Walter demonstrates the variation of game playing in a different manner, for he, unlike Toby, is completely unaware that he is playing. Instead of replaying reality, he believes that he can master it by his theories. The outer world which seems to be engineered by a series of mischances is Walter ’s opponent. Whenever a sad mischance strikes, Walter musters all his conviction in “learned wit” to form a theory or hypothesis to ward off the encroachment of the harsh reality into his own system. Walter therefore conducts the conflicts between self and world under his own conditions of play. If the substance of Toby’s game was agon, which he played according to mimicry, then agon also provides the basis for Walter ’s play, but this is always encroached on by another substance which Walter himself does not wish to be confronted with. This is alea. In agon, “the player relies only upon himself and his utmost efforts’ (Caillois 44), as he strives to defeat his opponent. Walter’s opponent,
however, is reality, and to defeat that would require removing the difference between self and world, and making the world equal to his subjectivity. Right to the end of the novel, this is his firm intent: “to force every event in nature into an hypothesis, by which means never man crucified TRUTH at the rate he did ” (XI, 32, 455).
Walter in this respect is truly the Don Quixote of Tristram Shandy, though in him only the manic elements of the knight are filtered through. In his conflicts with reality he
excludes his opponent, despite the fact that he needs him (or rather it) in order for his theories to gain any purchase. Reality challenges him, and so he must fight it, with the intent to eliminate the very thing that cond itions his philosophy. The game of agon Walter plays thus has a larger-than- life phantom- like opponent, the excluded reality. And the excluded
opponent takes up his position in the game, determining its content in the role of alea. The fact that chance now takes over the game makes itself known to Walter even to the extent of inflicting physical pain upon him.
What a chapter of chances, said my father, turning himself about upon the first
landing, as he and my uncle Toby were going downstairs— what a long chapter of chances do the events of this world lay open to us! Take pen and ink in hand, brother Toby, and calculate fairly— I know no more of calculations than this baluster, said my uncle Toby, (striking short of it with his crutch, and hitting my father a desperate blow souse upon his shinbone)— ‘Twas a hundred to one— cried my uncle Toby.— I thought, quoth my father, (rubbing his shin) you had known nothing of calculations, brother Toby.— ‘Twas a mere chance, said my uncle Toby— Then it adds one to the chapter— replied my father.
The double success of my father ’s repartees tickled off the pain of his shin at once— it was well it so fell out— (chance! again)— or the world to this day had never known the subject of my father’s calculation— to guess it— there was no chance. (IV, 9, 202-3)
Walters’s philosophy is agonistic in that it combats the intrusions of reality upon his self-enclosed world, but as chance continually invades this enclosure, he is forced to play the game of agon, at the same time generating alea as its subject matter. For “alea is a game based on a decision independent of the player, an outcome over which he has no control and in which winning is the result of fate rather than triumphing over an adversary… In contrast to agon, alea negates work, patience, experience and qualifications ” (Caillois 17).
Walter, nevertheless, continues indefatigably to play agon against alea, but not only does he have no prospect of winning; he himself is also played with by the very opponent that he is seeking to defeat. Chance takes over the contest, and so the outcome of the struggle must remain permanently unforeseeable. No matter how often he loses the battle, how hard he is defeated in each losing game, he will continue to compete, if he wants to remain in his own microcosm.
Under such circumstances, the incessant losing of games of agon against alea should make Walter aware of his own eccentricity— subjectivity ought to be made to become aware
of itself. But if it did, it would enter into a relationship with itself, and this would entail a view from outside the self. Playing, however, is an activity that allows the self to stay with and within itself, whereas if the subject were to enter into a relationship with himself, the self-containment of the self would be ruptured. Furthermore, playing offers a variety of ways in which singularity may be fanned out into many different nuances. Playing agon as an involuntary generating of alea is certainly different from having agon as the substance of playing mimicry. Play endows subjectivity with an opportunity to manifest itself; but the manner of gaming gives an individual slant to what is common to all subjectivity. Therefore the combination of games serves to bring out the idiosyncratic features which can assume bizarre shapes when games are played against their grain or have their structures inverted when they are combined. Playing agon as an involuntary generating of alea in order to endow the struggle with a purpose— namely, to control chance— makes the game endless, but by doing so it proves that nothing can break up the self’s being with itself. This is why Walter’s “whole life [is] a contradiction to his knowledge ” (III, 21, 148), though the consequence is that his knowledge is also played according to the conditions of chance.
Walter’s game of playing the elimination of the chance that he himself keeps producing leads to the continual loss of the mastery he seeks, so that eventually it is the player himself who is constantly being played. This game brings out the gulf that extends between self and world— a gulf which Water always thinks he can bridge by means of his theories. It is a game played involuntarily by the player against himself and thus reveals ineluctably how impossible it is for subjectivity— even when it supposes itself to be active— to step out of itself.
While Walter and Toby resemble each other in this respect, they are definitely
distinguished by their modes of gaming, which individualize what they have in common.
Both are players who present their subjectivity by means of different surrogates, which are both a substitute for and a pointer for subjectivity’s otherwise impenetrable base. Playing,
then, results in a constant generation of surrogates which allow for the self to act out staying with itself without ever defining what eludes definability. It therefore issues into an
unending variation through which the singularity of the self merges.
Sterne, however, plunges this endlessness into comedy, suggesting that endless gaming is but a ‘supplement ’, at best a role by means of which subjectivity can only play its inability to grasp itself and make itself available to the world. For this reason Toby lives only in his
“supplement,” which he constantly spins out of himself, while Walter is continually forced to undo his “supplements” in order to replace them with new ones which then suffer the same fate. Walter’s games are free-play, through which the unforeseeable always comes into being, whereas Toby’s games arise from the illusion that by playing them he can regain the basis of himself, and this is why he equates his games with the goal of creation. Thus their games move in radically different directions, though neither of them knows what he is actually bringing into play. And so, while both players nearly always stand virtually
together throughout their quests, they are almost infinitely distant from each other as well, for they represent the two poles of play— free-play, and the restoration of a whole. On the stage devised by Tristram where all their games take place, subjectivity is shown to be
differentiated into absolutely unique strains.