分割的舞台及其觀眾－勞倫司史坦”崔士強, 山帝”中的主題性探討

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(1)♁ 國立中山大學外國語文研究所碩士論文. The Divided Stage and Its Audience: The Representation of Subjectivity in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. 研究生：邱芳莉撰 by: Theresa F. Chiou 指導教授：田偉文教授 Advisor: Professor Rudolphus Teeuwen 中華民國九十三年七月.

(2) Abstract Being classified in the “anti- tradition of unclassifiable books,” Laurence Sterne ’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent. has fascinated generations of readers and critics with its seemingly chaotic richness. The narrator Tristram appears to hide his ultimate purpose and unity beneath a cloak of oddity and confusion, which defies any attempt on the reader’s part to ever pinning it down, and thus opens ground for various debates and critiques. Taking Tristram’s many futile efforts at tracing back the origin of his life as the starting point, this thesis attempts to explore the author- narrator’s deliberate use of oddity and confusion. The impossibility of ever finding a coherent and definite beginning of one ’s life is read in my study as a metaphor of one’s losing battle at pinning down the concept of self, the embodiment of the ungraspable subjectivity. Not even Locke’s epistemology or the eighteenth-century knowledge of anthropology can serve as an adequate framework of reference for the account of one’s life, if it is to be interpreted as subjectivity. The fact that men are different from one another arises from their individual hobbyhorse, the manifestation of subjectivity, which resists attempts to be defined exactly and thus makes itself unfathomable.. This discovery is the very basis of my reading of Tristram Shandy. Since. subjectivity refuses to be grasped, my thesis then proceeds to investigate the way in which Tristram represents this ungraspable subjectivity. The concept of staging is employed in this thesis to explore Sterne’s deployment of subjectivity. On the stage where the many facets of each character’s singular microcosm are presented, it is demonstrated that the reader is also drawn into Tristram’s game play, only with the peculiar result that in discovering subjectivity (theirs and ours,) we trespass boundary and assume Tristram’s subjectivity.. Key words: Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, Tristram, self, subjectivity, hobbyhorse, Locke, stage, play, game.

(3) Table of Contents Introduction: More Handles Than One Chapter One: “Have You Not forgot to Wind Up the Clock?”— Subjectivity and the Split of the Self I. The Ever Receding Beginning as a Metaphor of Subjectivity II. The Oblique Use of Locke’s Associationism III. The Idiosyncratic Association and the Core of the Self IV. Isolation as the Outgrowth of Subjectivity A. The Unconscious Split of Self from the World B. The Split Between a Fool’s Cap and an Idealist’s Heart C. The Deliberate Split between Life and Writing. 1. 10 10 14 18 20 21 30 33. Chapter Two: Manifesting the Ungraspable on the Imaginary Stage I. Subjectivity as Performance A. The Divided Stage Orchestrated by the Actor-Director-Narrator B. Gesture as a Means of Visualizing II. The Characters’ Games and Role Play A. Toby’s War Games B. Walter’s Game of Theories and Hypotheses C. Tristram’s Play of His Own Text and Role. 39 39 42 45 52 52 58 61. Chapter Three: The Constant Speaker on the Stage and the Audienc e I. “Writing Is But a Different Name for Conversation” A. The Polyphonic Nature of Speech/Writing B. Reader’s Participation in the Conversation 1. The Limited Freedom in Interpreting Text 2. The Ample Room for Reader ’s Reflection and Conclusion Drawing C. Writing as a Hobby-horse II. The Humor of the Novel. 65 65 66 68 69 75 79 83. Conclusion. 94. Works Cited. 99.

(4) Chiou 1. Introduction: More Handles Than One. Toward the end of his life in 1768, Laurence Sterne wrote one of his last and most interesting letters to an American admirer, Dr. John Eustace of Wilmington, thanking him for sending his favorite author a walking stick with gnarled handle, a “piece of Shandean statuary” (as Eustace called it): Your walking stick is in no sense more shandaic than in that of its having more handles than one— The parallel breaks only in this, that in using the stick, every one will take the handle which suits his convenience. In Tristram Shandy, the handle is taken which suits his passions, their ignorance or sensibility. There is so little true feeling in the herd of the world, that I wish I could have got an act of parliament, when the books first appear ’d, ‘that none but wise men should look into them. ’ It is too much to write books and find heads to understand them. (Letters 411)1 It was in late 1759 when Tristram Shandy first appeared. Two volumes of the novel, which were placed in the window of Hinxman’s Sign of the Bible Bookshop on Stonegate in York sold so quickly that R. and J. Dodsley, the London booksellers, immediately arranged for a London edition. As is evident from Cash’s biography of Sterne, in those early months of 1760 Sterne took the literary world by storm and secured his fame for posterity (Cash 24). The sensation caused was partly because of the fact that such an odd, seemingly frivolous and even “scabby” work was written by a clergyman, and partly because of the unusual manner in which its author conducts and presents his story. Ever since its first publication, a wide diversity of criticism has emerged to suit individual readers’ and critics’disposition and temperament for eulogizing or lambasting the work itself, or even the preacher-writer himself.. 1. Letters hereafter is used to refer Letters of Laurence Sterne, edited by Lewis Perry Curtis, the 1935 Claredon edition..

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(6) Chiou 2. The “handles” to handle the “muddle” (in E. M. Forster’s wording) reigning in the Shandy squiredom are indeed plenty (Traugott 3). Is the novel trivial, comic, sentimental, ironical, satirical, or a tragedy? To what category does it belong? Not only were critics each having their own handles, but the reading population’s reception wavers greatly from generation to generation, and from century to century.. To this day, we can only wonder at past attitudes towards this great original, Sterne : he was regarded prurient, eccentric, foolish, maudlin; his work was at best a lumber room from which might be culled some dear characters. In his own time he was sensational, the literary lion, always a poseur, always shandean. He has always been read and loved, but somewhat clandestinely, after the first clamor, intuitively appreciated but felt to be a not quite decent representative of the so-called high culture. Samuel Richardson, like many of his contemporaries, praised Sterne’s talent for character drawing: “Yorick, Uncle Toby, and Trim are admirably characterized,” but otherwise his reaction to the various volumes is: “execrable I cannot but call them… Unaccountable wildness; whimsical digressions; comical incoherencies; uncommon indecencies; all with an air of novelty, has catched [sic!] the reader’s attention” (Carrol 341-2). This irritation is tantamount to a confession that fictional characters can be appealing without conforming to the implicit demands of the eighteenth-century novel that they be carriers of moral concerns. Those more favorably disposed towards Sterne placed him in the great line of Rabelais and Cervantes, seeing him as a satirist. Among them was Edmund Burke, though he, too, had his problems with the novel: “These digressions so frequently repeated, instead of relieving the reader, become at length tiresome,” but at the same time the “faults of an original work are always pardoned” (Anderson 481). For all his goodwill, though, Burke too was guided by the prevailing expectations as regards the hero of an eighteenth-century.

(7) Chiou 3. novel: he had to represent moral attitudes, and so one must simply tolerate whatever could be subsumed under that heading. It is not surprising, then, that quite a few of Sterne’s critics were impressed by Yorick’s sermon on conscience, which even Horace Walpole— whose judgment was otherwise harsh— singled out for grudging praise: “The characters are tolerably kept up; but the humour is forever attempted and missed. The best thing in it is a sermon” (Anderson 473). Since Walpole himself reacted against the moralizing novel of the eighteenth century by launching the Gothic novel, in order to free human nature from the constraints of stylization, his remark here is convincing evidence of what Sterne’s contemporaries expected of narrative literature. That there was something special about Sterne’s characters, however, does seem to have been generally noted, even when they were simply dismissed, as in Dr. Johnson’s grandiose misjudgment:. “Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last” (Anderson 484).. The attacks directed against the book because it departed from classical novels, as well as from the expected moral framework, at the same time acknowledged the innovative nature of the characterization, though this was not understood, because it demanded new standards of judgment. The general attitude of disapproval continued to prevail in the Victorian age. For Sir Walter Scott, Sterne was “liable to two severe charges;— those, namely, of indecency, and of affectation” (Anderson 489), a criticism that was taken and turned into a commonplace by Walter Bagehot, when he wrote in 1864 that Tristram Shandy incorporated “indecency for indecency’s sake” (293). It was also derided for those very qualities that some of the later critics regarded as the highest art, namely, its style. For Bagehot, Tristram Shandy’s style is “phantastic, [and] its methods illogical and provoking” conditions which remove the coherence of a story or a plot (294). Such coherence had to be preserved, according to an.

(8) Chiou 4. attitude that demanded high seriousness from literature. Tristram Shandy was therefore overlaid by the projections of prevailing cultural codes, whether they were Dr. Johnson’s classicism or the Victorians’ moralism, and so it was generally condemned. It refused, however, to go away, but continued to irritate those who projected their ideas on to it. “[T]he foul satyr ’s eyes leer out of the leaves constantly, ” said Thackeray petulantly, complaining that the author of Tristram Shandy always looking in the reader ’s face, watching his effect (Anderson 493). Coleridge was more philosophical: “[T]here is a sort of knowingness, the wit of which depends, first, on the modesty it gives pain to; or secondly, on the innocence and innocent ignorance over which it triumphs; or thirdly, on a certain oscillation in the individual mind between the remaining good, and the encroaching evil of his nature, a sort of dallying with the devil… so that the mind has in its own white and black angel the same or similar amusement as may be supposed to take place between an old debauchee and a prude,— she feeling resentment, on the one hand, from a prudential anxiety to preserve appearances and have a character, and, on the other, an inward sympathy with the enemy” (Anderson 486). With very different evaluations, these are fundamentally twentieth-century views of the subversive jester in Sterne. Both Thackeray and Coleridge in their remarks distantly suggest a deeper aspect of Sterne’s art which is the major concern of the modern age: his tinkering with reality, confusing fiction and actuality, destroying illusion, making convention conscious, and abolishing cause and effect in time. The major concerns might be shared by many in the twentieth century, the consensus on the conclusion of exploring each issue is, however, hard to be reached. The moment we are about to accept Tristram’s invitation to keep our imagination as busy as his own, for he has promised to “halve this matter amicably, and leave him [the reader] to imagine ” (II, 11, 77) 2 ,. 2. All quotations from the text of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent. hereafter in this thesis are based on Howard Anderson’s Tristram Shandy: an Authoritative Text, the Author on the Novel, Criticism, Norton edition, 1980. The order as appeared in the parentheses are arranged as (volume, chapter, page number,) so that (I, 4, 4) stands for volume I, chapter 4, page 4..

(9) Chiou 5. and the moment we are willing to embrace Wolgang Iser ’s phenomenological approach to endorse our active and productive reading, some authority would be well on his way to convince us with ample evidence of the impossibility of Tristram’s promise: “Here the author plays his own annotator or mediator, forcing all his readers to “get” a text I am certain all will miss on first reading. Sterne’s humour depends on requiring from his readers a knowledge they could not possibly be expected to have ” (New, Critical Essays 129). On what ground can we be an active participant in Tristram’s (Sterne’s) world of “the learned wit” as championed by D. W. Jefferson? How to gain access to those esoteric or obscure sources of contemporary medical, legal, religious, scholastic background and knowledge? Greek remains Greek to us. Even with such a powerful annotation guide as the Florida Edition of Tristram Sterne, we gain more understanding on some Greek-like sources, the understanding is not originated by our mental participation, not even our imagination. We are guided and chaperoned, if we are willing, to trace behind a seemingly hostile text which is so alien to the rosy picture of half-and-half as promised by our narrator. As we are about to give a mental standing ovation to Tristram’s maverick announcement that “I shall confine myself neither to [Horace’s] rules, nor to any man’s rules that ever lived” (I, 4, 4), it is baffling to find our own naivety in taking Tristram’s nonconformity so wholeheartedly. Isn’t it now one of the most classic remarks that “Tristram Shandy is the most typical (emphasis mine) novel of world literature” (Shklovsky 89)? As we stare at the ****, the jagged lines, the grotesque curves transcribed from Tristram Shandy onto Shklovsky’s essay, knowing that the great Russian Formalist had laid bare Sterne’s technique of “laying bare” to us, we are on the brink of laying bare our insecurity of being trapped in indeterminacy. The same applies when we juxtapose reading Richard Lanham’s exposition of Tristram’s game and play with Sigurd Burckhardt’s “Law of Gravity.” Are we to be an arbiter or a mediator in judging or even reconciling those jarring opinions? Wayne Booth’s ratiocination on the completeness (Anderson 532-48) more recently is confronted by Calvin.

(10) Chiou 6. Thomas’equally well argued essay, “ Tristram Strandy’s Consent to Incompleteness: Discourse, Disavowal, Disruption. ” The list of controversies can run longer and longer: the (in)efficacy of communication, the (in)sincerity of Shandean sentimentality, the modern/postmodern debate on Sterne ’s representation of reality, a pessimistic concession to the current of life or an optimistic triumph announcing the narrator/author’s masterful control, and so on.. The novel indeed has more than one handle, and each handle can be tackled from many different, even totally opposing angles. Of all the many voices on how to handle the many handles, Nietzsche’s may provide a most pertinent observation in his reading of Tristram Shandy. For Nietzsche, Sterne is The most liberated spirit of his century!… in comparison with whom all others seem still, square, intolerant and boorishly direct. What is to be praised in him is not the closed and transparent but the “endless melody”: if with this expression we may designate an artistic style in which the fixed form is constantly being broken up, displaced, transposed back into indefiniteness, so that it signifies one thing and at the same time another. Sterne is the great master of ambiguity— this word taken in a far wider sense than is usually done when it is accorded only a sexual signification.. The reader who demands to know exactly what Sterne really thinks. of a thing, whether he is making a serious or a laughing face, must be given up for lost: for he knows how to encompass both in a single facial expression; he likewise knows how, and even wants to be in the right and in the wrong at the same time, to knot together profundity and farce. His digressions are at the same time continuations and further developments of the story; his aphorisms are at the same time an expression of an attitude of irony towards all sententiousness, his antipathy to seriousness is united with a tendency to be unable to regard anything merely.

(11) Chiou 7. superficially. Thus he produces in the right reader a feeling of uncertainty as to whether one is walking, standing or lying: a feeling, that is, closely related to floating. He, the supplest of authors, communicates something of this suppleness to his reader. Indeed, Sterne unintentionally reverses these roles, and is sometimes as much reader as author; his book resembles a play within a play, an audience observed by another audience. One has to surrender unconditionally to Sterne’s caprices— always in the expectation, however, that one will not regret doing so.— It is strange and instructive to see how as great a writer as Diderot adopted this universal ambiguity of Sterne ’s: though he did so, of course, ambiguously— and thus truly in accord with Sternean humour. (238-9) The philosopher who spent his life tracing the resentment and the cultural discontent which he saw concealed in traditional beliefs and contemporary ideas, discovers Tristram Shandy in all the richness of its referenc es. The fractured form brings out the double meaning, the thwarting of expectations turns the reader against his own preconceptions, the theatrical setting permits the staging of what has been hidden, and the pronounced artificiality of representation makes appearance into an ultimate reality. In Sterne, Nietzsche finds his most cherished intentions fulfilled— here is reflected the reverse side of what is. Something must always be questioned if not completely decomposed in order to give expression to what exceeds verbalization. Taking this “something” which requires our questioning and “what exceeds verbalization” as my subjective handle of reading Tristram Standy, my thesis sets as its focal point the exploration of that which lies behind the indeterminacy which permeates many parts of Sterne’s narrative. With an aim like this, I do not mean to try to reconcile, not even if it is possible, all the jarring elements implicit in Sterne ’s product and in a wide range of criticism; rather, my study may well be deemed as an effort of tracing— tracing back, speculating on, and trying how best to ratiocinate the origin and nature of Sterne’s/Tristram’s conscious (or.

(12) Chiou 8. unconscious? again a case of indeterminateness!) use of indeterminacy. Indeterminacy is already there in the narrative, and abounds indeed. What interests me most, nevertheless, is not so much its function or purpose as its origin, i.e., that which triggers all this elusiveness, the engine of the ungraspable. Without the effort to look behind, the many laughters and the double doses of befuddlement engendered by the omnipresent indeterminacy would drag us either to a void of disorientation or to an intolerable state of boredom, bored by our and Tristram’s perpetual indeterminacy. In this way of “handling” Tristram Shandy, what I embark on is perhaps more a regressive than a progressive journey, deliberately in tune to (also paying homage to) Tristram’s regressive tracing back the very origin of his life. Trying to decode Tristram Shandy by simultaneously holding every possible handle to me is a chimera, for not only Tristram the narrator is forever changing his face to us but almost all the other Shandy Hall inhabitants are perpetually enclosed in their funny yet unbreakable opaqueness. All we have is their singularity and idiosyncrasy which seem to freeze them, Tristram included, into a mystery. With this observation as my initial drive, Chapter One is an attempt to probe the individual characters’s singularity, the outer appearance of their subjectivity. Through the effort of probing, perhaps it is possible that some light can be shed on how the ungraspable subjectivity controls the flow of life and contributes to the fluid, indeterminate texture of the novel. In dealing with subjectivity and human understanding, some space is given to Locke’s epistemology, particularly the association of ideas, not only because Tristram subscribes to it directly or indirectly in many passages, but also because in taking Locke’s associationism as a stepping stone, it is easier for us to gain some glimpse of Sterne’s sense of subjectivity and the real distance between this very subjectivity and the representation of reality. Chapter Two, following the discussion of subjectivity, concentrates on the more technical side of how to present, or represent subjectivity. The whole novel of Tristram Shandy has often been decried of its lack of clear plot. We are offered some story lines,.

(13) Chiou 9. such as Toby’s amour, Tristram’s birth, and his baptism. Those however are more episode- like. The meager content of several episodes can hardly constitute a complete story in its full sense of comprising beginning, middle, and ending, not to mention constituting the rendering of a life. With such fragmentary bits of life to tell about and so daunting a topic of subjectivity to challenge, Tristram several times laments his incapacity of ever catching up with his life. His articulation sometimes falls short of communicating “what’s exceeding verbalization. ” Therefore we are given so many gestures, postures, details of objects, all of which serve as a means of assisting in our visualization. Visualization through staging is “capable of anything, ” and “[w]hat cannot be explained has to be staged” (Iser, Tristram 17). From this vantage point of staging and play, we may be allowed the privilege of peeping into the seemingly impenetrable subjectivity. Since the presentation of the characters and their subjectivity are in no small part manifested through staging, then what is presented before us is definitely pungent with the director ’s personal style. And since what is on the stage is supposed to be the narrator/director’s life, if he wants to remain loyal to his own title, then the narrator-director unquestionably is also an actor on the stage. Chapter Three naturally centers on Tristram’s singular way of “telling” his story, and the effect of this versatile narrator-actor-director’s personal flavor on his audience-reader.. Like a play or film review, this chapter ends with a. discussion of how the mood the auteur style 3 creates through his innovative technique has infected the viewer and what the general mood is, though each spectator is allowed his share of imagination to feel the mood.. 3. French film-maker Alexandre Astruc’s contention that the director was the author of a film was christened “la politique des auteurs” byFrancois Truffaut in 1954. According to “auteur theory,” the most significant films are those that bear the “signature” of their directors by proclaiming their personalities and key themes (Parkinson 185)..

(14) Chiou 10. Chapter One “Have You Not Forgot to Wind Up the Clock?” — Subjectivity and the Split of the Self. “Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last,” said the great Neo-classical khan, Samuel Johnson, in his conversation with Boswell eight years after Laurence Sterne’s death (Anderson 484). We have no means to know how long a duration constituted “long” in Dr. Johnson’s perception, though it is undeniable that Tristram Shandy, with all its oddities, DID last, survive, and well march into our century. A few statistics may attest its popularity: Tristram Shandy had been translated into German in 1665 when Volumes VII and VIII were still being published in London; a complete German translation of the entire nine volumes appeared six years after Sterne died. The last quarter of the eighteenth century would see the emergence of the French and Dutch versions, though not in complete nine-volume form. Throughout the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, new editions and translations would spring up almost every decade, sometimes many in a single decade. 4 The long history of its publication forms solid proof that the charm of this novel doesn’t seem to be diluted by its “odd” character.. I. The Ever Receding Beginning as a Metaphor of Subjectivity The sense of oddity indeed makes itself felt almost immediately as the narrative begins, especially to the contemporary readers whose reading habit was just newly fashioned by the then still relatively small stock of earlier novels. Where Fielding in 1749 started with: “In that part of the western division of this kingdom which is commonly called Somersetshire, there lately lived, and perhaps lives still, a gentleman whose name was Allworth… .” (3) and 4. The detailed publication history of Tristram Shandy since its first appearance in 1759 has been well documented and compiled by various scholars in different editions, for instance, Melvyn New’s Florida edition and the one compiled by Monika Reif-Hulser, as appeared in Wolfgang Iser’s Tristram Shandy..

(15) Chiou 11. where Defoe began with: “I was Born, as my Friends told me, at the City of Poictiers, in the Province, or County of Poictou, in France… .” (7) Sterne gives us a start— a start indeed, a shock for his starting Tristram Shandy’s life and opinions as follows: I Wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me: had they duly condiser’d how much depended upon what they were then doing:— that not only the production of a rational Being was concern’d in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;— and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:— Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,— I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me. (I, 1, 1) The reader’s expectation and presupposition of how a story is to be told is immediately overturned.. The birth seems more like a doom- laden end, for implicit in the first several. lines is a jesting blaming of the narrator ’s own parents for their not “duly considering what they were then doing.” For the hero of the eighteenth-century novel, birth is a beginning without questioning; what matters is his history frequently stressed in the actual titles of the narratives. History had specific connotations: it illustrated the testing of norms and ideals by subjecting the m to the vicissitudes of time. And the norms being validated are usually represented by the hero in the empirical world, so that the hero becomes a carrier of meaning, and its birth— if it was mentioned al all— was no more than the natural beginning of what was to be accomplished by the end. Tristram is no such messenger, and so he does not write a history but a “life,” with no aspirations towards self-perfection.. The “life” is but a. “[n]arrative of a Life past,” as defined by Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary (314). This kind of.

(16) Chiou 12. “life” is in direct contrast to “history,” for instead of binding all events together in an ultimate meaning, it expands each single incident out into its prehistory, showing that the character of events is such that they need not necessarily have taken the course that they did. While the history is drawn together by the meaning of its end, the “life” explodes into the imponderable. The connections between natural and historical processes thus undergo a remarkable inversion: in the history type of novel, the hero’s birth is the natural precondition for the unfolding of his story; for Tristram, the birth stands at the end of an infinitely expanding range of pre- histories. Underlying the history is teleological ordering of its purpose, whereas Tristram’s pre-birth life stories are all marked by the workings of chance. If Tristram’s “life” were written only as a counter to the success story contained in the history, then the latent parody would now have nothing but historical interest.. A parody that. can outlast the context of its genesis, nevertheless, must be more than a mere inversion of an inherited schema. Since the beginning itself turns out to be a result, with Tristram’s misfortunes starting nine months before his birth, it may be said that for the most part the hero can hardly be held responsible for what happens to him. Consequently he is no longer a suitable carrier of meaning in the service of an overall purpose, and so in comparison to his fellow eighteenth-century heroes, Tristram is without a function. Instead of demonstrating something, he himself becomes the object of scrutiny, thus causing a shift in the narrative tradition by opening up hitherto unexplored realms: the hero, having lost his various traditional functions, is now set free to become a subject in his own right; and being thrown back upon himself, as it were, he begins to discover himself in all his difficult complexity. Before Tristram’s actual birth in Volume III, Tristram the narrator has exhausted nearly every possible way to trace back and pin down the determinate origin of his misfortune, his life, only to find all efforts being in vain. The long journey tracing back, now conceived by the narrator as a novel beginning both of his own life and of his writing, however, is an.

(17) Chiou 13. unfathomable abyss. As soon as the reader is ready to take the theory of humours as popped out on the very first page as the surest, real origin/beginning, he is guided by the narrator in his oblique way to a gradual yet somewhat surprising realization that the character of the theory itself is highly elusive, almost impenetrable, and thus ungraspable. To a writer who admitted that he wrote “not to be fed but to be famous,” (Letters 497) it is not surprising that he would invoke the then widely familiar theory of humours as an endorsement to his explanation on his protagonist’s origin. The theory, glossily termed the eighteenth-century anthropology, as Wolfgang Iser suggested, was developed in Late Antiquity and had undergone quite a few definition changes by the mid-eighteenth century (Tristram 48-9). What began in the sixteenth century as a quasi-scientific and natural definition of man as composed of and mixed by the four cardinal fluids had been adapted to describe contemporary situations and become more and more historicized by the end of the seventeenth century. Thus to someone like Sir William Temple, the “humour ” was already “a mannered form of behavior, ” (Tave 98) which— though one was born with it— had a conspicuous boom in England. From Congreve up until late in the eighteenth century, the climate was held responsible— and indeed Sterne regards Yorick’s peculiarity as being conditioned by the weather (I, 11, 17). In addition to the climate, England’s social conventions were regarded as feeding- ground for the humour as a form of eccentricity— and indeed, eccentricity become the hallmark of humour. Thus humour was considered the offshoot of given social and meteorological conditions, leading to ever increasing individualization for which “eccentricity” turned out to be the common denominator (Tave 100-4). But, what forces actually motivate this individualized eccentricity implicit in the humours? Would Sterne’s, or the narrator’s, recourse to the contemporary understanding of the humour theory make more accessible the new subject matter of the self, the origin of the self? For the former question, Sterne provides us with such medieval physiological terms as.

(18) Chiou 14. the “animal spirits,” the homunculus, and warns us of the fact that these pre-self conditions may be subject to a thousand weaknesses if the mixture of the fluids (of the humours) should be wrong. And yet the narrator didn’t, or rather was unable to, articulate how and what to concoct a right mixture of fluids, and what constitutes a less misfortune-prone self- to-be, i.e., the homunculus. All that is known is that the humours are the cause of a “self,” as to the forces that govern the physiological interplay of the humours are inexplicable. By so showcasing the commonsense- like mid-eighteenth century anthropology, Tristram, or Sterne, simultaneously overrules the possibility that contemporary anthropology can offer a natural explanation of the self, instead, it makes the self even more elusive, and more inaccessible.. With this oblique and peculiar application of the theory of the humours,. Tristram the narrator is killing two birds with one stone: First, the sure ground to anchor the self is shattered, or even removed, for even the taken- for-granted origin of birth has its character of being impenetrable. Second, all the efforts to conceive a solid, valid definition of the self are then destined to be in vain. As if dropping the stone inadvertently, Tristram, leaving the impenetrable nature of the humours to sir, the reader, pretends to have accepted the theory whole-heartedly, and squarely lays the blame for disturbing the “right” combining and engendering of the homunculus on his parents, for they didn’t mind enough what they were about when they begot him. Namely, his mother ’s peculiar association of marital duties with clock winding was held responsible for his misery yet to be unfolded.. II. The Oblique Use of Locke’s Associationism Within only two pages of Tristram Shandy’s first chapter, Locke’s association of ideas is brought to the fore. Through the circumstances surrounding his birth, the narrator feels himself to be a victim of Locke’s cognitive premises: Namely, that, from an unhappy association of ideas which have no connection in.

(19) Chiou 15. nature, it so fell out at length that my poor mother could never hear the said clock wound up,— but the thoughts of some other things unavoidably popped into her head,— and vice versa:— which strange combination of ideas the sagacious Locke, who certainly understood the nature of these things better than most men, affirms to have produced more wry actions than all other sources of prejudice whatsoever. (I, 4, 5) Not surprisingly Locke’s exposition of the association of ideas is here treated and refracted playfully. The interesting thing is that there is a time lapse of almost seventy years between the appearance of Locke’s work and the publication of Tristram Shandy. It is true that the impact of Locke’s theory of human understanding upon contemporary thought was considerable. In the first decades of the eighteenth century the An Essay concerning Human Understanding was widely read, frequently cited, quoted, debated, and adapted to various current uses. But the pertinent fact to note here is that Laurence Sterne was not writing in those early decades and was not a party to the early celebration of the Essay; Sterne was born in 1713, twenty three years after the publication of Locke’s Essay, and most of Tristram Shandy was written in the early 1760s. So, we might ask: what did Locke have to offer to an aspiring novelist? When An Essay concerning Human Understanding was first published in 1690, Locke consolidates more than a century of speculation among skeptical philosophers and others as to how man comprehends his own experiences in the world. Underlined in his analytical examination of the process of the human mind are some central points: first, a recognition that, far from Descartes’ thought system, man does not possess innate ideas; second, a realization that all of the ideas man possesses can only be derived from two sources, sensations drawn from the experiential world and man’s own reflections based upon those sensations; and third, knowledge arises from the combination of “simple ideas” which impinge on the mind from outside..

(20) Chiou 16. Since Locke rejects Descartes’ innate ideas— which did not permit any increase of knowledge through their combination, then it is necessary for him to assume the existence of archetypes in order to prevent combination from getting out of hand. While Locke assigned a regulative function to archetypes, he also admitted that “the mind of man uses some kind of Liberty in forming complex ideas” (II, 21,33), and since complex ideas are brought about by way of Reflection, so they are the product of the human mind. Then, if intellectual freedom plays a role in associating ideas, how does this freedom influence the supposedly rational and universal regulative function of archetypes, which seek to restrict such liberty? This is the problem Sterne latches on to, offering an alternative to Locke’s solution couched in “reason, ” which seems not adequate to Sterne. The “sagacious ” Locke of course was not unaware of the dissonance implicit in this incorporation of archetypes and intellectual freedom. In filling the gap, Locke proposed that reason is the only key to form useful and usable combination and associations of ideas. And indeed the major endeavor of Locke’s Essay is to sketch out a reasonable and reliable connection between the individual mind and the external world which confronts it. The mind must learn a judicious receptivity to materials from the external world and conform its own operations to the realities of that world; the mind is a relatively passive student, one to be stimulated, schooled, and disciplined by real experience. Locke mistrusted the mind’s potential independence from external circumstances, and his discussion of free will offers a useful perspective on that problem. Locke argued that traditional debates over free will misstated the problem: the real question was not whether the will is free, but whether man is free, free to pursue his desires or to restrain himself from pursuit by a wise consideration. In Locke’s formulation, then, man’s freedom is the ability to be reasonable and to implement his reasonableness in the world; man can work thoughtfully towards his own happiness, and any other notion of freedom is foolishness: Is it worth the Name of Freedom to be at liberty to play the Fool, and draw Shame.

(21) Chiou 17. and Misery upon a man’s self? If to break loose from the conduct of reason, and to want that restraint of Examination and Judgment, which keeps us from chusing or doing the worse, be Liberty, true Liberty, mad Men and Fools are the only Freemen: But yet, I think, no Body would chuse to be mad for the sake of such Liberty, but he that is mad already. (II, 21, 21-2) The necessity of pursuing one’s happiness in a reasonable and practical way is not a restraint of human freedom, “or at least (not) an abridgment of Liberty to be complain’d of” (II, 21,50). Freedom from reasonable consideration was a liberty beyond Locke’s ken, and he systematically bound the mind’s potential independence from external circumstance into a sane and sensible working relationship with circumstance. Shandean freedom is of a wholly different sort, though. While Sterne did not denounce rational consideration of circumstance unconditionally, he consistently satirized particular attempts to encompass circumstances by reasonable means; the products of rational “liberty” in Tristram Shandy most often are narrow, self-contained, self-delusive, or simply foolish. Locke’s notions on how cognitive processes work Sterne basically agreed with, but only the latter placed different values on those processes. Locke rated the powers of the mind in a hierarchy stretching from reason at the top downward to lesser powers— will, emotion, imagination, humour, and others— which ought by rights to be subordinate to reason; the different powers take their value from their proximity to or distance from reason. Sterne ’s implicit design for the mind’s powers is more of a side-by-side nature, more counterpoised; all the powers of the mind have something to contribute to understanding; as evidenced from Tristram’s attempt to offer an idea on how cognitive processes are formed and on what could motivate the succession and combination of ideas: In swims CURIOSITY, beckoning to her damsels to follow— they dive into the center of the current— FANCY sits musing upon the bank, and with her eyes following the stream, turns straws and bulrushes into masts and bowsprits— And.

(22) Chiou 18. DESIRE, with vest held up to the knee in one hand, snatches at them, as they swim by her, with the other—. (VIII, 5, 383). Besides fancy, curiosity, and desire, what motivates the association of ideas are even more factors as we read back, especially on the passage depicting Dr. Slop’s difficulty in untying the many knots on his instrument bag: Great wits jump: for the moment Dr. Slop cast his eyes upon his bag (which he had not done till the dispute with my uncle Toby about midwifery put him in mind of it)— the very same thought occurred.— ‘Tis God’s mercy, quote he, (to himself) that Mrs. Shandy has had so bad a time of it,— else she might have been brought to bed seven times told, before one half of these knots could have got untied.— But here, you must distinguish— the thought floated only in Dr. Slop’s mind, without sail or ballast to it, as a simple proposition; millions of which, as your worship knows, are every day swimming quietly in the middle of the thin juice of man’s understanding, without being carried backwards or forwards, till some little gusts of passion or interest drive them to one side. (III, 9, 119) Passions, interest, and more often than not sheer chance drive different ideas together which, as perceptual data received from outside, lie dormant in the human mind until they are activated by some subjective impulse. And habits are the consolidated form of these impulses, just like Mrs. Shandy’s habit of linking clock winding with lo ve making, and they sometimes spring from the most singular motivation.. III. The Idiosyncratic Association and the Core of the Self Sterne’s odd adaptation of associationism implies a trans-valuation of Lockean understanding. In the Lockean system of association, there indeed exists in some odd minds the propensity to form anomalous and illogical associations among different part of its experiences:.

(23) Chiou 19. Ideas that in themselves are not at all of kin, come to be so united in some Mens Minds, that ‘tis very hard to separate them, they always keep in company, and the one no sooner at any time comes into the Understanding but its Associate appears with it; and if they are more than two which are thus united, the whole gang always inseparable shew themselves together.. (II, 33, 5). To Locke, idiosyncratic mental associations are not a reflection of understanding, but a kind of madness: I shall be pardoned for calling it by so harsh a name as madness, when it is considered that opposition to reason deserves that name and is really madness; and there is scarce a man so free from it but that, if he should always on all occasions argue or do as in some cases he constantly does, would not be thought fitter for Bedlam than civil conversation. (II, 33, 4) The reference to Bedlam— the colloquial abbreviation for Bethlehem Hospital— is in itself revealing, for this institution, founded in 1547, was a lunatic asylum that was run not for the benefit of its patients, but as an exhibition where the public paid to see the inmates on show. Even in the early eighteenth century, Tom Brown in his London Amusement was still recommending a visit to Bedlam “for any gentleman, disposed for a touch of the times” (Rousseau 181). But “madness” seems too much a grave indictment to Sterne fo r such rhapsodical associations. Surely there is no exact knowing why Mrs. Shandy associates the sexual act with winding up the clock, why Walter connects almost all events with the premises of scholastic rhetoric, or uncle Toby’s thinking of everything, even love, in terms of fortifications. Yet rarely any reader would in his sound mind consider these characters the inmates at Bedlam; more likely the depiction of these characters elicits a sense of funny absurdity and dramatizes each individual’s inherent peculiarity. All their peculiar associations springing from habit only function as a means to throw their individual self into relief; and as the origins of the habit are equally idiosyncratic, subjectivity is spotlighted as.

(24) Chiou 20. the core of the self. Throughout the narrative, this conception runs: “A man cannot dress, but his ideas get cloth’d at the same time” (IX, 13, 435). With the motivation inexplicable yet present in its manifestation, this origin of association serves as a schema to translate the self into terms of impenetrable subjectivity, which eludes capture by suspending all frames of reference. Since subjectivity precedes the efforts to grasp it cognitively, it turns into an eager drive for the urgent desire to come to grips with it. In this singular way of appropriating Locke’s philosophy, all the figures in Tristram Shandy have their signature ways of combining ideas, i.e., each riding his own hobbyhorse, which is the expression of their unmistakable singularity. This is a very special artifice of Sterne’s, giving him several advantages all at once. Firstly, while the characters are uniformly conceived in accordance with their association of ideas, the sources and motives of their respective combinations make them branch out into a variety of totally distinct figures beside whom the conventional message-bearing characters of the eighteenth-century novel seem like pale shadows. Secondly, by cutting his figures to the Lockean pattern, Sterne is able to dispense with the representational function and thus concentrate on presenting each individual’s “hobby-horse,” the manifestation of subjectivity. And thirdly, in taking the association of ideas at face value— in accordance with Locke’s conviction that there was no way to reach behind it— Sterne conceived it as an individual signature of the subject’s self-referentiality.. IV. Isolation as the Outgrowth of Subjectivity Shifting the ballast of Locke’s philosophy from reason to subjectivity, however, has its own side effect: the newly discovered subjectivity— the hobby- horses the characters ride, the caps and bells they shake— becomes the resource of his activity, the heart of his existence. In view of its eccentricity, the subjectivity often leads to a self- imposed isolation, since as Jean Jacques Mayoux aptly puts it, “[t]he subjectivity of man is another name for his.

(25) Chiou 21. solitude” (Mayoux, Laurence Sterne 115).. A. The Unconscious Split of Self from the World The inhabitants of Shandy Hall talk and talk, talking incessantly to one another, even to the audience outside their dwelling— the pages— on their mental schemes, obsession with knowledge, warfare, writing, and so on. The act of “engaging” in conversation is always present, but with the result of true communication forever denied to them, foreve r absent. At a vital moment leading to Tristram’s birth, Walter asks the people assembled in the living-room of Shandy Hall how it could be that since the arrival of Dr. Slop and Obadiah only two hours and ten minutes have elapsed, although it seems to him like an eternity. The question is, of course, meant to be rhetorical but Uncle Toby at once chips in with the all- important catch-phrase:. “’Tis owing, entirely… to the succession of our ideas. ” Quite. put out by the fact that Toby has stolen his thunder, Walter asks him what he knows about it. “No more than my horse,” is the rejoinder. And now Walter is in his element: Gracious heaven! Cried my father, looking upwards, and clasping his two hands together,— there is a worth in thy honest ignorance, brother Toby,— ‘twere almost a pity to exchange it for a knowledge.— But I’ll tell thee.— To understand what time is aright, without which we never can comprehend infinity, inasmuch as one is a portion of the other,— we ought seriously to sit down and consider what idea it is, we have of duration, so as to give a satisfactory account, how we came by it.— What is that to any body? Quoth my uncle Toby. For if you will turn your eyes inwards upon our mind, continued my father, and observe attentively, you will perceive, brother, that whilst you and I are talking together, and thinking and smoaking our pipes: or whilst we receive successively ideas in our minds, we know that we do exist, and so we estimate the existence, or the continuation of the existence of ourselves, or any thing else commensurate tot the.

(26) Chiou 22. succession of any ideas in our minds, the duration of ourselves, or any such other thing co existing with our thinking,— and so according to that preconceived— You puzzle me to death, cried my uncle Toby.— — ‘Tis owing to this, replied my father, that in our computation of time, we are so used to minutes, hours, weeks, and months,— and of clocks (I wish there was not a clock in the kingdom) to measure out their several portions to us, and to those who belong to us,— that ‘twill be well, if in time to come, the succession of our ideas be of any use or service to us at all. Now, whether we observe it or no, continued my father, in every sound man’s head, there is a regular succession of ideas of one sort or other, which follow each other in train just like— A train of artillery? Said my uncle Toby.— A train of a fiddle stick!— quoth my father,— which follow and succeed one another in our minds at certain distances, just like the images in the inside of a lanthorn turned round by the heat of a candle.— I declare, quoth my uncle Toby, mine are like a smoak-jack.— Then, brother Toby, I have nothing more to say to you upon the subject, said my father. (III, 18, 138-9) This is only one of the many examples of failure to communicate. Where indeed was my uncle Toby wounded? At Namur, he replies. Was it really in the groin? the Widow Wadman asks herself. All we witness is the clumsy bumping of the “windowless nomads” (Mayoux , Variations 16) again and again against each other or the world of objects and circumstances in the process of what might be fondly termed communication. What is noteworthy is that these “nomads” of the mind, especially the Shandy brothers, do not regard this breakdown of communication as a problem; conversation continues, and life goes on. What might constitute a sign of anxiety and bitterness in writers of our age such as Ionesco and Joyce is amused in Sterne. We may take the Shandy brothers as funny in the comedy of absurdity, but the highlight is more on the hilarious side of the comedy rather than on the.

(27) Chiou 23. bleak meaninglessness implicit in absurdity. Yes, the obsession so typified the Shandy brothers may have some shade of mild delirium— according to Locke’s standard, but the isolation of mind which results from the very obsession does not impose the burden of grave distress on the reader. It is a kind of isolation revealed but not understood by those enclosed in their own microcosms. The Shandean men are entranced in their own world of hobby-horses. Walter lives in a world of inapplicable learning, ungrounded hypotheses, and words without objects; uncle Toby’s penchant for military metaphors leads him away from the real world, not into it; and Tristram’s own groping after appropriate words and conceptions is continually betraying him into digression, ambiguity, confusion, or bawdiness. There is, however, a subtle line marking the differences between these hobbyhorsical worlds of the Shandy brothers and Tristram’s microcosm. In Tristram, we cannot help but recall one of the most impressive comments by the much “annoyed” Thackery: “the foul satyr ’s eyes leer out of the pages constantly” (Anderson 493). Tristram, or Sterne, has his own world of peculiar obsession. He knows this enough to show some of its contents sometimes to us, to hide deliberately some parts of his world from our knowing him too well at some other time. Anxiety, however, gradually builds up and betrays his seemingly calm control of every thing. We know this is someone, some “self,” who wittingly, simultaneously, and selectively dramatizes and withholds whatever materials he has at hand. This is the exact opposite of the Shandy brothers. In Walter and Toby all we have is their subjectivity and activity, seldom are we allowed for a glimpse of the self, “the inner processing of experience,” as defined by John Traugott (12). Uncle Toby’s “self” appears fugitively in one moment when the Widow Wadman appears with her curious finger and venereal eyes. Only at the split second of Walter’s fall across the bed upon hearing of the newly born Tristram’s broken bridge (and before his hand strays into the chamberpot) does his “self” show through. Except for the rare moments, these two characters are dominated.

(28) Chiou 24. by their indulgence in their hobby- horses, their own microcosms. They don’t share Tristram’s privilege of being knowing, being self-conscious. While Toby, for example, is marching up and down his bowling green and fabricating odd parts and utensils of his house into culverins and petard, he is all activities, and his activities are his life. There is not an inner experience which can be traced at the conscious level for him. So is the case of Walter. The manner in which Sterne portrays the Shandy brothers could easily lead to over-simplistic conclusions on these two characters. Firstly, they may easily be reduced to “flat characters” (Forster 65-79), since their reactions and activities are always predictable. Secondly, the characterization of them would make them sound like hollow men, without a human core to anchor, to sustain their living, and thus make meaningless of their very existence (and by extension, such kind of hollow men certainly should arouse in the reader a sense of desolation, loneliness and alienation, if our reading experienc e of modern plays, existentialist novels can be a signpost instructing how we may receive Tristram Shandy.) But the characters of Walter and Toby are anything but flat, as Iser argued, “the resemblance [of the flat characters and the Shandy brothers] is only structural, as they [Walter and Toby] nullify the concomitant function of flat characters by standing for something impenetrable ” (Tristram Shandy, 5) How often we have our laughters burst when bridge meets bridge, as Dr. Slop’s bridge for a crushed nose is mistaken for my uncle Toby’s bridge for military transit, so that a nose is a nose, and a nose is not a nose; or when a pompous name of “Trismegistus ” is doomed to be transformed into an awful and ill-omened “Tristram.” In some sense, the causes of our laughters are surely predictable; they are derived from the so-called flat character ’s repertoire: everything would be unfailingly linked to this for Walter, to that for Toby, which is already learned through our reading experience so far of Tristram Shandy. What is amazing is the fact that the seemingly predictable “routines” do not seem to wear thin our interest, nor do they check our impulse to smile or even to laugh..

(29) Chiou 25. The primary reason of our undying laughter may be two-fold. While their individua l habitual association of ideas, their individual eccentricity delimits their reactions to the real, objective world to stereotypical routines, the routines, however have their own chimerical character. What is predictable is only the knowledge that A would definitely lead to B. The “leading” process, however, is a mystery; we remain uninformed about what precisely triggers the first spring of the peculiar association, or what form would the association take. We know it is Toby’s habit to associate things with warfare, still we do not know it enough to get bored as the bridge for Dr. Slop would easily pass for another bridge for Toby. This kind of unpredictability within predictability pervades Tristram Shandy, especially notable in the portrayal of Walter and Toby. As Traugott points out, “‘character’is a construct… all else is art” (13). Such a construct which incorporates the unpredictability with what is overtly predictable, though it may fall short of our modern expectation on the quest for a unique “self,” has its own pungent personal coloring which remains forever hard to be grasped, hard to be pre- meditated, and which makes the claim of being “flat” sound dubious. As mentioned previously, the inner self is hardly shown to the reader unless one summons his participating imagination. Bobby’s death may provide a good starting point to examining how a peculiar mind works in a seemingly opaque “self.” Walter’s grief, suppose he grieves, on Bobby’s death is something we have to imagine, and imagine hard. His immediate recourse to antiquity and philosophical harangue concerning death makes him nearly forget the sad occasion of his eloquent allusion (V, 3, 247-50); the mind’s excursions help to protect him from the unbearable in a way that a more “reasonable” approach could not, though he perhaps does not even recognize the protection mechanism has been initiated. The same goes for Toby. Military fantasies cure uncle Toby’s wound when the “reasonable ” measures urged by doctors fail, and imagined battle s on the bowling- green add life and color to an otherwise drab and frustrated retirement. The Peace of Utrecht is a tragedy in Toby’s life, for it necessitates finding a new fantasy to structure his life (so, he promptly “falls in.

(30) Chiou 26. love” with the Widow Wadman.) Sterne’s celebration of fantasy is not unequivocal— he charts a thousand ways in which Toby’s fantasies are delusive, limiting, and self- isolating, but the central fact remains that Toby’s fantasies are life-sustaining. If Walter and Toby are truly hollow men, the sense of meaninglessness and aimlessness permeated through their characters shall impose a strong feeling of bleak alienation on the reader. On the other hand, if they both are conscious of their life-sustaining activity and technique, the pain they try to shun should be even more acutely felt by the reader. But neither is the case. We of course are offered in Toby and Walter their separate microcosms of isolation, their failure of real communication, but this is a peculiar kind of isolation— isolated without the heady feeling of desolate loneliness. And the secret might be that, though they live in their separate, hard-to-reach-out microcosm, their selves live actually in perfect, inseparable communication with themselves. This means that the self’s references in and to the outside world— whether they be the association of ideas or the artillery— are not perceived “cognitively” as prescribed by Locke, but are only present as integral components of the character. “The self expands into areas of reality, but these, in turn, become so firmly incorporated in the self that any difference between subject and object is erased” (Briggs 98). Singularity, or eccentricity, consists in the very fact that the self selectively adapts reality, and although it moves within the world, it does so in such a manner that it never departs from itself. Seen from this light, the obsession with theories, antiquities or military activities, then, are the individual’s unremitting resistance to any separation between his self and the world, and it takes on a manic character, for the separation is not even perceived when communication breaks down. In such a way of binding one’s self to the real world, the individual necessarily has to undergo an internalized process equaling his self to the concrete, objective world. He first has to filter and tear away elements of reality which are alien to the self (the activity of filtering and tearing is by no means on a conscious level, though,) and.

(31) Chiou 27. then simultaneously projects his self on to the real world. To keep the magic spell of the mania from being broken, this dual process must not be allowed to filter into consciousness. This explains the contentment and indeed the cheerfulness that always mark the behavior of the Shandy brothers, and even the misfiring of their conversation does not detract from the enjoyment they derive from their obsessions. They constantly offer cues by means of which they each “ensure the incorporation into themselves of worlds that lie beyond them, thus providing experience of their own uninterrupted communion with themselves” (Briggs 107). This self-containment is reinforced by the fact that most of their lives are spent in the living room at Shandy Hall, within whose narrow confines they are protected from any outside interference that might disturb the pleasure of their manic subjectivity. The only disturbances that do take place occur when they leave their enclave: Walter makes an unnecessary journey to London because of the phantom pregnancy of Mrs. Shandy, and Toby has an abortive love affair in the house of the Widow Wadman. The parameters of Shandy Hall symbolize the boundaries within which the self can reside with itself. Within such self- imposed boundaries of containment and isolation, the breakdown of communication is not only unperceived by those who reside within, but also amazingly unobtrusive to their sharing of one another’s feeling. Incorporating the contradictory aspects of obsession- induced solitude and the reaching-out sympathy is some thing extraordinary (even in our own age.) It seems a common sense that sympathy requires opening one’s heart and eyes to see and receive the misery in the real world which is not just one’s own projection. The rationale should further go that once stepping outside the self-enclosed cosmos to “really” see the world other than one ’s self, the spell of the self-sustained self world would immediately shatters, for one would gradually or abruptly come to confront the distinction between “I” and the much larger world which is not “I.” But things are of course predictably not as we have predicted for Tristram Shandy. Toby presents an exquisite and odd synthesis of those two qualities: he is on the one hand.

(32) Chiou 28. entrenched in his manic obsession, yet possesses on the other the nature of goodness and tenderness to reach other ’s affliction. Tristram’s enthusiastic blessing of Toby conveniently points to some of the essential elements of this character of good ness: Peace and comfort rest for evermore upon thy head!— Thou envied’st no man’s comforts,— insulted’st no man’s opinions.— Thou blackened’st no man’s character,— devoured’st no man’s bread: gently with faithful Trim behind thee, didst thou amble round the little circle of thy pleasures, jostling no creature in thy way;— for each one ’s sorrows, thou hadst a tear,— for each man’s need, thou hadst a shilling. (III, 34, 162-3) The good man here contemplated is good by nature, not by a triumph of repression; devoid of traditional aristocratic magnificence, pride, and aggression; tender and benevolent toward others, not competitive. Far from aspiring to great deeds, public power, or fame, he is content with life in a narrowly circumscribed private sphere. However, with Toby’s subjectivity-based manic obsession in mind, it is hard to keep one’s suspicion in abeyance; one cannot help but pause at times to question the sincerity of Tristram’s portrayal of Toby’s generous mind— is there an implicit ridicule behind all those façade of maudlin eyes and benevolent gesture? As Susan Staves points out, “[h]ardly any eighteenth-century texts are able to celebrate private goodness and simplicity without either sinking into occasional bathos or using irony to surround pure sentiment so as to achieve some distance from it— the latter, of course, being Sterne’s characteristic solution” (82). But strange is the fact that, while Sterne does often develop refined ironies to avoid bathos, at crucial points he refuses to ironize Toby’s goodness or to permit the laugher of superiority at Toby’s expense. Thus, although the narrator provides a protracted account of Toby’s assembling a wooing costume from the tattered remnants of his uniform and wig dredged up from his old campaign trunk and although he first entertains the hypothesis that the splenetic might smile at the resulting spectacle, he then firmly reverses field:.

(33) Chiou 29. Such it was— or rather such would it have seem’d upon any other brow; but the sweet look of goodness which sat upon my uncle Toby’s assimulated every thing around it so sovereignly to itself, and Nature had moreover wrote GENTLEMAN with so fair a hand in every line of his countenance, that even his tarnish’d gold- laced hat and huge cockade of flimsy taffeta became him; and though not worth a button in themselves, yet the moment my uncle Toby put them on, they became serious objects, and altogether seem’d to have been picked up by the hand of Science to set him off to advantage. (IX, 2, 424) The comedy does not diminish the sentiment, nor does the sentiment annihilate the comedy. Contemporaries commented on the oddity of a reading experience that so suddenly oscillated between feeling states conventionally thought mutually exclusive. The Critical Review observed in 1762: “The author has contrived to make us laugh at the ludicrous peculiarity of Toby, even while we are weeping with tender approbation at his goodness of heart” (Tave 225). The way in which Sterne reconciles the goodness, the sentiment with the “ludicrous peculiarity” in Toby, however, is a little problematical. A various array of details, minutiae surrounding the sentimental scenes— the buttons, the flimsy taffeta, the gold- laced hat… all of them seem to carry a trace of hobbyhorsical concentration and indulgence. Sterne, indeed, “treats sentiment just as he treats every other hobby-horse,” as Norman Holland argued (430). In spite of (or because of?) Tristram’s staunch defense of Toby’s heart of gold, we detect a trace of frivolous irony almost always hidden underneath the sugar coating of sentiment. Sentiment indeed, but it is a feeling not in excess of the object but for the pleasure of feeling. “Feeling, having the right feeling at the right time, becomes as much a game as anything else. Far from connecting man to man, it seems to act the other way, to render man content with his pleasures of his own feelings” (Lanham 592-3). By endowing the hobbyhorsical character to the feeling- sharing sentiment the individual.

(34) Chiou 30. enclosed in the self- world abolishes the need to step outside of the security of his own boundaries. He now acquires the peculiar way to look out onto the world other than his, without ever knowing this is the Other, the Macro-, the objective, the real world, for in his all-hobbyhorse microcosm, the realities alien to him have already been automatically and unconsciously split; all he perceives now is without exception predominated by his subjectivity, or his idiosyncrasy. And if sentiment and feelings are to reside in such a microcosm, they necessarily have to be internalized and transformed to some kind of hobby-horse which is characterized by splitting one’s self from the real world without one’s knowing.. Without the transformation the sentimental and feeling subject will be forced to. recognize the disparity between “I” and the reality, and soon the self would have to step out of itself, and this would signify the complete extinction of their species, the like of Walter and Toby.. B.. The Split Between a Fool’s Cap and an Idealist’s Heart 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:.

(35) Chiou 31. 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,.

(36) Chiou 32. 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.