The Limited Freedom in Interpreting Text

It seems that the reader has to be equipped for such a dialogue. Thus, he is confronted with pages that are black, or mottled, or blank, and is constantly being jerked to attention by a pointing finger, and inversions or omissions of whole chapters so that he can always be present to himself in the condition of his own activated imagination. He is all the time to be drawn into a dialogue in which the narrator, the author and the characters are already mixed, if not mixed up. The reader’s participation, however, does not amount to giving license to set fancy on the wing though. The notion that Tristram Shandy has been designed to free its reader’s fancy must be especially qualified because it has received impressive sanction from several generations of critics. It has recently been advocated, for instance, by Wolfgang Iser, who pointedly designated Tristram Shandy to illustrate his general assertion that “a literary text must… be conceived in such a way that it will engage the reader’s imagination in the task of working things out for himself.” According to Iser, “Sterne ’s conception of a literary text is that it is something like an arena in which reader and author participate in a game of

imagination” (“Reading Process” 280). To support this doctrinal advocacy, not of

understanding, but of “imagination, ” Iser confounds Tristram with Laurence, attributing this statement, not to the Shandy historian, who actually made it, of course, but to his novelistic creator:

[N]o author, who understands the just boundaries of decorum and good breeding, would presume to think all: The truest respect which you can pay to the reader’s understanding, is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself.

For my own part, I am eternally paying him compliments of this kind, and do all that lies in my power to keep his imagination as busy as my own. (II, 11, 77) Even if a reader decides that Tristram is as good as his word and has, indeed, amicably halved his history with his society, allowing “Sir, ” “Madam,” and the rest fifty percent of the creative responsibility for the story of his life and the formulation of his opinions, this situation and all its cooperating participants we must recognize to be the whole conception of Laurence Sterne.

Sterne has created the conversational arena— an arena quite unlike anything found in any modern English novel— in which Tristram engages an assembled mixed company of

attendants in the deliberate exposition of his own family history and his own opinions. But the truth remains that, despite a few disclaimers, disclaimers he himself often contradicts, Tristram hardly allows his company half or even a grain in the composition of his life and opinions. The notorious equivocal openings provided by Tristram’s usage of “nose,”

“whiskers,” and “crevice,” for example, are only substantially, not socially, halved.

Tristram’s discourse opens before “Sir” and “Madam” and any who identify with them a narrowly defined choice between each term’s conventional meaning and one suggested by Tristram’s conversational context. Even such apparently wide abstractions as “it” and

“thing” Tristram’s conversational treatment narrows in the most pointed and powerful ways.

Consider, for instance, the meaning of the term “thing” in this paragraph, in which Tristram is professedly describing Uncle Toby’s plan for the enjoyment of his military hobby-horse in the privacy of his bowling green:

Never did lover post down to a belov’d mistress with more heat and expectation, than my uncle Toby did, to enjoy this self- same thing in private;— I say in private;— for it was sheltered from the house, as I told you, by a tall yew hedge, and was covered on the other three sides, from mortal sight, by rough holly and thickset flowering shrubs;— so that the idea of not being seen, did not a little contribute to the idea of pleasure preconceived in my uncle Toby’s mind.— Vain

thought! however thick it was planted about,— or private soever it might seem to think, dear uncle Toby, of enjoying a thing which took up a whole rood and a half of ground,— and not have it known! (II, 5, 70)

Readers are surely confined to at most two meanings for “thing” here, as in general with Tristram’s equivocal suggestion. If they fail to notice any “opening” or if they cannot choose between the two possible meanings, then they are stuck with a single

understanding— in the latter case, that the term is equivocal. It is the reader’s responsive understanding, at all events, and not their free imagination that is at stake— as Tristram often insists.

By considering the explicit call on his reader ’s understanding that Tristram makes following the very passage that Iser quotes, one can enforce this point:

’Tis his turn now;— I have given an ample description of Dr. Slop’s sad overthrow, and of his sad appearance in the back parlour;— his imagination must now go on with it for a while.

Let the reader imagine then, that Dr. Slop has told his tale;— in what words, and with what aggravations his fancy chooses:— Let him suppose that Obadiah has told his tale also, and with such rueful looks of affected concern, as he thinks will best contrast the two figures as they stand by each other: Let him imagine that my father has stepp’d up stairs to see my mother:— And, to conclude this work of imagination,— let him imagine the Doctor wash’d,— rubb’d down,— condoled with,— felicitated,— got into a pair of Obadiah’s pumps, stepping forwards towards the door, upon the very point of entering upon action. (II, 11, 77-8)

The imagination Tristram refers to here is both responsive and intellectual, not a private flight of fancy: the reader should attempt to conceive, at whatever degree of precision the narrative suggests, the course of the events that Tristram, the only person who knows them, wishes to share with society. Earlier Tristram directed the memb ers of his audience, “[i]magine to

yourself a little, squat, uncourtly figure of a Doctor Slop,” and went on himself to give a detailed guide of the exact figure in the exact attitude he wished his audience to visualize.

This “ample description, ” which should guide them in responding to the present passage, simply allows them to recall Slop’s overthrow, which Tristram extensively described a few pages ago, and to recollect a more general course of events, the details of which are irrelevant to Tristram’s purposes, that is, or course, Slop’s ablution and introduction to the Shand y quarters, about which Tristram likewise informed them.

In another passage, Tristram has more pointedly indicated the imaginative participation he requires of his readers in the presentation of Dr. Slop and, indeed, throughout the course of his narrative:

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 his author ’s hands,— be pleased he knows not why, and acres not wherefore.

(III, 12, 133)

Throughout his discourse with “Sir, ” “Madam, ” and the rest, Tristram, as one may amply demonstrate, appeals to and satisfies such a sensitively responsive conduct in his

reader/audience— whether they are inclined so to render the reins of their imagination into his hands or not. He once insists that a gentleman in the group must have Uncle Toby’s

bowling green “in his imagination” because, Tristram insists, he has given this gentleman “so minute a description” of it (VI, 21, 312). Tristram often denies that a reader could possibly imagine what happened next in the Shandy history— with perfect justification. He often digresses to explain events no one in his audience could have foreseen or understood, always explicitly announcing that he is doing so. He pauses, for example, to explain the confusion Toby and Walter faced when Trim mentioned a “bridge ” that needed fixing; to explain why Walter was so determined to employ Dr. Slop in his child’s delivery— and even proposed a cesarean section to his wife; to present the peculiar trait that allowed his father to cope with

his grief over Bobby Shandy’s death; to account for Trim’s feelings of guilt over the

sash-window accident; and, of course, to illuminate the Widow Wadman’s uncertainty about Uncle Toby as a husband, her painful circumstances, and her tragic course of action.

Tristram asserts, “it is in vain to leave [any of the peculiar developments in his private history]

to the Reader’s imagination” (V, 18, 264). However, he expresses the hope that after he has explained them, giving all the Shandy circumstances that curiosity requires and decency will allow, the reader will understand these developments.

By now we can see that Tristram’s discursive procedures are always rationally accounted for. He often implores his reader to attend closely and seriously to his story. If they do so, they will find that he has accounted economically and yet fully— and as precisely as his social circumstances will allow— for the constricted, tragicomical life he has endured. By describing, with all their determining conditions, his conception, his birth, his christening, and a certain early accident, as a brief of overview will show, Tristram has explained the total failure, the total lack of normal human chances, that his life, the encroaching end of which he pointedly indicates, has allowed him. One point, the strict biological truth of his potency, he however has never been able to publish: the social realm, which has come to bound his being and his ambitions, disallows such a precise point of information, not merely on the ground of decency, but also on that of scandal. The principle that inhibits Tristram, a principle the unhappy widow Wadman would have understood only too well, is that a man cannot

effectively declare his sexual potency in public, not, at any rate, once it has become necessary for him to do so. Tristram, nevertheless, is able to complete his social communication.

Because of his unlucky origins and his sash-window accident— or because of the scandal that came to surround these events— he has been unable to endow society with another generation of Shandys. And since, as he has pointedly explained, his brother died young— before he could enjoy the “free ingress, egress, and regress into foreign parts before marriage ” (IV, 31, 234) that his father was planning for him— leaving Tristram the Shandy heir, and since Uncle

Toby, though personally the best-equipped man ever produced in the course of nature to be a husband and a father, died without issue, Tristram faces in his own imminent death the extinction of his strange and wonderful line. A series of ridiculous but characteristic defeats to his father and his uncle, each of which has been presented much more vividly and much more particularly than any lady or gentleman could have imagined, have terminated in the destruction of the Shandy family. The tragedy Tristram has written with tremendous clarity and force, thus composing what he himself calls a “tragicomical… contexture” (VII, 7, 359).

There are, of course, gaps of many kinds in the shorter spans of Tristram’s discourse.

These “openings to equivocal strictures,” which bristle in Tristram’s talk, no doubt tease Sir ’s and Madam’s imaginations, as Tristram himself recognizes, and imperil their apprehension of his life and opinions. These openings, however, are less open, less subject to a reader’s imaginative intrusion than they may seem. There are, for one thing, the many gaps asserted by asterisks. In the passage describing his childhood accident, when Tristram tells us that

“the chambermaid had left no ******* *** under the bed” and reports that Susannah, who was tending him, had suggested, “cannot you manage, my dear [while helping him into the window seat], for a single time to **** *** ** *** ******?” (V, 17, 264), do we not know pretty well what words should fill the spaces? If we do know, we know; if not, we are left with Tristram’s asterisks; and in either case we have a vivid fictional experience, either of Tristram’s slyly completed or of his slyly withheld communication.

The precise words whispered to the edges of the Shandy world about the extent of Tristram’s infant suffering, which the narrator represents with several lines of evenly spaced asterisks, are no doubt, as the disposition of the asterisks suggests, indeterminable; but the general substance of that gossip is also available to inference. Beasterisked passages occur throughout Tristram’s discourse, and although the degree of the precision with which a reader’s responsive awareness fills them varies from passage to passage, as in the case of Dr.

Slop’s entrance to Shandy hall, achieve the particularity of understanding that will allow one

to follow Tristram’s discourse and his history. Often the degree of precision, though

Tristram may tease and delay, is finally absolute. Consider the “******[six asterisks]” that Dr. Slop produces with a rhetorical flourish from his green baize bag. Tristram admittedly suspends the translation of this figure while he first derives an opinion from Slop’s gesture and then fills in some necessary narrative background. During this suspension he

experimentally forces a number of terms into the indicated six alphabetical spaces, “ a scar, and axe… [a] BAMBINO,” and, of course, the “forceps” Slop had intended to produce.

None of these will fit. Finally he presents the six- letter word, “squirt,” that fits the gap, and, of course, his intentions as a portrayer of life and opinions ( III, 13-5, 134-6).