Making and Unmaking Man: Further Reflections on Sterne’s Allusions to Charron’s Of Wisdome

Abstract

This article reconsiders the role that the allusions to Pierre Charron’s treatise De la sagesse, in its English translation by Samson Lennard , Of Wisdome, have in Tristram Shandy. Charron was a disciple of Montaigne and an advocate of philosophical scepticism in early seventeenth-century France. He was influential, especially in the Jansenist circles, but his reception was, and still is, not uniform, as some regarded him as an anti-dogmatic apologist of Christian values, while for others he was simply an impious free thinker. After an overview of Sterne’s references to Charron, noticed by Francois Pellan and Melvyn New, the article concentrates on a further possible allusion to Of Wisdome in the last chapter of volume 9 of Tristram Shandy that mentions Plato and Diogenes together. The article maintains that the odd coupling of those two ancient philosophers might have derived from a chapter in Of Wisdome that Sterne already used in the famous incipit of his Tristram Shandy. In this view, beginning and end of Tristram Shandy appear to join in calling attention to two of the main themes that run through it, thus providing a sort of ideal denouement to a story that set the duty of caring and nurturing against men’s instinct for ‘undoing and killing one another [and] ruining and destroying our own kind’, as Montaigne had said and Charron, and then Sterne, restated in their own ways.