Laurence Sterne (1713-1768) – Tristram Shandy

Decide which of the following fragments are more appropriate to be invoked as illustration in a discussion of Sterne’s a) view of fictional character; b)parody of novelistic conventions; c) metafictional strategies. In many of the following fragments there is an implicit dialogue between narrator and reader. Consider the kind of

reader(s) the narrator addresses; what does he expect of his audience?

1. II. ii. Pray, Sir, in all the reading which you have ever read, did you ever read such a book as Locke’s Essay upon the Human Under-standing?––Don’t answer me rashly, because many, I know, quote the book, who have not read it, and many have read it who understand it not: ---If either of these is your case, as I write to instruct, I will tell you in three words what the book is.––It is a history.––A history! Of who? What? Where? When? Don’t hurry yourself.––It is a history book, Sir, (which may possibly recommend it to the world) of what passes in a man’s own mind; and if you will say so much of the book, and no more, believe me , you will cut no contemptible figure in a metaphysic circle.

2. III. xii. [Attack on critics] Their heads, Sir, are stuck so full of rules and compasses, and have that eternal propensity to apply them upon all occasions, that a work of genius had better go to the devil at once, than stand to be pricked and tortured to death by them.––And how did Garrick speak his soliloquy last night?––Oh, against all rule, my Lord,––most ungrammatically! Betwixt the substantive and the adjective, which should agree together in number, case and gender, he made a breach thus,––stopping, as if the point wanted settling;––and betwixt the nominative case, which your lordship knows should govern the verb, he suspended his voice in the epilogue a dozen times, three seconds and three fifths by a stop-watch, my Lord, each time.––––Admirable grammarian!––But in suspending his voice––was the sense suspended likewise? Did no expression of attitude or countenance fill up the chasm?––Was the eye silent? Did you narrowly look?––I looked only at the stop-watch, my Lord.––Excellent observer!

And what of this new book the whole world makes such a rout about?––Oh! ‘tis out of all plumb, my Lord,––quite an irregular thing!––not one of the angles at the four corners was a right angle.––I had my rules and compases, &c. my Lord, in my pocket.––Excellent critic! […]

I would go fifty miles on foot, for I have not a horse worth riding on, to kiss the hand of that man whose generous heart will give up the reins of his imagination into the author’s hands,––be pleased he knows not why, and cares not wherefore.

Great Apollo! If thou art in a giving humour, ––give me,––I ask no more, but one stroke of native humour, with a single spark of thy own fire along with it,––and send Mercury, with the rules and compasses, if he can be spared, with my compliments to––no matter.

3. IV. xxxii. And now, that you have just got to the end of these four volumes––the thing I have to ask is, how do you feel your heads? My own aches dismally––as for your healths, I know, they are much better––True Shandeism, think what you will against it, opens the heart and lungs, and like all those affections which partake of its nature, it forces the blood and other vital fluids of the body to run freely through its channels, and makes the wheel of life run long and cheerfully round.

Was I left, like Sancho Panza, to choose my kingdom, it should not be maritime––or a

kingdom of blacks to make a penny of––no, it should be a kingdom of hearty laughing subjects. And […] I should add to my prayer––that God would give my subjects grace to be as WISE as they were MERRY; and then should I be the happiest monarch, and they the happiest people under heaven––

4. V. xvi. This is the best account I am determined to give of the slow progress my father made in his Tristra-paedia; at which (as I said) he was three years and something more, indefatigably at work, and at last, had scarce completed, by his own reckoning, one half of his undertaking: the misfortune was, that I was all that time totally neglected and abandoned to my mother; and what was almost as bad, by the very delay, the first part of the work, upon which my father had spent the most of his pains, was rendered entirely useless,––every day a page or two became of no consequence.––

5. V. xxiv. As many pictures as I have given of my father, how like him soever in different airs and attitudes,––not one, or all of them, can ever help the reader to any kind of preconception of how my father would think, speak or act, upon any untried occasion or occurrence of life.––There was that infinitude of oddities in him, and of chances along with it, by which handle he would take a thing,––it baffled, Sir, all calculations.––The truth was, his road lay so very far on 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.––In other words, ‘twas a different object,––and in course was differently considered.

7. VIII. ii. It is with LOVE as with CUCKOLDOM––––But now I am talking of beginning a book, and have long had a thing upon my mind to be imparted to the reader, which if not imparted now, can never be imparted to him as long as I live (whereas the COMPARISON may be imparted to him any hour in the day)––I’ll just mention it, and begin in good earnest.

The thing is this.That of all the several ways of beginning a book

which are now in practice throughout the known world, I am confident my own way of doing it is the best––I’m sure it is the most religious––for I begin with writing the first sentence––and trusting to Almighty God for the second.

‘Twould [It would] cure an author for ever of the fuss and folly of opening his street door, and calling in his neighbours and friends, and kinsfolk, with the devil and all his imps, with their hammers and engines, &c. only to observe how one sentence of mine follows another, and how the plan follows the whole.

I wish you saw me half starting out of my chair, with what confidence, as I grasp the elbow of it, I look up––catching the idea, even sometimes before it half way reaches me––

I believe in my conscience I intercept many a thought which heaven intended for another man.

8. VIII. vi. I declare, I do not recollect any one opinion or passage of my life, where my understanding was more at a loss to make ends meet, and torture the chapter I had been writing,

to the service of the chapter following it, than in the present case: one would think I took a pleasure in running into difficulties of this kind, merely to make fresh experiments of getting out of them––Inconsiderate soul that thou art! What! Are not the unavoidable distresses with which, as an author and a man, thou art hemmed in on every side of thee––are they, Tristram, not sufficient, but thou must entangle thyself still more?

9. IX. xxiv […]Though I have all along been hastening towards this part of [my story], with so much earnest desire, as well as knowing it to be the choicest morcel of what I had to offer to the world, yet now that I am got to it, any one is welcome to take my pen, and go on with the story for me that will––I see the difficulties of the descriptions I’m going to give––and feel my want of powers.

It is one comfort at least to me, that I lost some fourscore ounces of blood this week in a most uncritical fever which attacked me at the beginning of this chapter; so that I have still some hopes remaining, it may be more in the serous or globular parts of the blood, than in the subtile aura of the brain––be it which it will––an Invocation can do no hurt––and I leave the affair entirely to the invoked, to inspire or to inject me according as he sees good. [There follows an INVOCATION to the “Gentle Spirit” of his “beloved CERVANTES”, which is, however, soon abandoned for an account of incidents from his trip to Italy. Sterne himself had made such a trip, in 1765-66].