The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Laurence Sterne · a novel in nine volumes · York and London, 1759 to 1767 · scored on Sterne’s English, with its printed devices, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Comic novel of consciousness; autobiography that never arrives, sermon, learned burlesque and sentimental fiction in one voice
Mythos
The house that cannot propagate, every misfortune the same misfortune; the knight and his squire remade as English benevolence; the jester’s skull in a parsonage
Phase
From a conception in 1718 and a birth on 5 November of that year, with Toby’s wound at Namur and the courtship of the Widow Wadman before it, to the narrator’s flight through France
Presentation
Fiction; nine volumes published in pairs and singly over eight years, with a Greek epigraph from Epictetus, a black page, a marbled page, a blank page, diagrams of its own narrative line and chapters torn out or left blank
Register
One voice, stopping, turning and resuming on the dash, from obstetric farce and the bawdy to the sermon and the recording angel, addressing Madam and Sir
Scale
One family, two brothers and their servants, and a house in the country
Governing Proposition
A gentleman sets out to tell his life and opinions, and cannot reach his own birth for two volumes: his conception was spoiled by a question about a clock, his nose was crushed at delivery, his name was given wrongly, and every misfortune of the house of Shandy turns out to be the same misfortune. Around him his father rides his theories, his uncle Toby rides his fortifications, and only kindness crosses between them. The wager of the novel is that a mind moves by association and not by sequence, that a life cannot be told because the telling falls further behind the living each day, and that a book which lets its own telling be its subject can know both.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The book came out in pieces over eight years: volumes I and II at York in December 1759, then in London in 1760; III and IV in 1761; V and VI in 1762; VII and VIII in 1765; and IX in 1767. Laurence Sterne, a Yorkshire parson, published the first pair at his own risk and under a persona, and London made it a sensation. He died in March 1768. Whether the ninth volume ends the book or only stops it is argued. The desk takes the work as published, ending where it ends, and does not charge it for a continuation it never had; the question is its own, and one of the book’s open ones.
On the title page stands a sentence of Epictetus, in Greek: men are disturbed not by things but by their opinions about things. The life promised is a life of opinions, and the first event in it is a disturbance. At the moment of Tristram’s conception his mother asks his father whether he has remembered to wind up the clock. The question is not random: the clock and the conception have become joined in her mind, as Locke said ideas are joined, by association. The book will run on that law.
So the narrator begins before the beginning, and cannot catch up. He is born on 5 November 1718, but not until the third volume, and named, by error, in the fourth. He tells his reader that he falls further behind his life the more he writes. The structure he announces is the one he keeps: “Digressions, incontestably, are the sun-shine”, and the work is “digressive, and it is progressive too”. Every return in it is to one house, one parlour and one family whose misfortunes are all the same misfortune.
Movement II
Before Tristram is born, the parson Yorick dies. His death in the first volume is marked with “Alas, poor YORICK!”, and the page after it is printed black. It is the first height in the book, and the first of the printed devices that make the page itself part of the work. Yorick is Hamlet’s jester carried into a parsonage, and the jest and the grief are given together.
The household is two brothers. Walter Shandy rides theories, of names, of noses, of auxiliary verbs, and argues them with an eloquence that persuades no one. His brother Toby, wounded in the groin at the siege of Namur, rides his fortifications: with his servant Corporal Trim he rebuilds on the bowling green the sieges of William’s and Marlborough’s wars in Flanders. When Walter’s eloquence rises, Toby answers it by whistling Lillabullero. They are the knight and his squire remade as English benevolence, and they cannot reach each other by argument.
Toby reaches everyone by kindness. He spares a fly, and tells it why: “This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me.” Trim reads a sermon aloud, and his stance as he reads it is described with a precision no novelist before had given to the body. The disclosure is made in the parlour: each mind runs on its own track, and what crosses between them is gesture and sympathy.
Movement III
The birth takes two volumes. Dr Slop arrives with his forceps and his Catholic learning, and in the parlour the curse of Ernulphus is read aloud entire. The forceps crush the infant’s nose. Walter, whose theories make a man’s fortune hang on his nose and his name, sets his hope on the name: the child shall be Trismegistus. By error he is christened Tristram, and the second hope goes the way of the first.
Every misfortune of the house is one misfortune. The conception spoiled by a clock, the nose crushed, the name lost, and later the sash window, Toby’s wound in the groin, and at the end Walter’s bull: the line of Shandy cannot propagate. That myth is built, and it is load-bearing. The book does not let it bear weight beyond the joke, and that is the limit of its archetypal reach.
Between the events stand the digressions. Slawkenbergius’s tale of noses runs on far past its point. A chapter is torn out of the fourth volume. A marbled page stands in the third, as the black page stood in the first. The book is a performance of its own difficulty, and the test of necessity finds in it what could go: some of Walter’s theories, the length of the tale of noses and the curse.
Movement IV
News comes that Bobby, the elder son, is dead. Trim drops his hat, and the gesture says what no argument in the house can. It is the book’s method at its most exact: a height reached with one movement of the body, and the systems of the mind left talking.
In the sixth volume comes the story of Le Fever, who is dying, and Toby swears an oath over it. The accusing spirit carries the oath up, and the recording angel drops a tear upon it “and blotted it out for ever”. The sentimental and the bawdy are one physics in this book, since in each the body interrupts the mind, and the recording angel and Ernulphus’s curse obey one law.
The sixth volume also leaves a page blank, for the reader to draw the Widow Wadman, and at its end the narrator draws the line of his own narrative, in curves and loops. The diagrams are not ornaments. They are the form demonstrating what it cannot do in words: that a life told by association will not run on a line.
Movement V
In the seventh volume the narrator himself takes flight, from Death, through France. The voice holds; the law loosens into travelogue, and the journey is half a separate book. It is the race the book has run from its start, the pen against the life, made literal.
The last two volumes return to Toby and the Widow Wadman, whose courtship falls years before Tristram’s birth: the book that cannot reach its hero’s birth ends before it. Two chapters of the ninth volume are printed blank and supplied later. Within it the narrator stops: “Time wastes too fast”, and the passage that follows is on the brevity of life, written by a man who would die a year after it was printed.
The book closes on Walter’s bull, whose failure gives it its last words: “A COCK and a BULL”. The line of Shandy ends, in the book’s last joke, as it began, in a failure to propagate. Samuel Johnson said it would not last. It is in print, read in German and Russian as in English, filmed once as a film about failing to film it, and the line of novels that take their own telling as their subject runs from it through Diderot and Machado de Assis to Joyce and Woolf. Whether the ninth volume ends the book or only stops it is still argued; the book itself, digressive and progressive, has not stopped.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test meets a book built to defeat it. Sterne makes digression the structure: “Digressions, incontestably, are the sun-shine”, and the work is “digressive, and it is progressive too”. The returns are required: the clock and the conception, the nose, the name and the sash come back through every volume, and Toby’s hobby-horse is the same in the first volume and the last. But the rubric asks of parts, and parts could go. Slawkenbergius’s tale of noses runs far past its joke; Ernulphus’s curse is given entire; Walter’s theories of names and auxiliary verbs and his Tristrapaedia repeat one comedy; the seventh volume’s flight through France is half a separate book. That excess holds the axis at the foot of the twelve, kept from lower because the book always returns to one parlour.
Score: 7.7 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: each mind runs on its own track of associations, rides its hobby-horse, and cannot be reached by argument; what reaches across is gesture and sympathy. Walter’s systems never touch his brother, and Toby answers his eloquence by whistling Lillabullero; yet Toby’s kindness, which has no theory, reaches everyone, the fly included: “This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me.” The book shows what Locke’s psychology implied and no narrative had shown, that a life cannot be told because the telling falls further behind the living every day, and that the body interrupts every system the mind builds. Held below 9.0 because the disclosure of consciousness is comic and partial: the women, Mrs Shandy above all, are kept outside it by design.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The elevation is frequent and small, and it is of feeling more than grandeur. Yorick’s death, with “Alas, poor YORICK!” and the black page after it, is the first height. The story of Le Fever, in the sixth volume, rises to the accusing spirit and the recording angel, who drops a tear upon Toby’s oath “and blotted it out for ever”. Trim’s dropped hat at the news of Bobby’s death is a height reached with one gesture. In the ninth volume “Time wastes too fast” opens onto a passage on the brevity of life. Against these, the chosen register is comic, bawdy and deflating, and it turns from every height almost before reaching it; the axis weighs height and frequency together, and deflation is the book’s method. Held below 8.5 for that reason, which is no fault in the book.
Score: 8.2 / 10
There is a myth here, and it is partly built. The house of Shandy is a line that cannot propagate: the conception spoiled by the question about the clock, the nose crushed by Dr Slop’s forceps, the name Trismegistus lost to Tristram, the sash window, Toby’s wound in the groin at Namur, and at the close Walter’s bull, whose failure gives the book its last words, “A COCK and a BULL”. That is load-bearing: every misfortune is the same misfortune. Toby and Trim are the knight and his squire remade as English benevolence, and Toby has become an archetype in his own right; Yorick carries Hamlet’s jester into a parsonage. But the book’s mode is the unravelling of story, and its archetypes are more often evoked in comedy than built into a structure that bears weight beyond the joke.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inheritance is Rabelais, Cervantes, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Swift’s Tale of a Tub, Locke’s Essay, and, closest and youngest, the English novel of Richardson and Fielding, barely twenty years old. The turn is against the novel at its birth: a life that does not reach its hero’s birth for two volumes and leaves him behind for most of the rest; a narration that discusses its own progress, addresses the reader and draws its plot as a line; the printed page itself made an instrument, black, marbled and blank. The stake was real: a Yorkshire parson published the first volumes at York at his own risk, under a persona, with matter that drew charges of indecency unfit for a clergyman, and continued for eight years against reviewers who turned hostile. Held a step from the top only because nearly every device has a precedent in the learned wit of Rabelais and Swift; the swerve is in making them a novel.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes entire. The book knows that consciousness proceeds by association and not by sequence, and knows it only because it is written so: the clock and the conception are joined in Mrs Shandy’s mind as they are joined in the book’s first chapter, by Locke’s law. It knows that time lived and time written cannot be made to agree, because Tristram falls further behind his life the more he writes; no linear form could state that except as an aside. The diagrams of the narrative line, the black page and the blank page are not ornaments; they are the form demonstrating what it cannot do in words. The digressive and the progressive are one movement. Held a tenth below the highest because the seventh volume’s journey is a frame other books could have held.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Evidence over two and a half centuries, and the yield has increased. Samuel Johnson’s judgment, recorded by Boswell, was “Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.” Later readers show why it was wrong: Viktor Shklovsky’s essay of 1921, which called it the most typical novel in world literature because it lays bare its own devices; the modernists’ recovery of it as a novel of consciousness; readings of it as Lockean psychology, as sentimental ethics, as a parson’s comedy of the Fall, as a study of a wounded body, as metafiction before the word. Its questions stay open: whether the ninth volume ends it, what Toby’s wound is, whether Walter is a fool or the book’s sad philosopher. And the form yields on each return, as the chronology the book seems to scatter turns out to be kept.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The field is English literature of the 1760s, the decade of Rasselas, The Vicar of Wakefield, Smollett and The Castle of Otranto. The force: a reorganisation of what the novel could be at the moment it had just become a form, showing that the narration itself, its time, its reader and its page, could be the novel’s subject. Much of the reach was delayed, which the rubric credits and discounts: for a century the novel’s main road went elsewhere. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: an immediate sensation in London in 1760, and across Europe soon after; Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste is built on it; Goethe and Jean Paul admired and used it; Machado de Assis’s Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1881) avows the free form of Sterne; and the line runs through Joyce, Woolf and Shklovsky to the metafiction of the twentieth century.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Survival over two and a half centuries, weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: the work survives whole as published, its devices included; whatever the ninth volume is, it is what Sterne printed. Presence: continuously in print, translated into the principal European languages, with a particular life in German and Russian, taught as a founding text of the novel and of its self-consciousness, and filmed once, as a film about failing to film it (A Cock and Bull Story, 2005). Its surface carries period matter, the siege-craft of William’s and Marlborough’s wars, the obstetric controversies, the scholastic learning Walter cites, but as the matter of comedy, not as a topical satire. Charged: its presence is narrower than that of the widest survivors of its century, and it is more taught than read.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Judged on Sterne’s English, with no translation between. The prose is a voice, and the control of it is complete: the sentence that stops, turns and resumes on the dash, a mark of many lengths that is the book’s signature; the address to Madam and to Sir; the timing of the interruption, which is itself the comedy. Gesture is written with a precision no novelist before Sterne attempted: Trim’s stance as he reads the sermon, the drop of the hat, Toby’s pipe, Walter’s hand reaching across his body for his handkerchief. The apparent chaos is constructed, and the devices land where the argument needs them. Charged: the bawdy innuendo is played on a few notes and repeated; the later volumes are thinner in invention than the first six; and some set pieces, Slawkenbergius above all, run on past their effect.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the curse of Ernulphus, read aloud entire in the Shandy parlour, and the death of Le Fever. One law governs both: every person acts by the train of his own associations and his hobby-horse, and only sympathy crosses from one to another. Walter’s systems, Toby’s fortifications, Slop’s Catholic learning and Trim’s sermon obey it; so do the narrator’s digressions, which are his hobby-horse. The bawdy and the sentimental are one physics, since the body interrupts the mind in each, and the law holds over a range from obstetric farce to the recording angel. Charged: the seventh volume’s journey through France, which keeps the voice and loosens the law into travelogue; and the ending, whose cock-and-bull close is apt but leaves the book’s chief line, Tristram’s own life, unarrived.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Many orders, held within one house and one voice. Consciousness above all, in Tristram, Walter and Toby. The family, in the Shandys’ marriage, the brothers and the dead son Bobby. War, in Toby’s wound and his campaigns on the bowling green, and behind them William’s and Marlborough’s wars in Flanders. Learning, in Walter’s systems and the scholastics. The body, in birth, noses, wounds, impotence and death. Medicine, in Slop and the forceps. The sacred, in Yorick, the sermon and the recording angel. Time and mortality, in the flight from Death and the narrator’s race against his pen. Each is a hobby-horse or a body, integrated, not listed. Held below 9.0 because the state, labour and class are thin, the women stand outside the book’s consciousness, and the world beyond Shandy Hall is a ground rather than an order the book holds.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Swerve at 9.4, then The Living Form at 9.3. A turn against the novel at its birth, made at a parson’s risk, in which the narration, its time, its reader and its printed page became the subject; and a form that knows consciousness moves by association and that a life cannot be told, and knows it only because it is written so.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.7: the digressive principle is required, but Slawkenbergius’s tale, Ernulphus’s curse given entire, Walter’s repeated theories and the flight through France could go in part without loss. Next above it, The Sublime at 8.2, a register that turns from every height almost before reaching it; then The Archetypal Deep at 8.4, a myth of the line that cannot propagate built into the house, with the rest of the archetypes evoked in comedy.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.7 against a threshold of 7.5, by two tenths. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.3, The Made at 9.1, The Inner Law at 8.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on one axis: The Swerve at 9.4, The Imperishable at 9.2, Pressure on Tradition at 9.1 and The Unconcealment at 8.9 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.4 falls a tenth short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 7.7, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.6. Four of the five summit conditions are met; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, at 8.8, stands below it as well.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, in nine volumes issued in pairs and singly between 1759 and 1767: I and II (York, December 1759, then London, 1760), III and IV (1761), V and VI (1762), VII and VIII (1765) and IX (1767). Sterne died in March 1768. The unit is the nine volumes as published, with their printed devices, the black page, the marbled page, the blank page, the diagrams of the narrative line and the missing and blank chapters, as part of the text. Whether the ninth volume ends the book is argued; the work is taken as published and not charged for a continuation it did not have. No text was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Sterne’s English, with no translation between. English is quoted only where its words are certain; Johnson’s words are from Boswell. Sterne’s dash is described, not reproduced. The Greek epigraph is paraphrased. Events are paraphrased, and chapter numbers are not given. Facts that could not be verified, among them the length of the book in words and the claim that its chronology is kept without contradiction throughout, are not given.