As the director as well as one of the major actors of his own theatre, Tristram has his own unique part to play also. He has to play himself, but he is not allowed to indulge exclusively in either the Toby’s game of restoration of what cannot be grasped or Walter’s free play, for as the director-actor his game must achieve two things: it must elucidate that of the other characters, and it must elucidate him in play. Therefore he cannot play the game of his characters, for otherwise he would coincide with them, and yet in his game he must so outstrip that of the others that he will become a kind of framework for them while at
the same time objectifying himself. And so Tristram does not play agon, or mimicry, or alea, or any of their possible combinations, but ilinx— a form of play “based on the pursuit of vertigo and which consist[s] of an attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of
perception… this vertigo is readily linked to the desire for disorder and destruction” (Caillois 23) and, one should add, leads to a form of carnivalization such as leads itself particularly to the fool which Tristram sees himself as. Ilinx has an anarchistic tendency which releases things suppressed, and when it is played by the fool it is guided by an awareness that is not without its own rules. Even though Tristram does not feel bound to “any man’s rules that ever lived” (I, 4, 4), the vertigo into which he plunges everything is guided by an aleatory rule which juggles subjectively with all traditional forms, generic possibilities, and rhetorical tropes.
The rule is aleatory in so far as the inherited plethora of forms and conventions is now played according to subjective standards and not those which formerly determined their application. Richard A. Lanham correctly points out: “Sterne’s innovations do not stand within the range of expectation realistic fiction holds out. He did not extend the domain of the novel. Much rather, he appropriated its subject for an elaborate game with classical narrative patterns. These are rhetorical, nonmimetic, nonrealistic” (27-8). Tristram feels himself called upon to juggle with traditions and conventions in an aleatory manner, by means of which he creates himself, only to plunge the resultant objectfication into a dizzying dance of forms, thus highlighting the fact that ilinx, the game played by him, is nothing but a
‘supplement’ of his own ungraspable subjectivity. In order to grasp himself, he is continually driven into free-play, perpetually interrupting himself and yet preserving his balance; juggling his sources, yet letting us see them as sources; disturbing our sense of time by dragging us forward and backward in it; saying one thing to hold our attention while doing another; moving us with a dislocating wrench from one style or one genre to another. By simultaneously carrying out of the two counter- movements of play, Tristram becomes the
total player. Besides, in the process of his game, Tristram fulfills an important function:
when he plays ilinx according to the aleatory rule his play throws into relief the structures of the other games, which spotlight singularity as an individualization of subjectivity, including his own, which, in turn, is refracted through the mirror of the other games. But his game also refuses to yield “a single point of view in the novel, a philosophic control as it were, and then continually alerts us to the need for one. Thus we must constantly search for a key, a basis for interpretation, and feel silly for doing so” ( Lanham 98). For cognitively inaccessible subjectivity, which can only be revealed through the individualizing
‘supplements’ brought about by the game played, there can be no subsuming concept, even though we are continually provoked into researching for one. And if indeed we do feel silly for doing so, this feeling reveals the ineradicable difference which makes singularity what it is.
Tristram as the central subjectivity of the novel— central because it registers everything around it, including its own impermeableness— has set up the imaginary scene, but as he acts on it just like everyone else, he is also reflected by it. But in his case what is mirrored forth is not that which has remained concealed, as with the other characters; instead, Tristram himself is staged by his author in the form of a hologram. For the reader is confronted with images from various angles— the ilinx pla yer is Tristram’s self-carnivalization; the
stage-director is the opponent of the characters he directs; the fool interprets subjectivity as a game; the narrator blots out all points of view. Holographically Tristram comes and goes through the aspects from which he is seen, and thus he becomes a figure of play pure and simple, because playing with him always coincides with being played by him.
Tristram Shandy is, then, embodiment of what is virtually total play. No matter what individual definitions of play one might offer, it will always produce something, even when it is only concerned with re-enacting given realities. Performance is its keynote, and its
elevation in Tristram Shandy shows clearly that this novel relies predominantly on
performance and not on mimesis to divulge its reality. This reality is subjectivity, which is only to be grasped through exploration and not imitation. Play is the mode of presentation, which tilts the balance in favor of the performative element, which is always present, even when it is subservient to imitation in the concept of mimesis. The further a pre-given object fades from view, the more important performance becomes in setting the intangible before the reader’s imagination. Instead of mimesis, play now becomes the backbone of presentation.
This is clearly to be discerned by the absence of plot and story, which as causal and sequential organization of narrative have always underpinned mimetic intentions. Their place is taken by the unconnected games of the hobby- horses, through which subjectivity is presented as an endless iteration of its aspects, making its inaccessible base merge through reactions that are both expected and yet at the same time surprising; thus Sterne avoids the potential tedium of subjectivity forever playing itself.
Chapter Three
The Constant Speaker5 on the Stage and the Audience
I. “Writing Is But a Different Name for Conversation”
Aside from the bustling and rustling world of game play on the central stage, also in front of us is the perpetually writing narrator-actor-director who also occupies some corner of the stage which he creates for his play. In endlessly weaving in and out of the central stage, alternately playing the role assigned by himself and stepping out of the role to resume his writing task. Even when the central stage is still in the middle of playing, Tristram would often make no scruple to suspend, or freeze the actions there, and walks across the stage to his writing corner to write, to comment, or more exactly, to talk to his audience-reader.
Often the line separating writing and speech becomes so subtle as to be almost indiscernible, as Tristram has made it explicit early that:
Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation: As no one who knows what he is about in good company would venture to talk all;— so no author who understands the just boundaries of decorum and good breeding would presume to think all… . (II, 11, 77)
In declaring “writing… is but a different name for conversation, ” Tristram is offering a genuine insight, if not into the way all writing should be carried on, at least into a natural and satisfying way of reading Tristram Shandy. William Hazlitt claimed to find in Sterne’s writing “the pure essence of English conversational style ” (Anderson 488). In it Virginia Woolf heard the “sound and associations of the speaking voice”; “we are as close to life as we can be” (81). More recently, James Swearingen attributes to Sterne “an understanding of the
5 The term “the Constant Speaker” is a borrowing from Leland E. Warren’s essay “The Constant Speaker:
Aspects of Conversation in Tristram Shandy.” University of Toronto Quarterly 46 (1976): 51-67. Warren in his essay gives more emphasis on the unbridgeable gap between writing and conversing though.
language act as rooted in a speaking community… when reading proceeds like conversation both content and the reader changed much as the two sides of a metaphor alter one another”
(Reflexivity 91). Finally, Bruce Stovel argues that Sterne “recreated in his novel the satisfactions found in the familiar everyday activity of gossiping” and that “the novel’s situation, style, and mood recreate that experience (116, 123). Various as these readers and their critical presuppositions are, all respond to the voice of Tristram as somehow more engaging, more fully present to the reader than we have reason to expect possible in writing.
Since conversation is “the talk occurring when a small number of participants come together and settle into what they perceive to be a few moments cut off from (or carried on the side of) instrumental tasks; a period of idling felt to be an end in itself, during which everyone is accorded the right to talk as well as to listen and without reference to a fixed schedule” (Goffman 14), it would be characteristic of conversation that one can never know precisely what will emerge from it. This is due not only to the different standpoints of the participants, but also to the need to interpret statements through their implications. “In authentic conversation, then, one listens not only to what is said but to the unsaid, the horizon of meaningfulness, that wells up within it ” (Swearingen, Reflexivity 13). Thus, if a
conversation is to be successful, the partners will have to reach beyond what is familiar to them, and grasp something that had hitherto not lain within their “horizon. ” This process, according to Tristram, demands an effort on both sides, since the conversation is not only conducted by the partners, but the partners are also conducted by the conversation. And since he regards writing as conversation, it follows that he cannot fully know in advance where he is going.