Satire, Comedy and Tragedy: Sterne’s “Handles” to Tristram Shandy

By Richard C. Raymond

The first four chapters of the book provide a close reading of the satiric, comic, and tragic action of Laurence Sterne’s novel in the context of criticism from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Chapter 5 provides a summary of Chapters 1–4, focusing on Sterne’s purpose in revising satiric plot structures and in blurring the lines between fiction and autobiography. Chapters 6–8 then examine Sterne’s themes from TristramShandythat inform his letters, sermons, and other fiction; Chapter 9 discusses the international reception of TristramShandy and argues for using writing-to-learn strategies to teach Sterne’s greatest novel to undergraduate and graduate students.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Oct 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781839988646

Book preview

PREFACE

Reflecting the turn toward cultural studies, the rich site for exploring issues of race, gender, and social injustices, the twenty-first century has seen many university presses publishing books focusing on multiple works and disparate authors. Most scholars have celebrated the value and timeliness of such publications,¹ but I would argue that the time has come for a fresh reading of Sterne’s greatest novel. In perusing the criticism on Sterne’s work, we find Tristram Shandy frequently cited as a novel on novel-writing, a novel well grounded in eighteenth-century fiction yet a precursor to Joycean stream-of-consciousness narration and to postmodern thought (Keymer 20, 27); we also find descriptions of Sterne’s novel as equally grounded in satire on Enlightenment system-building, satire reminiscent of Burton’s reflections on the sources of melancholy, Swift’s allegories on madness, Cervantes’ anti-romances, and the learned wit of Rabelais and Monteyne (Keymer 20, 21, 24). Reflecting these diverse descriptions of Sterne’s most famous novel, book-length studies of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy appeared frequently in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s; since then, Sterne studies have multiplied and prospered, primarily in academic journals, but also in specialized books.²

I offer this book, then, to demonstrate that, beyond the traditional objects of satire found in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Sterne has revised the satiric plot in developing what I call the benevolent dullness of Walter, Toby, and Tristram; I borrow this term dullness, of course, from Alexander Pope’s great satire The Dunciad, published in 1743, two decades before Sterne began publishing the first volumes of his novel.

The Shandys’ self-defeats derive, as this book will show, from generous instincts and from deliberate moral characters as well as from arrogant self-deceptions that typify traditional objects of satire, such as leaders in government, the military, the sciences, the arts, and literature—the intelligent but sinisterly self-absorbed dunces that populate Pope’s nightmarish poem and threaten collectively to bury all in a culture of darkness.³

Additionally, the book will show that this paradoxical blend of dullness and benevolence in Sterne’s characters generates an ambiguous moral condition that evokes both praise and blame in Sterne’s readers. The book will argue, further, that the reader’s ambivalent response to Sterne’s Shandean characters testifies to the operation of a fictional structure too dynamic in the conflicts it portrays to permit defining the novel’s plot as primarily satiric, comic, or tragic, as many influential scholars have done.

The book will then conclude that Sterne revised the satiric action in his novel to draw the reader toward the standard of humble but active benevolence represented by Parson Yorick; Sterne did so by luring the reader first into the confused but laughing world of generous true Shandeism. If Sterne’s readers can see the nobility as well as the humor of the Shandys’ inevitable self-defeats, the reader will discover the difficulty of living the Yorick standard but also the possibility of escaping from the utter darkness of dullness.

The book relies on Alvin Kernan’s The Plot of Satire (1965) for its close analysis of Pope’s term dullness as the action of self-defeat resulting from egocentric distortions of reality. The methodology employed also derives from Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957) as well as from Kernan’s work, focusing on the operation of satire, comedy, and tragedy as the generic plots which form Tristram Shandy. I chose Kernan and Frye to provide this theoretical foundation for my study because their work, published in the 1950s and 1960s, informed the thinking, directly or indirectly, of nine book-length readings of Sterne’s novel, studies published between the mid-1950s and the late 1970s, underscoring the richness in those decades of Sterne criticism. These books include John Traugott’s Tristram Shandy’s World: Sterne’s Philosophical Rhetoric (1954), John M. Stedmond’s The Comic Art of Laurence Sterne: Convention and Innovation in Tristram Shandy (1967), Melvyn New’s Laurence Sterne as Satirist: A Reading of Tristram Shandy (1969), John Holtz’ Image and Immortality: A Study of Tristram Shandy (1970), Richard A. Lanham’s Tristram Shandy: The Games of Pleasure (1973), Michael V. De Porte’s, Nightmares and Hobbyhorses: Swift, Sterne, and the Augustan Ideas of Madness (1974), Helene Moglen’s The Philosophical Irony of Laurence Sterne (1975), James E. Swearingen’s Reflexivity in Tristram Shandy: An Essay in Phenomenological Criticism (1977), and William Freedman’s Laurence Sterne and the Origin of the Musical Novel (1978). Collectively, these nine books represent the breadth and the depth of scholarship on Tristram Shandy over these two decades.

Beyond these seminal texts, the book will also address the views of scholars who published articles on Sterne before and during this same period, as well as key articles and books on Tristram Shandy that reached print in the four decades since the publication of the books listed above. The latter articles and books illustrate the turn toward cultural studies noted above, but they also contribute to this long conversation on the structure and intent of Sterne’s novel. By joining this conversation, I hope to make a persuasive case for re-reading Tristram Shandy, not only to savor its structural complexity but also to explore Sterne’s rhetorical intent in befriending us in his fiction.

Further, I will bolster my five-chapter argument on Sterne’s rhetorical intent in Tristram Shandy with four additional chapters. Providing a close reading of Sterne’s letters, Chapter 6 traces in these epistles the satiric, comic, and tragic themes that inform Tristram Shandy. Chapter 7 then offers analysis of Sterne’s sermons, stressing their thematic linkages with Tristram Shandy, especially the causes and effects of dullness, the inescapable sufferings that define human experience, and the possibility of experiencing some measure of happiness in a life of self-examination and loving service to others, joys that grow from such God-centered reflections. Next, Chapter 8 discusses the similarities and differences between the Parson Yorick in Tristram Shandy and the Parson Yorick in Sterne’s second highly autobiographical novel, A Sentimental Journey and in Sterne’s A Continuation of Bramine’s Journal. After reviewing the international reception of Tristram Shandy relative to the satiric, comic, and tragic plots of Sterne’s novel, Chapter 9 explores ways to enhance the teaching of this globally significant work by using writing-to-learn strategies.

Finally, I want to acknowledge what many readers may have already inferred: this book grows from my dissertation on Tristram Shandy, which I successfully defended at Miami University in 1978, just one month before my 31st birthday. Four decades later, I offer this book as a significant revision of my dusty dissertation, a revision that incorporates major criticism of Sterne’s novel since I filed my dissertation, a revision that also recognizes what the much younger version of myself could not clearly see: the uplifting profundity of a dying author running from death not out of fear of the grave, rather out of the outrage of mortality for someone who has more to say, more to create.

So why, most readers will ask, did I wait four decades to resume this study of Sterne’s work? My delay surely did not grow from lack of interest, especially since I can vividly recall that dissertation defense, where Dr. Frank Jordan, a renowned Romanticist and a reader on my committee, joined my dissertation director Dr. David Mann in praising my work as a model dissertation. Professor Jordan did not say a model of what, but I guessed that he intended to compliment a work that he said he would use as a model for aspiring doctoral students. Naturally, with such encouragement, I set out to publish my work. First, I sent it to the University of Florida Presses, the publishing home of Melvyn New and other distinguished Sterne scholars. I received a polite letter in response, but one that carried the final verdict: no thanks. I then sent my chapter focused on comedy and Tristram’s Uncle Toby to South Atlantic Bulletin (now South Atlantic Review). Editors there expressed some interest but ultimately sent me the same no thanks. So, I initially abandoned this work because I was too sensitive about rejections, too easily discouraged.

Then life happened. After leaving Miami University, my wife Judy and I had three great kids—Heather, Anna, and Matt—all 13–20 years older now than I was when I finished my dissertation at Miami! These four people have been the greatest blessings of my life, so I would never say that they distracted me from reviving my work on Sterne; however, providing for them did focus my attention not just on being a good partner for Judy and a good father for Heather, Anna, and Matt, but also on re-energizing my career with new projects.

These projects, over four decades, included teaching at two two-year colleges, one in Wyoming, one in Georgia; teaching in two regional institutions, Georgia Southern University and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock; and teaching at a major research institution, Mississippi State University. At all these schools, my work focused on teaching technical writing, composition, and literature to my students, all of whom needed to learn how to write and—just as important—how to use writing to learn material in rhetoric and literature. Additionally, these years led to special projects, such as directing the Little Rock Writing Project (LRWP, 1997–2003) and MSU’s Maroon Institute for Writing Excellence (MIWE, 2013–2014). On both these projects I followed the National Writing Project model. For seven consecutive summers, I offered the LRWP to K-13 teachers from across the disciplines wanting to grow as writers and to learn how to engage students in learning material via writing. In a much different context but with similar motivations, for two summers I offered the MIWE program to MSU professors in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities wanting to renew their courses with writing-to-learn strategies. This abiding interest in writing-to-learn also led to two Fulbright professorships, one to the University of Shkoder in Albania in 2003, the other to the University of Pristina in Kosovo in 2012. These teaching roles also led to several administrative posts, including Chair of the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at UALR (1995–2004) and Head of the Department of English at MSU (2004–2016).

Not surprisingly, these teaching and administrative interests led to a modest list of publications—articles and books—most focused on pedagogical issues, some focused on literary criticism, including Balkans fiction, Swift’s satire, Johnson’s sermons, and Austen’s novels—but not a word on Tristram Shandy—until 2018, when South Atlantic Review published my article on Toby, Tristram, and the Reader: The Triumph and the Defeat of True Shandeism. This article offers far more than a rehash of my chapter on Toby from that 1978 dissertation; instead, it argues the claim stated in the subtitle by blending my reading with that of scholars writing from the seventies to 2018. Thus encouraged, I took up this book project in earnest, hoping someone beyond Professor Jordan’s graduate students would consider my views on Sterne’s startling eighteenth-century novel.

Notes

1Thomas Keymer, Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 20, 21, 24.

2Ryan Stark has recently published his brilliant book titled Biblical Sterne: Rhetoric and Religion in the Shandyverse, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021). However, Stark focuses on all of Sterne’s work, with just one chapter devoted exclusively to exploring Tristram Shandy. Published by Oxford UP in 2002, Thomas Keymer’s equally influential book on Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel covers Sterne’s novel more expansively, examining the thematic significance of serialized publication as well as narratological indebtedness to Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and the Moderns, but this breadth of scholarship necessarily minimizes Keymer’s close reading of Sterne’s novel. Five years after Keymer’s book, Rene Bosch published Labyrinth of Digressions (Costerua New Series, 2007), an equally valuable volume focused on Sterne’s personal turn from the tradition of Augustan satire, which generated a highly ambiguous work and, in turn, influenced a broad range of imitators (255). Additionally, Mary-Celine Newbould published Making Noise: Sterneana and Adaption (Routledge, 2013), a volume on Sterne’s influence on sentimental travel narratives, late-eighteenth-century theater, and graphic arts.

3Alexander Pope, The Dunciad, The Complete Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 800.

Chapter 1

WALTER, TOBY, TRISTRAM, AND THE READER: STERNE’S REVISION OF DULLNESS

Those who enjoy humor ranging from the sentimental to the ridiculous have long embraced Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, for such readers attest, as do Anne Bandry-Scubbi and Peter de Voogd (2013), that Sterne keeps his promise to arouse laughter that will help them to fence against ineluctable pain.¹ As Madeleine Descargues-Grant and many other scholars attest, among the most memorable sources of laughter in Sterne’s work stands Tristram’s father Walter, the bungling philosopher of systems who stumbles in unbuttoned trousers to his son’s christening, hoping to secure the infant’s future with Trismegistus, a name, Walter asserts, that will guarantee the boy’s greatness (4: 384; 1: 57). Equally entertaining, Tristram’s Uncle Toby, the gentle ex-captain of artillery, plays boldly at war games but trembles in innocence before seductive Widow Wadman and tenderly refrains from hurting a bothersome fly (6: 556; 8: 715; 3:191). Most readers will also admit to chuckling heartily over Tristram’s bawdy at the expense of an oversexed abbess (7: 606), and over Parson Yorick’s hot-chestnut prank at the expense of the pompous old fornicator Phutatorius (4: 378); and such readers may laugh all the more freely with license granted by both Tristram and Sterne (1: Dedication to Pitt, 9; 8: 716).²

Yet, as Richard A. Lanham explains, critics have long debated the meaning of Sterne’s humor.³ In the ludicrous but short-lived clashes between the Shandys, all described in the following chapters, many mid-twentieth-century scholars see moral instruction, a reflection of the need for reasonable heads to join generous hearts in Christian living, an expression of faith in humanity’s capacity for goodness in response to pain.⁴ Some critics from the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries have echoed these moral themes. For instance, J. T. Parnell finds in Sterne’s humor a commitment to Anglican values and an expression of fideistic skepticism in response to philosophical systems woven from pride,⁵ and Ryan Stark speaks of Sterne advancing the Christian faith in a decidedly odd way by exposing gloomy religionists everywhere.⁶ Shannon Hartling, echoing Stark and Parnell, stresses Sterne’s critique of politeness as a guide to living, upholding instead Christian teachings on bearing the suffering inescapable in our often comical sexual frailty as well as in our futile resistance to illness and death (Hartling 2006, 495). Similarly, Elizabeth Kraft stresses the Biblical blending of spirituality and sexuality readily found in Toby’s and Tristram’s earnest longing for human contact and their ethical sincerity in their fumbling to order their lives (Kraft 2002, 368, 364).⁷ Focusing on the hilarity of unrestrained Shandean obsessions—Walter’s theories, Toby’s model fortifications, and Tristram’s chaotic autobiography—other critics find models for survival in a chaotic world, a line of argument that extends over five decades,⁸ while others find a mocking commentary on Locke’s theories of clear communication.⁹ In Sterne’s constant concern with procreativity, a theme associated with all Shandean hobbyhorses, other commentators discover an appropriate subject for serious comedy and an efficient vehicle for witty attacks on splenetic, hypocritical morality.¹⁰ In exploring Tristram’s arrogant struggles as jesting narrator, many scholars over five decades have stressed Sterne’s forward-looking experimentation with the reader as well as his interaction with his self-conscious narrator Tristram, yielding what Patricia Meyer Spacks calls a comic epic of narcissism that anticipates postmodern fiction¹¹; others read in the same fiction the essence of Sterne himself and his realist’s view of time in its relation to the creative process.¹² In the isolation of these fallen hobbyhorsical riders, some scholars see the inevitable defeat of fools¹³ while others see the pathos of the tragicomical human condition.¹⁴

Such varied points of critical view reflect the accuracy of Sterne’s comment that Tristram Shandy, like a Shandean walking stick, possesses many handles.¹⁵ Indeed, the questions critics have asked about Tristram Shandy suggest that one may grab on to Sterne’s novel at more than one point: in terms of genre, what is Tristram Shandy? Has Sterne written a farce with laughter-provoking designs on the reader’s spleen? Or, given the clergyman’s close proximity to the Scriblerian greats and his Swiftian satirical skill shown in attacks on clerical pomposity, A Political Romance, has Sterne written a serious satire on pride, a Swiftian attack on the self-defeating action of self-inflating dullness, a Popean defense of Christian benevolence? Or, in light of Sterne’s short distance from the Romantic age, has the author of A Sentimental Journey also written the comedy Tristram Shandy to unite readers in laughter over the foibles of the creative imagination? Or, in view of Sterne’s focus on the inner life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, one gentleman whose perpetual aloneness receives little relief from his well-intended but ineffectual efforts to communicate, has Sterne painted a jester’s vision of the tragic existential condition?

Yet, this broad range of critical inquiry notwithstanding, many critics have resisted acknowledging that Tristram Shandy has more handles than one worth grabbing. Those who stress the comedy in Sterne’s novel minimize the satire.¹⁶ Those who stress Sterne’s satire see the humorist-narrator and the warm-hearted reader as the primary objects of the satire.¹⁷ Those who see tragedy in Tristram Shandy disagree whether Tristram offers a comic testimony on a tragic life or struggles to impose an orderly tragic plot on an absurd comic life.¹⁸

Sterne, however, invites us to try every handle, favoring no one genre over the others. Those readers inclined to cling to only one handle make their choice, writes Sterne to Dr. Eustace, according to which knob protrudes most conveniently to reach of their passions, their ignorance or sensibility (Curtis, Letter 229, 411). In other letters to Warburton and Dodsley, Sterne alludes to the comic handle of his work with his commitment to bring readers to join him in laughing as loud as I can at whatever he finds Laugh-at-able in my way (Curtis, Letter 63, 115; Letter 37, 74). Yet Sterne also sounds much like the Swiftian satirist when he writes that he will do the world good by ridiculing what I think deserving of it—or of a disservice to sound learning, differing from Dean Swift only in his unwillingness to go as farr as Swift in brightening the solemn colour of his cassock (Curtis, Letter 47, 90; Letter 38, 76–77). Sterne the satirist-humorist, however, also implicitly stresses the tragic handle of his work when he writes of his commitment to writing Tristram Shandy even after suffering abuse, as does Yorick, for his well-intended, instructive wit (7: 641; 1: 32–37), even after accepting death’s threat to his work, as does Tristram (9: 754)¹⁹

This book finds its purpose, then, in accepting Sterne’s invitation to grab Tristram Shandy by every available handle that Tristram the narrator offers his readers, especially when Tristram offers those handles simultaneously. Held by any handle, Tristram Shandy provokes laughter, at least, says Sterne, in each true feeler with a taste for humour (Curtis, Letter 229 To John Eustace, 411). But my analysis will show that no single generic handle—the satiric, the comic, or the tragic—gives one sufficient grasp of Sterne’s humor, the consequence of Sterne having revised the traditional objects of satire passed on from the Augustan tradition, revisions that dramatize the ambiguous complexity of human motives, what Melvyn New has called the entire human enterprise.²⁰ When Sterne entices us, through Tristram’s often irreverent but sometimes obtuse opinions, to grab satire’s handle, the selfish, prideful motivations of his characters, his narrator, and his readers seem damnable. When Sterne invites us to shift our grip to comedy, those same damnable human motives seem less vicious, less harmful, and, therefore, more tolerable. When Sterne offers us the handle of tragedy, those same amusing motivations seem to flow from strength as well as from weakness, to be admirable as well as regrettable. After we shift our grip repeatedly through nine volumes—sometimes within a single sentence—Sterne’s humor reveals not only the strengths and weaknesses of Tristram and his predecessors, but also those of his reader. As noted above, Sterne claims that some readers, the true feelers, have found Sterne himself inside Tristram Shandy (Curtis, Letter 229, 411), but many moralistic readers within Sterne’s fiction reject the community of friends that Tristram longs to form.²¹

To achieve this purpose of gripping all Sterne’s generic handles to Tristram Shandy, I will first show that Sterne’s characters, superficially, fit the traditional satiric mold of dullness as Alexander Pope defines such destructive folly in his moral satire The Dunciad, and as Alvin Kernan elucidates Pope’s term in his Plot of Satire. I will then argue that the meaning of Shandean dullness changes, grows more ambiguous, as Sterne reveals the motives behind the Shandys’ seeming self-absorption, revelations that enable and necessitate generic complexity.

I will derive my method for my analysis of Sterne’s humor by drawing on the seminal generic theories of Northrop Frye and Alvin Kernan,²² two twentieth-century genre-and-myth critics whose theories inform the work of nine scholars—John Traugott, John Stedmond, Melvyn New, William Holtz, R. A. Lanham, Michael V. De Porte, Helene Moglen, John Swearingen, and William Freedman—all of whom wrote book-length studies of Tristram Shandy during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.²³ To bring this analysis of Sternean criticism up to date, I will blend discussion of these books with key articles and books published over the five decades since these nine influential scholars published their books. Though many of these publications, reflecting shifts in critical focus over these same decades, evince primary interest in cultural studies, most also locate Tristram Shandy within the genre of satire, or comedy, or tragedy; consequently, connecting their analyses with those of the monographs listed above will reveal the richness of Sternean criticism but also its unwarranted narrowing of generic focus. I will employ, then, Frye’s and Kernan’s definitions of satire, comedy, and tragedy to analyze the plot of Tristram Shandy; however, unlike New and the other eight scholars listed above, all influenced by the work of Frye, Kernan, or both, I will go beyond their work by giving equal emphasis to each generic plot.

But before pursuing this analytical plan, I want to warrant such work by discussing in more detail this notion of Sterne’s expanding the plot of satire. Additionally, I will briefly survey the analyses of the nine critics listed above to provide backing for my claim that Tristram Shandy deserves a multi-handled reading.

Sterne’s Expansion of the Plot of Satire

In The Plot of Satire, Alvin B. Kernan adopts Alexander Pope’s term Dullness to define the action of satire. Dullness, writes Kernan, manifests itself as an ancient and powerful force, symbolized by Pope’s goddess in the Dunciad, a force that tries to return the universe to chaos by regaining dominion over all minds (Kernan 1965, 3). The enthralled mind, the dull mind, continues Kernan, full of boldness and energy, ceaselessly works to affirm egocentric self-deceptions (Kernan 1965, 3–4). Self-defeat, therefore, emerges as the radical action of satire. The goddess lures the mind with promises of power but leaves the