SOURCE: "The Irony of Character," in The Philosophical Irony of Laurence Sterne, University Presses of Florida, 1975, pp. 65-96.

Tristram Shandy is a novel of ideas. Its form is part of the idea, not a background for it, and the characters themselves are aspects of the intellectual quest, all constructed from some pivotal irony, subject to some central paradox, treated with sceptical insight as well as love. That is not to say that Steme's people are two-dimensional representatives of specific positions, spokesmen for the successive stages of a dialectical formula, as Traugott would have it. They inhabit their personalities quite fully, although it is true that their personalities are limited by the uncompromising points of view from which they perceive the world. We watch them interpreting, acting, interacting, responding. Their realities meet, clash, and destroy one another, yet remain curiously intact, for each character has a basic integrity, a core of inflexible ego that keeps him unique and self-sufficient.

The odd way in which Sterne related the particular and the abstract (the irreducible human quality and far-reaching universal propensities) began in his pre-Shandean sermons, for it must be remembered that the man of letters had his birth in the man of God. Sterne's later sermons (the earlier sermons, published last, are primarily exercises in borrowing) reveal the author's persistent attempts to discover the motives of men's actions, the basic elements of personality and character. Lansing Van Der Heyden Hammond points this out in his book Laurence Sterne's "Sermons of Mr. Yorick": "Time and again throughout the Sermons he reverts, obviously with the best of intentions, to the tenet that morality alone is insufficient as a motivating factor in human behavior—but invariably the naturalistic implications, not the teleological, are the ones he lingers over and illustrates" (p. 95). As a minister Sterne had surprisingly little interest in theological matters or traditional questions of doctrine. He was a moral philosopher who was concerned with the social effects of action rather than with their supernatural sanctions. As Hammond wrote, it was Sterne's desire to emphasize "the less striking, homelier virtues which count for so much in everyday living: toleration and kindliness, patience and understanding, thoughtfulness and sympathy, modesty and sincerity" (p. 96). These are also the saving virtues of the otherwise perverse characters of Tristram Shandy.

It is not surprising, therefore, although it is certainly unconventional, that Steme would elaborate upon and even distort the texts upon which his sermons were based. When he could not find what he wanted in his text, he had no difficulty in composing a new one for his use. For example, when he deals with "The Character of Herod," he explains: "With this view, it may not be an unacceptable application of the remaining part of a discourse upon this day, to give you a sketch of the character of Herod, not as drawn from scripture,—for in general it furnishes us with few materials for such descriptions…¹ I Similarly, in his sermon "The Levite and His Concubine," Sterne does not make use of the whole Biblical story which ends with the Levite's surrender and subsequent dismemberment of his concubine. He uses only the first half of his source, paradoxically demonstrating with it the importance of courtesy and mercy: "It serves no purpose to pursue the story further; the catastrophe is horrid: and would lead us beyond the particular purpose for which I have enlarged upon this much of it,—and that is, to discredit rash judgement, and illustrate from the manner of conducting this drama, the courtesy which the dramatis personae of every other piece, may have a right to."² In general, when we compare Sterne's sermons with the sources given us in Hammond's appendix, we find that Sterne tends to concretize the generalization by relating every point of view to a particular personality. Whenever possible, he adopts a dramatic form of narrative, changing his own voice and implicating his audience with an explicit address or direct quotation. As Traugott suggests, the result of his technique is the involvement of the reader in a dialectic which emphasizes the crucial role of interpretation in differentiating the hidden truth from the obvious illusion. This was to be used with great effect in the novel.

In "The Prodigal Son," which is typical of the mature sermons, Sterne muses upon the father's attempts to dissuade his son from undertaking his journey, describes sentimentally the emotional moment of departure, comments liberally upon the youth's impulsive foolishness, elaborates upon his repentant thoughts as he entreats Heaven to help him, and offers with great relish both a detailed account of the boy's lapses into sin and an ironic description of the falsity of the world. Rejecting more conventional discussions of the parable, Sterne concludes with some up-to-date comments of his own about the Grand Tour and its educational values. The sermon seems quite prophetic of Tristram Shandy in that it bears the strong imprint of Sterne's personality with his propensity for the dramatic and digressive, his sharp ear for dialogue, his desire to surprise through jarring eccentricities of style and deft portrayals of emotional states, his basically secular, practical orientation, and his marvelous sense of the absurd and incongruous.

Of course, the didactic purpose of the sermons demanded a relative simplicity of structure and characterization. The concept of a "ruling passion" was particularly useful since it enabled Sterne to draw his moral issues clearly, centering motive and consequence upon a single peculiarity of character to which a definite value could be assigned. Using the "obsessions" of his major figures as the focal points of his sermons, Sterne was able to satisfy simultaneously the dramatic and moral demands of his work. Thus, in analyzing Herod, who is driven by "ambition, an immoderate thirst, as well as jealousy of power," Steme explains his method of illuminating the character of his hero: "The way to which is—in all judgments of this kind, to distinguish and carry in your eye, the principal and ruling passion which leads the character—and separate that, from the other parts of it,—and then take notice, how far his other qualities, good and bad, are brought to serve and support that."³

This view of character, which had its roots in Locke's associationism, required a more sophisticated application in the complex situations and ideas of Tristram Shandy. In the Shandean world Sterne no longer had defined signposts by which to steer. Although his moral, artistic, and intellectual values might have remained fundamentally the same, they now had to function and validate themselves in a universe of constantly changing perspectives. Given free rein in the disorderly world of secular activity, the hobby-horse—a concrete expression of the ruling passion—became a more unruly and complexly defined beast than Tristram himself suggests. "For my hobby-horse, if you recollect a little, is no way a vicious beast; he has scarce one hair or lineament of the ass about him 'Tis the sporting little filly-folly which carries you out for the present hour——a maggot, a butterfly, a picture, a fiddle-stick an uncle Toby's siege, or an any thing, which a man makes a shift to get astride on, to canter it away from the cares and solicitudes of life …" (VIII.xxxi.584). The hobbyhorse is a serious matter—as serious, Sterne reveals with great insight, as a child's game. It is both a function and an implied criticism of the romantic impulse. It is an expression of the urge to create value and an expression of the urge to sublimate or escape the limiting conditions of the actual. It is the illusion that lends importance to life by interpreting and recreating reality. It reflects both the strength and the weakness of its possessor, derived as it is from his abilities and directed toward his aspirations. Thus Tristram does not exaggerate when he says "'Tis as useful a beast as is in the whole creation—nor do I really see how the world could do without it" (VIII.xxxi.584). It is either with less insight or greater irony that he comments earlier that "… so long as a man rides his HOBBY-HORSE peaceably and quietly along the King's highway, and neither compels you or me to get up behind him, pray, Sir, what have either you or I to do with it?" (I.vii.13). Indeed, one of Tristram Shandy's primary themes has to do with the inevitable entanglement of hobbyhorses, with the rider's insistence that everyone should get up behind him. It is the thoroughness of the individual's involvement, the intensity of his commitment, that makes conflict unavoidable. And while the collision among riders disturbs the smoothness of the journey, it also prevents one from venturing too far from the common path.

In Tristram Shandy, then, the hobbyhorse becomes the focal point of the total personality. It connects the world of thought with the world of action and reveals the central irony of each character. The emergent ironic patterns, expressive of the disparity between aspiration and realization, are compared with one another to create a total picture of the perverse and abortive course followed by human relationships.

To consider these patterns in more detail, it is convenient to identify two distinct groups of characters: the first distinguished by its members' rationality, sophistication, and rhetorical finesse, the second by the individual's reliance upon intuition and sensibility. Walter, Tristram, and Yorick will, of course, be found in the first group; Toby, Trim, the Widow Wadman and Mrs. Shandy are in the second.

Walter Shandy.—Of all the Shandys, Walter's commitment to rationalism is the most extreme and explicit. He believes firmly in the mind's capacity for discovering, creating, and verbalizing truths which can lay claim to some objective validity. He is the scholar whose hobbyhorse (the creation of systems, the formalization of knowledge) is born from his attempts at reconciling the pure world of mind with a physical world that is volatile and full of contradiction. Walter's curiosity is endless. His love of the obscure and secret analogy, the unsuspected and surprising unity hidden in the physical object or the suggestive word, is insatiable and indiscriminate: "Then reach me my breeches off the chair, said my father to Susannah There is not a moment's time to dress you, Sir, cried Susannah the child is as black in the face as my As your, what? said my father, for like all orators, he was a dear searcher into comparisons …" (IV.xiv.287). Yorick's opinion of Walter's insights can be defended: "… there was a seasoning of wisdom unaccountably mixed up with his strangest whims, and he had sometimes such illuminations in the darkest of his eclipses, as almost attoned for them: be wary, Sir, when you imitate him" (V.xlii.404). But Tristram's judgment is more generally applicable: "My father … [forced] every event in nature into an hypothesis, by which means never man crucified TRUTH at the rate he did …" (IX.xxxii.644). It is, of course, the irony of Walter's position that his confidence in reason's resources encourages the creation of imaginative illusions and leads him to formulations that are altogether at variance with precepts of commonsense.

Paralleling Walter's paradoxical faith in the absolute power of reason and the eccentric and amateurish way in which he exercises his faculty is the almost magical control he attributes to the word and the affective, rather than analytic, possibilities which he inevitably explores in his own rhetoric. He believed "That there was a strange kind of magick bias, which good or bad names, as he called them, irresistibly impress'd upon our characters and conduct" (I.xix. 50). Here we find one of those problems which Locke had encountered: with what validity can one hypothesize a fixed core of meaning that is somehow separable from the relativity of a word's contextual definition and implication? Walter's suspicion of the name "Tristram" arises partially from ignorance. He considers the name's proper derivation, but he recollects erroneously the nature of the men who had answered to it historically by overlooking the great medieval hero who bore it: "… he says there never was a great or heroic action performed since the world began by one called Tristram nay he will have it, Trim, that a man can neither be learned, or wise, or brave …" (IV.xviii.295).

It is precisely because of Walter's attitude that Tristram's name comes to exert an influence upon the boy's conduct and character. Sterne knew what Locke felt but would not accept: that language, when considered in a psychological context, could assume a frightening life and power of its own. While it held great promise as the tool of social intercourse, the implementation and perhaps basis of man's ability to reason, its rich potentialities concealed many traps. Of these, Walter is frequently a victim. He is presented as a practitioner of language, a rhetorician, an orator: "He was certainly irresistible, both in his orations and disputations; he was born an orator; Theodidaktos. Persuasion hung upon his lips, and the elements of Logick and Rhetorick were so blended up in him,—and, withall, he had so shrewd a guess at the weaknesses and passions of his respondent, that NATURE might have stood up and said, "This man is eloquent" (I.xix.51-2). But Walter's skill is intuitive, not conscious or rational: "… it was a matter of just wonder … that a man who knew not so much as the names of his tools, should be able to work after that fashion with 'em" (I.xix.53). Thus we have the paradox of the scholar or academician whose oratory springs from an intuitive ability and has an emotional appeal, but is no more based upon reason than are his fanciful systems, the children of a fertile and eccentric imagination. For Walter, argument is a game in which substance is made subordinate to method. It involves the assumption and acting out of various roles, as in his disagreement with Mrs. Shandy about the attendance of a midwife at the birth of his second child, "when he had done arguing the matter with her as a Christian, and came to argue it over again with her as a philosopher …" (II.xix.146). Walter's love of language—indeed, his addiction to forms of expression—is carried to its extreme and paradoxical end with his theory of the auxiliary verb, a parody of Aristotle's ten categories. Walter rejects the metaphor, prize of wit and imagination, the sine qua non of his own technique. Instead he suggests: "Now the use of the Auxiliaries is, at once to set the soul a going by herself upon the materials as they are brought her; and by the versability of this great engine, round which they are twisted, to open new tracts of enquiry, and make every idea engender millions" (V.xlii.405). The word, therefore, becomes father to the idea and restricts and determines the form of reality.

This odd impracticality, the ironic result of an attempt to achieve accuracy of thought and expression, is only one example of the conflict between the theoretical and the practical that frustrates and typifies Walter's life. His concoction of grandiose, abstract theories is linked most frequently to an inability to understand and control his own motivations and actions. Thus, his concern for money and reputation, in addition to a more honorable interest in the well-being of his family, motivates his opposition to his wife's confinement in the city. It is not surprising that he would rationalize his motives, but his rationalization is resourceful beyond any reasonable expectation. He attributes his refusal to a fear that the state would eventually collapse as a result of the movement of men and money to the city. And even here his altruism is brought into question as he expresses his concern for the demise of the squirearchy (I.xviii.47). Any matter that piques his intellectual curiosity causes him to sacrifice the concrete requirements of his family to the more abstract delights of the mind. He gleefully plays a practical joke on Dr. Slop, revealing the fit forms of swearing by having Slop read a form of the excommunication of the Roman Church. Meanwhile his wife lies in bed, awaiting the doctor's obstetrical services (III.xi. 171-79). Similarly, Walter becomes immediately and passionately involved in the pedantic foolishness of the visitation dinner and forgets that he has come in order to change Tristram's name, the retention of which, he feels, invites certain doom (IV.xxix.326). He is a man with well-developed opinions about door hinges, but he has never bothered to oil that one which is an eternal problem to him, although "… three drops of oyl with a feather, and a smart stroke of a hammer, had saved his honour for ever" (III.xxi.203). How then can we or Mrs. Shandy be surprised when, hearing from Obadiah the news of his son's circumcision, he returns from a hurried trip upstairs, not with bandages and medicine, but with Spencer de Legibus Hebrceorum Ritualibus and Maimonides (V.xxvii.384).

This unusual conflict between abstract interests and practical concerns frequently expresses itself in a dichotomy of emotion and reason—the most dehumanizing aspect of Walter's character. One is disquieted by Walter's blithe inquiry: "What is the character of a family to an hypothesis? … Nay, if you come to that—What is the life of a family …" (I.xxi.69). Involved as he is in the excitement of his own ideas, he is able to see his wife only as an object, a piece of personal property whose functions, abilities, interests, and life itself are defined as they relate to him. "It is very strange … that my wife should persist … in trusting the life of my child … to the ignorance of an old woman; and not only the life of my child, brother, but her own life, and with it the lives of all the children I might, peradventure, have begot out of her hereafter" (II.vi.99-100).

Walter's responses to incidents which would induce in most people a paroxysm of grief are the deformed offspring of a strangely incongruous and divided spirit. They indicate the extent to which Walter's hobbyhorse is a self-defeating attempt to construct for himself a meaningful reality that bridges isolation and frustration. The funeral oration "My Father's Lamentation" (a compendium of classical mourning literature) in response to Bobby's death, the rhetorical exercise presented on the occasion of Tristram's unexpected circumcision, and his expression of grief by the assumption of a stylized posture when he learns of the crushing of his younger son's nose—all convey Walter's attempts to counter the unexpected and impersonal thrusts of fate with the only controls at his disposal, those of gesture and language. The man seems frequently to disappear behind his contrivance, and it is only rarely that we are allowed to glimpse the emotion that defies formalization. One of these moments is given to us in the image of Walter beside his brother's grave, perceived, presumably, by a more mature Tristram and recalled, therefore, with a fuller degree of consciousness and understanding. "—Where—All my father's systems shall be baffled by his sorrows; and, in spight of his philosophy, I shall behold him, as he inspects the lackered plate, twice taking his spectacles from off his nose, to wipe away the dew which nature has shed upon them—When I see him cast in the rosemary with an air of disconsolation, which cries through my ears,—O Toby! In what corner of the world shall I seek thy fellow?" (VI.xxv.452). Less directly, we are left to detect the strains of emotionality that fairly scream through the intensity of Walter's intellectual attacks and belie the nature of his involvement:

My father had such a skirmishing, cutting kind of a slashing way with him in his disputations, thrusting and ripping, and giving every one a stroke to remember him by in his turn that if there were twenty people in company in less than half an hour he was sure to have every one of 'em against him.

What did not a little contribute to leave him thus without an ally, was, that if there was any one post more untenable than the rest, he would be sure to throw himself into it.… (VIII.xxxiv.588)

Walter is ruled by his fear of spontaneity—a fear that is ironic in a man whose richness of imagination and intensity of spirit do, in fact, militate against the coldness and formality of a purely rational approach. In moments of greatest crisis the numbed philosopher is able to summon expressive forms which give him an illusory sense of controlling the uncontrollable reality. It is before the more ordinary circumstances of his relationships that the defenses crumble and his humanity is exhibited in all of its glorious illogicality and inadequacy.

The consistency of Walter's characterization and the piteousness of his circumstances are most fully revealed through his sexual conflict. It is in the physical functioning of man that Walter finds the most frightening signs of his own vulnerability and the most unhappy possibilities of spontaneous response. Walter's attempts to formalize the spontaneous inevitably end in failure and the attempt changes not only his life, but also the lives of his descendants. Indeed, Tristram's unfortunate fate is largely linked to his father's attitude toward sexuality, which is, one feels, only partially determined by the incapacities of age: "As a small specimen of this extreme exactness of his, to which he was in truth a slave, he had made it a rule for many years of his life, on the first Sunday night of every month throughout the whole year, as certain as ever the Sunday night came,—to wind up a large house-clock which we had standing upon the back-stairs head, with his own hands:—and being somewhere between fifty and sixty years of age … he had likewise gradually brought some other little family concernments to the same period, in order, as he would often say to my uncle Toby, to get them all out of the way at one time, and be no more plagued and pester'd with them the rest of the month" (I.iv.8).

The repressive nature of the Shandys' sexual relationships is the ultimate expression of their inability to relate to one another: "… cursed luck! said he, biting his lip as he shut the door, for a man to be master of one of the finest chains of reasoning in nature, and have a wife at the same time with such a headpiece, that he cannot hang up a single inference within side of it, to save his soul from destruction" (II.xix.147). But, more than this, Walter's final, bitter repudiation of the sexual act reveals its importance to him as an instance of the natural, spontaneous, and emotional elements in man which prove his animality and balance his spiritual and rational aspirations. "—That provision should be made for continuing the race of so great, so exalted and godlike a Being as man I am far from denying—but philosophy speaks freely of every thing; and therefore I still think and do maintain it to be a pity, that it should be done by means of a passion which bends down the faculties, and turns all the wisdom, contemplations, and operations of the soul backwards a passion, my dear, continued my father, addressing himself to my mother, which couples and equals wise men with fools, and makes us come out of caverns and hiding-places more like satyrs and four-footed beasts than men" (IX.xxxiii.644-45).

It is, then, his refusal to recognize the needs of his own nature, and his inability to reconcile the practical demands of a contradictory, obscure, and frequently illogical world with the strivings of his soul and mind, that make of Walter a tragi-comic figure. Tristram's plea is well-founded: "Will not the gentle reader pity my father from his soul? to see an orderly and well-disposed gentleman, who tho' singular, yet inoffensive in his notions, so played upon in them by cross purposes;—to look down upon the stage, and see him baffled and overthrown in all his little systems and wishes; to behold a train of events perpet, ually falling out against him, and in so critical and cruel a way, as if they had purposedly been plann'd and pointed against him, merely to insult his speculations" (I.xix.55-56). But still, while Walter seems doomed to suffer all the agonies of a cruelly impervious fate, his suffering is actually the absurd result of his absurdly limited vision. The unfortunate incidents which fill his life—as slight as the misnaming of one of his sons, as important as the death of the other—are all equally diminished by the nature of the consciousness which defines them. It is rather his isolation that achieves a tragic dimension: an isolation that grows from the disparity (we are reminded again of Locke) between the forms of his aspiration and the materials of the empirical world. The individuality of his experience alienates him both from himself—natural functions divided against vain strivings—and from others, who are also unique and also lonely.

Tristram.—In Tristram, Sterne gives us a new version of the paradox that plagues Walter. The father's fascination with processes of thought becomes in the son a preoccupation with the functioning of wit. Both would control and make meaningful the forms of reality with their particular methods of perception and expression. Both are defeated by the subjective limitations of imagination. On the level of action and communication they are rendered impotent.

Tristram makes it quite clear, at the well-known opening of his story, that his physical and intellectual endowments were thoughtlessly determined at the very moment of his conception: "I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider'd how much depended upon what they were then doing; that not only the production of a rational Being was concern'd in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind; and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost …" (I.i.4). As if the absurdity of his begetting were not a sufficiently negative force in the determination of his life, Tristram goes on to describe himself as a fool of Fortune, whose life has been filled not with great evils but with "pitiful misadventures and cross accidents" (I.v.10). It is with the descriptions of these misfortunes and accidents that the first six volumes are primarily concerned.

It must be noted, however, that Tristram's version of the catastrophic circumstances of his conception rests upon a favored theory of his father. Similarly, the effect on his life of the small misfortunes and accidents which are treated as critical milestones in his development can be largely attributed to passionate attitudes, communicated passionately to him. In short, it is in the subtly created relationship of the father to the son that we find the real roots of Tristram's own development.

Walter's beliefs and aspirations are determining factors, not because they have reference to a validating reality, but because they become in themselves versions of reality, positive causes of action. Nowhere is this clearer or more important than in the influence of Walter's name theory upon Tristram's life: its determination of the limits of Tristram's aspirations and the ironic forms of his failure. Trismegistus is the name that Walter carefully chooses for his son. Tristram is the name the child is mistakenly given. "But, of all the names in the universe, he had the most unconquerable aversion for TRISTRAM;—he had the lowest and most contemptible opinion of it of anything in the world——thinking it could possibly produce nothing in rerum naturd, but what was extreamly mean and pitiful …" (I.xix.55). It is toward Trismegistus, the Egyptian god of fertility, inventor of writing, creator of language, reckoner of time, that the youngest of the Shandy males must eternally strive.⁴ Like Sisyphus, he will come repeatedly within a hair's breadth of success, only to meet defeat—as Tristram: his life molded by the name chosen but not given, molded by Walter's prenatal expectations and postpartum disappointment. But, as with Sisyphus, the absurdity of his situation will contain within it the seeds of an ironic success that is part, not of the result, but of the effort.

Tristram does recognize, to some extent, the strength of Walter's influence upon him. For example, when he speaks of the muddle into which he has gotten both the reader and himself while trying to unify the diverse parts of his story, he explains: "—But 'tis my father's fault; and whenever my brains come to be dissected, you will perceive, without spectacles, that he has left a large uneven thread, as you sometimes see in an unsaleable piece of cambrick, running along the whole length of the web, and so untowardly, you cannot so much as cut out a ** … or a fillet, or a thumbstall, but it is seen or felt—(VI.xxxiii.462-63). Like Walter, Tristram is not attracted to an idea because of its relevance. The smallest association is sufficient to stimulate him and, once stimulated, he is engrossed by the possibilities for its development. Thus, after he presents Locke's explanation of the failure of the understanding to retain impressions and illustrates it in the little scene involving Dolly and the sealing wax, he acknowledges: "Now you must understand that not one of these was the true cause of the confusion in my uncle Toby's discourse; and it is for that very reason I enlarge upon them so long, after the manner of great physiologists,-—to shew the world what it did not arise from" (II.ii.86). Although Tristram is able to view his father's obsessive love of systematizing with some degree of objectivity and is clearly unwilling to go to the same extremes in his intellectual commitments, he is unable to resist the lure of an original hypothesis. Speaking of his father's views on swearing, he says: "The hypothesis is, like most of my father's, singular and ingenious too; nor have I any objection to it, but that it overturns my own …" (III.xii.183). In the course of the book he does put forth many hypotheses of his own. They are concerned with such diverse matters as the inability of wit or judgment to develop in a northern climate (III.xx. 196), the cyclical movements of history, with special emphasis on epistemological and cultural areas (I.xxi.64-65), and the advisability of using goat's whey as a cure for impotence and milk coffee to treat consumption (VII.xxx.518).

In general, there is a basic difference between the attitudes of father and son toward themselves, which determines the nature of their intellectual postures. The difference is one of perspective and imagination. While Tristram does share his father's eccentric interests, he is drawn always to the element of wit that is involved in the composition of an idea, rather than to the ramifications of the metaphysical exercise. "I am not such a bigot to Slawkenbergius, as my father; there is a fund in him, no doubt; but in my opinion, the best, I don't say the most profitable, but the most amusing part of Hafen Slawkenbergius, is his tales, and considering he was a German, many of them told not without fancy …" (III.xlii.241). Tristram's acute interest in the possibilities of wit grows from his recognition of relativity as a dominant principle in the subjective universe. This recognition prevents him from committing himself absolutely to any statement or judgment. Like Walter, he delights in setting up a proof that will support a particular hypothesis; but, unlike his father, he is able to discover afterward without difficulty or upset that his hypothesis is somehow irrelevant to the proof (I.xxi.65). Further, this recognition of relativity is closely linked to his poetic and sentimental awareness of the transitory nature of work, life, and love: "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" (IX.viii.610-11).

If Tristram cannot evade his imprisonment in a world without objective certainties, he is able to penetrate many of the mysteries which characterize the isolated positions of its inhabitants. It is part of Tristram's weakness that he is attracted to Walter's hypotheses at the same time that he is aware of their gratuitous nature. It is also an indication of his strength. His consciousness is more inclusive and critical. For him (here he differs from Locke) wit is the superior faculty. He delights in its exercise, in the discovery of paradox, in the revelation of irony. If he frequently cannot differentiate or order, he can (and always does) enjoy the spectacle of a kaleidoscope world whose component parts are endlessly shifting and recombining to present each individual observer with a uniquely formed totality.

Tristram's hobbyhorse is the book he is writing: "What a rate have I gone on at, curvetting and frisking it away, two up and two down for four volumes together, without looking once behind, or even on one side of me, to see whom I trod upon!—I'll tread upon no one,—quoth I to myself when I mounted—I'll take a good rattling gallop; but I'll not hurt the poorest jack-ass upon the road So off I set up one lane down another, through this turn-pike over that, as if the arch-jockey of jockeys had got behind me" (IV.xx.298). To recount his story and offer his opinions is Tristram's way of communicating the nature of his experience. To present it with immediacy is to experience directly as he creates. The only formalism is the arbitrary order imposed by his mercurial wit. Attempting to translate his mode of perception and expression into the major work of his life. Tristram unknowingly reveals the central irony of his position. He would compensate for the externally imposed failures which he must suffer as a man with the self-generated success that he will achieve as an author. "Oh, Tristrain! Tristram! … the credit, which will attend thee as an author, shall counterbalance the many evils which have befallen thee as a man thou wilt feast upon the one—when thou hast lost all sense and remembrance of the other!" (IV.xxxii.337). He defeats his purpose, however, because his work is a truer reflection of his perverse vision than he is able to appreciate. In accordance with his view of the world as a half-mad system of arbitrary relationships, Tristram obligingly dons a fool's cap in which to face his audience,⁵ although he does, on occasion, insist upon the real presence, the face behind the fool's grin: … if I should seem now and then to trifle upon the road, or should sometimes put on a fool's cap with a bell to it, for a moment or two as we pass along, don't fly off,—but rather courteously give me credit for a little more wisdom than appears upon my outside …" (I.vi.l1). He is so dominated by the cheerful, exaggerated inconsistency of his licentious wit that his art becomes merely another facet of his determination. The control, as we shall see, is Sterne's. The failure is Tristram's. His curious, confusing relationship with the reader, his exuberant enjoyment of baroque rhetoric, his love of paradox, and his indulgence in verbal practical jokes all combine to make a seeming mockery of artistic form.

In a curious way, then, the dichotomies which plague Walter are oddly transmuted in Tristram. Walter's delight in the functioning of mind becomes in the more aware Tristram an enjoyment of the possibilities of wit. Walter's adherence to rationality carries him into an abstract world that has no parallel in reality. Tristram's creation of paradox provides us with linguistic and intellectual patterns that comment upon reality while trapping us in the limitations of his subjective and eccentric awareness. As Walter's obsession with reason causes his denial of spontaneity, Tristram's love of the metaphorical defies the exertion of control and makes a great irony of his central purpose—to know and explain. Both escape into an area in which action and expression are deprived of their effectiveness.

Yorick.—Between Walter and Tristram stands Yorick, the third and most firmly grounded "man of reason," who suggests still another possibility for the functioning of the rational mind, and another ironic example of frustration and disappointment. Since Tristram, as the narrator, functions largely outside of the novel's action, and since the nature of his relationship with the reader prevents him from being completely reliable as a reporter, Yorick is useful in providing a norm against which the other characters can be measured. When Yorick meets the effete or unnatural, his response is pure practicality: "I wish, Yorick, said my father, you had read Plato; for there you would have learnt that there are two LOVES—I know there were two RELIGIONS, replied Yorick, amongst the ancients one——for the vulgar, and another for the learned; but I think ONE LOVE might have served both of them very well" (VIII.xxxiii.587). He meets the abstract with a similar kind of parry: "I wish there was not a polemic divine, said Yorick, in the kingdom; one ounce of practical divinity—is worth a painted ship load of all their reverences have imported these fifty years (V.xxviii.387). In short, Yorick's hatred of the hypocritical, his ability to penetrate and undermine affectation, his commonsense and uncompromised values, and his clearsightedness in a world that seems always to be viewed in distorting mirrors, are all attributes which make him an effective commentator able to introduce a note of reason, although he is unable to effect any change in events or personality.

It is through his identification of both Tristram and Yorick with the figure of the jester that Sterne draws the closest parallel between them. As jesters they share a love of laughter, a sense of the absurd, a verbal dexterity and lively wit, a dislike of all that is not honest, and a recognition of individual eccentricity and social affectation. Further, both are raised to a level of tragi-comic seriousness and given universal reference by their closeness to death: Tristram's omnipresent sense of a fatal illness and, therefore, of the transitory; the association of Yorick with Hamlet's fool, who is himself a symbol of the impermanence of human values. There is an important difference here, however, for Tristram and Yorick are both types of the wise fool whose mockery masks sense. Tristram alone is victimized by his own wit.

As with all the central characters of Tristram Shandy, Yorick's personality is organized around a basic irony, a tension between the abstract and practical levels of behavior. Those qualities which seem most admirable make him vulnerable to the senseless malice of the community: "… it was his misfortune all his life long to bear the imputation of saying and doing a thousand things of which (unless my esteem blinds me) his nature was incapable. All I blame him for or rather, all I blame and alternately like him for, was that singularity of his temper, which would never suffer him to take pains to set a story right with the world, however in his power.… he ever looked upon the inventor, the propagator and believer of an illiberal report alike so injurious to him, he could not stoop to tell his story to them—and so trusted to time and truth to do it for him" (IV.xxvii.324). In his alienation from his congregation he becomes the very antithesis of the successful pastor: full of humanity and good will that cannot be communicated or implemented, the ineffectual and increasingly sceptical shepherd of a rebellious flock.

However, the bulk of responsibility lies not with Yorick himself but with the community, which can neither understand nor appreciate him. What they construe as Yorick's pride is revealed to be rare objectivity and modesty. Rather than disclose a flattering truth about himself, Yorick prefers to appear as a figure of low comedy: "His character was, he loved a jest in his heart—and as he saw himself in the true point of ridicule, he would say, he could not be angry with others for seeing him in a light, in which he so strongly saw himself…" (I.x.19). Similarly, his "wild way of talking" is revealed to be little more than good commonsense, and his chief indiscretion is an honesty that will not be compromised: "In a word, tho' he never sought, yet, at the same time, as he seldom shun'd occasions of saying what came uppermost, and without much ceremony; he had but too many temptations in life, of scattering his wit and his humour, his gibes and his jests about him.—They were not lost for want of gathering" (I.xi.27).

Yorick shares Tristram's critical awareness, his perception of paradox, his psychological acumen. But he is not limited by Tristram's obsessive concern with ambiguity. His associations and his style are controlled and direct. Therefore, he cannot, like the brothers Shandy, be betrayed by the subjectivity within, by a disparity between his aspirations and his means of achieving them. It is for this reason that Yorick has no need of a hobbyhorse; his mount is real, if pathetic. Instead, he is betrayed by the subjectivity without—a victim of the relativity and fallibility of opinion and judgment. Although Yorick can meaningfully organize his own perceptions, these have no effect on the behavior of others. For the majority, appearance (variously perceived) is reality. It is Yorick's comprehension of the values that belie appearance that is the cause of his estrangement from the community which he would serve.

Toby.—Although none of the other characters is idealized in the way that Yorick is, there are others who, with Tristram, share Yorick's corrective function. For Sterne, a simple commonsense perspective is the sine qua non that can cut through illusion and hypocrisy. To the extent that they possess this kind of perspective, both Toby and Trim contain within themselves an antidote to their own eccentricities, a corrective of total obsession. Toby's intuitive responses ground him in the matter at hand. Because he is dominated by his emotions, which are in turn stimulated by the particular event, his attention, once fixed, is tenacious. His mind rejects the more tortuous paths of abstraction which delight the sophisticated intelligence. Thus, when he attends the visitation dinner with his brother, so that they may determine the possibility of changing Tristram's name, he and Yorick are alone in remembering their purpose. His naive directness and modesty contrast sharply with the Scholastics' self-concerned quibbling over problems of legality, church history, and semantics. When Toby learns that the members of the court had ruled unanimously that the Duchess of Suffolk was not of kin to her own child, he asks a question that a concern for human values necessitates, a simple question that indicates with naive curiosity the absurdity of applying abstract reasoning to fundamental human issues: "And what said the duchess of Suffolk to it? said my uncle Toby" (IV.xxix.330). It is essentially the same as his response to Walter's attempts at recounting the various reasons suggested by philosophers to explain short and long noses: "There is no cause but one … why one man's nose is longer than another's, but because that God pleases to have it so" (III.xli.240).

But for all of Toby's directness, he cannot keep himself from becoming involved in one of the most puzzling paradoxes of the Shandy's altogether puzzling universe. Expressed through his hobby-horsical love of military campaigns, this involvement is the most extreme sign of his inability to function in any but a subjective world. He is not tempted by the elaborate, abstract exercises of reason, and is not even able to use logical concepts to explain that kind of experience which does not directly impinge upon his own. For this reason he can only communicate on a limited, primarily intuitive level. The only kind of experience with which he is equipped to deal is that which refers to fundamental human emotions. Thus his wisdom is nurtured on simplicity and develops from an absolute inability to comprehend multiplicity. This differs substantially from the sophisticated, philosophical awareness that is Yorick's.

There is never any question about Toby's humanity. His possession of this quality is established early in the novel when we are allowed to hear him addressing an imprisoned fly: "I'll not hurt a hair of thy head:——Go, says he, lifting up the sash, and opening his hand as he spoke, to let it escape; go poor devil, get thee gone, why should I hurt thee?—This world surely is wide enough to hold thee and me" (II.xii.1 13). The story of Le Fever provides us with indisputable proof of his benevolence, as it does of his loyalty, tenderness, optimism, and total susceptibility. Taken together they explain Hazlitt's observation that "uncle Toby is one of the finest compliments ever paid to human nature."⁶ Taken together they also underscore the paradox of Toby's hobby: the obsession of a man of love with the forms and procedures of war. Like all of the Shandy obsessions, his contains an element of the universal. Toby himself hints at this in his odd explanation of belief that the ox is a more suitable animal than the bull to stand symbolically with woman as the founder of society: "For when the ground was tilled, said my uncle Toby, and made worth inclosing, then they began to secure it by walls and ditches, which was the origin of fortification" (V.xxxi.391). Toby does recognize that war is a fundamental expression of some basic biological need: "If, when I was a school-boy, I could not hear a drum beat, but my heart beat with it——was it my fault?—Did I plant the propensity there?—did I sound the alarm within, or Nature?" (VI.xxxii.460). But his recognition is marvelously limited: marvelous in its human misunderstanding and in its self-deception, for Toby's justification of his obsession is a brilliant network of truth and falsity, of petty detail and grand concern. It is a sincere and flawed attempt to make intelligible the classically obscure relationship of ends and means. It is a testimony to the thoroughness of the paradox, the intensity of the conflict between the illusion and the reality. Questioned about the way in which man is shaped for the terrors of war, Toby responds: "—But why did you not add, Yorick,—if not by NATURE—that he is so by NECESSITY?—For what is war? what is it, Yorick, when fought as ours has been … upon principles of honour what is it, but the getting together of quiet and harmless people, with their swords in their hands, to keep the ambitious and the turbulent within bounds? And heaven is my witness, brother Shandy, that the pleasure I have taken in these things, and that infinite delight, in particular, which has attended my sieges in my bowling green, has arose within me, and I hope in the corporal too, from that consciousness we both had, that in carrying them on, we were answering the great ends of our creation" (VI.xxxii.462).

The most striking part of Toby's defense lies in its conclusion: in the confusion of the game with its object. Indeed, it is the extent to which Toby is unable to differentiate between the two, the extent to which one becomes a complete substitute for the other, that makes Toby's obsession so fascinating and invests it with a psychological validity of its own. Toby's explanation of his motivations and his description of the development of his interest suggest that the grimmest aspects of war have been repressed in much the same way that he has escaped from an awareness of his wound. In a sense, the affliction of his wound represents the only infusion of the ideal with the real—in this case, a physical fact that cannot be denied.

Significantly, it is not Toby's instinct for life that restores his health. His wound, a scar from the contact of mind and body with the undeniable fact of war, is healed when the reality is made acceptable: when it is, in effect, sublimated. "The desire of life and health is implanted in man's nature; the love of liberty and enlargement is a sister-passion to it: These my uncle Toby had in common with his species;—and either of them had been sufficient to account for his earnest desire to get well and out of doors; but I have told you before that nothing wrought with our family after the common way;—and from the time and manner in which this eager desire shew'd itself in the present case, the penetrating reader will suspect that there was some other cause or crotchet for it in my uncle Toby's head …" (II.iv.92). The cause is Trim's creation of a game that has all the fascinations of war, drawing its inspiration, progress, and form from actual campaigns, but sharing none of war's horrors. It is, in effect, a concretization of the meaning which war has always had for Toby. And the soldier's fidelity to (as well as Tristram's description of) the smallest details having to do with the accoutrements and techniques of battle gives the illusion its reality for both Toby and the reader. At the same time, the irony of the exquisite complications of warfare—the rational control of that which is a sign of man's irrationality—is underlined.

Of course, the irony is always reciprocal. If reality gives the lie to Toby's illusion, that illusion—harmless in the protected quiet of the bowling green—accentuates the questionable concomitants of his noble utterances: "… the knowledge of arms tends so apparently to the good and quiet of the world—and particularly that branch of it which we have practised together in our bowling-green, has no object but to shorten the strides of AMBITION, and intrench the lives and the fortunes of the few from the plunderings of the many …" (IX.viii.609-10). Although Toby's wholehearted, childish immersion in his hobby has its delightful side, there is a more menacing aspect to it in his dependence for the continuation of his play upon the continuation of actual combat and in his sorrow at the signing of the Peace of Utrecht.

It is further significant that when the regrettable peace forces Toby to turn from the delights of war, it is by the lures of love that he is tempted.⁷

—No more was he to dream, he had fixed the royal standard upon the tower of the Bastile, and awake with it streaming in his head.

—Softer visions,—gentler vibrations stole sweetly in upon his slumbers; the trumpet of war fell out of his hands,—he took up the lute, sweet instrument! of all others the most delicate! the most difficult!—how wilt thou touch it, my dear uncle Toby? (VI.xxxv.466)

That his immersion in military affairs had been a substitute for romance is suggested by this comparison of Toby, about to embark on his bowling-green adventure, with an ardent lover: "Never did lover post down to a belov'd mistress with more heat and expectation, than my uncle Toby did, to enjoy this self-same thing in private" (II.v.98).

Toby's new excursion into romance with the Widow Wadman serves the same purpose as his experimentation with the war games. They represent different expressions of the same impulse and, just as the complications of the game offered an escape from the harsher realities of the wound, so too with the maneuvers of love. Unfortunately for Toby, it is not as easy with the Widow Wadman to cloak the reality in the illusion. In the first place, he is not as familiar with the rules and procedures of this contest: "… he knew not (as my father had reproach'd him), so much as the right end of a Woman from the wrong, and therefore was never altogether at his ease near any one of them—unless in sorrow or distress; then infinite was his pity …" (IX.iii.602-603). In the second place, the game cannot be played for an extended period of time. The campaign is brief and the victor is expected to claim his reward. Just as Toby does not want the rewards of war—he bemoans the signing of the treaty, for it means that the reality must deny the illusion—neither does he wish to claim the reward of this other combat, sexual fulfillment. His wound, the only reality with which Toby must cope although he will never fully comprehend it, hinders him and negates the possibility of sublimation. When the crisis arrives he can only sidestep the issue and withdraw. When asked his reasons for wishing to marry, he replies, "They are written … in the Common-Prayer Book" (IX.xxv.634). Finding himself put off by the Widow's indelicate concern, he trades the new hobby for the old pleasures and proceeds to read about the Siege of Jericho (IX.xxv.635). The frustrations, tragic as well as comic, are inherent in the paradox of his situation.

Toby and Walter.—As we have observed with regard to Walter and Tristram, the hobbyhorse can be seen as a result of the individual's method of perceiving and his mode of expression. In other words, it provides the bridge between the world of thought and the world of action. The confidence in the power of wit and reason which is shared by Tristram and his father extends also to their love of rhetoric, their fascination with forms of expression. Both interests are reflected in their "hobbyhorsical" preoccupations. Toby, on the other hand, is not a man of thought and expression. He is rather the man of feeling and action. With significant irony Sterne interrupts Toby, in his first dramatic scene, after Toby has repeated the words "I think … I think." He is left gesturing mutely with his pipe as Tristram begins a long digression (I.xxi.63), and is picked up later when the long pause is lamely concluded: "I think, replied he,—it would not be amiss, brother, if we rung the bell" (II.vi.99).

Toby's early love of the military reflects his adherence to simple, formularized values as well as his desire to express himself directly through action. Sustaining his wound, he is not only forced into contact with a harsh, irrefutable reality, but is also, in his attempt to describe clearly the place and circumstances of his mishap, forced to rely upon language and abstract reasoning: "… the many perplexities he was in, arose out of the almost insurmountable difficulties he found in telling his story intelligibly, and giving such clear ideas of the differences and distinctions between the scarp and the counterscarp, the glacis and covered way,——the half-moon and ravelin, as to make his company fully comprehend where and what he was about" (II.i.82). In a sense, it is his inability to master language that is responsible for the perpetuation of his sickness. As Tristram explains: "T'was not by ideas,——by heaven! his life was put in jeopardy by words" (II.ii.87). His hobby is born from his lack of verbal success, and with his new-found approximation of action comes also an approximation of health. Still, when he attempts to function anywhere beyond this play world of soldiers and campaigns, when he attempts to communicate with anyone whose interests and responses differ to any extent from his own, he faces the same acute problems. Because of the polar differences that exist in Toby's and Walter's perceptions of the world, their relationship emphasizes the propensities and weaknesses of each.

It is necessary to recognize the depth of feeling, the good will and common sympathy, that exists between the two brothers. Typical is Toby's immediate response to Trim's explanation of the Widow Wadman's repeated inquiries into the nature of his wound: "—Let us go to my brother Shandy's, said he" (IX.xxxi.643). Nor is Walter's attachment to Toby any less strong. "He was, however, frank and generous in his nature;——at all times open to conviction; and in the little ebullitions of this subacid humour toward others, but particularly toward my uncle Toby, whom he truly loved; he would feel more pain, ten times told (except in the affair of my aunt Dinah, or where an hypothesis was concerned) than what he ever gave" (II.xii.1 14). But Toby is as little able to overcome the pressure of Walter's rhetoric to discover his meaning as he is able to overcome the narrowness of his own associations. And the nature of Toby's customary response is a constant cause of disturbance to Walter: "… it is one of the most unaccountable problems that ever I met with in my observations of human nature, that nothing should prove my father's mettle so much, or make his passions go off so like gun-powder, as the unexpected strokes his science met with from the quaint simplicity of my uncle Toby's questions" (III.xli.239). Even when Walter vows that he will never again tease his brother about his hobbyhorse, his own language—reflecting the irresistible attraction that the subject has for him—undercuts the force of his intention. "May my brains be knock'd out with a battering ram or a catapulta, I care not which, quoth my father to himself, if ever I insult this worthy soul more" (III.xxiv.212). When the brothers do respond to one another's pronouncements, the cause can always be traced to a misinterpretation growing out of a private association. Thus Walter, at one point, becomes interested in Toby's discussion of fortification because he finds in it ripe ground for a dissertation upon trade (II.xiv.1 17-18). Or Toby wrongly defines a word when there is more than one possible meaning that could be assigned to it. "'Tis a pity, said my father, that truth can only be on one side, brother Toby, considering what ingenuity these learned men have all shewn in their solutions of noses.—Can noses be dissolved? replied my uncle Toby" (III.xli.239). But more often than not Toby merely provides Walter with a convenient presence at which he can philosophize. Unhappily Walter is doomed to be a teacher who cannot teach since Toby is the student incapable of learning.

The irony of their relative positions is continually emphasized by the effect which each unconsciously achieves, an effect that seems frequently to stand in direct contradiction to the one intended or expected. It is with good reason that uncle Toby is compared to the Cynic philosopher Diogenes, who refuted the arguments of Zeno against motion: "… the Philosopher would use no other argument to the sceptic, who disputed with him against the reality of motion, save that of rising up upon his legs, and walking a-cross the room …" (I.xxiv.78). For the irrefutable simplicity of Toby's commonsense response seems often to contain more relevance, more meaning, more profound intuition, than all of Walter's elaborate theorizing.

As the antients agree, brother Toby, said my father, that there are two different and distinct kinds of love, according to the different parts which are affected by it the Brain or Liver—I think when a man is in love, it behoves him a little to consider which of the two he is fallen into.

What signifies it, brother Shandy, replied my uncle Toby, which of the two it is, provided it will but make a man marry, and love his wife, and get a few children. (VIII.xxxiii.585-86)

Of course, there is another, deeper irony here that is inherent in the nature of their lives. Walter, despite his analytical and rational approach, has married and begotten children, while Toby, although not lacking in feelings proper to his sex, seems doomed to a childless bachelorhood. It is but another example of the illusory and deceptive effect of language in its tenuous relation to thought and its more tenuous relation to reality.

Similarly, Toby's gestures, his facial expressions, his habit of whistling Lillabullero "when anything shocked or surprised him; but especially when any thing, which he deem'd very absurd, was offered" (I.xxi.69), all declare the impotence of language, its in feriority to a more delicate and subtle method of communication. Meaning shines through the intuitive response while it is hidden beneath the obliquity of the complex, carefully planned utterance.

Trim.—Trim and Toby's relationship offers the only example of communication on an explicitly verbal as well as a mute, intuitive level. The irony of their relationship consists of the domination of master by servant, for although Toby frequently acts as a kindly guardian to Trim, gently reprimanding his lapses of taste, it is Trim who draws the pattern for their lives and emerges as the stronger, more lucid of the two. Trim is more consistent than any of the Shandys. He is not ruled so much by an obsession as he is by a kindly understanding of his master's needs and a sincere concern for the practice of basic moral and humanitarian precepts.

Although it is true that Trim is willing to mount Toby's hobby-horse and share with him a total imaginative immersion in the minutiae of their play battles, one does not feel that he is as deeply committed. He delights in his own inventiveness in working out the details of their game, and he is not immune to the delights of play, but his real interest is in his master's well-being. His purpose is therapeutic; when one form of therapy becomes impractical, he throws himself without regret into the development of the next possibility, the romance with the Widow Wadman.

If Trim could be said to have a hobbyhorse of his own, it would be this: "The fellow lov'd to advise,—or rather to hear himself talk…" (II.v.95). Trim is an orator, and because he is a subtle mixture of the intuitively artful and the intuitively artless, he functions as a foil for both Toby and Walter. A central irony of his characterization grows out of the paradox developed between art and nature.⁸ Trim is the natural orator whose instinct approximates art. Nevertheless, he is unable to differentiate art from nature and can only comprehend fiction when it is reduced to concrete terms. He resorts, as does Toby, to the use of gesture and posture in order to express himself; but while Toby's dependence is clearly the result of impotence before language, Trim's bears the force of intention. Asked for an opinion, he formally arranges himself in a particular attitude before replying: "Prithee Trim, said Yorick, without staying for my father's leave,—tell us honestly—what is thy opinion concerning this self same radical heat and radical moisture? … The corporal put his hat under his left arm, and with his stick hanging upon the wrist of it, by a black thong split into a tassel about the knot, he marched up to the ground where he had performed his catechism; then touching his under jaw with the thumb and fingers of his right hand before he opened his mouth, he delivered his notion thus" (V.xxxviii.400). But his knowledge of the gesture which can most effectively be employed, the posture which can most eloquently be assumed, is intuitive. It is prompted by his fine sense of the dramatic and facilitated by a matter-of-fact acceptance of his own body.

Trim's rhetoric—indeed his whole method of approaching and interpreting the objective world—is characterized by his commonsense perspective, literalness, and lack of imagination. Unlike Walter, he is never led astray by a richly fabricating wit or a playful fancy. Trim tends always to particularize the abstract and translates everything into experiential terms. He is unable to differentiate between imaginative materials and phenomenological occurrences, although he is himself, in his instinct for rhetoric, presented as an artist. He must submerge the work of art and the theoretical formulation in the chaotic mass of personal experience. His emotional rendering of Yorick's sermon "On Conscience" demonstrates this, just as the responses of Toby, Walter, and Dr. Slop to his reading comprise a statement about their epistemological and aesthetic orientations.

In Walter's and Trim's responses to Bobby's death we are given "two orators … contrasted by nature and education, haranguing over the same bier" (V.vi.359). Walter's route, which proceeds by way of metaphor, reference, and allusion, is a circuitous one, while Trim, we are told, goes "strait forwards as nature could lead him, to the heart" (V.vi.359). His speech is the more effective of the two, for it is not obscured by the oddments of learning. Trim is, in a sense, the ideal orator, for his rhetoric is an expression of the whole man. His eloquence is derived from his conviction of the correctness of his cause and reflects the generosity of his heart and the strength of his values. In this sense he satisfies the classical Platonic rules of oratory. While Walter's primary concerns are intellectual and aesthetic (this is true of his perceptions as well as his mode of expression), Trim's orientation is principally moral. He deals in clear absolutes, never recognizing that more than one meaning may be assigned to a value term. Thus, when Dr. Slop gives his permission for Trim to read the sermon on the grounds that they all take equal risks on which side of the church it is written, Trim replies: "'Tis wrote upon neither side … for 'tis only upon Conscience, an' please your Honours," (II.xvi.120). Trim's naive simplicity does more here to undercut the doctor's position than would a direct attack. He produces a similar effect with similar means when he speaks of the misfortunes of people he has known, while Walter lies prostrated after learning that Tristram's nose has been crushed in the birth process:

O!—these are misfortunes, cried Trim,—pulling out his handkerchief—these are misfortunes, may it please your honour, worth lying down and crying over.

My father could not help blushing. (IV.iv.275)

Trim emerges as a more balanced human being than most of Sterne's other characters. Through his morality and humanity, the world of thought and the world of action are united, and there is no disparity created between his aspiration and the reality against which it is measured. His judgments are not marred by Walter's eccentricities or Toby's unknowing optimism, and both perspective and deliberation mark his actions. That the functioning of his body is as normal as the functioning of his mind and conscience—typified by the same easy acceptance and righteous confidence—is made clear by his relationship with Bridget. Walter, Toby, and Tristram are unable, for a combination of physical and psychological reasons, to allow themselves the satisfactions of normal sexual pleasures. Walter and Toby find their escapes in games of the intellect and the imagination. Tristram finds his in art and in a harmless but frustrated sentimentality.

Thus, on one side we have Toby's unnatural modesty and the Widow Wadman's elaborate machinations as she attempts to discover the extent and significance of Toby's wound. In contrast, we are given Trim's and Bridget's direct acceptance of the real issue. What is illegitimate curiosity in the widow becomes justifiable concern in the maid. The cause, one infers, lies in the readiness of the suitors and the attitudes of the social groups to which they belong: "… 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 miserably here—In pronouncing which he slightly press'd the back of her hand towards the part he felt for—and let it fall" (IX. xxviii.639). Throughout Tristram Shandy, Sterne demonstrates that sexual potency, as an alternative mode of communication, is a function of the whole man, reflecting his capacities and the balance of his faculties. Trim is the most normal of the people who inhabit Tristram's world. The directness of his approach and his firm grounding in the practical and realistic demand the sacrifice of his imagination but allow him to move with physical and intellectual freedom, unhampered by the irrational demands of obsession or the stringent controls of society.

Mrs. Shandy.—At the opposite end of the spectrum stands Mrs. Shandy, who is defined almost exclusively in negative terms: she is Locke's "white paper," unmarred by experience, passive in her perception of the world, seemingly unable to interpret meaningfully or express her impressions, performing her female functions more by accident than through intent. Totally lacking in imagination, she is also without curiosity: "—That she is not a woman of science, my father would say—is her misfortune—but she might ask a question" (VI.xxxix.472). A woman who prefers to remain at home knitting a pair of worsted breeches for her husband rather than joining her family on their Grand Tour, Mrs. Shandy is without ideas or interests and is therefore possessed of few associations, depending upon habit and tradition for her responses. Because her ability to learn is so restricted, she is virtually unable to express herself: "Now she had a way … and that was never to refuse her assent and consent to any proposition my father laid before her, merely because she did not understand it, or had no ideas to the principal word or term of art, upon which the tenet or proposition rolled. She contented herself with doing all that her godfathers and godmothers promised for her—but no more; and so would go on using a hard word twenty years together—and replying to it too, if it was a verb, in all its moods and tenses, without giving herself any trouble to enquire about it" (IX.xi.613).

There are no scenes of greater comic frustration in Tristram Shandy than those which present the dialogues between Tristram's mother and father: "… a discourse seldom went on much further betwixt them, than a proposition,—a reply, and a rejoinder; at the end of which, it generally took breath for a few minutes, (as in the affair of the breeches) and then went on again" (VI.xxxix.472). The patterns of their conversations also contain an elementary paradox. Typically, in the "Bed of Justice" which is held to decide the advisability of putting Tristram into breeches (VI.xviii.437), Mrs. Shandy's continual agreement—intellectual as well as sexual—implies criticism through its passivity. Her extreme flexibility implies a basic, mindless inflexibility and her willingness is tantamount to refusal. In her neutrality, extremes meet and negate one another. Further, their lack of communication extends to sexual matters, and their physical and intellectual incompatibility are reciprocal metaphors. Although they approach their conjugal bed from opposite extremes of temperament and orientation, Walter's accusation of his wife might with justice be applied to him as well: "You never will distinguish, Mrs. Shandy, nor shall I ever teach you to do it, betwixt a point of pleasure and a point of convenience.—This was on the Sunday night;—and further this chapter sayeth not" (VI.xviii. 438-39). The relationship between Mr. and Mrs. Shandy is one of the novel's numerous instances of the difficulties that arise when one attempts to distinguish cause from effect. Their misfortune arises not so much from their own individual circumstances as from the impossibility of combining their two temperaments. Tristram makes it clear that they share—albeit unconsciously—the responsibility for the misfortune of his destiny. "A temperate current of blood ran orderly through her veins in all months of the year, and in all critical moments both of the day and night alike.… And as for my father's example! 'twas so far from being either aiding or abetting thereunto, that 'twas the whole business of his life to keep all fancies of that kind out of her head … And here am I sitting, this 12th day of August, 1766, in a purple jerkin and yellow pair of slippers, without either wig or cap on, a most tragicomical completion of his prediction, "That I should neither think, nor act like any other man's child, upon that very account" (IX.i.600).

Occupying this negative position in terms of potentiality, achievement and aspiration, Mrs. Shandy plays a minor but curiously contemporary and parodic role. Northrop Frye has written in his Anatomy of Criticism: "To the extent that the encyclopaedic form concerns itself with the cycle of human life, an ambivalent female archetype appears in it, sometimes benevolent, sometimes sinister, but usually presiding over and confirming the cyclical movement" (p. 322). Indeed, there is in Mrs. Shandy's presence something of the universal principle of female endurance which persists amid the paradoxes of her position and her personality. She is the woman—the life-force—who remains remote and uninvolved. She is the mother who, in the earliest moments of procreation, flaws the very life she creates because she rejects her own sexuality. She is an absurd Penelope, a silent and frigid Molly Bloom. But within the peculiar, alien demands of her milieu, despite the extraordinary limitations which are imposed upon her from within and without, she does continue to function, and follows, however unenthusiastically, the patterns set down for her.

Sterne seems anxious to convey in his characterization of Mrs. Shandy a sense of an irreducible human quality—purged of all that is meaningful save an inarticulate demand for sympathy: sympathy for her personal situation and for the chaotic collection of circumstances that have created it. It seems important that we are not allowed to see her response to the news of Bobby's death. A strong response would make of her a completely different, more conventional character, and her usual passivity would in this case become intolerable. It is only by maintaining her in neutrality that Sterne can create the polar image that is more limited in its universality but not essentially different from that of all the Shandys.

Sterne follows the same basic technique with his other characters, immersing them in just enough complexity to give them depth while keeping his world sufficiently abstract. In a curious way, the qualities of characterization that are responsible for his realism are responsible also for the abstract universality. These qualities grow out of his awareness of the empiricist paradox and his desire to communicate it in specifically human terms. As we have seen, the hobbyhorse, which expresses the uniqueness of the individual, develops from the control of the external world by the internal economy peculiar to each man. The relation of rational, imaginative, and physical powers determines whether the individual will function principally in a world of intellect, art, action, or instinct; this in turn determines which of the faculties and functions will remain undeveloped and even unused. In such a world, where uniqueness is confirmed by a lack of successful communication, eccentricity must be the rule.

By concentrating upon these basic functions Sterne does, of course, achieve a certain universality in his characterizations, and by keeping outside of the complexities and superficialities of a world that is defined by social values, he cannot avoid a measure of abstraction. Because of the intensely personal nature of each man's response, all gestures toward creating a meaningful, communicable concept are made invalid—all but the attempt itself: the repeated movement outside oneself, the continuation in the face of all frustration and negation.

In some fundamental way, then, Sterne defines his characters as he organizes his structure: through diversity and eccentricity. And his people—much as the form of his book—are subject to the whims and pressures of external forces. Just as they cannot control the world outside of themselves, so too are they unable to determine the course and manner of their own lives. The irony of them all, as we have seen, is the disparity between their aspirations and the reality, their distortions of the world and their delusions about themselves. They are important because they tell us about the nature of the human mind, the nature of the human predicament, the possibility of human salvation. Together their lives compose a pattern which represents universal—not individual—potentiality and limitation. The unity of Tristram Shandy is thematic. Just as the form and structure work to create an image of confusion, so do the characters achieve their definition in isolation and alienation. There are dramatic scenes (vignettes) and the drama of monologue, but there is no progressive dramatic movement. The characters are part of a universal paradox, subject to the ironies that besiege their lives, motivating and defeating them. These ironies are inevitable in a completely subjective world in which neither circumstance nor language can claim absolute reference.…

Notes

¹ "The Character of Herod," in The Sermons of Mr. Yorick, 1:105.

²Sermons, I:211.

³ "The Character of Herod," p. 107.

⁴ M. K. Singleton, in his essay "Trismegistic Tenor and Vehicle in Sterne's Tristram Shandy," relates (albeit not very persuasively) Tristram Shandy to Greek and Latin Trismegistic or Hermetic Literature.

⁵ Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, pp. 231-33, points out that the tradition of the clown derives from the mime plays of antiquity in which the clown's absurd behavior reflected his inability to understand simple logical relationships. The court jester who descended from the MIMUS was characterized by his inverted logic, his use of false syllogisms, free associations, and real or feigned madness.

⁶ Quoted in Alan B. Howes, Yorick and the Critics: Sterne's Reputation in England, 1760-1868, p. 112.

⁷ A. R. Towers, "Sterne's Cock and Bull Story," [in ELH, vol. xxiv (1957)] also discusses the role of displacement in Toby's hobby.

⁸ See William S. Farrell, "Nature vs. Art as a Comic Pattern in Tristram Shandy[,]" [in ELH, vol. xxx (1963)]. Farrell discusses at length the expression of the art-nature paradox in the rhetorical patterns of the novel.