Tristram Shandy's Enlightenment Aesthetic
1989, revised 2005, 2006, 2010
The European Enlightenment first flared in an international culture that was losing its moorings. Dogmas sanctifying Church, tradition, and Crown and long taken for granted, were losing their utility for a secularizing intelligentsia, newly emergent from the rising bourgeoisie, and for some disaffected aristocrats along with them, tired of perpetual religious war that had long exhausted its gains. And there were those of rank who became as conscious as the townsmen of the clash of their interests with those of clergy and the rest of the nobility. As suspicions grew about the truths which maintained once revered estates in their prominent social, political, and legal positions, the old values and ways of doing things became subject to cutting critique, satire, and even open denunciation, although the most pointed critics, such as old Voltaire, more often than not, expressed themselves beyond national borders or the safe haven of some untouchable patron.
To pursue any knowledge that lies beyond the safety of convention means to embrace insecurity, as even a philosopher as temperamentally disposed towards routine, caution and duty as Kant could recognize:
Dogmas and formulas, these mechanical tools designed for reasonable use-- or rather abuse-- of [humanity's] natural gifts, are the fetters of an everlasting non-age. The man who would cast them off would make an uncertain leap over the narrowest ditch, because he is not used to such free movement. That is why there are only a few men who walk firmly, and who have emerged from non-age by cultivating their own minds. (Kant 385)Concerns with epistemology, which Descartes had brought center, came to dominate philosophy, as those engaged with "cultivating their own minds" found it increasingly important to replace foundations of knowledge that once shaken, crumbled, right along with the reliance on ancient authority. Voltaire, Diderot and like-minded philosophes sought principles more ready to withstand critical challenge, though not always without misgivings. Hence Voltaire could not only coin some sharp witticism that piquantly expressed one or the other of the new values—"Better to free the guilty than condemn the innocent."— but also manifest a decidedly conservative side in politics or literary taste that younger rationalists would find de trop.
Gleefully flouting classical canons of taste and workmanship, instead, Lawrence Sterne's novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, appears at first glance a madcap tour de force, willfully foiling literary expectations, but with little philosophical pertinence. Nonetheless it reflects the Enlightenment's epistemological unease by parading its narrative mechanics out in the buff, inviting, no, demanding the reader's conscious intervention as interpreter, and deferring its ultimate meaning right along with its deferred plot resolution. Shandy epitomizes the Enlightenment text because of its playfulness, which results from its meditation on a question that seems at first merely literary, but occasioned as soon as the mind sheds its tight swaddling of dogma and as soon as it assumes adult responsibilities, soon involving everything that concerns the European Enlightenment, "How is representation possible?"
As far as conventional narrative expectations are concerned, whether those before or since, Shandy brilliantly satisfies few. At one point Tristram, narrating, simultaneously juggles stories of how Dr. Slop, in attending his birth, had smashed his newborn nose; how Uncle Toby mistook, for a military emplacement, a bridge mentioned by Tristram's father intended for restoring that little nose; and how Corporal Trim came to be involved in some unspecified adventure; presenting each story all out of chronology, but ordered according to the associative sequence in which details from each episode jostle Tristram's increasingly exasperated mind.
O ye POWERS! (for powers ye are, and great ones too)---- which enable mortal man to tell a story worth the hearing, ----that kindly show him where he is to begin it, ---and where he is to end it, ----what he is to put into it, ----and what he is to leave out, ----how much of it he is to cast into shade, ----and whereabouts he is to throw his light! ----Ye who preside over this vast empire of biographical freebooters, and see how many scrapes and plunges your subjects hourly fall into; ----will you do one thing? I beg and beseech you (in case you will do nothing better for us) that wherever, in any part of your dominions it so falls out, that three several roads meet in one point, as they have done just here, ----that at least you set up a guidepost, in the center of them, in mere charity to direct an uncertain devil which of the three he is to take. (Shandy 150)Alas, the Powers prove inattentive, at least for the course of this novel.
Although the novel commences with the night of Tristram's conception, this beginning proves arbitrary, failing (deliberately on Sterne's part, one supposes, though not on his poor narrator's) to bring any dramatic or thematic significance to bear. Shandy's plot lines extend in many directions, forward and back, and sometimes both at once. What closure the book possesses ends on "a cock and bull story," yet another diversionary discussion, it turns out, held among Tristram's father, Uncle Toby, Obadiah the servant, and Dr. Slop (Shandy 458). These characters appear here and there throughout the novel more like recurring motifs than anything motivated by narrative logic.
Shandy is an open text in yet another sense, quite literally, with blank pages and passages offered up for the readers to complete the story with their own imaginations, inviting the reader, in one case, to "paint… to [his or her] own mind" the finery of the Widow Wadman (Shandy 335). Recognizing that such shenanigans violate the distance and distinction customarily in force between author and reader, Tristram offers this justification:
Writing, when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is), is but a different name for conversation: As no one who knows what he is about in good company would venture to talk all; ---so no author who understands the just boundaries of decorum and good breeding would presume to think all: The truest respect when you can pay to the reader's understanding is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself. For my own part, I am eternally paying him compliments of this kind, and do all that lies in my power to keep his imagination as busy as my own. (Shandy 84-85)No mere consumers of entertainment, Tristram demands that his readers do their own chores, secure their own meaning, any meaning in fact that suits them. Tristram Shandy is nothing if not a text preoccupied with the mechanics of its own making, as though Sterne serves as its most severe critic as well as its author. Such critical temper permeated the Enlightenment, with criticism honed as weapon of cultural warfare. As Paul Hazzard writes in The European Mind, "But while the philosophes' criticism was a form of aggression, it was far from being undisciplined. They did not merely lash out at what seemed to them outmoded, mendacious, or doubtful; they systematically inquired into the faculty of criticism itself, and into the relation of criticism to the activity of philosophizing. It is not an accident that they were addicted to psychology, that in their hands philosophy turned from metaphysics to epistemology…" (18).
Sterne inquires into the relation critical distance bears to narration through placing his narrator, an ostensive autobiographer, at that distance. Tristram functions as a critic even in the up-swell of the creative act. Tristram engages in various meta-narratives concerning his narrative, including commentary about what future chapters should address: "Have not I promised the world a chapter of knots? two chapters upon the right and the wrong end of a woman? a chapter upon whiskers, a chapter upon wishes? ---a chapter of noses? ---No, I have done that…" (Shandy 202). Tristram wrings his hands over the book's possible critical reception: "There is nothing so foolish, when you are at the expense of making an entertainment of this kind, as to order things so badly as to let your critics and gentry of refined taste run it down…" (Shandy 68). Meant to be funny, this criticism is also ironic: "see how flawed this novel is, a tale told by an idiot, but see, discriminating Sirs, this flaw is its commanding virtue."
In the long run, Tristram finds it impossible to truly represent his life, to transform it all into text. Such an ambition would mean covering all the time he has spent up to that moment writing all the previous text:
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 that to my first day's life ----'tis demonstrative that I have three hundred and sixty-four days more life to write just now, than when I first set out; so that instead of advancing, as a common writer, in my work with what I have been doing at it ----on the contrary, I am just thrown so many volumes back ----was every day of my life as busy a day as this ----And why not? ----and the transactions and opinions of it to take up as much description ----And for what reason should they be cut short? as at this rate I should just live 364 times faster than I should write ----It must follow, an' please your Worships, that the more I write, the more I shall have to write ----and consequently, the more your Worships read, the more your Worships will have to read. (Shandy 206)
Tristram's life has been too unwieldy to represent, the book itself too unwieldy to structure. One can make of it what one wills.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman thus shares in the Enlightenment's epistemological obsessions, written as if it were a personal memoir, whose subject becomes the struggle of its narrator's attempt to narrate it, pointing to the problematic nature of representation. What should the memoirist include? What leave out? Why? Since concision and ellipsis are inevitable in narration, what principles should guide the selection? These questions still carry force among contemporary authors. John Ashbery rehearses them at the beginning of Three Poems, his own impossible account of a reach for meaning inevitably deferred.
Having put into question the essentialist ontology that dominated Western thought since Parmenides and Plato gained influence, Enlightenment thinkers accelerated a crisis in literature that had actually began brewing with Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Cervantes: what defines character when character becomes a matter not of a person's timeless essence, to be revealed or discovered in turns, but a matter of that person's deeds? A previous literature, that of Sophocles, Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucher, could write typological characters without giving it a second thought, persuasively presenting characters in their quintessence, whose personalizing details more often than not assume allegorical weight, representing a set of interlocking qualities that apply to all members of that type, for in their times, role and rank more strictly defined (and limited) people. But Sterne understands that more modern writers, working when social categories are not only under attack, but up in the air, could draw quite different characters, even should they rise from similar backgrounds and job titles, with roughly equal plausibility, since it all depends upon what personality traits or circumstances of place, time or fortune independent of inherited rank or occupation that the writer choses to include.
So what counts as being truly representative of character? Tristram's obsession with noses, to be sure, but does that fix Tristram in place for us as definitively as Odysseus' book of tricks fix within our sense of his world the "fortunate… master mariner and soldier, blessed son of old Laërtes"? (Fitzgerald translation) What action reveals character? Bloom's many small social blunders and humiliations in Ulysses or the accumulation of small actions that evidence his great heart? Both reveal something about how he ticks, but what counts most becomes a matter of context. But how the author frames that context, and represents that character, constitutes as much of the author's nature as it does the character's. But neither comes given nor fixed, except in retrospect, shaped by precedents but not defined by them, regular only in terms of probabilities. Taking Kant's uncertain leaps over even the most narrow of ditches.