tenth anniversary issue: iii || shandean geometry and the challenge of contingency

Shandean Geometry and the Challenge of ContingencyAuthor(s): Michael RosenblumSource: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 10, No. 3, Tenth Anniversary Issue: III (Spring,1977), pp. 237-247Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1345451 .

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Shandean Geometry And the Challenge of Contingency

MICHAEL ROSENBLUM

Shklovsky's famous claim that Tristram Shandy is the most typical novel of world literature is both an embarrassment and a challenge to the student of Sterne. The

pronouncement lacks the authority and resonance of Whitehead's more famous dictum that all philosophy is a footnote to Plato, even the plausibility of the analogous statement about Cervantes and the history of the novel. It recalls instead the Sterne-obsessed speaker in Wayne Booth's wonderful parody who

projects a history of Western Literature from Homer to Hemingway in which all writers would be judged by the way they adumbrate or derive from the Master of York. This is a fine comment not only on the excesses of the cult of Sterne, but on any scholarship which claims that its chosen text has "included and exhausted all that the human imagination can rise or fall to" (to quote another mad speaker, the Hack in A Tale of a Tub). Whether or not all novels really are or really need to be about the writing of novels, I think the insight of the Russian Formalist about Sterne's "typicality" is suggestive: Shandy remains one of the best novels for thinking about the nature of the novel as a form. Sterne is one of the first of the "narratologists," a philosopher about the way stories have been told and can be told.

The aspect of novelistic form that I would like to use Shandy to reflect on is what may be called the logic of events in a narrative: why does what happens happen? To what extent are the events predictable, to what extent are they ex-

plainable? Does the sequence of events imply a characteristic way things have of

happening, a set of laws for the fictional universe? And if this is the case, then are we to see such laws as following from or making a comment on beliefs held

by the author and his readers about how things happen in the real world? I will begin by considering two familiar ways of accounting for why matters

fall out as they do in Tristram Shandy. The first asserts that events do happen in such a way as to imply a view of the universe: Sterne gives us what B. H. Lehman describes as a representation of "contingency incarnate." 1 The second

1 "Of Time, Personality, and the Author: A Study of Tristram Shandy," Studies in the Comic, University of California Studies in English, 8, No. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1941), rpt. in Laurence Sterne, ed. John Traugott (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968), p. 24: "For Sterne, the world is contingency incarnate. Anything and everything may be upset by thoroughly but irrelevantly motivated chance. If chance sometimes advances a clean line of action, it more often impedes it or carries it on a

tangent." See also Jean-Claude Salle, "A State of Warfare: Some Aspects of Time and Chance in Tristram Shandy," Quick Springs of Sense, ed. Larry S. Champion (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1974), p. 213: "The narrator's efforts to circumscribe contingency are constantly defeated and, though dismissed with a shrug, his conclusions on the subject are consistently pessimistic."



NOVEL SPRING 1977

offers a historical explanation for this emphasis on contingency: the difficulties that the Shandy family has with order are related to the difficulties men were having with the idea of order towards the end of the eighteenth century.2 I will argue that the first statement is incomplete, and that the second slights the history of the novel as a form by looking for its explanations entirely within the realm of the history of ideas. If it is true that Sterne renders the sense of the contingency of events with greater force than any previous novelist, it is also true that he gives the fullest representation of those powers which battle the contingent. What Sterne does is part of the continuing battle of all "realistic" novelists against too easy an idea of order, the predictable patterns established by previous novelists. In his novel Sterne neither affirms nor denies the idea of order in the calendar year 1759, but instead enlarges the possibilities of his own form of expanding our sense of what constitutes order in a work of fiction. Instead of playing variations on the mid-century theme of order threatened, Sterne develops a theme which belongs equally to the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, and which is crucial to any novelist's continuing exploration of reality, the question of how men make their orders. This is the sense in which I think Tristram Shandy is a "typical" novel.

I

Notwithstanding the references to the benevolent hand of Providence and to the not-so-benevolent fatalities that govern the affairs of some men (whether imagined as a mischievous Duchess or an unpropitious astral conjunction), I think most readers would agree that the deity which presides over Tristram Shandy is Chance. The events represented are of the order of the King of Bohemia's just happening to take a walk in Trim's abortive tale. As Toby tells Trim, such an event was "a matter of contingency, which might happen, or not, just as chance ordered it." 3

For the philosophers very little that happens in the world is not contingent, since almost everything that happens could be imagined as happening otherwise. Even what we take to be the laws of science-the equations governing the acceleration of falling objects or the conversion of mass into energy-are not necessary in the same sense that analytic propositions are necessary. In common usage, however, contingency is a less absolute notion: we say that an event is contingent when it seems to have come about by chance, when it could not have been predicted. In this sense Tristram Shandy is full of contingencies, since the narrator is always pretending to be surprised by the turn of events.

Contingencies may surprise us, but the unpredictable need not, in retrospect, remain unexplainable. W. B. Gallie has argued that the crucial developments of

2The most recent and impressive exposition of this argument is Martin Battestin's The Providence of Wit:

Aspects of Form in Augustan Literature and the Arts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974).

3 The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. James Work (New York: Odyssey, 1940), p. 567: "Now the King of Bohemia with his queen and courtiers happening one fine summer's evening to walk out-Aye! there the word happening is right, Trim, cried my uncle Toby; for the King of Bohemia and 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).

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MICHAEL ROSENBLUMISHANDEAN GEOMETRY 239

most stories are contingent in that they are unforeseen and unpredictable. Stories relate events which stand out against the "predictable uniformities" of everyday life: "the coincidences, unforeseeable recognitions and revelations, and other fortuitous happy or unhappy events." 4 It is this departure from the uniformities of daily life which makes the story. But yet as we follow a story, and for Gallie this is an active process of understanding, we do not feel that such reversals undermine the logical continuity of the story or make the events seem unintel- ligible. We manage to find them "intellectually acceptable after all," we make sense out of them in spite of their unpredictability because we can see how and why the events happened. Thus a narrative which calls attention to the contingency of the events it records does not therefore give a sense of their unintelligibility. On the contrary, narrators like Sterne and Fielding who boast of their powers to surprise the reader are also narrators who spend much of their time justifying and explaining the various turns of events. If there were no good explanation for the mysterious cry of "Zounds" or for the seemingly miraculous entrance of Dr. Slop, these surprises would hold no interest for the reader. In the real world such contingencies as the death of Bobby or the fall of the hot chestnut and the window sash can be explained by laws: gravity for the chestnut and sash, mortality for Bobby. Such events are the result of a combination of Chance and Necessity, the twin signs under which everything in Shandy (and as Democritus reminds us, in the universe) happens. By the time Tristram is through with his explanations we see how and why these events happened-the order of explanation that would be appropriate if they were events in the natural world. But he also answers another kind of question: "Why should the narrator or the reader consider such a sequence of events worth putting into a narrative?" Tristram justifies the narrative as an imitation of events in the natural world by explaining them; he justifies the narrative as an artistic structure by showing that the explanation itself is interesting. Explanation, what makes the narrative convincing, is also what makes it satisfying. Shandy is thus a striking example of narrative logic because of its characteristic excess: it gives us more contingency than most novels, but it also gives us more explanation.

The novelist who wishes to simplify his dealings with contingency can always take Aristotle's distinction between what the historian does and what the poet does as a statement of absolution. The poet need concern himself only with the ought-to-have happened, leaving the unpleasant task of wrestling with the contingent what-actually-happened to the historian. This is a comfort, however, which novelists are increasingly reluctant to claim. As Frank Kermode has argued, it is the task of the novelist to do justice to our sense of "contingent reality," all the circumstances which seem to resist the imposition of our "paradigmatic forms." 5 We may associate this determination to make things difficult for writer and reader with what Kermode describes as the "skepticism" of the modern novelist, but this skepticism came naturally to Sterne. He allows for events which are not only

4 W. B. Gallie, Philosophy and the Historical Understanding (New York: Schocken, 1964), pp. 24-26.

s The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 127-152. I am greatly indebted to Professor Kermode's concepts throughout my essay.



NOVELISPRING 1977

independent of the wishes and expectations of his characters, but which are also seemingly unrelated to or destructive of his purposes as a story-teller-though of course such an appearance is "faking", since he has invented these contingencies in the first place. For a novelist like Sterne only the tough games are worth playing. He makes Tristram the batter in a game in which the strike zone is enlarged to include any pitch that is delivered: no ball can be refused because it is too high or too wide, no event can be excluded from the narrative because it appears to be trivial or irrelevant. If the world is rich with circumstance, then he too must dare to be circumstantial, perhaps more so than any narrator who has gone before him. In A Tale of a Tub circumstantiality is the sign of the narrator's folly. In Clarissa it is justified by what the narrators perceive as the overwhelming gravity of the events. In Tristram Shandy circumstantiality is the mark of Tristram's willingness to try to make sense of all events-especially the unpromising and the anti- climactic, the clutter of contingencies which have as their justification only that they happened to have happened.

We need go no farther than the celebrated opening sequence to appreciate Sterne's balancing of the contingent and the intelligible, his transformation of circumstantiality into a design which the reader can follow. Mrs. Shandy is saying something, Walter is doing something, and their offspring is making a wish that would undo the unfortunate consequence of the convergence of word and deed: "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" (I,l,p. 4). The wish itself is predicated upon a Shandean hypothesis about origins; as in mythic thought, the beginning is everything. Since he appears to accept his father's premises, Tristram is in effect giving us the myth of how he came to be Tristram. Each circumstance in the first six books, chance-derived though it may be, establishes new necessities for his future history. Whatever possibilities for his future well-being that survive the conception are eliminated by the birth, the naming, and the circumcision. Causes all, the effect being Tris- tram as he addresses the reader in the full flower of his Tristramhood.

Notwithstanding advances in genetics and obstetrics, Walter's difficulties with cause and effect sequences are still very real. Like him we are subject to cause and effect sequences that are no less fantastic than Alice's discovery that picking up a fan in Wonderland will make her go out like a candle. Like Tristram we can only conjecture about the workings of cause and effect. Operating on his father's principles, Tristram reasons that if "A" causes "B" then surely the circumstances surrounding "A" will affect the kind of "B" which is the result of "A." The quality of Tristram's mind is dependent upon the physical and emotional well- being of the sperm and foetus, and that in turn is affected by the state of mind of Mr. Shandy, which in this case is disturbed by a thought passing through the mind of Mrs. Shandy. This particular disturbance is to be explained in part by the peculiarities of Mrs. Shandy's mind, a mind at once more transparent and more mysterious than the rest of creation. It is also explained by a law propounded by Mr. Locke about how minds in general operate. We are given many contingencies, but also many explanations. Is the chain of cause and effect really the way Tris-

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tram says it is? We don't know anymore than we can know whether nurses' breasts influence the size of noses or whether names shape the named. Everywhere in Shandy there are hypotheses about causes and effects. Both Sterne and his great contemporary Hume agree that cause and effect is an "idea of such prodi- gious consequence." 6 It is also a fiction that we project onto the world, a kind of phantom, albeit one capable of giving us many blows.

Between the necessity, the biological realities of the reproductive act which even the Shandys share with the rest of mankind, and the all but unfathomable workings of Chance, the uncertainty about which of the spermatozoa will fertilize the egg, there would seem little to be said about Tristram's or anybody else's conception. But the Shandean mind wishes to encompass the event. If it cannot alter the course of events, it can at least invent a theory which will humanize the process by which the not-yet-human becomes human. The gap between matter and mind is dealt with by making the homunculus into as "much a fellow-creature as my Lord Chancellor of England." Although we may doubt whether sperm and foetus, the begettors and the begotten, are related in tire way that Tristram says they are, we are nevertheless given the "true" story of conception-the human intentions, fears, and speculations which alone make the act significant. Physical events with their boring uniformities and their opaque contingencies are translated into mental phenomena, because, as Sterne demonstrates, what passes in a man's mind is always interesting, and the only source of intelligibility the event will have.

The circumstances of Tristram's conception become extraordinary coincidences only because Walter has an overriding intention, the wish for a worthy heir, and a set of hypotheses about how to produce one. That Mrs. Shandy should ask the question at that moment, that the very means by which the infant was to be delivered intact should be the means by which the most precious part (or next to most precious part) is damaged, that the name should be that name of all names- all these chance events are remarkable, literally worth remarking upon, only in relation to Walter's theories. Their existence (certainly not their truth) is what justifies the narrative. In other words, coincidence in Tristram Shandy is a name for those contingencies in which somebody is interested. And given the Shandean stance towards experience, the absolute inquisitiveness which manages to find anything potentially interesting, it follows that coincidences are going to be found everywhere. If Sterne's wish to imitate the appearance of contingency seems to threaten an endlessly divergent narrative, then Tristram's ability to find coincidences everywhere brings convergence, the kind of intersection of events that produces "followable" stories. From his father Tristram has learned the most valuable lesson of all: the world is recoverable by hypothesis.

It is also recoverable by retrospective explanation. In Shandy we are not so much concerned with what happens as with why what happens happens, the energy of the narrative lying in the explanatory process itself. Slop's mysteriously swift and mysteriously muddy arrival turns out to be satisfyingly unmysterious. The ringing of the bell for Obadiah and the knock at the door which announces

6 A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Begge (1888; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon, 1951), p. 75.

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Slop's arrival are examples of the relation of contiguity in time and the relation of resemblance (both are sounds and signals), but appearances notwithstanding, they are not examples of cause and effect. The swiftness of Slop's appearance is explained by his having set out independently for Shandy Hall, the manner of his appearance is explained by his collision with Obadiah some three score yards from the stable. Explanations for the collision itself belong to the realm of physics, where an accelerating Obadiah mass encounters a Slop mass unable to increase its motion. Subject as they are to the laws governing bodies in motion and at rest, the two men are unable to avoid their fate.7

First surprise, then explanation: minds are rarely defeated by the rush of events. Even minds as addled as Toby's use "covering laws" to explain puzzling events. Walter and Toby abstract from the circumstances of Slop's arrival the unlikely space-time equations which made it possible. From the inferred great speed of Slop, Toby is led to the chariot of Stevinus, and the volume of Stevinus leads to the discovery of a manuscript of a sermon, which leads to the reading of a Prot- estant, anti-Catholic sermon to the Catholic Slop, whose brother happens to be a prisoner of the Inquisition. Coincidence piled upon coincidence, or no coincidence at all: just the ironies which chance brings and which can be made into a narrative by the inquisitive observer.

Everything that happens, no matter how seemingly random, discrete, or trivial, is eventually made into a pattern. When Walter removes his wig with his right hand and pulls out a striped handkerchief from his right coat-pocket with his left hand, the zigzag of his hands against his midsection reminds Toby of the trenches of St. Nicolas in 1695.8 The surface events produced by such contingencies as Walter's irritated gesture and the placement of pockets in 1718 suggest an under- lying geometry to Toby which he retranslates into other events. For him these contingencies are lucky coincidences, since they help him to see the pattern for which he is always looking. Toby's conviction that almost everything that is said or done happens to bear upon fortifications is a sign of his obsession, but it is related to his nephew's ability to discover the geometries that he needs to make a tale worth the telling out of the materials that chance brings. With the Shandean mind as ground, anything can be figure.

The logic of Sterne's narrative is nowhere better illustrated than in the affair of the two broken bridges. While Walter and Toby sleep, while the grown-up Tristram prefaces, the infant Tristram finally manages to get born. The birth is reported in a characteristically oblique way: Trim does not say that a child has been born, only that a bridge is being made to replace one that has been smashed. When Trim tells Walter that he is seeking a mortar, Walter replies: "If Dr. Slop has any drugs to pound, let him do it in the kitchen" (III, 22, p. 205). When Walter hears the acoustic image "mortar" he supplies a signification from the

7Not quite. Slop might have been able to save himself had he not "crossed himself.+--Pugh!-but the Doctor, Sir, was a Papist.-No matter; he had better have kept hold of the pummel" (II,19,p.106). The unlucky name, the unlucky religion, and the unlucky gesture it prompts suggest that this particular accident barely conceals Sterne's wish to prove "what little advantage there is in crossing."

8 The episode occurs in III, chapters 2 and 3, pp. 158-160.

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MICHAEL ROSENBLUMISHANDEAN GEOMETRY

semantic field that is natural to him. He is ready to hear Slop clattering with mortar and pestle at the very moment when Slop is in fact already in the kitchen soundlessly constructing a bridge out of cotton and the whalebone from Susannah's girdle. Walter has no way of knowing that the appropriate semantic field for "mortar" should have been Toby's, since Trim is referring to the two mortars he has made from a pair of jack-boots-a mutilation of an inheritance that presages the more important mutilation to come. When Trim then tells them that Slop is in the kitchen making a bridge, Toby gives his thanks since he assumes that the acoustic image lies within his semantic field. Having mistaken the context the first time, Walter is prepared to find Toby's response as wide of the mark as his had been-as it is. But he didn't expect the term to refer back to the field of the first response, the obstetrical. In both cases, where two possible meanings are represented by one sound, each brother chooses the wrong meaning and has his expectations shattered.

It is not only sounds that come together in the word "bridge." Tristram finds that three possible narrative roads leading to the bridge come together, since the explanation of why Toby assumed that Slop was working on a military bridge belongs equally to the matter of Toby's campaigns, the matter of the Widow Wadman, and the matter of Tristram's birth. In order to explain Toby's response to "bridge," Tristram has to move back to the aftermath of the Battle of Dunkirk, the lingering skirmish between Trim and Bridget, and the bridge that was broken accidentally in the encounter between them. Trim's explanation makes it clear that although the destruction of the bridge was accidental, the accident was the result of a very deliberate activity. "Do tell us seriously how this affair of the bridge happened" (III, 24, p. 210). Walter delights in the episode because of the overlapping of the language of love and the language of war, the way in which battering rams, cuvettes, and thrusting bridges describe military and amatory projects.

Considered as a physical event, the damage to Tristram's nose is nothing-at least to Slop, Toby, and presumably the infant Tristram. But to Walter it is everything. The flattened nose is a mark no less fateful than the maimed foot of Oedipus. Like Laius, Walter has tried to take precautions, seeking out Slop to avert the ancestral curse, only to see Slop become the instrument (with his instru- ments) of that curse. But what is for Walter "at the plane of experience" the convergence of tragedy, is for Tristram and his readers "at the plane of contempla- tion" 9 the convergence of comedy. Walter staggers offstage to collapse in bed, but Tristram remains to savor all the ironies. Events may seem to diverge in Shandy, but there is always an opposing force which discovers a pattern to be made, in this case the relation of two kinds of bridges to one concept and its opposite, potency and impotency. As Walter observes, the world is big with coincidence; to read this novel is to be instructed in the art of noticing coincidences. Not the gross and melodramatic kind that have become so familiar in the old plots: a man murders his father at a place where three roads meet and marries a princess who is his mother. Sterne's coincidences, neither so spectacular nor so sinister,

9 I take the distinction from Salle, p. 220.

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are made of such convergences as a bridge broken by a victory in love and a bridge whose breaking predicts Tristram's future humiliations on the battlefield of love.

II

My discussion has emphasized Sterne's ability to make apparently chance events seem intelligible. At the same time he still manages to give the appearance of randomness: we don't feel that what looks like chance at first will later be revealed as part of the author's hidden plan. Lawyer Dowling's appearances and reappear- ances seem very much a matter of chance, but before we have finished Tom Jones we realize that the apparent contingencies cleverly conceal authorial necessities.

Any intricately plotted novel is in this respect very like the description of the world that Sterne gives in his sermon, "Time and Chance." The sermon takes as its point of departure the text from Ecclesiastes that time and chance guide the affairs of men. After drawing out some of the apparently "atheistic inferences" of the text, Sterne argues that the very unpredictability of events is necessary to show us that there is some cause guiding the affairs of men other than mere human

agency or the regular working of Nature's law. The improbability of certain events

guarantees another order of causation "which cause can be no other than the First Cause of all things, and the secret and overruling providence of... Almighty God." The career of Joseph, whose "life and future fortune still depended upon a series of contingencies," demonstrates that, appearances to the contrary, everything that happens happens providentially. Joseph appears to have been given over to the enmity of his brothers and the operations of chance, but "when the whole DRAMA was opened, then the wisdom and contrivance of every part of it was displayed." 10 At the moment when Joseph reveals himself to his brothers we realize that the hand of Providence has been working all along. In the same

way the final recognition scene which reveals Tom's birth and moral character also reveals that all the apparent contingencies were necessary to Fielding's plot.

Fielding piles complication upon complication, knotting the string of the narrative until it seems a hopeless tangle. At the last moment he gives a sharp tug and holds up a miraculously straight piece of string. Sterne ties even more knots, but never tries to undo them: he demonstrates his virtuosity by making it worth the reader's while to contemplate those knots. Author and reader must collaborate

episode by episode if the narrative is to make any sense at all. If the reader cannot connect the question Mrs. Shandy asks in Chapter I with the explanation offered in Chapter IV, the whole sequence is meaningless. The "secret of birth" is char-

acteristically not something to be revealed at the end of the narrative, but an

explanation which is the narrative. Author and reader together gather up the strands of the contingent and weave them into the cloth of intelligibility. If the fabric is still lumpy with knots, so much the better, since the feat is all the greater to have made something out of unpromising materials.

o1 The Sermons of Mr. Yorick, ed. Wilbur L. Cross (New York: Westminster Press, 1904) I. 132-135.

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In The Providence of Wit Martin Battestin argues that "the idea of Providence -of Chance as Direction, of Time as a movement from Genesis to Apocalypse comprehending every contingency under the eye of God" 1 informs all of the major literary works of the first part of the eighteenth century. According to Pro- fessor Battestin these "ontological assumptions" began to "lose their currency" towards the end of the century, so that a work like Tristram Shandy can be seen as marking the turning point between one way of imagining the world and an other, a sign of the tumble from the Divine Center to the human eccentric. Sterne sensed that "the 'cosmic syntaxes,' to use Earl Wasserman's phrase, had been broken." 12 Such a view is intriguing, especially when set forth with Professor Battestin's great range of illustration. I would agree with him that Tristram Shandy is about the orders that men make, but I am not convinced that this became Sterne's subject by virtue of the apparent default of God's Order. I think Sterne would have been interested in the syntax by which men construe their experience whether or not he sensed the breaking of the "cosmic syntaxes." Although the meanings that the Shandy family come up with are suspect, not to say downright mad, each interpretation is rendered in a spirit of triurrph. There is little sense, as I read the work, that the meaning the Shandys construct will have to suffice in the absence of a more authentic meaning which men once possessed. The tone of the novel is elegiac about many kinds of losses, but not, I think, about the loss of a divine Order.

All of which is to say that the Stere who writes Tristram Shandy is neither philosopher nor theologian. He is interested in the way human minds work, but his attitude towards the orders that men construct has neither the reforming urge of Locke nor the consistent skepticism of Hume. Although the sermon "Time and Chance" insists that Providence informs the divine drama, the little drama that Tristram stages in his private theater of memory forces us to accept no particular doctrine about the mind of man or the order of the universe. The only thing that Sterne "proves" in Tristram Shandy is that the conjunction of mind and universe is an especially rich one. The world is full of circumstances to be looked into, jests to be delivered, and perplexities to be accounted for, and the mind of man is just such an instrument suitable for carrying out all these tasks. Whether or not Sterne represents contingency because he came upon the stage at a particular point in the history of European thought, as Professor Battestin's argument might seem to suggest, the response of minds to the world was his true subject; in order to tell the kind of story he was interested in, he chose a logic of events which would most clearly demonstrate the workings of human minds. As a clergyman, Sterne may have been concerned with the designs of the divine Geometrician, but as a novelist his great resource is the shakier designs that men trace. Con- tingency, that state of affairs which Sterne seems to attribute to the world, is also that state of affairs which will most challenge men as they go about the task of constructing their orders. Contingency is an inkblot to which men can ascribe

1 Battestin, p. viii.

"Battestin, p. 258.

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their favorite shapes and messages. It is as likely to goad men into revealing the

workings of their minds as is the Stranger's Nose in the "Tale of Slawkenbergius." As the Russian Formalists would put it, contingency is what motivates the story.

The hero of one of the most famous of modern novels, Nausea, is afflicted by contingency, his sense that anything can happen next in the world. For him contingency is viscosity, moistness, a dreaded formlessness. The longer he stares at such things as the roots of a chestnut tree, the more the familiar human meanings disappear. For Tristram contingency is surprisingly dry and geometric; it is not an affliction but a challenge. Wherever he casts his gaze the human meanings multiply. When the hot chestnut falls into Phutatorius' codpiece at the Visitation Dinner the event immediately generates, in addition to the physical sensation, a field of mental energy: the elaborate, ingenious, and mistaken conjectures about the origin and meaning of the accident. That very same body of clergymen goes on to consider the proposition that a mother is of no kin to her own child. Nothing is necessary if so "natural" a relation as kinship can be seen as a human construc- tion. Tristram is exhilarated by the proliferation of human meanings and by his

recognition of the extent to which we live in worlds of our own making. Where Sartre's hero finds the dry, inflexible orders he seeks only rarely, Tristram is able to find his geometries everywhere. Sartre says that art is supposed to "reclaim the world by revealing it as it is, but as if it had its source in human liberty." 13 The world as it is in Shandy is the representation of contingency, the operations of chance which are independent of human desire. Liberty for Sterne is our free- dom and inventiveness in reading meanings into the world. There's always a joke to be found, even though from another perspective we are perhaps the victims of that joke.

Sterne's sermon tells us that although the world may appear chaotic there is

ultimately an authorized divine meaning for everything that happens. A sermon in the modern style might preach that there is no meaning in the world despite the appearances of order which our self-indulgent anthropomorphism insists on

projecting onto the world. Either we need say nothing about the world because it has all been divinely established, or else we need say nothing because there is nothing to be said. For Robbe-Grillet, "things are things, and man is only man." 14

In Tristram Shandy things are only things, but man being what he is, he will wish to ponder all the possible connections. All objects-plush trousers, old masks, caps, pin-cushions, and sashes (especially sashes) are weighted with meaning. Perhaps not God's meaning-if He is sending a message through these objects we are not equipped to receive them-but our meanings. Things happen in Shandy not to bear on the question, "Is there a meaning in the world?" but on the novelist's question, "How do men make their meanings?" The novelist's province is not to talk about how the world is but how we take the world to be. The fact that

13 As quoted in Kermode, p. 145. Robert Alter observes that the "Shandean man is everywhere in the fetters of circumstance but everywhere the imagination is free; the blind forceps of reality may crush one's nose... to a pulp, but the mind can still spin Slawkenbergian fantasies of a man with a proboscis so enormous that it mesmerizes an entire city." Partial Magic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), p. 55.

14 For a New Novel, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 52.

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MICHAEL ROSENBLUMISHANDEAN GEOMETRY 247

there are many ways of talking about the world, all of our own devising, does not daunt the novelist but gives him his very reason for existence. As Nelson Good- man says, "the answer to the question 'What is the way the world is? What are the ways the world is?' is not a shush, but a chatter." 15 Sterne is often seen as a precursor of many kinds of modernism, but one kind he does not anticipate is the literature of silence, the hush before the unknowable and the unnamable. Sterne's preference, as we know from listening to the voices of the novel, is for the energy and persistence of Shandean chatter.

16 "The Way the World Is," Review of Metaphysics, 14, 53 (September, 1960), 55.



tenth anniversary issue: iii || shandean geometry and the challenge of contingency

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