as Tristram’s tutor, is never characterized at all.
Irony against the Reader
While Fielding began addressing the reader directly, over the heads of his characters, Sterne takes this intimacy to new heights. In Chapter 6 of Book I, Tristram playfully asks for the reader’s sympathetic patience:
Keeping our temper is important because Tristram can be provoking, even hostile. In chapter 20 of Book I, Tristram sends “Madam” back to reread the previous chapter because she cannot remember how it was that Tristram told her that “his mother was not a Papist.” Actually, Tristram said no such thing, but since “it was necessary that I be born before I was christen’d,” it follows that his parents must in fact be Protestants because of the Sorbonne decision allowing baptism by injection already referred to.
When Sterne is not directly assaulting the reader, he uses something I have called reverberatory irony, which can be seen most easily in the following self‐contained episode from his second novel, A Sentimental Journey, the chapter about the dead ass which Yorick the narrator finds barring his way at Nampont on the Paris road. At the posthouse, Yorick finds the owner mourning the death of his beast, a faithful animal who had borne him on his pilgrimage from Germany to the shrine of St. James of Compostela, and back again as far as Nampont. The ass “had been a patient partner of his journey, … had eat the same bread with him all the way, and was unto him as a friend.” And the mourner goes on:
Now on the surface, this may be merely Sterne indulging in a mildly bawdy double entendre, but there is a conflict between the literal and ironic readings that this passage produces. The sequence of reader affect provoked by the passage is a fairly complex one. The start of the story, in which we hear of the mourner, of the death of his eldest sons from smallpox and the recovery of his youngest, and of his grateful pilgrimage to Compostela, prepares us for a pathetic tale that we should take seriously. But then certain stylistic effects (like the pseudo‐biblical “was unto him as a friend”) begin to move the tale toward the verge of parody, and we begin to read ironically, questioning whether Sterne can be quite serious in presenting the mourner’s grief for his beast. And when we are told that the ass shared the pilgrim’s food, loved him, and actively searched for him when they were separated in the mountains, it seems clear that the beast has become inappropriately anthropomorphized (the way some of our friends treat their pets as people), and the sense that we may be reading irony becomes more pronounced.
The final paragraph discharges the tension with a joke in which this anthropomorphosis is made explicit: the double entendre that links up the beast to the man’s own buttocks. To make sure that the reader takes up this interpretation, Sterne includes the line, “I fear the weight of myself and my afflictions … have been too much for him,” which implicitly intrudes the mourner’s derrière into our consciousness just before the joke.
But while the joke discharges the tensions which our growing suspicions of irony have produced, it does not entirely cancel out the mourner’s story itself and Yorick’s heartfelt emotional reaction to it. Owing to the disproportion between the elaborate pathos of the narrative and the very small joke developed out of the ironic signals, a serious residue remains to which we continue to respond. And I suspect that, once we have laughed at Yorick’s line, we may well reflect that it is true: that it would indeed be something if we humans felt the same kind of concern for one another that the mourner felt, however inappropriately, for his dead ass. Those of us who are made momentarily to recognize our failure of sympathy and charity toward our fellow man, we who stand accused of loving our own asses above all the world, have been betrayed by our laughter, and we are likely to be mildly and briefly ashamed of ourselves. It is with this reaction, not with the initial laughter, that the tale of the dead ass is fully discharged.
In a sense, two forms of irony are going on simultaneously, one at the expense of the mourner and Yorick, which culminates in our laughter, the other at the expense of the reader, which culminates in our shame. To create this unusual sequence of reactions, Sterne must put us into a double‐bind. He must give us signals that license our laughter, then in effect accuse us of want of feeling for having laughed. It is this double‐bind that keeps the reader continually off balance. We must never be allowed to rest secure or to take the author’s stance for granted. But we, nevertheless, sense that Sterne knows his own mind, though he keeps us from ever entirely knowing it.