I

Our age likes to define man as a maker of fictions which he uses, legitimately or not, to make himself at home in the world. Man wants to orient himself in time and space, to discover his "whenabouts and whereabouts," and since neither one o'clock nor the boundaries of the state of New Jersey exist in nature, he invents temporal and spatial markers, such fictions as hours and days, latitude and longitude. Thus are established chronology and geography, arts which Uncle Toby tells Trim are essential to soldiers—and, we would add, essential to everyone else as well. Another way men use fictions to make themselves at home in the world is by the construction of narratives, another kind of orienting fiction. An obvious use of narrative is to make fictions of continuity, to show the relationships between separate events. Less obviously, but no less necessary, is the use of narrative for discontinuity, making related events intelligible by disentangling them. It's often been said that Tristram Shandy is a narrative about the nature of narrative. More specifically, I would say that it is an examination of the sloppy way in which less self-conscious narratives connect the discontinuous and disconnect the continuous.

Whether the world is ultimately continuous or discontinuous (or, as is more likely, those categories have meaning only in relation to the human intelligence which uses them), we are often frustrated by the appearance of continuity where we want discontinuity, and vice versa. The celebrated opening of Tristram Shandy examines the assumption that both life and narratives are discontinuous enough for us to be able to isolate a beginning. According to received opinion, both begin at birth; but Sterne shows us what we knew all along but chose to ignore in the interests of making any start at all: that birth is only an episode in a continuum of closely related events. Before the child there is the foetus, and before that the homunculus. And since the narrator's intention is to pursue the ultimate causes for his singular nature, the theme of the opening books being "How I became Tristram Shandy," he must go farther back to such remote but crucial events as his mother's marriage contract, his great-grandmother's jointure, and his uncle's would at the Siege of Namur.

What protects us from the alarming continuity of all phenomena, the "one-damn-thing-after-anothemess" of experience, are such demarcating fictions as "the beginning." Ordinarily we don't inquire into such protective fictions too closely lest we grow dizzy, but Tristram does not fear dizziness. The good doctors of the Sorbonne innocently welcome a technological breakthrough which will allow them to baptize an infant before it emerges from the womb. But Tristram points out that baptism can be carried even a few stages backward in the life of the embryo—"par le moyen d 'une petite canulle, and sans faire aucun tort au père."¹ Tristram is as usual being mischievous; but beyond the mischief lies a real question: at what point does mere germ plasm become an immortal soul capable of salvation or damnation? Puzzles about continuity lead to an analogous question: when does a series of words become deeds? The theologian Didius conjectures about the number and kinds of errors a priest could make in his recital of the baptismal formula before his words would cease to constitute a valid baptism. The abbess of Andouillets and Margarita break "Bouger" into syllables in the hope that halving the venial sin will dilute it into no sin at all. Where we most need a fixed boundary, we are most plagued with continuity, the imperceptible and infinite degrees by which one thing or moment shades off into another. We wish to say this is the first moment of life, or this is the exact moment of death; or (to shift to another dimension where continuity also bedevils us) this is the exact place where the wound was got.

Steme is equally skeptical about the ease with which narratives conveniently give us the continuity we want. When we read most narratives we feel that continuity is natural; one event leads us inevitably to another. Writing and reading a narrative are like travelling along a road, a road that, we hope, is smooth and straight. And maybe even downhill, so that the lucky reader and writer will pick up momentum as they advance. The basic metaphor (a book is a kind of a road) is a favorite with Steme; but he has no use for easily travelled roads. Only fools would want to go the shortest distance between two points in the shortest possible time. His road, as he always reminds us, has twists and turns, with even a roadblock or two. But what most slows down the traveller along Tristram Shandy is the discontinuity of the road. Like the road which goes from two lanes to one, from blacktop to gravel, Sterne's road is always changing—typographically, linguistically, or temporally. Sometimes it is in plain type, sometimes in italics, gothic, or no type at all (the famous mottled, blank, or blackened pages). Usually the road is in English, but sometimes it is in Latin (or alternating Latin and English), or French, or even Italian or Greek. Sometimes we are travelling in 1718, or 1748, or 1695, or any combination of those times.

In the famous engravings of lines and loops which close Volume VI, Sterne has given his map of the road. For all their twists and tums the lines representing the digressions suggest continuity rather than discontinuity, because no matter how curled and looped the squiggles are, the line itself is unbroken. "This" leads to "that" because there is no boundary between "this" and "that." The account of the birth leads to the account of the midwife which leads to Yorick's horse which leads to Yorick's character which leads to Yorick's death. (There's an end, at any rate.) While the digression emphasizes the connectedness of events and of the narrative which relates them, what I will call the interpolation emphasizes the discontinuities in our accounts of events. Where the digression sneaks up on us (the narrator starts talking about one thing and by degrees finds himself talking about something else), the interpolation is sharply set off against what precedes it and what follows it. The interpolation shifts to another kind of language. The main road of 7m-tram Shandy is the language of the autobiographical narrative, but in the interpolation we switch to the language and conventions of the sermon (Volume II), the legal contract (the marriage articles of Volume I), the theological deliberation (the Doctors of the Sorbonne in Volume I), the curse (Volume III), the mock-romance (The Tale of Slawkenbergius in Volume IV or The Fragment on Whiskers in Volume V), the educational handbook (the Tristrapaedia of Volume V), the personal history (Trim's tale of the Fair Beguine in Volume VIII), or the travel book (Volume VII): The road then is heterogeneous, composed of mixed rather than uniform materials.

Another way of putting it is to say that the road is not entirely a new one since it incorporates previous verbal structures. In order to set down the words of Tristram Shandy Tristram/Sterne consulted either genuine documents or actual literary texts, or pretended to consult mock-documents and pseudo-quotations. In the first category are the record of the deliberations of the Doctors of the Sorbonne on the tenth of April in 1738, or the curse of Bishop Emulf (Sterne's footnote attests to the authenticity of both documents). The most important of the "real" documents is the sermon preached at the cathedral church at York in July of 1750. In the second category of actual literary texts are the famous "borrowings" from Rabelais, Burton, Locke, etc. In the third category of the pretended document there are Mrs. Shandy's marriage settlement, Walter's letter to Toby, and the Tristrapaedia. In the fourth category one could put the pretended literary quotation like the Tale of Slawkenbergius or the Fragment Upon Whiskers.

In all four categories Sterne is incorporating printed or written (or ostensibly printed and written) texts into the main narrative. An equally important class of speech which purports to be anterior to the narrative is the speech of the live voice: either the oral recitation of a memorized text, the telling of a tale or a "true" story, or the reading aloud of a written text. Where the written text is associated with Walter, Tristram, and Yorick, the star performer of the oral mode is Trim, who recites the Ten Commandments, who tells (almost) the Story of the King of Bohemia and his Seven Castles, who recounts his own true history in the story of the Fair Beguine, and his brother Tom's in the parallel history of the Sausage-Maker's Widow. For a while it appears that Trim is to be the chosen instrument for the recital of Le Fever's story, but at the crucial moment the narrator remembers that he has left Mrs. Shandy listening at the door. Since Trim likes to hear himself read aloud, he is chosen for the most extended oral performance of all, the reading of Yorick's sermon. Also in the class of reading a written text aloud is Slop's rendition of the curse of Ernulf. A variation of this class is Walter's performance ("half-reading, half-discoursing") of his Tristrapaedia.

The interpolation as I am defining it, then, is an extended and contrasting insertion into the main narrative which actually follows or pretends to follow a preexisting verbal formulation. Of course the premise of any realistic narrative is that it follows pre-existing speech, dialogue being only the record of what "someone" has said. The difference is that in the interpolation "what someone has said" is shaped or controlled even before he has said it. The tale of the King of Bohemia or the story of Le Fever is presumably more or less in Trim's head before he gets the opportunity to begin it: if not the actual words, at least the order of events and the conventions for telling a story. His performance is not unique and spontaneous, but generic and artificial since it is being shaped by "rules"—in this case the rules of story-telling. On this basis any extended speech deliberately cast into a mold by the speaker could be considered an interpolation. Thus we might include Walter's speech on the death of Bobby since it is a deliberate imitation of a classical oration, or Toby's apologetical oration—though perhaps here the conventionality is to be attributed more to the narrator than to the intentions of the speaker.

The interpolation calls our attention to the element of "preformedness," the presence of an independent construction within the larger narrative. In The Poetics of Quotation in the European Novel; Hermann Meyer describes the quotation as "a bit of preformed linguistic property shaped by another"² in the works of such writers as Rabelais, Cervantes, and Steme. What I'm calling the interpolation shows how much of language is "preformed" in a broader sense. The interpolation, unlike the quotation, doesn't necessarily imitate a specific speech act (these words in this order), but the form of a speech act: the sermon, oration, curse, etc. Thus it reminds us of some simple truths about how men speak. We use one master code, the English language, which contains all the rules for syntax and the possibilities of diction from which the individual speaker must choose. Between the total system of the language and the individual utterance, there is another level, what Jakobson calls a "system of interconnected sub-codes," or what Todorov calls "the rules of discourse."³ Speech thus is cast into forms; everything is a manner-of-speaking. Telling a story is not a natural act, a mere automatic recital of what happened: telling and listening to a story mean knowing the rules for following a story.⁴ Men don't just speak the English language—they tell jokes, anecdotes, made-up stories, and "true" stories; they give orations and they give sermons.

II

Tristram Shandy is a book full of many strange things, but perhaps nothing stranger than the appearance of "On the Abuses of Conscience" in Volume II. For one thing, although it is broken into repeatedly, the sermon is given in its entirety, and thus provides one of the few times that the word "FINIS" can appear unequivocally in Tristram Shandy. More surprising is the fact that Sterne should put a sermon into the secular, not to say profane, context of Tristram Shandy. Sermons were something to be delivered in church or to be published separately or as part of a homogeneous collection. They were not (until Steme did so) to be published within a novel. Of course Steme has a great fondness for theological and ecclesiastical material. But in such episodes as the deliberations of the Doctors of the Sorbonne, the curse of Emulf, the tomb of St. Maxima, and the pilgrimage of the Abbess of Andouillets, the lore is drawn from the Church of Rome, which for Steme puts it within the realm of literature—satire. The sermon, however, comes from Sterne's own church and pulpit, making its inclusion a breach of decorum only to be matched by the publication of the collected sermons in the name of Yorick. Both Yorick and his creator are casual about their "used" sermons; one cuts them into strips to light his pipe and the other uses them to fill out the pages of his novel.

Why should Sterne want to include a sermon in Volume II? Why this sermon? The questions are inevitable and, as is usually the case with Steme, lend themselves to a wide variety of answers. It is conventional for a group of characters in early fiction to read an accidentally discovered manuscript in order to pass the time (though it is typical of Steme to insert a sermon into the "slot" where a reader of Cervantes or Fielding might expect to find a romance such as "The Curious Impertinent" or "The Unfortunate Jilt"). We can also relate the themes of the sermon to the themes of Tristram Shandy as a whole, or we can emphasize the kinds of responses that the sermon elicits from the characters.⁵ All of these answers make sense, but I think the best answer is that Steme put in the sermon because he chose to, and that choice is totally arbitrary. To use a fancy word from modern poetics (which already exists in Uncle Toby's critical vocabulary), the appearance of the sermon at this point is contingent. Perhaps habit and critical ingenuity have diminished our capacity to feel the full force of the contingent in Sterne. What is at first surprising and inexplicable may eventually come to seem necessary and even inevitable: How could there be a Tristram Shandy without a complete Anglican sermon somewhere within its first hundred pages? Yet one of Steme's feats as a novelist (or Tristram's as an autobiographer) is his ability to show how any contingency can become part of a pattern, how the apparently discontinuous can be experienced as continuous. But we can't appreciate this feat unless we see fully how arbitrary the inclusion of the sermon is.

In order to emphasize the arbitrariness Steme gives a precise account of the train of events leading up to the discovery and reading of the sermon. The immediate starting point is the thoughts that take place in Toby's head at the moment of Slop's appearance in the Shandy parlor. Toby assumes that Slop's rapid arrival is the effect of Obadiah's summons but one need not be a student of Hume to realize that this is a faulty inference of cause and effect. The un-Humean conclusion leads to a Lockean association of ideas: "Your sudden and unexpected arrival … instantly brought the great Stevinus into my head …" (II, 12; p. 84). We are led from Toby's head to Stevinus, to what the book of Stevinus which Trim has fetched might contain (in the way of chariots) to a sermon stuck between the pages. The sequence, like every other one in Tristram Shandy, is at once totally unpredictable and yet totally intelligible. There is an explanation for everything, though it may take a while to find it. We discover that the sermon is planted between the pages of Stevinus because the author of the sermon had borrowed the volume earlier. Chance has brought them a sermon. Chance has also made it difficult for Walter to make use of Dr. Slop's professional services, but Walter sees that something can be made of the convergence of the Protestant sermon and the Catholic Slop. Because a sermon has been stuck incongruously between the pages of a military treatise, we have the even greater incongruity by which an authentic, mid-century Anglican sermon of mildly Latitudinarian persuasion can find its way into the pages of a novel.

Sterne is, I think, less interested in the contents of "On the Abuses of Conscience" than he is in the fact that it belongs to so highly conventionalized a genre. Though Sterne wouldn't have put it in these terms and would have mocked anybody who did, the question that underlies the whole episode is "What are the formal properties of the sermon as a kind of discourse?" The very first thing noted about the sermon, the means by which Trim identifies it as a sermon rather than a chariot, is a formal feature: "'tis more like a sermon, for it begins with a text of scripture, and the chapter and verse; and then goes on, not as a chariot,—but like a sermon directly" (II, 15; p. 90). Quotation from scripture is a distinctive attribute of the genre, the sermon being that kind of composition which not only takes its point of departure, but also receives its ultimate authority, from the word of God. A sermon is always governed by rules; not only rules for how the text is to be written, but also rules for the circumstances of delivery of the text. In recent years Richard Ohmann has applied J. L. Austin's influential account of "speech acts" to the study of literature. The notion that each kind of speech act has its own rules helps us to see exactly why the sermon episode is so funny. According to Austin, any "illocutionary act" must meet the following criteria if it is to be considered "felicitous": "(1) the participants are qualified and appropriate, (2) the circumstances are right, (3) the verbal component is spoken accurately and completely, (4) the speaker's beliefs and feelings are those required for performance of the act in good faith, and (5) the participants conduct themselves appropriately afterwards."⁶ It is easy to see that Trim's delivery of the sermon is a kind of Art of the Fugue of infelicity. The speaker is not an ordained clergyman, nor is he the author of the text which he is reading. The site is not a church where the participants are worshipping, but the Shandy downstairs parlor where they are killing time. The speaker breaks into tears before he can complete the text and is repeatedly interrupted by his auditors. The speaker undertakes the reading not because he wishes to reform his auditors, but because he likes to hear himself read aloud. The only effect of the sermon is that Slop falls asleep, which may or may not be in accord with the rules of sermons. These various "infelicities" are of course more striking when we realize that in July of 1750 the sermon was part of a felicitous speech act: given by a clergyman in consecrated space before a body of the (one hopes, appreciative) faithful.

To break the rules for sermons is to remind us what those rules ordinarily are. Steme's formal bias, his concern with "the message for its own sake"⁷ is evident, as it is evident throughout all of Tristram Shandy. Sterne contrasts what the sermon usually is with what the sermon can become. It is not one, but four different messages, or four ways of conceiving the relation of sender to receiver. First, there is the original sermon as preached and published by Laurence Sterne, whose auditors and readers would understand it as a serious Anglican sermon. The second kind of message takes place within the fictional world. There it is hard to decide whether the sender is Yorick who wrote the sermon, Trim who reads it, or (more likely) Walter who encourages Trim to read it. Walter's intention is to tease his auditors and thereby divert himself. The third way of analyzing the message takes us outside of the fictional world. At this level the sender is Laurence Steme, novelist, one of whose resources as a novelist is access to the sermons of Laurence Steme, clergyman. The addressee is the reader, who is intended to admire the way a sermon can be used in a novel, and the way in which Sterne can brilliantly anticipate the charges of plagiarism which were to be brought against him. Yes, he says, the preacher Sterne is as much a plagiarist as Sterne the novelist. Both steal from Parson Yorick.

If the first message was sermon as sermon, the second sermon as a way to pass the time, the third sermon as novelist's material, the fourth is sermon as come-on or "puff." Toby says "it does not appear that the sermon is printed, or ever likely to be" (II, 17; p. 95). Toby is wrong three times over as both the contemporary and modern reader cannot help noticing. The sermon was printed in August of 1750, and "is" in print at the very moment the reader scans the text of Tristram Shandy. Moreover, the footnote at this point announces Sterne's further intention of making the sermon part of the collected sermons of Yorick: "That in case the character of Parson Yorick and this sample of his sermons is liked,—that there are now in the possession of the Shandy family, as many as will make a handsome volume, at the world's service …" (II, 19; p. 108). To return momentarily to Austin's fourth rule, one would assume that the "good faith" of the speaker requires his disinterestedness. He should not have any ulterior designs upon his auditors other than his professed one (design enough) of their salvation. Sermons surely are not to be the means by which other sermons are sold. But the sender at the fourth level is the prospective publisher of four volumes of sermons, and the addressee is the original contemporary audience, with, the publisher hopes, a fondness for sermons and an extra guinea or two to spend. With this stroke we are moved from the realm of the sermon or the novel into the real outer world in which the reader lives, breathes, and spends his money.

I have been arguing that the comedy of the sermon episode depends upon Sterne's playing with the rules of discourse. To understand a sermon is to know its particular manner of speaking. This means knowing how its metaphors are to be taken and how it is related to other kinds of speaking such as historical narration. When the sermon evokes the "piteous groan" of a victim of the Inquisition and asks the congregation to "see the melancholy wretch who utter'd it," Trim thinks the wretch is his brother Tom. Trim, Slop, and Walter argue about the proper interpretation of the passage: "I tell thee, Trim, again, quoth my father, 'tis not an historical account,—'tis a description.—'Tis only a description, honest man, quoth Slop, there's not a word of truth in it.—That's another story, replied my father" (II, 17; p. 105). In taking the words literally as a historical account Trim reveals his ignorance of the way figurative language can operate in a sermon. As Walter tells him, the passage is a description, or more precisely, the figure hypotyposis.⁸ It's not Tom but a construct of language, an allegorical abstraction whose cellmates are Mercy, Religion, and Justice.

Toby and Mrs. Shandy have the same kind of difficulty in recognizing a special manner-of-speaking when they listen to Walter's response to the news of Bobby's death. His speech is a neo-classical form of the speech of consolation. Just as the sermon is an intertwining of the words of the sermonizer with the preexisting words of the prophets, apostles, and God, the neo-classical orator mingles his own situation and words with his classical source, producing a conventional double-speaking with which the classically educated gentleman of the eighteenth century would be familiar. Needless to say, this is a code that is unavailable to either Toby or Mrs. Shandy. "Returning out of Asia, when I sailed from Aegina towards Megara, (when can this have been? thought my uncle Toby) …" (V, 8; p. 267). The calendar established by Walter's mode of discourse points to the time when Servius Sulpicius took the trip to which the words refer, the time shortly thereafter when he wrote his letter of consolation to Cicero, the time when Cicero incorporated it into his Epistolae ad Familiares, the "present" time (1719) when Walter speaks those words, and 1761 when Tristram writes those words. But mostly "no year of our Lord" as Walter tells the incredulous Toby. Mrs. Shandy has the same trouble with Walter-as-Socrates' enumeration of "three desolate children."

This same question—how are our coordinates for referring to time and space changed by different kinds of discourse⁹—is raised most explicitly by Trim's attempt to tell the tale of the King of Bohemia. If the events of a story can be said to happen (and that's just what a story seems to assert), then they must be "situatable" in time and in space. Trim and Toby assume that language works in the same way as it does elsewhere. Toby insists that Trim tell exactly when the story takes place, and Trim in his innocence chooses the year 1712. Toby's objection is sound: to have even one giant, as Trim modestly proposes, means that it must be set "some seven or eight hundred years out of harms way" where the teller is safe from the niggling demands of formal realism. But it's not so clear that Toby is right to assume that the date implies all of the historical events of the year. Does 1712 mean that, among other things, the narrative is alluding to the secret agreement by which the Duke of Ormand, commander of the British forces, was prevented from engaging in battle with the French?

And similarly, when Trim says Bohemia, does that automatically mean, whether or not he specifies it, that we are to infer "landlocked" as one of its properties?¹⁰ The means by which Bohemia's geography becomes a part of Trim's tale and finally terminates it illustrates Sterne's formal interest in the rules that regulate telling and listening to a story. Trim is unable to get on with his tale because he and Toby get bogged down in the discussion of the importance of chronology and geography. On his fifth attempt to tell the tale Trim introduces the epithet "unfortunate" to describe the King of Bohemia. I assume that the king was not unfortunate in the original version of the story; he becomes so only the fifth time around, when the frustration of the teller of the tale is attributed to the subject of the tale. When Toby inquires "why unfortunate?" Trim is much too polite to tell the real reason, and so he must invent a reason. Given Bohemia, he makes the inference that the king lives in a landlocked country by the analogous process by which 1712 begets the Duke of Ormand's disgrace. From there it is only a small jump to invent the attribute which will explain "unfortunate": the king's love of navigation. What is "outside" the tale, the map of Bohemia and Trim's frustration as a storyteller, changes the tale—another illustration of the general rule in Tristram Shandy that no system or secondary world (whether it be sermon, tale, or fortification) is uncontaminated by what is outside it.

Toby and Trim are naive in their understanding of how stories work, just as they are naive in their response to the sermon. But at the same time their misunderstandings do reflect ambiguities in the codes themselves. In their own fashion Toby and Trim are puzzling over real questions. We can smile along with Walter over Trim's difficulties with the "naked wretch," or his intention of handing over the crown that Toby will give him to the women and children who are the victims of fanaticism. Although the fanatic and his victims are hypothetical, the sermon is also asserting that there are real people for whom they stand. Within the framework of the sermon real claims are being made about alleged Catholic cruelty in battle and the suffering caused by the Inquisition. In other words, Tom is not on an entirely different plane of reality than the naked wretch of the sermon. Trim has difficulty with the sermon because at this point it is speaking a complex combination of the figurative and literal, the hypothetical and the historical.

Toby and Trim also raise real questions about the construction of stories: To what extent are stories self-enclosed constructions creating their own time, space, and causality, and to what extent are they bound to the pre-existing chronology, geography, and the order of events of the "real" world? The writer can take the map, the almanac of facts, and the calendar of events that constitute history as his necessity, or else he can see them for what they are—contingent because they could be otherwise. And because they could be otherwise, as an artist he is free to imagine them otherwise. Toby objects when Trim confuses the area of his choice with the area in which he is constrained, when he tries to pass off what is necessary as his own free choice. Toby approves of Trim's saying that "the King of Bohemia with his queen might have walk'd out, or let it alone;—'twas a matter of contingency, which might happen, or not, just as chance ordered it" (VIII, 19; p. 437). But when Trim says that there "happening throughout the whole kingdom of Bohemia, to be no sea-port town whatever," Toby argues that Trim is confusing the contingent and the necessary. Bohemia's seacoast is not subject to the control of any narrator. For the pious Toby the primary world is not contingent but providential, the configuration of Europe being such that the inhabitants of Germany do not drown.

For the modern novelist the realm of the contingent is enlarged. It is unlikely to Toby that the seas could overflow into the lowlands of Europe, but Roquentin in Nausea can conceive of the seat of a tram car turning into a donkey's paw. For Roquentin the only necessity is that which he creates within his own narrative. A modern writer is likely to claim more for his sovereignty as a storyteller, insisting upon his right to "re-invent the world," as when the author of Ada bends and warps our spatial and temporal coordinates, grafts the twentieth century onto the nineteenth, and playfully crossbreeds the continents. Such wheeling and dealing with "reality" reflects a willingness to assert the autonomy of narratives.¹¹ A less extreme formulation, more in accord with the conservative spirit of Toby's poetics, is that the novelist works within a dialectic of sovereignty and constraint. Narratives which are totally free or totally bound are uninteresting. Trim discovers that even with the fairy-tale-like King of Bohemia he is still obliged to follow rules.¹²

III

Telling a story or giving a sermon is a very special kind of speaking, and so is writing an extended narrative like Tristram Shandy. which is made up of many manners of speaking. In fashioning so piebald a work Sterne is demonstrating something of the actual linguistic discontinuity of real life in which we shift automatically from one code to another, making our continuities out of patched-together discontinuities. By reminding us of how we are always shifting our coordinates, the interpolation defamiliarizes something which we might otherwise take for granted. In this sense the interpolation is the instrument of Sterne's realism, realism being defined here (following the Russian Formalists' definition of art) as the means by which we are forced out of our customary orientation, those mental habits which familiarize and so cheat us out of the world.

I would assume that it is the goal of realism to enlarge our sense of what can be and therefore what ought to be put into novels: the background noise, the competing messages, the remote circumstances which a tidier narrative would reject as irrelevant. Chekhov showed that people do not speak as consecutively or as intelligibly as the conventions for representing speech on the stage suggest. In a similar way the interpolation enlarges our sense of how men use words. The real subject of Tristram Shandy (and perhaps of all novels—and to that extent Shlovsky's famous claim about its typicality is true) is how men use words. Certainly the main activity of the Shandy family is almost entirely verbal: they talk, read, write, and listen.¹³ William Gass has argued that the true source of the storyteller's verisimilitude is not the imitation of nature, but the attempt to follow "as closely as he can our simplest, most direct and and unaffected forms of daily talk."¹⁴ The mysterious "reality" of Walter and Toby is bound up with Sterne's representation of their speech, but precisely because Sterne is such a great realist he does not confine himself to the simplest and most direct forms of speech. Instead Sterne gives us the highly formalized speech, the full range of oral and written messages which Walter and Toby send and receive. Realism in the eighteenth-century novel means quite simply the representation of such contemporary forms as the sermon, the guide-book, and the neo-classical oration, in the same way that realism in the modern novel would mean representing such characteristic modern forms as the commercial or the telephone conversation. At the same time verbal reality in Tristram Shandy is made up of such unlikely performances as the recitation of the Ten Commandments, a paragraph from Rabelais, and a twelfth-century formula for excommunication.

I would also assume that it is the goal of realism to demonstrate the multiplicity of possible viewpoints that may be taken towards the world."¹⁵ A discontinuous narrative, a motley narrative stitched together out of different ways of speaking (and stitched together with black thread so that all the seams will show) acknowledges that each account has its own way of making sense of the world. Sterne knows that there are many ways of speaking, none of them privileged or uniquely authoritative. A single way of speaking, like a single hobby-horse, is reductive because we are confined to only one way of interpreting the world. But the contemplation of more than one hobby horse or the bringing together of many ways of speaking in successive interpolations is expansive and liberating. For Sterne the established ways of handling historical or autobiographic narrative are not the only ways. He is always aware of making choices, adopting one convention rather than another. To write is to obey certain rules, and if we are confined to one set of rules we may forget that there are others, or that we are working within a system which is neither natural nor inevitable. As the philosopher Nelson Goodman puts it, "the world is as many ways as it can be truly described, seen, pictured etc. and … there is no such thing as the way the world is."¹⁶ Lest we forget, the interpolation forces us to shift, immersing us successively in the account of the world given by legal contracts, literary quotations, letters, mock-romances, sermons, travel-guides, educational handbooks, and imitations of oral narration.

Finally I would argue that the interpolation educates the reader in an attitude towards experience which can be described as Shandian. Things put themselves in our path and we must allow them to testify, to yield full measure of instruction, wit, and mystery. When the train of association in Toby's head leads to Stevinus, Walter is willing to allow the sailing chariot to become the new center of interest, and when the chariot leads to the sermon, he is willing to listen to that too. There is the great impending event, the birth of Tristram abovestairs, but Walter is downstairs, and he need not confine his interest to the birth any more than Tristram as narrator need focus on the "main" event. Neither Walter nor Tristram asks how the sermon is relevant, or asks it to justify itself in relation to something else. Events need not be subordinated to one another because each event is potentially its own center. Yorick has borrowed Stevinus in the first place because he is "inquisitive after all kinds of knowledge." Walter welcomes the reading of the sermon because he has such a "strong propensity … to look into things which cross my way, by such strange fatalities as these …" (II, 17;p. 91). Where the father likes to see where circumstances will lead, the son likes to trace events back to their origins: "My way is ever to point to the curious, different tracts of investigation, to come at the first springs of the events I tell" (I, 21; p. 50). This kind of inquisitiveness is the first cause of everything in Tristram Shandy, just as everything in the Iliad follows from the wrath of Achilles. Walter, Yorick, and Tristram are admirers of the gratuitous act and connoisseurs of the contingent. Chance is for them and for the reader the opportunity to break out of the closed circle of experience. Chance offers one of the few pleasures that Walter and Tristram can consistently enjoy, the delight in seeing the way in which the purely contingent yields a pattern.

I have quoted the maxim that art gives us the world back again by making it strange. For somebody like Walter the world is already made strange: "The truth was, his road lay so very far one side, from that wherein most men travelled—that every object before him presented a face and section of itself to his eye, altogether different from the plan and elevation of it seen by the rest of mankind" (V, 26; p. 289). Sterne has made sure that we make our way along his "road" in the same way Walter makes his way along his, circumspectly, deliberately, and with surprise. To invoke the Formalists once more, we are made to feel the stones of the road. Our speed depends upon our familiarity with the road and the kinds of guesses which we think we can safely make as to what lies ahead. The interpolations, among other aspects of the book, make it difficult for us to feel confident about what lies ahead, since the road is always changing. Because the road is always new, we are convinced that it is worthy of our closest attention.

Notes

¹ I, 21; p. 48. All references are to Ian Watt's edition of Tristram Shandy (New York, 1965).

² Hermann Meyer, The Poetics of Quotation in the European Novel (Princeton, 1968), p. 6. See also Mixail Baxtin's observation that "to the prose writer the world is full of other people's speech acts; he orients himself among these, and he must have a keen ear for perceiving and identifying their peculiarities." "Discourse Typology in Prose," in Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska, p. 194.

³ See Roman Jakobson, "Linguistics and Poetics," in Style in Language, ed. Thomas Sebeok (Cambridge, Mass., 1966), and Tzvetan Todorov's "Structuralism and Literature," in Approaches to Poetics, ed. Seymour Chatman (New York, 1973).

⁴ See W. B. Gallie, "What Is a Story," in Philosophy and the Historical Understanding (New York, 1964).

⁵ In a fine and persuasive account of the sermon in the context of the work as a whole, J. Paul Hunter argues that Sterne's emphasis on the response to the sermon "demonstrates what will not, and what will, move the minds of men." See "Response as Reformation: Tristram Shandy and the Art of Interruption," Novel, IV (1971), 132-46. In The Comic Art of Laurence Sterne (Toronto, 1967), J. M. Stedmond suggests that the sermon "seems to represent the closest thing to a straightforward 'norm' against which to gauge the comedy of the first two volumes" (p. 84). For a treatment of the sermon as theology, see Arthur H. Cash, "The Sermon in Tristram Shandy," ELH, XXI (1964), 395-417.

⁶ Richard Ohmann, "Literature as Act," in Chatman, p. 83.

⁷ Jakobson, p. 356.

⁸ William J. Farrell, "Nature versus Art as a Comic Pattern in Tristram Shandy," ELH, XXX (1963), 16-35.

⁹ In their own unsophisticated way Trim and Toby have stumbled upon the theoretical issues pursued more systematically in Kate Hamburger's Die Logik der Dichtung (Stuttgart, 1957).

¹⁰ I don't think we have to worry whether or not Trim had read Winter's Tale, but it would be interesting to know at what point the "seacoast in Bohemia" had become notorious as the spatial counterpart of what would be an anachronism in time.

¹¹ In an interview John Barth argues that "if you are a novelist of a certain type of temperament, then what you really want to do is re-invent the world…a certain kind of sensibility can be made very uncomfortable by the recognition of the arbitrariness of physical facts and the inability to accept their finality. Take France, for example: France is shaped like a tea pot, and Italy is shaped like a boot. Well, okay. But the idea that that's the only way it's ever going to be, that they'll never be shaped like anything else—that can get to you after a while." See The Contemporary Writer, eds. L. S. Dembo and Cyrena N. Pondrom (Madison, 1972) p. 23.

¹² In fact the fairy tale, of which we require the least fidelity to the outside world, is conversely the most bound by its very distinctive conventions. Stories are always constrained, either by the demands of realism, by the conventions of particular genres, or by the fact that a story as it unfolds constitutes a system. Once certain choices have been made, other possibilities are excluded.

¹³ Perhaps this is because the domain of language is safer. The "doing" which is an alternative to "saying" is always suspect. "And pray what was your father saying?" asks the stupid reader at the end of the first chapter (Walter is clearly "doing," not "saying"). Toby thinks that at the end of the tale of the Beguine Trim "made a speech." See also David Grossvogel's emphasis on the importance of live speech in Sterne in Limits of the Novel (New York, 1972), p. 32.

¹⁴ William Gass, Fiction and the Figures of Life (New York, 1972), p. 32.

¹⁵ The following pronouncements on realism are offered in the knowledge that no generalizations about the goal of realism are likely to win universal consent. For a recent, able defense of what seems to me a very traditional view of realism in the novel, see J. P. Stern, On Realism (London, 1973).

¹⁶ Nelson Goodman, Language of Art (Indianapolis, 1968), p. 6.