The Artifice of Failure in "Tristram Shandy"

Abstract

Tristram Shandy does not really begin ab ovo, though the narrator claims it does. Neither does it begin in medias res. Outrageously and appropriately it begins in flagrante delicto. begins as a sexual joke, and remains just until, after nine volumes, the cock-and-bull story ceases without concluding. The novel is about how any one comes to know anything, it is about reality more intensely than are most other novels, and the inconclusive conclusion is presented rather than stated: man is a mystery, and the world is inscrutable; the ordinary modes of apprehension and analysis are totally inadequate to the tasks they are called upon to perform; life itself is ineffable, ineluctable, and certainly tragic-redeemed, in so far as redemption may be possible, by laughter, which makes sport of the mystery; by love, which accepts it; and by art, which re-creates it. Narration in chronological terms is as false to life's complexity as is an epistemology based upon the transverse zig-zaggery (in Uncle Toby's phrase, used in another connection) of Locke's theory of the association of ideas. Against the conventional mode of story-telling and the idiosyncratic wilfulness1 of Locke, Sterne sets the figure of a circle, and it may be said the novel's structure is peripheral. If the reader, and Sterne, are little nearer an understanding of the heart of the matter at the end of the novel than at the beginning, at least the ordinary mendacities by which men live have been discredited, and the magnitude of life's difficulties has been exposed to view. The testing of all hypotheses has ended in failure, but in the endeavor the circle has been drawn: the effort itself has led to the making of a work of art. It is not things themselves, says the epigraph from Epictetus, that disturb men, but their judgments about these And one of the tasks of Tristram Shandy is to capture or recapture the sense of things as things. is a scientific novel, conceived in the spirit of serendipity-the only approach a self-respecting scientist can arguably take. The novel is written in the first person, supposedly by the eponymous hero of the tale, whose double prerogative of narrator and commentator, of observer and material witness, of writer and philosopher (the words are those of Henri Fluchere) is maintained throughout. And the attitude is necessarily one of constant vigilance.2