hobby-horses and the definition of character

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Hobby-Horses And The Definition Of CharacterIn Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy

by Hugo Blumenthal

At the beginning of his autobiographical project, Tristram Shandy decides to ‘draw’ the character of his uncle Toby ‘by no mechanical help whatever’ but from his uncle’s ‘hobby-horse,’ sure that ‘there is no instrument so fit to draw such a thing with, as that which I have pitch’d upon’ (I, xxii i-xxiv, 61).1 The fact that Tristram arrives to such a decision after mentioning –at the beginning of the same chapter– Momus’s glass, the mythical device that could help to reveal the ‘heart’ (truth) of a man, is rather significant: ‘[…] had the aid glass been there set up,’ Tristram writes, ‘nothing more would have been wanting, in order to have taken a man’s character […]’ But since such aid is ‘an advantage not to be had by the biographer in this planet’ (I, xxiii, 59), Tristram would have to look for another way to present his characters. In that sense, as Martin Battestin has suggested, the recourse to the hobby-horse could be seen as an attempt to substitute an impossible Momus’s glass.2

The impossibility of having the ‘advantage’ of Momus’s glass implies that men are ‘opaque’, not ‘transparent.’ Therefore, by following the cultural metaphor that historically (mainly in the West) associates the sense of vision with knowledge and possession, to try to reproduce or represent the true being or essence of a man is a difficult enterprise. After all, how could anyone reproduce or represent –taking representation as a form of reproduction, as a form of doubling its object– what he cannot see, what he does not have access to? Someone could argue that a writer (like Tristram or Sterne) must know in order to express, as a painter needs to see in order to reproduce –in a word, that an artist, as everybody else, must possess, somehow, the ‘object’ he pretends to offer through art, in order to be able to offer it. Otherwise, would not the artist’s offer be a false offer? According to Wolfgang Iser, even if man is not ‘transparent’, all attempts to define its character must not necessarily be illusory?3 If so, what are the advantages of the hobby-horse? Or depending on its success, could the figure of hobby-horse pass for a substitute of Momus’s glass?

Tristram, however, does not seem too apprehensive about the possibility of failing in his attempts to characterise his uncle Toby, his father, or even himself, through the figure of the hobby-horse, a figure that is going to run as ‘a kind of back-ground to the whole’ (I, ix,

Hugo Blumenthal ©2006

1 Unless otherwise stated, all quotations are from Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. by Melvyn New and Joan New (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997).

2 Martin Battestin, ‘Sterne: The Poetics of Sensibility’, in Modern Critical Interpretations: Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, ed. by Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), [pp. 59-86], pp. 81-82.

3 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Eighteenth-century anthropology’, Laurence Sterne: “Tristram Shandy”, trans. by Henry Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988) [pp. 48-54], p. 50.

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15). Because Momus’s glass is considered merely as an ‘advantage’, it is possible to think that there could be other ways to represent the true character of a man, that such an enterprise could, after all, be achieved, and that the hobby-horse could be one of such ways. If that is the case, perhaps the most logical question to ask first is what is a hobby-horse; only then it would be possible to try to understand why Sterne/Tristram could have chose ‘to ride’ with it.

Originally, the word ‘hobby-horse’ was mainly used to designate a wooden imitation of a horse’s head attached to a broom, used in the morris or the mummer’s dance; what today remains mainly as a children’s toy. It was, therefore, a non-realistic representation of a horse, that riders (dancers and children) supplied with their own legs (sometimes concealed, as John Vignaux Smyth notes), to sustain the illusion of riding a (real) horse.4 As with most games, it was a question of enjoying an illusion (the hobby-horse) without mistaking it completely for what was supposed to represent (a horse). Curiously enough, ‘hobby-horse’ was also a slang term for prostitute in Sterne’s day –as Elizabeth Kraft remind us–, a use that could be traced back as far as Shakespeare.5

Tristram, however, uses the hobby-horse as a metaphor for something different: after all, Toby’s fortifications, Walter’s theories, or Tristram’s autobiographical narration, don’t seem to include any ‘hobby-horse’ to explicitly designate any of the meanings the term originally alluded. What happens is that Tristram assigns an extra meaning to the ‘hobby-horse’, using it as a sign of a sign, to designate a sort of benevolent obsession that helps to organise, understand and interact with the world. In psychoanalytic terms, a hobby-horse could then be conceived as a sort of neurosis, that, though in excess it could hardly be considered healthy, it is always preferable to the psychosis an individual could have in its absence. [That is not to say that Tristram, Walter, or Toby, are latent psychotics; only that Tristram’s use of the ‘hobby-horse’ seems closer to a certain degree of necessary neurosis, that constitutes every subject (though it is more evident in some people than others); a constitutive neurosis that if somebody were going to eliminate, could end up with the loss of the subject into a psychosis.] In other words, the hobby-horse is a way to deal with the Real. Therefore, as Battestin points out, the order that the hobby-horse ‘affords is real enough and necessary to the rider, but in an absolute sense it is illusory.’

Despite such departure from the more familiar meanings of the ‘hobby-horse’ at the time, it is difficult to believe that Sterne could have chosen such a figure without


4 John Vignaux Smyth, , ‘Sterne’, A Question of Eros. Irony in Sterne, Kierkegaard, and Barthes (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1986) [pp. 13-100], p. 45n.

5 Elizabeth Kraft, Laurence Sterne Revisited (New York: Twayne, 1996), p. 63. See also John Vignaux Smyth, ‘Sterne’, A Question of Eros. p. 45n; and ‘Hobby-horse’, Oxford English Dictionary Online, http://dictionary.oed.com/

6 Martin Battestin, ‘Sterne: The Poetics of Sensibility’, p. 66.

http://dictionary.oed.com/




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acknowledging, and intending, somehow, those other meanings that the readers could have hardly avoided as connotations. Following then what seems to be the doubling-up of a sign, the hobby-horse could be read as intending to point out the artificiality of those obsessions on which a man rides on, or dances with; an artificiality concealed in part by the rider himself (who hides his/her own legs). And with Tristram recognising Shakespeare as an influence, even the connotation of ‘prostitute’ for the hobby-horse doesn’t seem out of place, especially since Tristram at some point makes an analogy between uncle Toby and his military games, and having sex with a woman; an analogy not difficult to untie through the hobby-horse, when the sexual act has been commonly represented as a kind of ‘riding’; in this case riding a hobby-horse is like riding a ‘false’ woman, that stands for a real one.

Whereas the figure of the hobby-horse incorporated all those meanings or more, its use as a privileged form to enable characterisation was not entirely original, it has its precedents in a long tradition of the use of figures (as ‘humours’, ‘genius’, etc.), to try to understand and define man. But that doesn’t mean they are all the same, for Tristram at least is going to try to take some distance from one aspect of this kind of tradition, declaring that

[…] no shall my pencil be guided by any one wind instrument which ever was blown upon, either on this, or on the other side of the Alps; –nor will I consider either [Toby’s] repletions or his discharges, –or touch upon his Non-Naturals […] (I, xxiii, 61)

And the same could be said about ‘the old doctrine of the humours […] which saw human nature as an unbalanced mixture of body fluids […] though the basis of the mixture remained unknown’ –as Iser points out–, since, after all, the hobby-horse is proposed as a substitution for a mechanical way of representation, and –again, according to Iser– ‘what could be more mechanical’ than such a doctrine?6 (D. W. Jefferson, however, would have disagreed with Iser, since he sees such figures in a more rhetorical way, as figures of ‘learned wit’ that allowed a certain degree of freedom in the construction of fabulous theories, as Walter Shandy seems to demonstrate so well.)7 As Battestin points out, Sterne’s notion of the hobby-horse seems closer is to

the theory of the ruling passion popular in contemporary psychology and most memorably stated in Pope’s Epistle to Cobham and the Essay on Man. […] [according to which] if we would know the characters of men, Pope’s advice is to “Search then the Ruling Passion.”8


6 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Eighteenth-century anthropology’, p. 51.

7 Cf. D. W. Jefferson, ‘Tristram Shandy and the Tradition of Learned Wit’, in New Casebooks: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. by Melvyn New (London: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 17-35.

8 Martin Battestin, ‘Sterne: The Poetics of Sensibility’, p. 65. See also Henri Fluchère, Laurence Sterne: From Tristram to Yorick. An Interpretation of Tristram Shandy, trans. by Barbara Bray (London: Oxford University Press, 1965) pp. 284-285.

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After all, in one of his letters, Sterne declared that ‘The ruleing [sic] passion et les egarements du coeur, are the very things which mark, and distinguish a man’s character; –in which I would as soon leave out a man’s head as his hobby-horse.’9 The originality of the hobby-horse –with respect to the theory of the ruling passions– comes from being a non-serious object: basically, a toy. As Ian Watt points out, it is important to keep in mind that

[…] “hobby”, in the sense of a favorite pastime, acquired its modern approbative sense only in the nineteenth century; […] a concern with hobbyhorses in an adult had, to an earlier generation, seemed a frivolous derogation of man’s stature as a rational animal.10

Tristram, on the contrary, though far from celebrating playing with hobby-horses, seems to try to understand (almost condescendingly) the inevitability of such a game; because, not even he, who is conscious that everyone plays with a hobby-horse (‘[…] have not the wisest of men in all ages, not excepting Solomon himself,’ he asks, ‘–have they not had their HOBBY-HORSES […]?’ (I, vii, 13)), seems to be able to escape from it. Of course, some hobby-horses could look apparently more serious than others, but, nevertheless, they are still hobby-horses.

But despite the fact that everyone is said to have a hobby-horse, the hobby-horse is used by Tristram as a way to represent differentiation, rather than as a way to represent human nature through abstraction and generalisation (something Tristram, as a human being, could have done quite easily, by claiming possession of the object of his discourse through own experience). In other words, Tristram tries less to demonstrate that to be human implies to have a hobby-horse than to show how the hobby-horse could account for the particularity of a human being. Because, though everyone has a hobby-horse, apparently there are not two alike (though, to say something like that would be to generalise, since Tristram’s concern is less with the entire humanity than with the very particular nature of his uncle Toby and his father Walter): Toby’s hobby-horse being the most singular (‘[…] the gait and figure of him was so strange, and so utterly unlike was he, from his head to his tail, to any one of the whole species […]’ (I, xxiv, 62)). But the difference escapes (or cannot be completely apprehended through) the hobby-horse, because the rider influences his hobby-horse as much as the hobby-horse influences the rider. As Tristram writes,

A man and his HOBBY-HORSE, tho’ I cannot say that they act and re-act exactly after the same manner in which the soul and body do upon each


9 Laurence Sterne, Letter 47, Jan. 30, 1760, in Letters of Laurence Sterne, ed. by Lewis Perry Curtis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), p. 88.

10 Ian Watt, ‘The Comic Syntax of Tristram Shandy’, in Modern Critical Interpretations: Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, ed. by Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987) [pp. 43-57], p. 53.

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other: Yet doubtless there is a communication between them of some kind […] (I, xxiv, 61-62)11

There is, then, a reciprocal nourishment between a man and his hobby-horse, that keeps alive and renders more visible the particularities of the man’s character. But that the hobby-horse doesn’t stand for the entire character of a man is made evident by Toby’s moral character. Tristram then has to recognise that ‘I could not give the reader this stroke in my uncle Toby’s picture, by the instrument with which I drew the other parts of it […]’ (II, xii, 92). Then Toby’s hobby-horse needs to be supplemented by another figure, as by the expression ‘he wouldn’t hurt a fly.’12

In the end, rather than a real horse, the hobby-horse seems to represent the movement of riding, of being carried away by something, in part with the rider’s own will and consent; a movement that helps to characterise the rider in the same way as it helps him to escape definition. As with Momus’s glass, the hobby-horse then stands as a ‘mere’ advantage for characterisations, to try to capture what cannot be possessed by any other means; but a rhetorical figure after all, subjected to limitations.

Hugo BlumenthalLondon, 2006

A Note On IserWolfgang Iser’s The Implied Reader could hardly be said to be or to include an ‘account of the development of the novel’.13 That is, if we understand for it an historical account of the reasons that made possible the apparition, consolidation and development of the genre that would be known as ‘the novel’ –as for example those accounts that have been written by Ian Watt, Michael McKeon, Paul J. Hunter, Margaret Anne Doody, or John J. Richetti.14 In fact, it is not clear that Iser ever attempted such an account. As he writes in the introduction,


11 See also D. W. Jefferson, ‘Tristram Shandy and the Tradition of Learned Wit’, p. 33.

12 Cf. Elizabeth Kraft, Laurence Sterne Revisited, p. 55.

13 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Introduction’, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974).

14 Cf. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985); Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); Paul J. Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990); Margaret Anne Doody; John J. Richetti, The English Novel in History 1700-1780 (London: Routledge, 1999).

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[…] I have not sought to shape the essays [that conform The Implied Reader] into a distilled history of the novel, but have dipped into the history at those points where it seems […] that something new and significant took place.15

Of course, a sort of ‘evolution of the novel from Bunyan to Beckett’ runs through the whole book, but what Iser clearly does in his ‘Introduction’ is to present his theories about negation, indeterminacy, and the role of the reader, in relation to the novel as a ‘genre’.16 Under such circumstances, it would be unfair to criticize him for over-simplification of the history of novel. Nevertheless, a few things could be said about his concept of the novel and the role of the reader, especially from the point of view of some of the debates about the origin(s) of the English novel.

First of all, though, it must be observed that Iser’s curious use of inverted commas to designate ‘genre’ instead of ‘novel’ seems to question the suitability of the term ‘genre’ rather than any stated definition of ‘novel’ (which could be said to depend upon the concept of ‘genre’); a definition that not only has changed a lot since the seventeenth century (to mention an example of such a change, ironically enough most of those we today consider the first English novelists were against the idea of calling their works ‘novels’), but a definition from which today depends every possible account of the history of the novel as a genre.17

Iser never tries to define the novel, but is clear that he takes distance from the idea of the novel as direct representation of an historical reality and that still manages to define its function in purely epistemological terms (as knowledge of the world). On the other hand, it is clear that Iser values the novel as the only literary genre that –to use Iser’s own terms– ‘confronts’ the reader ‘directly’ and ‘immediate[ly]’ with an ‘empirical reality’, in ‘a particular environment’, ‘familiar’ to the reader.18 In comparison, it is as if for Iser all other literary genres before the novel only could reduce (‘induced’) the reader to ‘contemplate’, not to read, their ‘exemplariness.’ Iser then seems to forget that in its origins the novel was still predominantly didactic, proposing models to follow (as Richardson’s Clarissa) rather than for contemplation.

But even then, Iser’s implicit idea of the novel and its value seems not far from Watt’s theory of the novel’s ‘formal realism’, or –more recently– John Richetti, who sees the development of the novel as the history of a shift from the ‘unreal’ world of the ‘romance’ to a realistic vision, centred on a familiar world (though others, like Paul Hunter, rather consider the novel developing from a confluence/influence with many other textual


15 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Introduction’, The Implied Reader, p. xii.

16 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Introduction’, The Implied Reader, p. xii.

17 For a good summary of the definition of ‘novel’, including its most controversial elements, see Paul J. Hunter, Before Novels, Pp. 22-28.

18 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Introduction’, The Implied Reader, p. xi.

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genres, as criminal biographies, diaries, etc.)19 Actually, it could be argued that Iser also seems to base The Implied Reader over such a shift, though he never attempts to account systematically for the reasons that could have made possible a passage from the ‘romance’ (or other earlier narrative forms) to the novel. All Iser tells us in the ‘Introduction’ is that such a shift or break of the novel occurred in the eighteenth century, apparently because by then ‘people had become preoccupied with their own everyday lives’ –what it should be read as: interested in reading a ‘representation’ of life resembling their own everyday lives (of course, it is as difficult to imagine that before novels people weren’t preoccupied with their own everyday lives, as it is to picture them reading basically as a way to ‘escape’ from their own lives).

Part of the problem seems due to the almost unavoidable generalisation necessary to Iser’s theory of the implied reader. All the same, though Iser recognises that a theory ‘must have its foundation in actual texts, [since] for all too often literary critics tend to produce their theories on the basis of an [a]esthetics that is predominantly abstract […]’, a similar case could be made against his theories, which are far from being properly grounded on actual responses to the texts he engages with.20 Because, even if Iser recognises that the active nature of the reading process ‘vary historically from one age to another […]’, he is very little concerned with presenting examples of such variations. Iser then seems to neutralise differences between readers, as if creating a single category, ‘the reader’ (which he seems to model on his own experience as a reader). In other words, Iser ignores the huge differences between readers that could be found in the historical reception of many novels, as well as seems to ignore the reader’s knowledge of the context in which the novel was published. After all, his concept of the indeterminacy of the novel is more concerned with explaining why a text could have a different meanings for a same reader in two different times, than to explain differences between readings more clearly influenced by historical and sociological factors.

On the other hand, even if Iser adjudicates an active role to the reader, in the re-creation of the novel as in what he calls ‘counterbalance’ of the necessary ‘negation’ presented in any novel, he doesn’t take into account other possible functions of the reader, as for example how readers could have influenced the development of a novel, as is clearly seen in the eighteenth century and part of the nineteenth century, were novels were published in instalments, or serialised, with the writer having access to the reaction of the readers for the future composition of his book, as was the case with Richardson’s novels, where a whole group of selected readers helped to shape its novels, but also the general reading public, as for Sterne in the publication of Tristram Shandy.


19 See John Richetti, ‘Introduction’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth Century Novel, ed. by John Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge, 2002), pp. 1-7; Paul J. Hunter, Before Novels.

20 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Introduction’, The Implied Reader, p. xi.

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Biblography

Primary SourceSterne, Laurence, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. by Melvyn New and Joan New (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997)

Secondary SourcesBarnou, Dagmar, ‘[The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response]; [The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett]’, MLN, 94, 5 (1979), 1207-1214

Battestin, Martin, ‘Sterne: The Poetics of Sensibility’, in Modern Critical Interpretations: Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, ed. by Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), pp. 59-86

de Man, Paul, Blindness & Insight, Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed (Cornwall: Routledge, 1996)

Fluchère, Henri, Laurence Sterne: From Tristram to Yorick. An Interpretation of Tristram Shandy, trans. by Barbara Bray (London: Oxford University Press, 1965)

Hartley, Lodwick, Laurence Sterne: An Annotated Bibliography, 1965-1977 (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1978)

‘Hobby-horse’, Oxford English Dictionary Online, http://dictionary.oed.com/ (06.06)

Hunter, Paul J., Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990)

Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Eighteenth-century anthropology’, Laurence Sterne: “Tristram Shandy”, trans. By Henry Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988), pp. 48-54

Iser, Wolfgang, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974)

Jefferson, D. W., ‘Tristram Shandy and the Tradition of Learned Wit’, in New Casebooks: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. by Melvyn New (London: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 17-35




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Jefferson, D. W., ‘Tristram Shandy and the Arts of Fiction’, in The New Pelican Guide to English Literature, vol 4, From Dryden to Johnson, ed. by Boris Ford ([London]: Pelican, n.d.), pp. 323- 337

Kraft, Elizabeth, Laurence Sterne Revisited (New York: Twayne, 1996)

Lamb, Jonathan, ‘Sterne and irregular oratory’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth Century Novel, ed. by John Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge, 2002), pp. 153-174

Lanham, Richard A., ‘Pastoral War’, Tristram Shandy: The Games of Pleasure (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), pp. 77-92

Lynch, Jack, ‘Tristram Shandy: An Annotated Bibliography’, http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/ ~jlynch/Biblio/shandy.html (06.06)

McKeon, Michael, The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987)

Modern Literary Theory, ed. by Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh, 4th ed (London: Arnold, 2001)

Park, William, ‘What Was New About the ‘New Species of Writing’?’, Studies in the Novel, 2 (1970), 112-130

Riquelme, John Paul, ‘The Ambivalence of Reading’, Diacritics, 10, 2 (1980), 75-86

Richetti, John J., The English Novel in History 1700-1780 (London: Routledge, 1999

Rowson, Martin, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (London: Picador, 1996)

Smyth, John Vignaux, ‘Sterne’, A Question of Eros. Irony in Sterne, Kierkegaard, and Barthes (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1986), pp. 13-100

Stedmond, John M., The Comic Art of Laurence Sterne: Convention and Innovation in “Tristram Shandy” and “A Sentimental Journey” (Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1967), (see pp. 75-76)

The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth Century Novel, ed. by John Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge, 2002)


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Watt, Ian, ‘The Comic Syntax of Tristram Shandy’, in Modern Critical Interpretations: Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, ed. by Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), pp. 43-57

Watt, Ian, The Rise of the Novel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985)


hobby-horses and the definition of character

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