Document Type

Dissertation

Date of Award

1976

Keywords

Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, Influence, American literature, 19th century, History and criticism

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

English, General Literature, and Rhetoric

First Advisor

William B. Stein

Second Advisor

Zack Bowen

Third Advisor

Vincent Freimarck

Abstract

Story telling long bore a stigma which, while not necessarily evil, still induced a great many artists to strive, amidst the uncertainty of time and opinion, to depict their fondness for the jaunty tale or absurd anecdote in an inoffensive yet richly expressive style. The above quotations all pivot upon nonsense and exaggeration, a favorite mode of many of the greatest writers in the language. The method these authors followed in creating their comic masterpieces is often clearly reflected by their treatment of such a phrase as "a tale of a tub.” Though now practically obsolete, this epithet, first traced to an anecdote from Thomas More's court, occurs in enough contexts to provide a broad range of definition for a whole literature of humor hitherto rarely remarked in literary tradition….A tale of a tub, then, proves to be any kind of nonsense, fooling, or absurdity promulgated in story form, something silly in the telling as well as in the matter being told.

The mirthful element inherent in the tale of a tub deserves more than the mere acknowledgement meted out by literary tradition. But attending to this oversight requires a new perspective of the literary critic, for the literature of mirth inhabits a country of a different order of philosophy from the commonly held norm. The outspoken wags writing the literature of laughter, when perceived to be less a band of heretical brigands, daring traditional scholarship's proven methods and testing the patience of critics, than a fellowship of ludic logocrats, fully conscious of their unconventional skills and exploiting them in the face of prejudice and misapprehension, may then emerge as the true inheritors of the gift of laughing at oneself, a habit deserving of many more adherents in a world already overstocked with suspicious, malignant egotism.

....

From Swift’s maniacally madcap extravagance follows Sterne, whose Tristram Shandy is the first book in the language in tales of tubs, and in most other respects as well.

Sterne sheds a labyrinth of words in fashioning Tristram Shandy, all deriving from and producing the tale of a tub. Sterne’s tubs contain the suggestion of a tale or joke he hesitates to broach directly, for he wills his reader to share equally in his creative generation. Sterne’s own reading directions specifically entreat his reader to give heed to his text of an original method of literary exercise. Sterne’s carefree pen writes his journey through fiction and life, to the tale of a tub. Sterne the cock-and-bull hermetist caches his meaning in his wordplay, where tubs emerge wherever his fancy reins and his jest gallops. Sterne the artist employs the subtle art of euphemism, in deference to his reader’s acumen and taste, as concealed reference, pun, and reductio ad absurdum multiply his mockery of the tubs of literalism and weighty abstraction. Sterne the critic delivers the tubs of his own imaginative insight as he demonstrates the technique of his manifold “genius,” a pregnant word whose etymology manipulates his frame of reference and perception. Words line the lanes of his writing’s progress, but each is transformed into a tale of a tub, guided by the tublocentric, logocentric gait of Sterne's Pegasian hobbyhorse.

In speaking of Sterne’s art the familiar and expected in language and literature must be dismissed as largely irrelevant, for what Sterne’s writing skill displays amounts to an impromptu rebuttal of all systems of literary identification yet formulated. Sterne properly deserves the designation, logocrat, for he deals in words and meanings with right of property, like Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty. Sterne unshackles prosaic language of its petrified meanings. Tristram Shandy after over 200 years remains a totally “open” novel, completely resisting allegorical interpretation. Sterne draws from all genres of writing to unfold his own, with no beginning or ending in the conventional, Aristotelian sense. He exploits the sexual and excremental exploits of man, playing upon the relationship between mind and body set up by society. Always the “slang-whanger,” Sterne regales the multiple meanings of words in his fiction, to open up language: out of the death of ordinary communication and conversation Sterne’s tale takes form, in the euphoric spirit of play. He celebrates the imagination’s ability to do anything it wants with words. His epithets continually transform into new modes, as his ulterior aim conceals both jest and earnest, the whole engendering dissociations upon ordinary associations in every encounter with his text.

Sterne’s language, as does any new language, precipitates a new model of the universe, and necessitates a new mode of perception. His skill at illustrating situations by the orchestration of polarizing semantic meanings converts a situation into pun, which his studied repetition (usually a play of hyperbole or reductio ad absurdum) detaches from ordinary restraints, so that the pun’s effect just keeps on going, proliferating as a potentially infinite sequence of ideas in the mind of the reader. However, since what is perceptible often proves demonstrably different from such ideas, they can have no validity except as fantasy. Not changes in the spectacle, or in its actors and spectators, but people’s perceptions of and reactions to them, are Sterne’s real concern. For he realizes that the distortion of individual perception presents a continually unfolding panorama upon the fabric of observable reality, and his technique emphasizes this “hobbyhoriscal bent” in human nature. Sterne’s theater transforms the drama of Descartes into its ultimately ridiculous implications, which Sterne parodies to destroy any temptation to impute validity to preconceived and received systems of interpretation. Sterne inevitably creates a tale expressive of and sympathetic to what he conceives, physiologically, to be the true experience of man and woman in living, and in doing so he necessarily revolutionizes language.

Sterne’s linguistic subtleties and his skill at perpetrating rhetorical and character jokes, oddly enough, have never been subjects of critical scrutiny. Most early criticism of Tristram Shandy and its wily author tends toward close inspection of the moral, political, philosophical, religious, and other similar aspects of Sterne’s supposed structural and ethical ingenuousness. A closer look at Tristram Shandy itself, however, leads to immediate deflation of all serious concerns overburdening Sterne criticism. A brief essay into Sterne’s misbegotten reputation will shed light on this portrait of gravity looming ominously above Tristram’s mischievous progenitor.

Sterne’s incorrigible comic gaiety of intent provokes the following appellations so common to Sterne criticism since its inception:

The generalizations applied to Sterne are too varied to be fully summarized, but it is obvious that he was frequently treated as a “wit and artist” but no moralist, a “fantastic sentimentalist and a distinguishable idealist," an ethical heretic with an equal amount of heresy in another direction—for had he not “destroyed” the "novel form?" (Laurence Sterne in the Twentieth Century, p. 15)

The puffery evident in such wilting opinions’ characterization (more often of the legendary Laurence than of his jovial brainchild) succeeds in adumbrating “the struggle to find some satisfactory definition or genre for Tristram Shandy” (ibid., p. 21), the sparkling surfaces of Sterne’s book of a joke.

The critical consensus still gives comedy (and the tale of a tub) short shrift in terms of relative importance, hanging on to the deadly serious pose of the scholastic in dress and mien despite professing liberality and secularity. Henri Fluchere, whose study of Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne: From Tristram to Yorick, is the most extensive to date, still treats everything of Shandy deadly seriously. Without fail posing the rhetorical obverse to Sterne’s obvious intent, Fluchere thereby causes imaginary issues to arise and their consequent contentions and analogies to follow on that account where a more mirthful eye, of Shandean persuasion, perhaps, would relieve him of his constricted insight. He persists in taking every Shandean twist and wrinkle straight and literally, tediously noting resemblances, sources, and stock generalizations of secondary importance about the “larger sense” of Sterne with respect to his assumed peers. Fluchere misses every trick, so frets over trivialities and crotchets, and understands woefully little of Sterne’s genius as comic artist. Such evidence of the attention paid to Sterne’s wordplay and gifts of the comic imagination, when weighed against the ponderous amount of painstaking devoted to more traditional lines of criticism, ensures that Tristram Shandy remains the most praised book in our literature for “sensibility” and other tales of tubs entirely inconsequential to Sterne’s curiously crafted flight from definition.

This attention to “sensibility” and “sentimentality” nonetheless paves a ready road to the main concern of this tale, the influence of the comic Sterne on American literature to Melville. If contemporary critics so little comprehend the mirth borne talents of Laurence Sterne, what can be expected from writers now hopelessly immured in a less historically “enlightened” age? Yet a trail of suggestion tracing the race of Shandy in America begins there.

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