Fencing with the symptom: a Lacanian reading of Laurence Sterne's sentence structure and punctuation in Tristram Shandy

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay considers Laurence Sterne's sentences from a Lacanian point of view. My argument parallels the disordered utterances that drive the narrative of Sterne's novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman and the framing of psychoanalysis. Its structure as a swarming address to an enigmatic, shifting listener (the essayistic digressions, evasions, and precisions that aren't precisions) recalls the disordered speech of a patient arriving in analysis with an unmanageable, disordering symptom; in the case of Shandy and Sterne, the ‘vile cough' of tuberculosis. Throughout many free-associative sessions, the patient maps out the undislodgeable hard pan of the symptom. By tuning in to areas of anxiety in discourse, the analysand becomes a kind of ‘artist of the symptom’, reappropriating and converting it from a source of disorder to an ordering principle - a sinthome, in Lacan's punning neologism. What cannot be cured must be enjoyed: this is precisely what the author-narrator dyad of Tristram Shandy manages, converting the narrator's cough into the motor of the novel's grammar, syntax, and punctuation; and making the novel the fencing piste for its author-narrator's duel with a symptom that can't be defeated, its distinctive dash being their shared rapier.