Benevolence and tender heart are not Toby’s exclusive signature, though; Parson Yorick provides another example of human benevolence. When he rides his old horse through his parish, it is because he would rather spend his money on the welfare of his community than on a new horse. His external appearance makes him an object of mockery, but “instead of giving the true cause,— he chose rather to join in the laugh against himself” (I, 10, 13). He much prefers to “bear the contempt of his enemies, and the laughter of his friends, than undergo the pain of telling a story, which might seem a panegyric upon himself” (I, 10, 14).
Yorick here is advanced to the forefront as the hero of Tristram’s history, and indeed Tristram refers to him more than once as “my Hero” (I, 12, 19; I, 10, 12). Those qualities that
Tristram most admires are to be found in Yorick, who has the finest pedigree of any Sternean character. Not only does he descend in a direct line from Hamlet’s “king’s chief Jester” (I, 11, 16), but he is also of equal rank with comic genius of Don Quixote:
I have the highest idea of the spiritual and refined sentiments of this reverend gentleman, from this single stroke in his character, which I think comes up to any of the honest refinements of the peerless knight of La Mancha, whom, by the bye, with all his follies, I love more, and would actually have gone further to have paid a visit to, than the greatest hero of antiquity. (I, 10, 15)
This “reverend gentleman, ” though in many ways comparable to Don Quixote, is distinguished from the seeming craziness of the famous knight by the fact that he is acutely conscious of himself. He is crazy to the point of being viewed and mocked as a fool, only the façade of being a fool is his own “willing” pretense, and the idealist generosity under the camouflage of wearing a fool’s cap makes him simultaneously ridiculous and tragically noble— ridiculous for his parishioners, while noble to the illuminated reader (and to Yorick himself.) The synthesis of a self-conscious fool and the inner idealism constitutes an almost incredible combination. As Fool, he remains detached from everything, whereas as Don Quixote, he is always totally involved. And here we have a split which is quite different from that which characterizes Walter and Toby. While the Shandy brothers are separated from the concrete world, the split in Yorick takes place within himself, through the Fool’s awareness and the idealist’s blindness. He knows what he is doing, but keeps quiet about what he is, in order to join others in mocking something that ought not to be the subject of laughter or condemnation.
The acute consciousness of being a fool, however, is reserved only to his inner self.
Instead of filling the world with his own projections like the Shandy brothers, the idealist side of Yorick, while all- involving, constantly separates his self from the world. In other words, he is too clear- minded about the fact that the world ’s dealings, transactions, and its opinions on him never are the true picture of what he really is. In this constant, almost
schizophrenic split between a fool and an idealist, Yorick communes with himself as someone else— he remains himself on the one hand in the guise of a fool, which he definitely is not,
and on the other hand, in assuming the role of idealistic deep in his heart, which often contradicts his penchant of levity and jolly character. This peculiar strain of communing with one’s self as someone else does not mean leaving himself. It is this extraordinary relationship within the self- splitting self that makes Yorick seem eccentric, in the sense of decentered. “Mirroring oneself in another self and never allowing the other self to dominate the relationship, indicates to what extent such an activity has internalized the difference which otherwise exists between self and world. Positioned eccentrically, he stands where he stands, and at the same time not where he stands” (Markley 187).
Maintaining this duality entails experiencing the self as suffering, but again there is nothing final about this suffering— it would disappear once the duality had been removed.
It is true that Yorick dies “quite brokenhearted” (I, 12,21), but it is with a quotation from Sancho Panza on his lips “and as he spoke it, Eugenius could perceive a stream of lambent fire lighted up of a moment in his eyes;— faint picture of those flashes of his spirit which (as Shakespeare said of his ancestor) were wont to set the table in a roar!” (I, 12, 22).
Turning tears to laughter makes Yorick’s moment of parting both pathetic and comic.
What appears to be a split in the personality constituted an ideal quality in the eighteenth century, as can be seen from the epitaph published fourteen years after Yorick’s death in the novel, by the Sentimental Magazine (1774):
He felt for man— nor dropt a fruitless tear,
But kindly stove the drooping heart to chear… .
… with humour ’s necromantic charm,
Death saw him sorrow, care, and spleen disarm. (Tave 190)
If Yorick was already the hero of Tristram’s history, he now rises to the heights of a paradigm for the century. He combines two mutually exclusive frames of mind in a manner that would be impossible in real life. However, what is revealing here is less the reality than the conditions that give rise to it. The split in Yorick continually causes suffering to turn
into laughter, ideals into foolery, and awareness into naivety, but then the laugher, foolery and naivety are themselves overturned because in dispatching their opposites they can only
destabilize themselves. Through this constant overturning, it is impossible to reduce the self to an assumed core. Instead, everything springs from the split of the self, the basis of which remains unfathomable. Subjectivity thus appears in an unmistakable duality. It both fashions itself and exposes its self-production to failure.