Sterne’s Tristram Shandy:
Stylistic Commentary
To a certain extent, Shklovsky’s essay on Tristram Shandy1 is an application of the principles stated in “Art as Technique,” but with material added by the development of the Formalist methodology between 1917 and 1921. Shklovsky’s basic assumption, announced in the earlier essay, is that the business of literary criticism is to discuss the literariness of literature, to discuss that which makes literature different from other kinds of discourse. In the case of the novel, this quickly led the Formalists to distinguish between story and plot. Although Tomashevsky’s “Thematics” (see pp. 66–78) shows the distinction clearly, a few words about it are in order here.
Story is essentially the temporal-causal sequence of narrated events. Its formula, capable of infinite extension, is always “because of A, then B.” Because Raskolnikov is an impoverished intellectual, he killed…; because Pip fed a convict, …. Such is the pattern of the story, each event coming in the order in which it would occur in real life and the events bound each to each in a cause-and-effect relationship. This, to return to the notion of defamiliarization, is the familiar way of telling something; but precisely because it is the familiar way, it is not the artistic way. Artistry, for Shklovsky, requires both defamiliarization and an obvious display of the devices by which the familiar is made strange.
In these terms, plot becomes the story as distorted or defamiliarized in the process of telling. Even a novel as superficially simple in construction as Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter distorts both temporal and cause-effect relations by, for example, beginning in the middle, after the adultery that properly begins the main action. Or such a seemingly orthodox novel as Vanity Fair has plot rather than story partly by virtue of the parallel development of two strands that are causally unrelated—the Becky Sharp strand and the Amelia Sedley strand. As Shklovsky shows in his study of Tristram Shandy, the ways of making a story into a plot are innumerable, but all involve some kind of disarrangement of what we could call the natural, or real-life, sequence of events. Since plot distinguishes the natural from the artistic method of narration, Shklovsky is interested in plot.2
As a result, Shklovsky can logically conclude his essay with the apparent exaggeration that “Tristram Shandy is the most typical novel in world literature.” What he means is that it is the most plotted, the least “storied,” of any major novel. Cause and effect in the ordinary sense hardly exist in Shandy’s world.3 Moreover, the techniques by which Sterne makes a plot from Shandy’s story are not realistically “motivated.”4 As Tomashevsky will explain later, “motivation” is the reason for the use of a device, word, or any element that gets into a literary work.
In the conventional novel, so the theory runs, a number of the included elements may be accounted for as attempts to achieve verisimilitude (Hawthorne’s elaborate description of how he found the scarlet letter; Hester’s beauty and passionate nature and Chillingworth’s age and coldness, which make the adultery of an otherwise noble woman seem plausible, etc.). When Shklovsky says that a technique is “unmotivated,” he means simply that we cannot provide a satisfactory realistic reason for its presence. A device so used is “revealed,” or “displayed,” or “laid bare”; it exists more to be noticed by the reader than to function in the work. But as Shklovsky recognizes, the distinction is not always clear-cut. The digressions on “noseology,” for example, help account for Shandy’s character, but they are also “revealed” because Sterne is at great pains to make the reader aware that they are digressions. Generally, if we are more aware of the technique than of its function, it is “revealed” or “laid bare.”
Although the implication that a novel exists merely to display the technique of its author seems like the most blatant aestheticism, it must be remembered that in “Art as Technique” Shklovsky argued that only through artistry are our perceptions sharpened.5 Because we keep stumbling over the literary devices in Tristram Shandy, Shklovsky could consistently have argued, we must attend to them and through them to the universe that Sterne has created.
In this essay I do not propose to analyze Laurence Sterne’s novel, but rather to illustrate general laws of plot. Formalistically, Sterne was an extreme revolutionary; it was characteristic of him to “lay bare” his technique. The artistic form is presented simply as such, without any kind of motivation. The difference between a novel by Sterne and the ordinary kind of novel is exactly that between ordinary poetry with its phonetic instrumentation and the poetry of the Futurists, written in obscure language.6 Yet nothing much is written about Sterne any more; or, if it is, it consists only of a few banalities.
The first impression upon taking up Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and beginning to read it is one of chaos. The action is continually interrupted; the author repeatedly goes backward or leaps forward; whole ten-page passages are filled with whimsical discussions about fortifications or about the influence of a person’s nose or name on his character. Such digressions are unrelated to the basic narrative.
Although the beginning of the book has the tone of an autobiography, it drifts into a description of the hero’s ancestors. In fact, the hero’s birth is long delayed by the irrelevant material squeezed into the novel. The description of a single day takes up much of the book; I quote Sterne himself:
I will not finish that sentence till I have made an observation upon the strange state of affairs between the reader and myself, just as things stand at present—an observation never applicable before to any one biographical writer since the creation of the world, but to myself—and I believe will never hold good to any other, until its final destruction—and therefore, for the very novelty of it alone, it must be worth your worships attending to.
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—[pp. 285–286].7
But when you begin to examine the structure of the book, you see first of all that the disorder is intentional and, in this case, poetic. It is strictly regulated, like a picture by Picasso. Everything in the book is displaced; everything is transposed. The dedication occurs on page 15, contrary to the three basic requirements of content, form, and place. Nor is the Preface in its usual position. It takes up approximately a quire, not at the beginning of the book but rather in Volume III, Chapter 20, pages 192 through 203. Sterne justifies the Preface in this way: “All my heroes are off my hands;—’tis the first time I have had a moment to spare,—and I’ll make use of it, and write my preface” (p. 192). The Preface contains, of course, as many entanglements as ingenuity permits. But the most radical of the displacements is the transposition of entire chapters (Chapters 18 and 19 of Volume IX are placed after Chapter 25). Sterne justifies the transposition so: “All I wish is, that it may be a lesson to the world, ‘to let people tell their stories their own way’” (p. 633).
But this transposition of chapters reveals another of Sterne’s basic techniques—that of impeding the flow of the action. In the beginning, Sterne introduces an anecdote about an act of sexual intercourse interrupted by a woman’s question (p. 5). Here is how the anecdote is brought in. Tristram Shandy’s mother sleeps with his father only on the first Sunday of each month and on precisely that evening Mr. Shandy winds the clock in order to get both of these domestic duties “out of the way at one time, and be no more plagued and pester’d with them the rest of the month” (p. 8). As a result, an unavoidable association has formed in his wife’s mind, so that she “could never hear the said clock wound up,—but the thoughts of some other things unavoidably popp’d into her head,—& vice versa” (p. 9). Here is the exact question with which Tristram’s mother interrupted the activity of his father: “Pray, my dear, … have you not forgot to wind up the clock?” (p. 5).
This anecdote is introduced into the work first by a general comment upon the inattentiveness of the parents (pp. 4–5), then by the mother’s question, the context of which we do not yet know. At first we think she had merely interrupted the father’s conversation. Sterne plays with our error:
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 [p. 5].
Then his remarks about the homunculus (fetus) are spiced with anecdotal references to its right to legal defense (pp. 5–6). Only on pages 8 through 9 do we get an explanation of this whole passage and a description of the odd punctiliousness of the father in his family affairs.
Thus, from the very beginning, we find displacement of time in Tristram Shandy. The causes follow the consequences, and the author himself prepares the groundwork for erroneous assumptions. This is one of Sterne’s characteristic techniques. The quibbling about the coitus motif itself, related to a definite day and referring back to what has already happened in the novel, reappears from time to time and ties together the various sections of this masterfully constructed and unusually complicated work.
If we visualize the digressions schematically, they will appear as cones representing an event, with the apex representing the causes. In an ordinary novel such a cone is joined to the main story line at its apex; in Tristram Shandy the base of the cone is joined to the main story line, so that all at once we fall into a swarm of allusions.
As we know, this same technique occurs in one of Andrey Bely’s last novels, Kotik Latayev, it is motivated by the fact that the novel shows the formation of a world from chaos. Out of the swarming mass appears an established order, with layers of puns on the names of the substances in the order stratifying and giving form to the mass.
Such time shifts occur often enough in the poetics of the novel. Consider, for example, the time shift in [Turgenev’s] A Nest of Gentlefolk (the shift is motivated by Lavertsky’s reminiscence) or in [Goncharov’s] “The Dream of Oblomov.”8 In Gogol’s Dead Souls no reasons are given for the time shifts (back to Chichikov’s childhood and Tentetnikov’s upbringing). Sterne, however, spread the technique throughout the entire work.
Exposition, preparation for a new character, always occurs after we have paused in perplexity over a strange word or an exclamation from that character. Here we have the exposure of the technique. In Tales of Belkin—in “The Shot,” for example—Pushkin made extensive use of time shifts. In “The Shot” we first see Silvio practicing his marksmanship; next we hear Silvio’s story about the unfinished duel; then we meet the Count, Silvio’s enemy, and learn the outcome of the story. The parts are in a II—I—III order, and we see a reason for the shift; Sterne, however, simply lays bare the technique.
As I have said already, Sterne thought such [aesthetic] motivation an end in itself.9 He wrote:
What I have to inform you, comes, I own, a little out of its due course;—for it should have been told a hundred and fifty pages ago, but that I foresaw then ’twould come in pat hereafter, and be of more advantage here than elsewhere [p. 144].
Sterne even lays bare the technique of combining separate story lines to make up the novel. In general, he accentuates the very structure of the novel. By violating the form, he forces us to attend to it; and, for him, this awareness of the form through its violation constitutes the content of the novel.
In my little book on Don Quixote,10 I have already noted several conventional methods of splicing story lines to form a novel. Sterne used still other methods or, using an old one, did not hide its conventionality but rather thrust it out protrudingly and toyed with it. In an ordinary novel digressions are cut off by a return to the main story. If there are two, or only a few, story lines in the novel, their fragments alternate with one another—as in Don Quixote, where the scenes showing the adventures of the knight in the court of the Duke alternate with scenes depicting the governorship of Sancho Panza. Zielinski notes something entirely different in Homer. Homer never shows two simultaneous actions. If by force of circumstances they ever had to be simultaneous, they were reported as happening in sequence. Only the activity of one character and the “standing pat” (that is, the inactivity) of another can occur simultaneously. Sterne allowed actions to occur simultaneously, and he even parodied the development of the story line and the instrusions of the new material into it.
The description of Tristram Shandy’s birth is the subject of the story line developed in the first part. The topic covers 203 pages, which nevertheless contain almost nothing about the actual birth of Tristram Shandy. For the most part, they deal with the conversation between the hero’s father and his uncle Toby. Here is how the development takes place:
—I wonder what’s all that noise, and running backwards and forwards for, above stairs, quoth my father, addressing himself, after an hour and a half’s silence, to my uncle Toby,—who you must know, was sitting on the opposite side of the fire, smoking his social pipe all the time, in mute contemplation of a new pair of black-plush-breeches which he had got on;—What can they be doing brother? quoth my father,—we can scarce hear ourselves talk.
I think, replied my uncle Toby, taking his pipe from his mouth, and striking the head of it two or three times upon the nail of his left thumb, as he began his sentence,—I think, says he:—But to enter rightly into my uncle Toby’s sentiments upon this matter, you must be made to enter first a little into his character, the out-lines of which I shall just give you, and then the dialogue between him and my father will go on as well again [p. 63].
Then begins a discussion of inconstancy so whimsical that it would have to be quoted to be communicated properly. On page 65 Sterne remembers, “But I forget my uncle Toby, whom all this while we have left knocking the ashes out of his tobacco pipe.” Then begins a sketch of Uncle Toby into which the story of Aunt Dinah is inserted. On page 72, Sterne remembers: “I was just going, for example, to have given you the great out-lines of my uncle Toby’s most whimsical character;—when my aunt Dinah and the coachman came a-cross us, and led us a vagary….” Unfortunately, I cannot include everything Sterne has written, so I shall continue with a large omission:
from the beginning of this, you see, I have constructed the main work and the adventitious parts of it with such intersections, and have so complicated and involved the digressive and progressive movements, one wheel within another, that the whole machine, in general, has been kept a-going;—and, what’s more, it shall be kept a-going these forty years, if it pleases the fountain of health to bless me so long with life and good spirits [pp. 73–74].
So ends Chapter 22; Chapter 23 continues: “I have a strong propensity in me to begin this chapter very nonsensically, and I will not balk my fancy.—Accordingly I set off thus.” And new digressions are in store for us. On page 77 there is a further reminder: “If I was not morally sure that the reader must be out of all patience for my uncle Toby’s character, …” and further down the page we find a description of Uncle Toby’s “Hobby-Horse,” his mania. It seems that Uncle Toby, wounded in the groin at the siege of Namur, was drawn into the erection of toy fortifications. Finally, on page 99, Uncle Toby can finish the activity he began on page 63:
I think, replied my uncle Toby,—taking, as I told you, his pipe from his mouth, and striking the ashes out of it as he began his sentence;—I think, replied he,—it would not be amiss, brother, if we rung the bell.
Sterne repeatedly resorts to this technique; and, as we see from his facetious reminders about Uncle Toby, not only is he fully aware of the exaggerations in his use of it, but he even enjoys playing around with it.
This manner of development, as I have already noted, is the characteristic pattern of Sterne’s work. For example, on page 144, uncle Toby says, “I wish, … you had seen what prodigious armies we had in Flanders.” Further on, the material about the mania of Tristram’s father begins to develop. In fact, Tristram’s father has attached to himself the following manias: on the harmful influence of the pressure brought to bear on the head of an infant when a woman experiences labor pains (pp. 149–154), on the influence of a man’s name upon his character (a motif developed in great detail), and on the influence of the size of a man’s nose on his potential greatness (this motif is developed in an unusually ostentatious way, approximately from page 217, when, after a short break, curious stories about noseology begin to develop). The Tale of Slawkenbergius is especially remarkable; Tristram’s father knows ten decades of ten tales each, all with stories about Slawkenbergius. The development of the noseology ends on page 272.
Mr. Shandy’s other manias also play a part in this particular development—that is, Sterne sidetracks our attention to talk about them.
The main story resumes on page 157:
—“I wish, Dr. Slop,” quoth my uncle Toby (repeating his wish for Dr. Slop a second time, and with a degree of more zeal and earnestness in his manner of wishing, than he had wished it at first)—“I wish, Dr. Slop,” quoth my uncle Toby, “you had seen what prodigious armies we had in Flanders.”
Once again the expansion of the material interrupts. And on page 163: “What prodigious armies you had in Flanders!” In Sterne, conscious exaggeration of the expansion frequently occurs without the use of a transitional sentence.
The moment my father got up into his chamber, he threw himself prostrate across his bed in the wildest disorder imaginable, but at the same time, in the most lamentable attitude of a man borne down with sorrows, that ever the eye of pity dropp’d a tear for [pp. 215–216].
An exact description of his posture follows; such descriptions are very characteristic of Sterne:
The palm of his right hand, as he fell upon the bed, receiving his forehead, and covering the greatest part of both his eyes, gently sunk down with his head (his elbow giving way backwards) till his nose touch’d the quilt;—his left arm hung insensible over the side of the bed, his knuckles reclining upon the handle of the chamber pot, which peep’d out beyond the valance,—his right leg (his left being drawn up towards his body) hung half over the side of the bed, the edge of it pressing upon his shin-bone.
Mr. Shandy’s despondency is brought on by the fact that the bridge of his son’s nose had been crushed by the obstetrical tongs during delivery and, as I have already said, an entire literary cycle on noses follows. On page 273 we finally return to the man we left lying on the bed:
My father lay stretched across the bed as still as if the hand of death had pushed him down, for a full hour and a half, before he began to play upon the floor with the toe of that foot which hung over the bed-side.
I cannot help saying a few words in general about the postures we find in Sterne. The first to introduce the description of postures into the novel, he always portrayed them strangely—or, more exactly, he defamiliarized them. I shall cite an example: “Brother Toby, replied my father, taking his wig from off his head with his right hand, and with his left pulling a striped India handkerchief from his right coat pocket, …” (p. 158). I go directly to page 159:
It was not an easy matter in any king’s reign, (unless you were as lean a subject as myself) to have forced your hand diagonally, quite across your whole body, so as to gain the bottom of your opposite coat-pocket.
The method of portraying postures passed from Sterne to Leo Tolstoy,11 who used it more flexibly and with psychological motivation.
I now return to Sterne’s technique of plot development with several examples which clearly establish the fact that awareness of form constitutes the subject matter of the novel.
What a chapter of chances, said my father, turning himself about upon the first landing, as he and my uncle Toby were going down stairs —what a long chapter of chances do the events of this world lay open to us! [p. 279].
(Then follows a discussion containing an erotic element which I shall say more about later.)
Is it not a shame to make two chapters of what passed in going down one pair of stairs? for we are got no farther yet than to the first landing, and there are fifteen more steps down to the bottom; and for aught I know, as my father and my uncle Toby are in a talking humour, there may be as many chapters as steps [p. 281].
Sterne devotes all of this chapter to a discussion of chapters.
The next chapter begins: “We shall bring all things to rights, said my father, setting his foot upon the first step from the landing—” (p. 283). And the next: “And how does your mistress? cried my father, taking the same step over again from the landing, …” (p. 284). And the next:
Holla!—you chairman!—here’s sixpence—do step into that bookseller’s shop, and call me a day-tall critick. I am very willing to give any one of ’em a crown to help me with his tackling, to get my father and my uncle Toby off the stairs, and to put them to bed….
I am this month one whole year older than I was this time twelvemonth; 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 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—[pp. 285–286].
The conventionality of this organization of the form is reminiscent of those octaves and sonnets filled with the description of how they were composed.
Here is one last example of such expansion in Sterne:
My mother was going very gingerly in the dark along the passage which led to the parlour, as my uncle Toby pronounced the word wife.— ’Tis a shrill, penetrating sound of itself, and Obadiah had helped it by leaving the door a little a-jar, so that my mother heard enough of it, to imagine herself the subject of the conversation: so laying the edge of her finger across her two lips—holding in her breath, and bending her head a little downwards, with a twist of her neck—(not towards the door, but from it, by which means her ear was brought to the chink)—she listened with all her powers:—the listening slave, with the Goddess of Silence at his back, could not have given a finer thought for an intaglio.
In this attitude I am determined to let her stand for five minutes: till I bring up the affairs of the kitchen (as Rapin does those of the church) to the same period [pp. 357–358].
And on page 367: “I am a Turk if I had not as much forgot my mother, as if Nature had plaistered me up, and set me down naked upon the banks of the river Nile, ….” But there is another digression even after this reminder. The reminder is necessary merely to renew our awareness of the “forgotten mother” in order to prevent the impression of the expansion from fading.
At last, on page 370, the mother shifts her position: “Then, cried my mother, opening the door, ….”
In this case Sterne expands the material by including a second parallel story; in such cases in novels, ordinary time is usually thought to be suspended, or at least not considered, as opposed to showing the passage of time by explicit appeals to our reason. Shakespeare used his interpolated scenes to suspend time—that is, to divert attention from the normal flow of time; and even if the entire inserted dialogue (invariably with new characters) continued only a few minutes, Shakespeare felt it permissible to carry on the action as if hours or even a whole night had gone by. (We assume that curtains were not lowered, for it is very likely that curtains were not used in the Shakespearean theater because of the projecting stage.) Sterne, by repeatedly mentioning and reminding us of the fact that the mother has been standing in a stooped position for the whole time, forces us to notice his handling of it.
It is interesting, in a general way, to study the role time plays in Sterne’s works. “Literary time” is clearly arbitrary; its laws do not coincide with the laws of ordinary time. If one studies, for example, the numerous tales and events concentrated in Don Quixote, he will see that the beginning of day and the beginning of night play no compositional role in the sequence of events—that, in general, the slow, lingering passage of the day does not exist. L’Abbé Prévost narrates Manon Lescaut in precisely the same way. Chevalier des Grieux tells the whole first part (seven folios) without a break; then, after a slight respite, continues for another seven folios. Such a conversation would have lasted sixteen hours, even under conditions allowing for rapid speech.
I have already spoken of the arbitrariness of time on the stage. But Sterne conceived of and used the arbitrariness of “literary time” as material for a game, as in Volume II, Chapter 8:
It is about an hour and a half’s tolerable good reading since my uncle Toby rung the bell, when Obadiah was order’d to saddle a horse, and go for Dr. Slop the man-midwife;—so that no one can say, with reason, that I have not allowed Obadiah time enough, poetically speaking, and considering the emergency too, both to go and come;— tho’, morally and truly speaking, the man, perhaps, has scarce had time to get on his boots.
If the hypercritic will go upon this; and is resolved after all to take a pendulum, and measure the true distance betwixt the ringing of the bell, and the rap at the door;—and, after finding it to be no more than two minutes, thirteen seconds, and three fifths,—should take upon him to insult over me for such a breach in unity, or rather probability, of time;—I would remind him, that the idea of duration and of its simple modes, is got merely from the train and succession of our ideas,— and is the true scholastic pendulum,—and by which, as a scholar, I will be tried in this matter,—adjuring and detesting the jurisdiction of all other pendulums whatever.
I would, therefore, desire him to consider that it is but poor eight miles from Shandy-Hall to Dr. Slop, the man mid-wife’s house;—and that whilst Obadiah has been going those said miles and back, I have brought my uncle Toby from Namur, quite across all Flanders, into England.—That I have had him ill upon my hands near four years;— and have since travelled him and Corporal Trim, in a chariot and four, a journey of near two hundred miles down into Yorkshire;—all which put together, must have prepared the reader’s imagination for the entrance of Dr. Slop upon the stage, —as much, at least (I hope) as a dance, a song, or a concerto between the acts.
If my hypercritic is intractable, alledging, that two minutes and thirteen seconds are no more than two minutes and thirteen seconds,— when I have said all I can about them;—and that this plea, tho’ it might save me dramatically, will damn me biographically, rendering my book, from this very moment, a profess’d Romance, which, before was a book aprocryphal:—If I am thus pressed—I then put an end to the whole objection and controversy about it all at once,—by acquainting him, that Obadiah had not got above three-score yards from the stable-yard before he met with Dr. Slop; … [pp. 103–104].
Sterne took the device of the “discovered manuscript” almost unchanged from among the old literary devices. Thus we find Yorick’s sermon in the novel. But, of course, the reading of this discovered manuscript does not of itself represent a long digression from the novel, for the sermon is repeatedly interrupted, chiefly by emotional ejaculations. The course of the sermon occupies pages 125 through 140, but it is greatly expanded by insertions of the usual Sternean kind.
The reading of the sermon begins with a description of Corporal Trim’s posture, depicted in Sterne’s usual purposely awkward way:
He stood before them with his body swayed, and bent forward just so far, as to make an angle of 85 degrees and a half upon the plain of the horizon;—which sound orators, to whom I address this, know very well, to be the true persuasive angle of incidence [p. 122].
And so it continues to:
He stood,—for I repeat it, to take the picture of him in at one view, with his body sway’d, and somewhat bent forwards,—his right-leg firm under him, sustaining seven-eighths of his whole weight,—the foot of his left-leg, the defect of which was no disadvantage to his attitude, advanced a little,—not laterally, nor forwards, but in a line betwixt them;….
And so on. The entire description continues for more than a page. The sermon itself is interrupted by a story about Corporal Trim’s brother. Then come the theological protests of a Roman Catholic (pp. 125, 126, 128, 129, etc.) and Uncle Toby’s remarks on fortifications (pp. 133, 134, etc.) Thus while following the course of the manuscript, Sterne also integrates it into the novel to a far greater degree than does Cervantes.
Sterne made the “discovered manuscript” a favorite technique in his Sentimental Journey. He finds, as he sets out to do, a manuscript by Rabelais; but, as is quite typical of Sterne, he interrupts the manuscript with a discussion about wrapping merchandise. (Sterne has made the unfinished tale acceptable in both its motivated and unmotivated forms.) The interruption of the introduced manuscript is motivated by the fact that its conclusion has been lost. On the other hand, nothing motivates the conclusion of Tristram Shandy, which ends with a simple cutting off of the narrative:
L—d! said my mother, what is all this story about?—
A COCK and a BULL, said Toriek—and one of the best of its kind, I ever heard.
The END of the NINTH VOLUME.
So also ends Sentimental Journey. “So that when I stretch’d out my hand, I caught hold of the Fille de Chambre’s—” and it ends there.
This, of course, is a specific stylistic device based upon a variety of things. Sterne worked against a background of the adventure novel with its extraordinarily strict forms and with its formal rule to end with a wedding in the offing. In Sterne’s novels the usual forms are changed and violated; it is not surprising that he handled the conclusions of his novels in the same way. We seem to stumble upon them, as if we found a trap door on a staircase where we had expected a landing. Gogol’s “Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt”12 is a short story concluded in the same way; but the conclusion is motivated, for the end of the manuscript was “lost” while baking pies (Sterne wraps currant jam in his). The notes comprising E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Kater Murr depend upon the same technique, with the nonexistent conclusion motivated by complicated time shifts and parallelism (justified by the fact that the pages are not in order).
Sterne introduces the story of Le Fever in his usual way: During a conversation about the choice of a tutor for Tristram, at the time of Tristram’s birth, Uncle Toby suggests the son of poor Le Fever, and the story immediately begins, narrated not by Toby but by Tristram Shandy himself:
Then, brother Shandy, answered my uncle Toby, raising himself off the chair, and laying down his pipe to take hold of my father’s other hand, —I humbly beg I may recommend poor Le Fever’s son to you;—a tear of joy of the first water sparkled in my uncle Toby’s eye,—and another, the fellow to it, in the corporal’s, as the proposition was made;—you will see why when you read Le Fever’s story:—fool that I was! nor can I recollect, (nor perhaps you) without turning back to the place, what it was that hindered me from letting the corporal tell it in his own words; —but the occasion is lost,—I must tell it now in my own [pp. 415–416].
The story about Le Fever, which runs from page 416 to page 432, then begins.
A separate cycle of stories (pp. 479–538) describes Tristram’s travels. Sterne later developed this episode, step by step and motif by motif, into his Sentimental Journey. Sterne also inserts a story about the Abbess of Andoüillets into the account of Tristram’s journey (pp. 504–510).
All of this diverse material, which is augmented by extensive excerpts from the works of various pedants, would undoubtedly tear the novel to bits were it not drawn together by crisscrossing motifs.13 A stated motif is never fully developed, never actually realized, but is only recalled from time to time; its fulfillment is continually put off to a more and more remote time. Yet its very presence in all the dimensions of the novel ties the episodes together.
There are several such motifs, one of them concerning knots. Here is how it appears—Dr. Slop’s bag of obstetrical instruments is tied up in several knots:
’Tis God’s mercy, quoth he [Dr. Slop], (to himself) that Mrs. Shandy has had so bad a time of it,—else she might have been brought to bed seven times told, before one half of these knots could have got untied [p. 167],
In the next chapter, same page:
In the case of knots,—by which, in the first place, I would not be understood to mean slip-knots,—because in the course of my life and opinions,—my opinions concerning them will come in more properly when I mention….
And so on. Then begins a discussion about knots, hitches, fastenings, bows, and so on endlessly. Meanwhile, Dr. Slop gets a little knife and cuts the knots, but accidentally wounds his hand. Then he begins to swear, but the elder Shandy “with Cervantes-like seriousness” suggests he not swear in vain, but rather curse in accordance with the rules of art and, in lieu of a handbook, hands him the formula of excommunication from the Roman Catholic church. Slop takes it and reads; the formula occupies two pages. The curious thing here is the motivation Sterne uses to develop the material. Usually such material has to do with medieval scholarship, which by Sterne’s time was already considered laughable (just as, in stories about foreigners, it is thought funny when they pronounce words according to their own dialectical peculiarities). These medieval materials are usually introduced into the story merely as manias of Tristram’s father. In this case, however, the motivation is more complicated. The material about baptizing a child prior to its birth and the droll argument of the lawyers about whether a mother is her son’s relative is quite removed from Sterne’s usual characterization of father Shandy.
On page 363 the knots motif appears again,14 with the chambermaid motif. Sterne suggests that instead of devoting a chapter to those subjects, he would rather substitute one on chambermaids, green gowns, and old hats. But the unsettled account of the knots and packages is not forgotten and comes up again near the very end on page 617 as a promise to write a special chapter about knots.
The references to Jenny are another motif which runs through the novel. Jenny first appears in this way:
it is no more than a week from this very day, in which I am now writing this book for the edification of the world,—which is March 9, 1759,— that my dear, dear Jenny observing I look’d a little grave, as she stood cheapening a silk of five-and-twenty shillings a yard,—told the mercer, she was sorry she had given him so much trouble;—and immediately went and bought herself a yard-wide stuff of ten-pence a yard [p. 44]
On pages 48 and 49 Sterne plays with the reader’s curiosity concerning the kind of relationship that exists between Jenny and the narrator.
I own the tender appellation of my dear, dear Jenny,—with some other strokes of conjugal knowledge, interspersed here and there, might, naturally enough, have misled the most candid judge in the world into such a determination against me.—All I plead for, in this case, Madam, is strict justice, and that you do so much of it, to me as well as to yourself,—as not to prejudge or receive such an impression of me, till you have better evidence, than I am positive, at present, can be produced against me:—Not that I can be so vain or unreasonable, Madam, as to desire you should therefore think, that my dear, dear Jenny is my kept mistress;—no,—that would be flattering my character in the other extream, and giving it an air of freedom, which, perhaps, it has no kind of right to. All I contend for, is the utter impossibility for some volumes, that you, or the most penetrating spirit upon earth, should know how this matter really stands.—It is not impossible, but that my dear, dear Jenny! tender as the appellation is, may be my child.—Consider,—I was born in the year eighteen.—Nor is there any thing unnatural or extravagant in the supposition, that my dear Jenny may be my friend.—Friend!—My friend. Surely, Madam, a friendship between the two sexes may subsist, and be supported without—Fy! Mr. Shandy:—Without anything, Madam, but that tender and delicious sentiment, which ever mixes in friendship, where there is a difference of sex.
The Jenny motif appears again on page 337:
I shall never get all through in five minutes, that I fear—and the thing I hope is, that your worships and reverences are not offended—if you are, depend upon’t I’ll give you something, my good gentry, next year, to be offended at—that’s my dear Jenny’s way—but who my Jenny is— and which is the right and which the wrong end of a woman, is the thing to be concealed—it will be told you the next chapter but one, to my chapter of button-holes,—and not one chapter before.
And on page 493: “I love the Pythagoreans (much more than ever I dare tell my dear Jenny).” There are other references to Jenny on pages 550 and 610 through 611. This last (I have let several pass) has a sentimentality seldom equalled in Sterne:
I will not argue the matter: 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 art 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.—
—Heaven have mercy upon us both!
CHAP. IX.
Now, for what the world thinks of that ejaculation—I would not give a groat.
and so ends Chapter 9.15
A few words about sentimentality in general are appropriate here. Sentimentality cannot serve as the mainstay of art, since art has no mainstay. The presentation of things from “a sentimental point of view” is a special method of presentation, like the presentation of them from the point of view of a horse (as in Tolstoy’s “Kholstomer”) or of a giant (as in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels).
Art is essentially trans-emotional, as in stories told of persons rolled into the sea in a barrel spiked inside like an iron maiden. In the Russian version of “Tom Thumb”16 children will not permit the omission even of the detail of the cannibal cutting off the heads of his daughters, not because children are cruel, but because the detail is part of the legend. Professor Anichkov’s Ceremonial Songs of Spring includes vernal dancing songs which deal with ugly, quarrelsome husbands; maggots; and death. Although these are unpleasant, they are part of the songs. Gore in art is not necessarily gory; it rhymes with amor—it is either the substance of the tonal structure or material for the construction of figures of speech.
Art, then, is unsympathetic—or beyond sympathy—except where the feeling of compassion is evoked as material for the artistic structure. In discussing such emotion we have to examine it from the point of view of the composition itself, in exactly the same way that a mechanic must examine a driving belt to understand the details of a machine; he certainly would not study the driving belt as if he were a vegetarian.
Of course, even Sterne is beyond sympathy, as I shall show. The elder Shandy’s son Bobby died at his home the very moment the father was deciding whether to use money, which he had acquired accidentally, either for sending his son abroad or for improving his estates
my uncle Toby hummed over the letter.
—— —— —— —— —— —— —— ——
—— —— —— —— —— —— —— ——
—— —— —— —— —— —— —— —he’s gone! said my uncle Toby.—Where—Who? cried my father.—My nephew, said my uncle Toby.—What—without leave—without money —without governor? cried my father in amazement. No:—he is dead, my dear brother, quoth my uncle Toby [p. 350].
Sterne here has used death to put his characters at “cross-purposes,” a common literary device using two persons talking about two different things and thinking they are talking about one and the same thing. Gogol uses the device in The Inspector General, in the first conversation between the Mayor and Khlestakov:
The same talking at cross-purposes occurs in Greboyedov’s Wit Works Woe:
ZAGORETSKY: |
On Chatsky’s score this outcry has arisen. |
COUNTESS GRANDMOTHER: |
Chatsky was escorted out to prison? |
ZAGORETSKY: |
Was clubbed in the Carpathians, went muzzy from the wound. |
COUNTESS GRANDMOTHER: |
Has clubbed with the Freemasons and Musselman Mahound?17 |
We find the same technique with the same motivation (deafness) in Russian folk drama, but it arises from a series of puns because of the folk drama’s usually loose plot. [A long quotation from the most popular of Russian folk dramas, Czar Maximilian, has been omitted here; it consists of one long misunderstanding based upon a series of puns.] These punning misunderstandings are typical of folk drama. Sometimes the device supplants the plot structure itself and leaves the drama without a trace of plot. Roman Jakobson and Peter Bogatyrev analyze the technique in their work on Russian folk themes.18
But Sterne’s own puns on death do not astonish us as much as the puns made by the father. For Sterne, the death of Bobby Shandy is chiefly motivation for expansion of the material: “Will your worships give me leave to squeeze in a story between these two pages?” (p. 351). And he inserts a fragment from the letter of consolation from Servius Sulpicius Rufus to Cicero. The introduction of this fragment is motivated by what Father Shandy has himself uttered. Later a collection of classical anecdotes about the disdain of death begins. Curiously, Sterne himself tells of Father Shandy’s eloquence:
My father was as proud of his eloquence as Marcus Tullius Cicero could be for his life, and for aught I am convinced of to the contrary at present, with as much reason: it was indeed his strength—and his weakness too.—His strength—for he was by nature eloquent,—and his weakness—for he was hourly a dupe to it; and provided an occasion in life would but permit him to shew his talents, or say either a wise thing, a witty, or a shrewd one—(bating the case of a systematick misfortune)—he had all he wanted.—A blessing which tied up my father’s tongue, and a misfortune which set it loose with good grace, were pretty equal: sometimes, indeed, the misfortune was the better of the two; for instance, where the pleasure of the harangue was as ten, and the pain of the misfortune but as five—my father gained half in half, and consequently was as well again off, as it never had befallen him [p. 352].
Here Sterne shows with unusual clarity the difference between the “happiness” and “unhappiness” of life taken as an everyday occurrence and as material for art.
Later the mother has to learn about the death of her son. Sterne handles it by having her overhear the news at the door; then he takes it into his head to build a simultaneous action in the kitchen. As I have already pointed out, he plays around with the action while the poor mother is left standing in an uncomfortable pose. At this time, a conversation about the son’s death is going on in the study. The thread of conversation has already passed from a discussion of death in general, through a discussion about voyages and the general diffusion of ancient learning (p. 369), and moved on to Socrates’ oration before his judges:
though my mother was a woman of no deep reading, yet the abstract of Socrates’ oration, which my father was giving my uncle Toby, was not altogether new to her.—She listened to it with composed intelligence, and would have done so to the end of the chapter, had not my father plunged (which he had no occasion to have done) into that part of the pleading where the great philosopher reckons up his connections, his alliances, and children; but renounces a security to be so won by working upon the passions of his judges.—“I have friends—I have relations,—I have three desolate children,”—says Socrates.—
—Then, cried my mother, opening the door,—you have one more, Mr. Shandy, than I know of.
By heaven! I have one less,—said my father, getting up and walking out of the room [p. 370].
Erotic defamiliarization, which is generally presented euphemistically (with genteel wording), is a very important part of Sterne’s expansion of the material. I have already treated the basis of this phenomenon in “Art as Technique.” In Sterne we find a remarkable diversity of methods of erotic defamiliarization; they are quite numerous, and I shall cite several. I shall begin with one dealing with the recognition of characters:
I am not ignorant that the Italians pretend to a mathematical exactness in their designations of one particular sort of character among them, from the forte or piano of a certain wind instrument they use,—which they say is infallible.—I dare not mention the name of the instrument in this place;—’tis sufficient we have it amongst us,—but never think of making a drawing by it;—this is aenigmatical, and intended to be so, at least, ad populum:—And therefore I beg, Madam, when you come here, that you read on as fast as you can, and never stop to make any inquiry about it19 [pp. 75—76].
Or here is another:
Now whether it was physically impossible, with half a dozen hands all thrust into the napkin at a time—but that some one chestnut, of more life and rotundity than the rest, must be put in motion—it so fell out, however, that one was actually sent rolling off the table; and as Phutatorius sat straddling under—it 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—let it suffice to say—it was that particular aperture, which in all good societies, the laws of decorum do strictly require, like the temple of Janus (in peace at least) to be universally shut up [p. 320].
Two further episodes in Tristram Shandy are especially typical of Sterne’s game of erotic defamiliarization. The two are similar, although one is simply an episode, while the other expands into one of those plots that continually interrupts the others and even becomes one of the major plot strands in the novel. The more important of these is Uncle Toby’s wound, a severe wound in the groin. A widow courting him and waiting to marry him does not know whether or not he is castrated and at the same time hesitates to ask. This situation greatly slows the progress of the novel. Sterne comments upon it:
There is not a greater difference between a single-horse chair and madam Pompadour’s vis-à-vis, than betwixt a single amour, and an amour thus nobly doubled, and going upon all fours, prancing throughout a grand drama [p. 209].
Hints and allusions repeatedly interrupt the novel. Approximately in Volume VI, Chapter 34, the hints begin to thicken, even though the introductory motif of the journey intrudes. In Volume VII, Chapter 43, Sterne refers to the newly introduced material as if this vein were exhausted:
I danced it along through Narbonne, Carcasson, and Castle Naudairy, till at last I danced myself into Perdrillo’s pavillion, where pulling a paper of black lines, that I might go on straight forwards, without digressions of parenthesis, in my uncle Toby’s amours—[p. 538].
Thus the wound in the groin and the impossibility of the woman’s asking about it in detail is introduced into the romance of Uncle Toby and the widow Wadman as a delaying action. I shall show in several supporting quotations how Sterne impedes the action.
After a solemn promise to continue the story of Toby’s amorous adventures without digression, Sterne then delays the action with digressions on digressions tied together by the repetition of such phrases as, “It is with love as with Cuckoldom” (pp. 540, 542). Then come the love metaphors: love is an old hat; love is a pie. The story proceeds with the attacks of the widow Wadman on Uncle Toby, but their description is again interrupted by a long “importunate story,” narrated by Trim—“The Story of the King of Bohemia and his seven castles” (pp. 560–569). This story is like the one Sancho Panza tells his master on the night of the adventure with the fulling mill, when he had tied Rosinante’s legs. Uncle Toby repeatedly interrupts with remarks on the nature of military techniques and on the style; I have already analyzed the method in Don Quixote. Like any “importunate tale,” it is based upon the recognition of the stalling tactics. It must be interrupted by a listener. In some cases its function is to hold the flow of the novel in check. Later, Trim abandons his telling of the story of the King of Bohemia and takes up the story of his own love (pp. 568–575); and at last the widow Wadman reappears on the scene. Here the motif of the wound also reappears:
I am terribly afraid, said widow Wadman, in case I should marry him, Bridget—that the poor captain will not enjoy his health, with the monstrous wound upon his groin—
It may not, Madam, be so very large, replied Bridget, as you think— and I believe besides, added she—that ’tis dried up—
—I would like to know—merely for his sake said Mrs. Wadman—
—We’ll know the long and the broad of it, in ten days—answered Mrs. Bridget, for whilst the captain is paying his addresses to you—I’m confident Mr. Trim will be for making love to me—and I’ll let him as much as he will—added Bridget—to get it all out of him—[pp. 581–582].
In Volume VIII, Chapter 31, the new material is introduced in the form of a metaphor of the kind frequently found in Sterne. He brings into play the lexically accepted metaphor “hobby-horse” in the sense of a whim and refers it to a real horse, then introduces the “ass” (part of the body) figure of speech. (Perhaps the origin of this metaphor is found in St. Francis of Assisi’s phrase about his own body, “My brother ass.”) This figure of speech is also developed, and a “situation based on a misconception” is built from it.
The father asks Uncle Toby about his “ass,” and the latter thinks this is a euphemistic name for the back part of his anatomy (pp. 583–584). [Shklovsky, apparently misled by the Russian, misinterprets the wordplay here as euphemistic.] A detail of the further development is interesting—Father Shandy’s speech to Uncle Toby is nothing other than a parody of the speech of Don Quixote to Sancho Panza about the governorship. I shall not show parallel extracts from both speeches here, especially since the widow Wadman awaits us. Uncle Toby and Trim are going to her, along with Mr. Shandy and his wife, who glance behind them and talk about the coming marriage.
The motif of the impotent husband who has his wife only on the first Sunday of each month crops up again here; the motif had been stated at the very beginning of the novel.
Unless she should happen to have a child—said my mother—
But she must persuade my brother Toby first to get her one—
—To be sure, Mr. Shandy, quoth my mother.
—Though if it comes to persuasion—said my father—Lord have mercy upon them.
Amen: said my mother, piano.
Amen: cried my father, fortissimè.
Amen: said my mother again—but with such a sighing cadence of personal pity at the end of it, as discomfited every fibre about my father—he instantly took out his almanack; but before he could untie it, Yorick’s congregation coming out of church, became a full answer to one half of his business with it—and my mother telling him it was a sacrament day—left him as little in doubt, as to the other part—He put his almanack into his pocket.
The first Lord of the Treasury thinking of ways and means, could not have returned home, with a more embarrassed look [pp. 613–614].
I let myself quote this passage at length because I want to show how the material Sterne introduces comes not merely from the outside, but rather belongs to one of the threads which tie up all the compositional strands of the novel. Again, as the digressions along the other strands progress, the knot motif reappears (p. 617). At last the wound motif returns, presented, as is typical of Sterne, from the middle:
—You shall see the very place, Madam; said my uncle Toby.
Mrs. Wadman blush’d—look’d towards the door—turn’d pale— blush’d slightly again—recovered her natural colour—blush’d worse than ever; which for the sake of the unlearned reader, I translate thus—
“L—d! rcannot look at it—
What would the world say if I look’d at it?
I should drop down, if I look’d at it—
I wish I could look at it—
There can be no sin in looking at it.
—I will look at it” [p. 623].
But a new development occurs. Uncle Toby thinks the widow is interested in the geographical locality where he was wounded, not in the actual place of the wound on his body. As a result, not even the reader understands the dialogue. The whole movement of the plot is affected here; it is slowed down.
Trim brings a map of Namur (Uncle Toby was wounded at Namur) to the disappointed widow, and once more the play on Uncle Toby’s wound is permitted to continue. Sterne repeatedly inserts it into the digressions (pages 625–629). And then comes the famous transposition of time; the previously bypassed Chapters 18 and 19 appear after Chapter 25. The scene resumes with Chapter 26:
It was just as natural for Mrs. Wadman, whose first husband was all his time afflicted with a Sciatica, to wish to know how far from the hip to the groin; and how far she was likely to suffer more or less in her feelings, in the one case than in the other.
She accordingly read Drake’s anatomy from one end to the other. She had peeped into Wharton on the brain, and had borrowed20 Graaf upon the bones and muscles; but could make nothing of it….
To clear up all, she had twice asked Doctor Slop, “if poor captain Shandy was ever likely to recover of his wound—?”
—He is recovered, Doctor Slop would say—
What! quite?
—Quite: madam—
But what do you mean by a recovery? Mrs. Wadman would say. Doctor Slop was the worst man alive at definitions [pp. 636–637].
Mrs. Wadman interrogates Captain Shandy himself about the wound:
“—Was, it without remission?—
“—Was it more tolerable in bed?
“—Could he lie on both sides alike with it?
“—Was he able to mount a horse? [p. 637]
And so on. The business is finally settled when Trim speaks about Captain Shandy’s wound with Bridget, the widow’s maid:
and in this cursed trench, Mrs. Bridget, quoth the Corporal, taking her by the hand, did he receive the wound which crush’d him so miserable here—In pronouncing which he slightly press’d the back of her hand towards the part he felt for—and let it fall.
We thought, Mr. Trim, it had been more in the middle—said Mrs. Bridget—
That would have undone us for ever—said the Corporal.
—And left my poor mistress undone too—said Bridget….
Come—come—said Bridget—holding the palm of her left-hand parallel to the plane of the horizon, and sliding the fingers of the other over it, in a way which could not have been done, had there been the least wart or protuberance—’Tis every syllable of it false, cried the Corporal, before she had half finished the sentence—[p. 639].
It is interesting to compare the symbolism of the hand motions with the erotic euphemism in the same novel.
A small preliminary observation. For the dramatis personae in the novel as well as for Sterne himself, the technique of decorous conversation becomes material for art in the sense that it is a method of defamiliarization. It is curious that this manual symbolism occurs in particularly masculine and “obscene” anecdotal folklore where we know the only rule of decency is the desire to speak as lewdly as possible. There too we find euphemistic material—in particular manual symbolism; once again, it is a technique of defamiliarization.
Let us turn to Sterne and a simple instance of erotic defamiliarization; again I have to quote almost an entire chapter, fortunately a short one:
—’Twas nothing,—I did not lose two drops of blood by it—’twas not worth calling in a surgeon, had he lived next door to us.… The chamber-maid had left no ******* *** under the bed:—Cannot you contrive, master, quoth Susannah, lifting up the sash with one hand, as she spoke, and helping me up into the window seat with the other,— cannot you manage, my dear, for a single time to **** *** ** *** ******?
I was five years old.—Susannah did not consider that nothing was well hung in our family,—so slap came the sash down like lightening upon us;—Nothing is left,—cried Susannah,—nothing is left—for me, but to run my country—[p. 376].
She flees to the home of Uncle Toby, who takes the blame in this case since his servant Trim had removed the hook-leads from the window sash for casting toy cannons.
Again, this is Sterne’s usual technique: He gives the results before he gives the causes. In this case the cause is given on pages 377–378. Trim tells the story of the accident, with the aid of hand gestures:
Trim, by the help of his forefinger, laid flat upon the table, and the edge of his hand striking a-cross it at right angles, made a shift to tell his story so, that priests and virgins might have listened to it;—and the story being told,—the dialogue went on as follows [p. 379].
Later, with digressions, discussions of digressions, etc., Sterne expands an episode about the rumors which spread among the people concerning what had happened.
It is interesting that Father Shandy, having learned what happened, runs to his son—with a book—and begins a talk about the general subject of circumcisions; it is also interesting that at this point Sterne parodies the motivation of interjected parts:
—was Obadiah enabled to give him a particular account of it, just as it had happened.—I thought as much, said my father, tucking up his night-gown;—and so walked up stairs.
One would imagine from this—(though for my own part I somewhat question it)—that my father before that time, had actually wrote that remarkable chapter in the Tristrapedia, which to me is the most original and entertaining one in the whole book;—and that is the chapter upon sash-windows, with a bitter Philippick at the end of it, upon the forgetfulness of chamber-maids.—I have but two reasons for thinking otherwise.
First, had the matter been taken into consideration, before the event happened, my father certainly would have nailed up the sash-window for good an’ all;—which, considering with what difficulty he composed books,—he might have done with ten times less trouble, than he could have wrote the chapter: this argument I foresee holds good against his writing the chapter, even after the event; but ’tis obviated under the second reason, which I have the honour to offer to the world in support of my opinion, that my father did not write the chapter upon sash-windows and chamber-pots, at the time supposed,—and it is this.
—That, in order to render the Tristrapædia complete,—I wrote the chapter myself [pp. 383–384].
I have not even the slightest wish to follow Sterne’s novel to the end because that is not what interests me; I am interested, rather, in the theory of the plot. I shall now remark on the abundance of quotations. It certainly would have been possible to have made fuller use of the material introduced in each quotation because almost no technique is represented anywhere in its pure form; but such an approach would have transformed my work into something like an interlinear translation with grammatical remarks. I would have forgotten the material and so exhausted it that I would have deprived the reader of the possibility of understanding it.
In order to follow the course of the novel in my analysis, I have had to show the whole of its “inconsistency.” The unusualness of the general plan and the order of the novel, even of the frequently extraordinary handling of the most ordinary elements, is what is characteristic here.
By way of a conclusion and as a demonstration of Sterne’s awareness of his work and his exaggerated violations of the usual plot structure, I introduce his very own graphs of the flow of the story of Tristram Shandy.
I am now beginning to get fairly into my work; and by the help of a vegitable diet, with a few of the cold seeds, I make no doubt but I shall be able to go on with my uncle Toby’s story, and my own, in a tolerable straight line. Now,
[p. 473]21
These were the four lines I moved in through my first, second, third, and fourth volumes.—In the fifth volume I have been very good,—the precise line I have described in it being this:
[p. 474]
By which it appears, that except at the curve, marked A. where I took a trip to Navarre,—and the indented curve B. which is the short airing when I was there with the Lady Baussiere and her page,—I have not taken the least frisk of a digression, till John de la Casse’s devils led me the round you see marked D.—for as for c c c c c they are nothing but parentheses, and the common ins and outs incident to the lives of the greatest ministers of state; and when compared with what men have done,—or with my own transgressions at the letters A B D—they vanish into nothing [pp. 473–474].
Sterne’s diagrams are approximately accurate, but they do not call attention to the crosscurrent of motifs.
The idea of plot is too often confused with the description of events—with what I propose provisionally to call the story. The story is, in fact, only material for plot formulation. The plot of Evgeny Onegin is, therefore, not the romance of the hero with Tatyana, but the fashioning of the subject of this story as produced by the introduction of interrupting digressions. One sharp-witted artist (Vladimir Miklashevsky) proposed to illustrate Evgeny Onegin mainly through the digressions (the “small feet,” for example); considering it as a composition of motifs, such a treatment would be proper.
The forms of art are explainable by the laws of art; they are not justified by their realism. Slowing the action of a novel is not accomplished by introducing rivals, for example, but by simply transposing parts. In so doing the artist makes us aware of the aesthetic laws which underlie both the transposition and the slowing down of the action.
The assertion that Tristram Shandy is not a novel is common; for persons who make that statement, opera alone is music—a symphony is chaos.
Tristram Shandy is the most typical novel in world literature.
Victor Shklovsky, Tristram Shandy Sterna: Stilistichesky kommentary (Petrograd, 1921).
1. The title of the monograph is Tristram Shandy Sterna i teoriya romana [Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and the Theory of the Novel] (Petrograd, 1921). The title given on the first page of the text is Tristram Shandy Sterna: Stilistichesky kommentary, the title we have used. The monograph was reprinted in Shklovsky’s O teorii prozy [On the Theory of Prose] (Moscow, 1925 and 1929). We have used the 1921 text.
2. See also Tomashevsky’s “Thematics,” below, pp. 66–67.
3. This is only partly true—or, we should say, only literally true. In a sense, cause and effect is the theme of Tristram Shandy, but Sterne is interested in the psychological cause and effect of the association of ideas rather than in physical cause and effect.
4. See below, pp. 80–84.
5. See above, p. 12.
6. That is, in ordinary poetry the “phonetic instrumentation”—rhyme, meter, alliteration, etc.—is often said to accompany a “meaning,” to which it is subordinate; Futurist poetry called attention to, or “laid bare,” the devices of instrumentation. Tristram Shandy is like Futurist poetry in that it also calls attention to technical devices that are usually subordinated. Ed. note.
7. Shklovsky read the Russian version of Tristram Shandy published in the journal Panteon Literatury [Pantheon of Literature] in 1892. Our quotations are taken from The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. James Aiken Work (New York: Odyssey Press, 1940); all page and chapter references are to this edition. Ed. note.
8. A section of Goncharov’s novel Oblomov (Part I, Chap. 9), originally published separately. Ed. note.
9. “Motivation” as used by the Formalists is a complex concept. Generally, motivation is the reason governing the use of a particular device and may include everything from the author’s desire to shock his readers, to the necessity of including specific props required by the action. See below, pp. 78–87. Ed. note.
10. Victor Shklovsky, Kak sledan Don Quixote [How Don Quixote Was Made], reprinted in O teorii prozy. Ed. note.
11. Shklovsky here has a one-word parenthetical insertion “Eichenbaum,” perhaps indicating that he saw Eichenbaum’s Molodoy Tolstoy [Young Tolstoy] (Petrograd and Berlin, 1922), before its publication. Ed. note.
12. From Nicholas Gogol’s Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka. Ed. note.
13. This passage is interesting because it is one of the few in which Shklovsky shows his sense of the importance of unity in fiction. It can be said in Shklovsky’s defense that he felt he had to take the novel apart before he could know how it worked. Moreover, he was usually interested either in a particular technique in itself or in showing departures from such norms as unity. Ed. note.
14. Actually, there is no reference to knots on p. 363, but there is a reference to buttonholes; in Russian both are petlya. Shklovsky may have been misled by the Russian, or he may have had in mind a more general “fastening” motif. The point makes little difference, however, since Sterne joins both the knot and the buttonhole motifs on p. 617. Ed. note.
15. Shklovsky mistakenly has, “And so ends Chapter 8.” Ed. note.
16. “Malchik s palchik,” a Russian variant of the Tom Thumb story. Ed. note.
17. Trans. by Sir Bernard Pares in Masterpieces of the Russian Drama, ed. George Rapall Noyes (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1960), I, 133–134. Reprinted through permission of the publisher. Ed. note.
18. Roman Jakobson and Peter Bogatyrev, “K probleme razmezhevaniya folkloristiki i literaturovedeniya,” [“On the Problem of the Demarcation Between Folklore and Literary Studies”], Lud Slowianski, II, No. 2 (1931). Ed. note.
19. “This passage probably alludes, with purposed equivocation, to the Italian castrati, some of whom had been imported into England, in the face of considerable popular opposition, to aid in the presentation of operas” (note by James Aiken Work, p. 76). Ed. note.
20. This must be a mistake in Mr. Shandy, for Graaf wrote upon the pancreatick juice, and the parts of generation. Sterne’s note.
21. These four diagrams are inverted in the Russian text. We have set them aright. Ed. note.