"tristram shandy's" phantom audience

"Tristram Shandy's" Phantom AudienceAuthor(s): William C. DowlingSource: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Spring, 1980), pp. 284-295Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344861 .

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Tristram Shandy's Phantom Audience WILLIAM C. DOWLING

Tristram Shandy, I want to argue, is a story without an audience-or rather, a work projecting an empty space where internal or imaginary audience normally exists in literature. The argument, so far as it involves formal or objective consideration of the novel-close analysis of the text in a mode now grown un- fashionable-is straightforward enough; what is no longer straightforward is the matter of audience itself. For actual readers of literary works, once banished on theoretical grounds in favor of internal audience, have in recent years been reintro- duced into interpretation in the guise of phenomenological subjects, affective crea- tors of meaning, haunted deconstructors of centerless structures of signification.1

I may announce at the outset, then, that my own analysis of audience in Tristram Shandy derives from a view formulated many years ago by W. K. Wimsatt, one anticipated by Walker Gibson and more recently asserted by Walter Ong:2 "the actual reader of a poem is something like a reader over another reader's shoulder; he reads through . . . the person to whom the full tone of the poem is addressed in the fictional situation." 3 Wimsatt speaks of poems here because poetry was his major concern in The Verbal Icon, but the same view of audience of course extends to narrative as well-to the "gentle reader" or "candid reader" of Tom Jones, to Madam or Sir or "your worships and reverences" as they appear in the pages of Tristram Shandy.

There are, I think, severe objections to Wimsatt's formulation of the formal or objective view of audience, but as I have recently had occasion to discuss those objections at some length elsewhere4 I should like instead to concentrate on what remains essentially right about his insight. The idea of audience as an internal or imaginary presence was meant to account for what occurs when we open the book and begin to read:

1I have in mind such works as Stanley Fish's Self-Consuming Artifacts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), Norman Norwood Holland's 5 Readers Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), Geoffrey Hartman's The Fate of Reading and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), and Wolfgang Iser's The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974).

2 Walker Gibson, "Authors, Speakers, Readers, and Mock Readers," College English, 11 (February 1950), 265-69; Walter J. Ong, S.J., "The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction," PMLA, 90 (January 1975), 9-21.

3 W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, The Verbal Icon (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954), p. xv.

4"Invisible Audience," Critical Inquiry, 5. (Spring 1979), 580-84. I here borrow my comments on "To His Coy Mistress" from that discussion.



WILLIAM C. DOWLING TRISTRAM'S AUDIENCE

Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime . . .

Here, at least, there are no actual readers, no seventeenth- or twentieth-century readers, no affective or phenomenological or deconstructivist readers, only the lady addressed as a silent presence in the second line. She belc)ngs, like the speaker, to a sphere of reality separate from the sphere inhabited by actual readers, and she constitutes the internal or dramatic audience of the poem.

Now discussions of Tristram Shandy, generally of so high a level of intelli-

gence, have not altogether ignored the internal audience of the story-indeed, Sir and Madam, their worships and reverences, constitute an imaginary audience too visible and too obviously internal to the novel to be ignored. Yet there has at the same time been a tendency, dating at least from Wayne Booth's treatment of Tristram Shandy in The Rhetoric of Fiction, to confuse actual and imaginary readers when treating the problem of audience in the novel, the usual view being that figures like Sir and Madam represent roles or masks for actual readers. Thus, for instance, John Preston argues that "Sterne's imaginary readers"

are an invitation to the reader to act out different versions of himself; they allow him to assume various identities within the fiction. This is not to say that he identifies himself with these characters. At least, if he does so, it is without

losing his own identity. Sterne is proposing a controlled and deliberate com- mitment to the fictional roles. He wants the reader to be able to 'play' another character and yet remain himself.5

We encounter versions of the same view in discussions even more recent-in R. A. Lanham's brilliant study of the novel from the perspective of game theory, for instance, where it simply exists as a silent assumption, or in James Swear- ingen's Reflexivity in Tristram Shandy, where it appears in phenomenological guise.6 Yet there are, of course, no actual readers in Tristram Shandy; Sir and Madam, like the lady of "To His Coy Mistress," are wholly imaginary presences, and we distort the meaning of the novel when we see them as masks for readers belonging to an utterly separate sphere of reality. With this in mind, then, I should like to go over some wholly familiar ground, the object being to reduce to coherent order some essential considerations concerning audience in Tristram Shandy.

As has often enough been remarked, the problem of audience in the novel begins not with audience itself but with Tristram sitting in his drawing room. Throughout the story, the details of the physical scene-writing table, pen and inkhorn, fireplace-are so insistent as to circumscribe utterly the act of writing.

5John Preston, The Created Self: The Reader's Role in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (London: Heinemann, 1970), pp. 205-206.

6 Richard A. Lanham, Tristram Shandy: The Games of Pleasure (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); James E. Swearingen, Reflexivity in Tristram Shandy: An Essay in Phenomenological Criticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).

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Thus we have Tristram, for instance, contemplating his usual mode of hasty composition-"dropping thy pen spurting thy ink about thy table and thy books, as if thy pen and thy ink, thy books and thy furniture cost thee nothing" 7-leaving his table to apostrophize Uncle Toby-"Here let me thrust my chair aside, and kneel down upon the ground . . ." (224)-or reporting on the very circumstances of composition: "It is not half an hour ago, when ... I threw a fair sheet, which I had just finished, and carefully wrote out, slap into the fire. . ." (293).

The problem is a problem, of course, because Tristram is alone as he writes, among his pen and his ink, his books and his furniture, and because in this solitude there is no audience. Except for the occasional sympathetic presence of his Jenny (who is not a member of his audience), and except for several physical dislocations (as when Tristram finds himself writing in similar surroundings in France), the solitary room remains the scene of writing throughout Tristram Shandy. There is Tristram, dressed in his jester's costume-"my purple jerkin, and my yellow slippers" (613)-alternately taking off and putting on his imaginary jester's cap, and there is in literal or actual terms no one else.

Yet this is the same Tristram who asserts that "writing, when properly man- aged (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation" (108). Thus Tristram Shandy becomes a conversation in solitude, a continuous dialogue between Tristram and those airy personages-Sir, Madam, "your worships and reverences"-conjured up by his imagination when he looks up from the page he is writing and gazes into the space beyond the table at which he is seated. The audience of the story, then, is imaginary in the double sense that it corresponds to no actual body of readers and that it is, within the dramatic situation of the work itself, imagined by Tristram.

As so often in Tristram Shandy, that is to say, a simple narrative or dramatic situation here underlies the superficial complications of the story. A bare sketch of the situation at issue now will suffice: what normally occurs is that Tristram, even as he gazes across his table at these airy personages, remains aware of the physical scene that surrounds them, much as one might gaze through the reflection on the inside of a window pane (to borrow Nabokov's favorite metaphor of narrative perspective) to the scene outside. Thus we have, recurrently, the sort of episode in which Tristram speaks to an audience imagined as being present in the room with him:

Shut the door.

In narrative terms, of course, all that is occurring here is that readers insuffici- ently "curious and inquisitive" are being invited to skip the remaining pages of a chapter. But we understand this fully only when we translate the phrase into dramatic terms: Tristram, looking up at an imaginary audience of properly

7 Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. James A. Work (New York: Odyssey Press, 1940), p. 215. Parenthetical references are to this edition.

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inquisitive listeners, asks one of those nearest the door of the room he is sitting in to close it against the incurious. This again is what is occurring when Madam is dismissed from the room to ponder the contents of a preceding chapter; she obediently leaves, Tristram lectures those who remain on the importance of reflective reading, and she returns: " But here comes my fair Lady. Have you read over again the chapter, Madam, as I desired you?" (57).

There is one further consideration. The audience at which Tristram gazes when he looks up from the page is more numerous than the room can accom- modate, and he is in this respect something like an orator sitting at his desk imagining the large crowd he will address the next day. This gives us, throughout the story, the division between listeners and readers: readers-"the gentle reader," "the Christian reader," etc.-are those who exist beyond that point in the crowd where faces blur and grow indistinct, who sit so to speak in the dark- ness beyond the first row of seats (this is the point of those passages where Tristram imagines the scene as a theater, himself as director or stage manager). Listeners, on the other hand, are those sitting in the front row, wholly if dimly visible in the reflection of the footlights.

The meaning of Tristram's equation of writing and conversation lies precisely in this division of audience into listeners and readers. For it is with the members of the audience who sit in the front row that Tristram conducts his imaginary conversation, Sir and Madam and their worships and reverences who seem to him so visibly present that they not only seem to be in the room-"Pray reach me my fool's cap-I fear you sit upon it, Madam 'tis under the cushion" (511)-but to respond or even to interject comments as he tells his story: "Tell it, Mr. Shandy, by all means.- You are a fool, Tristram, if you do" (207). Yet these responses and interjections, like Sir and Madam themselves, are wholly imagined.

We do not, I am afraid, have space for anything like an anatomy of even this audience-within-an-audience, these categories of moral and intellectual response peopled by the conventions of direct address. So let us, omitting the middle range of response represented by the bourgeois stolidity of Sir, consider the extremes represented by the innocent incomprehension of Madam and the hypocritical malevolence of their worships and reverences. These are extremes precisely because they symbolize, in Tristram's imagination as he writes, the opposing limits of response for any possible audience.

About Madam there is little to puzzle us. She is the uncomprehending and slightly ludicrous listener for whom noses are noses and whiskers whiskers, for whom the missing sexual dimension of the narrative makes Tristram's discourse as impenetrable as the "marbled page (motley emblem of my work!)" (226). Yet there are complications at work here, for Madam as a member of the audience is specifically identified with Mrs. Shandy within the story, her somewhat absent incomprehension deriving specifically from a feminine absence of libido. "A temperate current of blood," says Tristram of his mother, "ran orderly through

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her veins . . . in all critical moments both of the day and night alike" (600). The same is true of Madam, and the name of her incomprehension is chastity.

Chastity, that is to say, in the curious sense Tristram assigns to the term, as when, speaking of the "chaste deportment" of Yorick's sorry jade, he assigns its cause to "the temperance and orderly current of his blood.--And let me tell you, Madam, there is a great deal of very good chastity in the world, in behalf of which you could not say more for your life" (18). Yet the similarities between Madam and Mrs. Shandy are obvious enough to demand little comment. A more important complication arises when she is identified as well, as she is throughout the story, with Uncle Toby; for Toby is possessed of, as Tristram goes out of his way to explain to her, "that female nicety, Madam, and inward cleanliness of mind and fancy, in your sex, which makes you so much the awe of ours" (67).

To see the resemblance between Madam and Mrs. Shandy, that is, is to see only that extreme of comic incomprehension represented by both; "Why, 'tis a strange story! Tristram," interjects Madam at the conclusion of the episode of the abbess of Andotiillets (511); "L--d! . . ," echoes Mrs. Shandy at the end of Obadiah's cock-and-bull story, "what is all this story about?" (647). When such incomprehension is identified in turn with the moral innocence of Uncle Toby, however, we begin to understand that Madam represents an extreme of response ultimately, if uncomprehendingly, benevolent, the opposing limit of that hypocritical malevolence represented by their worships and reverences.

As we shall be returning to their worships and reverences later in the argument, let us here simply sketch their role in Tristram's imaginary audience. They are, first of all, the representatives of an established order, their reverences being specifically those powerful Anglican divines to whom Yorick refers when he asserts that "one ounce of practical divinity - is worth a painted ship load of all their reverences have imported these fifty years" (387), their worships being specifically those members of government-"your honours of the Majority and Minority," as Tristram elsewhere calls them (562)-to whom he refers when comparing a smoothly-functioning door hinge to the smooth functioning of government: "as cleverly as our government has been turning upon its hinges,- (that is, in case things have all along gone well with your worship,- otherwise I give up my simile)" (204).

In the relation between Tristram and their worships and reverences, then, we have the relation between the free life of the imagination and those powers of church and state committed, in the name of established order, to silencing all genuine imaginative expression. This is why Tristram so constantly pretends to worry about the response of their worships and reverences to the story he is telling-"in all nice and ticklish discussions,- " he says plaintively, ". .. I find I cannot take a step without the danger of having either their worships or their reverences upon my back" (436)-and this is why they represent the very antithe- sis of Madam's innocent incomprehension, gazing with a stern censor's eye on noses that are not, after all, simply noses.

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Yet noses begin by being nothing more than noses, and this is Tristram's line of defense against the "grave gentry" whose beards he so delights in pulling. The double meaning of the story is mirrored in the double response of this part of his imaginary audience-"though their reverences may laugh at it in the bedchamber," he says, "- full well I wot, they will abuse it in the parlour" (503) -and this double response is nothing other than the hypocrisy that characterizes the established order of church and state. This is the context in which sexual preoccupation becomes, in Tristram Shandy, a metaphor of that private imaginative reality that is denied in the parlor (in the pulpit, in the council chamber) by those custodians of public order who are, in the bedchamber, no different from the rest of humanity.

As we shall see, their worships and reverences represent in Tristram Shandy an image of neutralized or impotent malevolence; they are imaginary hypocrites reduced by the power of literary expression to harmless phantoms of malignity. Yet to see why this is so is simultaneously to see that the narrative structure of the novel, precisely b'y projecting an unreal audience into the room where Tristram sits writing his life and opinions, vacates the space normally occupied by internal audience in narrative. And this in turn is something we see only when we begin by considering the relation, much discussed and still much confused, between Tristram Shandy and Parson Yorick.

II

Formal or objective theory has taught us to respect, at least, the argument that authors and narrators belong to different spheres of reality-that Henry Fielding was an eighteenth-century author who has been in his grave for two hundred years, for instance, while the narrator of Tom Jones (an imaginary speaker) lives in the pages of the novel. How, then, are we to deal with the assumption, uni- versal in the commentary on Tristram Shandy, that Tristram and Parson Yorick represent aspects of Laurence Sterne's personality? The newest fashion, I take it, is to begin by acknowledging that the distinction between authors and narrators is a solution to an ontological question, but then to argue that Tristram Shandy mounts an assault on just that distinction:

Not only do the identities of Sterne and Tristram tend to fuse; so do those of Sterne and Yorick, ground enough for suspecting concealed affinities between Tristram and Yorick. The effect is to tease the reader with an uncertainty that makes an issue of both the ontological question, which is the central thematic concern of the book, and of the problem of interpretation which is influenced as much by the position of the reader as by the thing to be understood.8

As this is an essay on audience and not on narrator in Tristram Shandy, my own remarks on the problem must be extremely brief. Yet I want to suggest,

8 Swearingen, Reflexivity in Tristram Shandy, pp. 5-6.

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proceeding entirely on internal grounds, that there is a powerful reason why speculation about the Sterne-Tristram-Yorick question has survived so long- namely, that the narrator of Tristram Shandy is not Tristram Shandy but an unnamed Yorkshire clergyman who uses, and who reveals that he is using, Tristram as a fictive voice. As much of what I have to say on the matter will run parallel to those biographical speculations I want to dispose of, let me say again that my argument is purely internal: the unnamed clergyman is an imaginary speaker in the sense that Lemuel Gulliver or the narrator of Tom Jones are imaginary speakers, and he belongs (unlike Laurence Sterne, the deceased eighteenth-century author) wholly to literary reality.

Let us consider just one or two of those "concealed affinities between Yorick and Tristram" that have seemed to justify biographical speculation about the personality of Sterne. There is the matter, for instance, of Yorick's horse: Yorick is specifically a Yorkshire parson whose irreverent wit has damaged him in the opinion of the world (I repeat the obvious for a reason), and the symbol of his victimization is his "meek-spirited jade of a broken-winded horse" (20). Through- out Tristram Shandy we see Tristram mounted on his hobby horse, that high- spirited steed of the imagination-"Now ride at this rate with what good intention and resolution you may, -'tis a million to one you'll do some one a mischief, if not yourself He's flung -he's off-- he's lost his seat he's down- he'll break his neck- see!" (298)-and yet there is in the background, or rather in the stables of Shandy Hall, another horse quite as broken-winded and lean- sided as Yorick's Rosinante.

Once again, that is to say, we are dealing with the literal terms of a simple dramatic situation: Tristram's actual means of transportation, what he rides when he is not seated at his writing table mounted upon an imaginary hobby-horse, is the horse about which he exclaims-"by the trotting of my lean horse, the thing is incredible!" (223)-or mentions incidentally-"I would go fifty miles on foot, for I have not a horse worth riding on . . ." (182)-in the course of the story. Or there is Eugenius, equally the sympathetic and admonitory advisor of Yorick-

Trust me, dear Yorick, this unwary pleasantry of thine will sooner or later bring thee into scrapes and difficulties, which no after-wit can extricate thee out of.- (28)

-and of Tristram:

-- Here are two senses, cried Eugenius, as we walk'd along, pointing with the fore finger of his right hand to the word Crevice, in the fifty-second page of the second volume of this book of books, - here are two senses, quoth he. (218)

Even in a work as dizzying as Tristram Shandy, in short, we want to say that there are violations of probability, and furthermore that the probabilities being

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violated are those established by the story itself. What are the probabilities, for instance, against Tristram, professedly the well-to-do heir of Walter Shandy and the master of Shandy Hall, having in his stable only the "lean horse" of which he speaks, a horse not "worth riding on"? What are the probabilities against Eugenius, portrayed in the story as a coeval of both Yorick and Tristram, being the friend and advisor both of the deceased parson and the narrator who was still a child when the parson died? They are overwhelming, and considered simply as improbabilities they leave much in the novel inexplicable.

The problem of such inconsistencies or improbabilities ceases to be a problem only when we see that Tristram-leaving aside for the moment his resemblances to Yorick-is not the narrator of Tristram Shandy, that he is transparently a mask or persona for the unnamed speaker actually telling the story. It is, in fact, the very circumstantiality with which Tristram is located within an imaginary setting that exposes the persona: he is, once again, the son of a wealthy merchant who retired to the country, the present master of Shandy Hall; "for each man's need," says Tristram in a typical apostrophe to Uncle Toby, "thou hadst a shilling":

Whilst I am worth one, to pay a weeder, thy path from thy door to thy bowling green shall never be grown up.--Whilst there is a rood and a half of land in the Shandy family, thy fortifications, my dear uncle Toby, shall never be demolish'd. (224)

Now we have seen what sort of internal inconsistency this leads to: the Tristram who can afford the upkeep not only of his own establishment but of Uncle Toby's neighboring domain can, presumably, afford something better than the sorry jade he rides, and this is what invites us to align him with Yorick and Yorick's broken- winded steed. Yet this Tristram, odd enough in all respects, might simply choose for Yorick-like reasons to ride a Rosinante (Yorick himself, after all, was badly- mounted by his own choice). In the interests of brevity, then, let us focus on one of those incidental remarks that, in revealing a deeper inconsistency, invites a different conclusion; I set it off from the text for emphasis:

I vow and protest, that of the two bad cassocks I am worth in the world, I would have given the better of them . . only to have stood by, and heard my uncle Toby's accompanyment. (179)

At just this moment, obviously, we are no longer dealing with mere improb- ability or inconsistency but with paradox. Tristram, and no one other than Tristram, speaks these words-Uncle Toby is the uncle of no one else in the story-and Tristram, as a member of the laity, is not entitled to wear a clergyman's cassock. We can go further: the only person in the story entitled as a member of the Anglican clergy to wear a cassock is Yorick. Yet Yorick, when Tristram utters this remark, is in his grave. This one chance remark, then, gives us a narrator who is neither Yorick nor Tristram and who is a member of the

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Anglican clergy, and it gives us, as well, a story to be reconstructed from evidence present in the text itself.

The story goes something like this. In mid-eighteenth-century Yorkshire there is an Anglican clergyman whose unclerical ways bring him constantly into con- flict with the authorities both of church and state-with those authorities, more- over, on whom he is dependent both for his livelihood and his advancement. Recognizing that his battle with the established order is futile and self-defeating, that his unclerical impulses demand an outlet less dangerous to his own welfare, the clergyman disappears from the world-that is, adopts a more sober external demeanor in the world-and begins to write a story in which he appears as Tristram Shandy, the odd and whimsical son of an equally odd and whimsical merchant named Walter Shandy. His place of residence is an imaginary locale named Shandy Hall.

There is a further complication: the unnamed clergyman who disappears from the world to reappear within the book as Tristram Shandy includes, as part of the story, an account of his own disappearance. He does so by giving us the story of Yorick, a Yorkshire clergyman whose unclerical ways so alienate the opinion of those around him that eventually, beset with the hostility of those around him, he passes away. The marker of Yorick's death in the story is a black page, which is not only a funeral marker but a guardian symbol of (as the narrator says) "the many opinions, transactions and truths which still lie mystically hid under the dark veil" (226) of its blackness.

The central truth that lies hidden under the mystical veil of the black page, then, is that Yorick's death has been a sham death, his funeral a sham funeral. The opinions and transactions are those that, when the unnamed clergyman- narrator has died from the world in the person of Yorick and been reborn as Tristram, compose The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, his rebirth as a gentleman rather than a clergyman symbolizing a new immunity from the censure of the world. This is the hidden story at which the narrator hints whenever he refers to "Yorick's ghost; which, as the country people, - and some others, believe,-- still walks" (143). Yorick's ghost does indeed still walk-as Tristram Shandy.

Those concealed affinities between Yorick and Tristram are not so very concealed after all, and they point unwaveringly to the identity of the unnamed clergyman who tells the story from beginning to end. This is all we need to understand about the narrator of Tristram Shandy to address the problem of internal audience in the novel, and to audience we must now return. Yet even so compressed an account of the narrator's identity will be seen to suggest why the matter of audience is so problematic: as Tristram is an unreal narrator, his audience is an unreal audience. Tristram Shandy is a story in which a ghost addresses an audience of phantoms.

III We are now in a position, I hope, to see in precise terms how Tristram Shandy

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vacates the space normally occupied by internal audience in narrative. If the unnamed clergyman-narrator who tells the story spoke in his own voice or person, there would be no problem-like the speaker in "To His Coy Mistress" addressing his lady, like the narrators of more conventional novels addressing the gentle reader, he would be addressing that audience existing as an abstract boundary of intentionality at the outer limit of his discourse. The problematic nature of audience in Tristram Shandy thus derives from the narrator's having elected instead to speak through an imaginary persona whose audience is itself imagined.

The situation of the narrator sitting alone at his writing table, wearing the jester's costume and fool's cap that symbolize his role as Tristram, thus explains all those physical details that insist on his literal solitude. The scene of writing in the novel is a room not in an imaginary Shandy Hall but in the clergyman- narrator's own domicile, and the empty space he sees when he gazes across the table represents precisely the absence of audience that occurs when he speaks as Tristram. In speaking as Tristram, in turn, he assumes the double task of inventing an imaginary persona and the imaginary audience whom that persona addresses.

What becomes, then, of that audience the clergyman-narrator would address were he speaking as himself? The answer is that this audience ceases to exist except as what might be called an absent presence, but the terms on which this is so are specific enough. The clergyman-narrator speaking as Tristram is something like a spectator at a play aware of real people in the rows behind him: on the stage in front of him is an imaginary world of imaginary people (Hamlet, Horatio, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern), in the seats behind him are people belonging to that actual world of streets and restaurants from which they have come to the theater. The important difference is this: unlike the spectator at the play, the narrator who speaks as Tristram cannot turn around to see the actual audience behind him.

There are other differences as well, of course, but the essentials of dramatic situation in Tristram Shandy are caught in the analogy: to speak as Tristram is not only to speak with Tristram's voice but to gaze with Tristram's eyes at that empty room which the imagination populates with Sir and Madam and their worships and reverences, with an audience so vividly imagined that we hear its interjections and expostulations. Yet beneath all this is the clergyman-narrator's underlying consciousness that he is addressing empty space, and this gives us the novel's most important single image of Tristram's relation to his imaginary audience, writing not simply as another name for conversation but for conversation with an ass:

I have ever something civil to say to him on my part; and as one word begets another . . . I generally fall into conversation with him; and surely never is my imagination so busy as in framing his responses from the etchings of his countenance--and where those carry me not deep enough-- in flying from my own heart into his, and seeing what is natural for an ass to think- as well

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as a man, upon the occasion. In truth, it is the only creature of all the classes of beings below me, with whom I can do this: for parrots, jackdaws, &c.--I never exchange a word with them ....

- But with an ass, I can commune for ever. (522-23)

As Tristram imagines a conversation with an ass, that is, the narrator imagines Tristram imagining a conversation with Sir and Madam and the others, and he does so by flying from his own heart and seeing what it would be natural for Sir or Madam to think. And in the identification of audience with ass we discover just that unnatural division between the bedchamber and the parlor, between private response and public professions, that characterizes their worships and reverences as hypocrites. Denied as natural impulses, the passions become those "desires and appetites of the lower part of us" that Walter Shandy sees figura- tively as an ass-"he never used the word passions once but ass always instead of them" (584)-and in light of this denial readers hostile to Tristram and his book become jackasses in the more ordinary sense: "Bray, bray bray. Bray on, the world is deeply your debtor; louder still that's nothing" (408).

Yet the image of Tristram's audience as an ass insists most strongly on the silence of the brute, or rather on the literal silence of an audience that, along with its interjections, is wholly imaginary. And now we see the point of all this: in assuming Tristram's voice, and in projecting as a consequence an unreal or imaginary audience, the clergyman-narrator has reversed that relation between the imagination and the world that threatens the death of the imagination itself. The absent audience of Tristram Shandy represents that actual world of hypocrisy that sent Yorick to his grave, a world possessing the power to punish and suppress imagination wherever it is found. The imaginary audience present as Tristram speaks represents, conversely, a world summoned into existence by and wholly subject to the power of the imagination.

The name of this dominion is, of course, artistic expression, which is why Tristram Shandy so often insists on its own status as a created world. And it is why the clergyman-narrator, speaking as Tristram, so often celebrates that "fortune of the pen" (his death as Yorick and rebirth as Tristram) that has given him power over an audience created in his own imagination: "But courage! gentle reader! . . . 'tis enough to have thee in my power" (486). It is Tristram Shandy itself, a very symbol of the creative imagination in the fullness of its powers, that neutralizes and renders impotent the malevolence of the world, that avenges the death of Yorick by annihilating those powerful hypocrites who sent him to his grave and reconstituting them within the novel as the harmless and powerless body of grave gentry whose beards Tristram pulls: "Now, my dear Anti- Shandeans . . . and to you, most subtle statesmen and discreet doctors (do- pull off your beards)" (193-94).

Among those imaginary listeners sitting in Tristram's drawing room, of course, it is their worships and reverences who symbolize the anti-Shandean world, and it is a measure of their impotence-of their subjection, as phantoms con-

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jured up by the clergyman-narrator, to the imagination-that Tristram unfail- ingly treats them with jocular good humor. "The errantest TARTUFFE," he says at one point, "in science in politics or in religion, shall never kindle a spark within me," and the greeting he reserves for his imagined hypocrites is the epitome of benevolent condescension: "Bon jour! good morrow! . . . And how goes it with thy concubine thy wife and thy little ones o'both sides?" (541).

One of Tristram's incidental remarks in the course of the story has been widely taken to summarize the nature of Tristram Shandy. The novel, he says, "if 'tis wrote against any thing, 'tis wrote, an' please your worships, against the spleen" (301). The remark occurs, significantly, in the form of a direct address to that locus of impotent malevolence represented by their worships and reverences, and in the form as much as the content of the remark we discover why this is so: Tristram Shandy is not written against hypocrisy or venality in religion or government precisely because the relation between Tristram and his imaginary audience excludes the world in which the forces of hypocrisy and venality have power to suppress the imagination.

There remains, then, only the problem of that absent audience excluded from the novel when the clergyman-narrator, speaking as Tristram, addresses the audience of phantoms with which his imagination populates the room. The answer all along, of course, has been that this imagined audience mirrors in benign terms the world of malevolence and hypocrisy that claimed Yorick as its martyr, reveals the nature of that world by showing what, as reconstituted within the realm of the creative imagination, it is not. Tristram Shandy is a novel written against the spleen, is a celebration of the pure world of wit and imagination, because it is written in the space vacated by the mortal enemies of innocent laughter.

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"tristram shandy's" phantom audience

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