14 results in Satire, Comedy and Tragedy
9 - The International Perspective on Tristram Shandy and the Argument
- Richard C. Raymond, Mississippi State University
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Summary
We have discovered in Chapters 1 through 5 that in drawing his Shandean characters, Sterne's revision of dullness fuses benevolent intentions with self-defeating actions. We have found, too, that this paradoxical blend of self-sacrifice and self-inflation draws us within the Shandean world to admire their generosity and to laugh at their ineptness. Within the ambiguity of that world, we have also learned that while the benevolence of Yorick seems nearly unachievable, the life of utter dullness seems nearly unforgivable. Not surprisingly, as Mary-Celine Newbauld has thoroughly documented, such keen Sternean insights to the ambiguity of the human condition profoundly influenced other creative works in eighteenth-century Britain, including sentimental travel narratives, theater, and graphic arts.
The International Inf luence of Tristram Shandy and Sterne's International Inf luencers
In reading responses to Sterne's Tristram Shandy beyond England, we learn that Sterne's revision of dullness has been the primary cause of his work's popularity and influence. Lodwick Hartley writes, for instance, that Tristram Shandy enjoyed popularity with eighteenth-century American statesmen. While Thomas Jefferson admired Sterne's moral “emphasis on inward motive and intention,” Aaron Burr, thinking of forgivable, well-intended Shandean dullness, admitted that “if I had read Sterne more and Voltaire less, I should have known that the world was wide enough for Hamilton and me.” After outlining the many inept, eighteenth-century American imitations of Sterne's sentiment Hartley explains that twentieth-century Americans have appreciated Sterne for his Joycean treatment of “human isolation in a world where everybody is victimized by the limitations of language and by his own peculiar ‘association of ideas’ “ (Hartley 1971, 167). Yet American readers still value Sterne, says Hartley, as a “prophet of men of good will” (Hartley 1971, 168).
Sterne's revision of dullness has also strongly influenced non-English-speaking writers and readers. As A. O. Aldridge explains, Brazil's Machado de Assis reveals a “peevish pessimism” over worldly dullness that makes his tone more sardonic than Sterne’s. But Aldridge also notes that Machado de Assis revealed Sterne's influence by using the digressive technique to involve readers in the creative process of exposing hobbyhorsical dullness (Aldridge 1971, 170–75).
1 - Walter, Toby, Tristram, and the Reader: Sterne’s Revision of “Dullness”
- Richard C. Raymond, Mississippi State University
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Summary
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. 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).
Yet, as Richard A. Lanham explains, critics have long debated the meaning of Sterne's humor. 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. 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, and Ryan Stark speaks of Sterne advancing “the Christian faith” in a “decidedly odd way” by exposing “gloomy religionists everywhere.”
4 - Isolation and Death: The Tragic Undertones of Shandean Benevolent Dullness
- Richard C. Raymond, Mississippi State University
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Summary
Death, says Alvin Kernan, always emerges as the great symbol of tragedy. Isolation, therefore, as Northrop Frye explains, becomes the primary theme of the “tragic mode” in which the hero's exclusion from humanity often ends in exclusion from life. Though it seems at first strange to speak of tragedy in a satiric work devoted to laughter, the “underlying tonality” of Tristram Shandy modulates with tragic action, for the benevolent dullness of Sterne's comic heroes ends in either isolation or death.
Before progressing with his own life and opinions, Tristram relates the story of Yorick's death, which ends with the symbolic black page. I will therefore begin this chapter with a brief return to the tragic “fatality” that “attends the actions” of Yorick in his campaign against grave dullness (1: 24), focusing this time on Eugenius, who functions, to use Frye's terminology, as the “outspoken critic of the tragic action” and the witness of Yorick's cathartic death (Frye 1957, 218). Agreeing with Eugenius rather than with Helene Moglen, who finds Yorick an innocent victim of a dull community, I will show that Yorick, like most tragic protagonists in Frye's “high mimetic” mode, makes choices that cause his fate.
Eugenius’ Tragic Friend
We have already seen the type of Tristram's isolation in the penalty Yorick pays for his jesting campaign against dullness. We have also heard the warning of Yorick's friend Eugenius that the “fools” and “knaves” rebuked by Yorick's “sport” will challenge the parson with “war” (1: 32). As the “faithful friend,” whom Frye describes as “refusing, or at any rate resisting” that tragic hero's “movement toward catastrophe” (Frye 1957, 218), generous Eugenius spells out for the incorrigible parson-jester the “consequences” of such warfare with worldly dullness (1: 29). First, Yorick will suffer his “faith questioned,” his “works belied,” his “wit forgotten,” and his “learning trampled on” by the “malice” of “hired ruffians” (1: 32). Finally, in the “last scene” of his “tragedy,” the “helpless” parson will be “sacrificed” on the “fire” fueled by his jests in order to appease those who have felt the sting of his corrective wit (1:32).
8 - Parson Yorick in A Sentimental Journey and in A Continuation of Bramine’s Journal
- Richard C. Raymond, Mississippi State University
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Summary
I have argued in Chapters 1 through 5 that Sterne has consciously revised the traditional action of dullness in Tristram Shandy, that he has created benevolent Shandean characters who frustrate their good intentions with prideful, selfdefeating actions. Forwarding this same argument, Ronald Paulson asserts that Sterne also “modified the satiric process” in writing A Sentimental Journey. Though Yorick functions as a satirist in Tristram Shandy, writes Paulson, in A Sentimental Journey, the traveling parson becomes “both satiric object and observer” (264). To put Paulson's comment in the terminology used above, in A Sentimental Journey, Yorick displays, just like his friends in Tristram Shandy, benevolent dullness. Not surprisingly, in a close reading of Sterne's Continuation of Bramine's Journal, we find this same display of Shandean dullness found in A Sentimental Journey in Sterne's nonfiction account of Yorick-Sterne's passion for Eliza Draper and his anguish in England as she makes her own sentimental journey to India.
A Sentimental Journey
Yorick begins his journey basking in the warmth of his benevolent urge to share his prosperity, but his prejudice toward mendicants quickly exposes his self-righteous dullness. Sounding more like Tristram, who blames all his problems on fortune (1: 8), Yorick claims that he was “predetermined” to put his purse away when the “mild, pale” monk approaches, as the hard-working clergyman, now idle, cannot abide those who get through life in “sloth and ignorance, for the love of God.” Though Yorick later grants charity, in the form of a snuff box, to the monk (1: 26), his sudden, generous reversal, as John Stedmond points out, results from his desire to impress the melancholy beauty he has met. Yet the legitimate warmth of Yorick's heart radiates first from the guilt he suffers for his cruelty to the monk, guilt he feels before he meets the woman (1: 11); later, Yorick will cry over the monk's grave with only the reader there to note his feelings (1: 27).
Yorick's Sentimentality
Yorick's tears, however, do not always flow from deep feeling, as Stedmond argues in discussing the famous caged-starling scenes. Though Yorick sighs apostrophes to the abstraction “Liberty” and laments the “miseries of confinement” suffered in the bird cage and in the Bastille (2: 96, 97), the dull parson, observes Stedmond, forgets to release the bird in his anxiety over his own need for a passport to preserve his freedom (Stedmond 1967, 155; 2: 92).
Contents
- Richard C. Raymond, Mississippi State University
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6 - Laurence Sterne’s Letters
- Richard C. Raymond, Mississippi State University
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Summary
In a letter written in 1767, one year before his death, Laurence Sterne describes himself as a “sentimental being” but assures his anonymous aristocratic friend that he counts himself as no ineffectual, scatter-brained Shandy. “The world has imagined,” Sterne explains to the earl, that “because I wrote Tristram Shandy I was myself more Shandean than I really was.”
We must acknowledge Sterne's disclaimer here when we contrast his sales to those of Tristram, who laments the “ten cart loads” of unsold volumes (8: 663) and receives no recognition in Paris (7: 599). In contrast to such failure and anonymity, in a 1762 letter to the famous actor David Garrick, Sterne writes of the “unexpected honours” he received in France, boasting that he has, unlike Tristram, converted many French readers “unto Shandeism” (Letter 81: 224; Letter 84: 242). Indeed, in his 1765 letter to Robert Foley, Sterne admits receiving, unlike Tristram, a “considerable sum” from sales of Tristram Shandy (Letter 147: 409), and Sterne's letter to Thomas Becket in the same year describes gratifying sales (Letter 89: 261).
Yet despite this contrast between the author's success and the surrogate's failure as well as Sterne's denial of Shandean kinship, Sterne shares Tristram's authorial experiences and motives. We have already seen in Tristram Shandy itself that Sterne and Tristram have accepted the inevitable persecution that comes to wit and the inevitable death that comes to humanity, and that, their tragic resignation notwithstanding, both authors have committed themselves to writing for friendship and against dullness. Sterne's letters reflect this same Shandean resignation and commitment.
Sterne's Epistolary Rebukes of Moralistic Dullness
Even though Tristram Shandy became immediately fashionable, Sterne, like Tristram, received numerous rebukes from the “grave” moralists. In a 1760 letter to Garrick, Sterne speaks of the “wound” he received from the rumor that he intended to lampoon William Warburton as Tristram's tutor. Such a report, says Sterne, mirrors the kind of “malice” that “brought poor Yorick to his grave” (Letter 46: 123). In that same year, Sterne confesses in a post-script to a letter addressed to Warburton that “the scribblers’ use me ill” (Letter 59: 152); Sterne was also accused of slandering Dr. Mead in his portrait of the pompous Dr. Kunastrokius (Letter 45: 125). Reiterating
Frontmatter
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2 - The Yorick Standard, Walter’s Benevolent Dullness, and Tristram’s Friends: The Plot of Satire in Tristram Shandy
- Richard C. Raymond, Mississippi State University
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Summary
In analyzing the plot of satire in Tristram Shandy, I will first join Melvyn New and others in affirming that Sterne has set up good-natured Parson Yorick as his model of the humble but active life of benevolence, his Christian satiric standard, which exposes by contrast the self-defeating folly of dullness. But I will depart from New and John Stedmond by demonstrating the paradoxical blend of dullness and benevolence in the Shandean world. Focusing primarily on Tristram's father, Walter, I will show that Shandean self-deceptions flow from generosity as well as from self-importance. I will argue, too, that Sterne created this ambiguous but laughter-provoking fictional world not to make dullness seem harmless but to draw readers into “friendship” with those—the Shandys—who lack the brutal brand of dullness that buried Yorick, thereby luring readers toward the standard of humble benevolence that most will never fully attain. To emphasize the elusive challenge of Yorick's life, I will finally illustrate how Sterne uses Tristram to mock the dullness in readers that he fails to see in himself.
Dullness and Distortion of Reality
The plot of satire, says Alvin Kernan, relates events in no causal, linear sequence. Rather, the ironic, apparently disjunctive plot relates the actions of the self-deceived in conflict with the actions of the real world. Motivated by pride, by the conviction that they may exceed limitations that define mortals, the dull ignore “what is and is not possible for man” and, therefore, secure perpetual self-defeat and “build,” ultimately, a world without form, a wasteland swarmed by a mindless mob (Kernan 1965, 102, 14). Such a plot, notes Kernan, illustrates Northrop Frye's description of the “mythos of winter,” one of the four “mythoi or generic plots,” the mythos that portrays the energetic “creation” of chaos, of a “world that desire rejects” (Kernan 1965, 183, 14).
This triumph of chaos results, Kernan writes, from a “multitude of smaller movements” of dullness, which he categorizes as confusing reality, magnifying reality, and diminishing reality. When dull people use language, explains Kernan, they produce confusion rather than clarity because they intend to display their verbal wit, not to share their observations on reality (Kernan 1965, 30).
Preface
- Richard C. Raymond, Mississippi State University
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Summary
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, 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 streamof- 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.
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 selfdeceptions 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.”
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.
3 - “True Shandeism”: The Unhappy Comic Action in Tristram Shandy
- Richard C. Raymond, Mississippi State University
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Summary
The action of Shandean dullness, as we have seen, unfolds as radically satiric: arrogant self-deceptions produce social conflict and self-defeat. Witness once again the family “harmony” disrupted by Walter's self-indulgent research on Slawkenbergius, which secures neither the nose nor the future of Tristram (3: 277). We have also seen, however, that Shandean self-deceptions derive as well from self-preserving yet generous instincts fused with conscious benevolence in efforts for social union. Note once more Tristram's efforts on behalf of “friends,” partially described in the previous chapter. All comic characters, says Alvin Kernan, possess this vitality to preserve and give the self, and these efforts to reconstruct dull society on a benevolent foundation, explains Northrop Frye, define the goal of comic action. Because comic characters seek survival and freedom renewed in social union, they have the will to triumph over the “blocking forces” of dullness and the absurd mischances that together challenge their efforts to order human existence.
Writing his life and opinions for the sake of friendship defines Tristram's comic will to preserve himself and to unite others, a will, says William V. Holtz, that Tristram shares with his creator. The degree to which Sterne's art depicts the “comic triumph of life” over dullness will be the primary concern of this chapter (Kernan 1965, 187). To define the comic view of human limitations, I will first return to Tristram's story of Yorick, the parson whom Tristram endorses, before and beyond the black pages, for what Kernan calls his comic spirit, his warmth, and his wit. I will then follow John Stedmond in using Yorick to measure the dullness of Tristram's world; departing from Stedmond, however, I will show that Tristram purposely resurrects Yorick the jester not only to help him win friends through laughter but also to sharpen the contrast between Walter's educational follies and the learning abused by the worldly dull.
I will turn then to Tristram's self-assertive comic struggle against what Kernan calls the “ludicrous minutiae” that fill his family's past and prevent the telling of all. In Kernan's view, Tristram deprives his autobiography of the “dignity” he would give it when he insists on recounting past “trivialities” such as the ridiculousness of his naming and circumcision ceremonies (Kernan 1965, 96).
7 - The Shandean Sermons of Parson Sterne
- Richard C. Raymond, Mississippi State University
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Summary
In his scholarly Notes to the Sermons, the fifth volume of The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, Melvyn New rightly challenges the “notion” that “we can find a mirror in Sterne's Sermons of the popular conception of the Shandean author” (17), for Sterne wrote and preached as an Anglican clergyman aiming to convey a Christian message, not to reveal his own life (21). Yet, this autobiographical disclaimer notwithstanding, we have found in our analysis of Tristram Shandy Sterne's standard of humble benevolence in Parson Yorick; we have found self-inflating and self-defeating dullness in characters like Phutatorius; we have found the paradox of benevolent dullness in the Shandys; and throughout we have found Tristram and Sterne's intent to draw readers toward Yorick by drawing them first into the laughing world of the Shandys. These same discoveries of character and authorial intent, if not authorial identity, can be made in Sterne's sermons.
Sermons on “Kindred Virtues” and the Folly of Dullness
In the preface to Marjorie David's edition of The Sermons of Mr. Yorick,2 for instance, Sterne underlines Yorick's call for charity guided by religion, a call found in the “Abuses of Conscience” sermon delivered by Trim in Tristram Shandy (2: 139–67).3 His sermons, writes Sterne (Preface: 2), will illustrate “philanthropy, and those kindred virtues to it, upon which hang all the laws of the prophets.” In his sermon titled “Inquiry After Happiness,” Sterne expands on Psalm IV, 5–6, in a Johnsonian manner, surveying vain searches for happiness in pomp and sensuality to conclude that all such “experiments” lead to disappointment and the “perplexed state” of dullness (1: 5). One can escape this defeated state, writes Sterne, only through “the joy and satisfaction of living in the true faith and fear of Thee” (1: 5). Such faith, explains Sterne in “The Case of Hezekiah and the Messenger,” demands that a human being live, as we have found that Yorick lives in Tristram Shandy, with “open and generous integrity”; one must say “the thing he thinks” and do “the thing he pretends,” not like wealthy Hezekiah, who takes credit for the gifts of God (17: 164).
References
- Richard C. Raymond, Mississippi State University
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Index
- Richard C. Raymond, Mississippi State University
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5 - Benevolent Dullness, Ambiguity, and the Reader: Modal Complexity and the Plots of Tristram Shandy
- Richard C. Raymond, Mississippi State University
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Summary
Having analyzed the satiric, comic, and tragic actions that form the plots of Tristram Shandy, we might adopt the posture of Shakespeare's Polonius, who would only have to decide whether Sterne's work should be labeled tragicomic satire or satiric tragicomedy. Indeed, one might legitimately question the usefulness of the definitions of satire, comedy, and tragedy borrowed here from the work of Alvin Kernan and Northrop Frye, as none of these definitions, by itself, lets us describe the complex action of Tristram Shandy.
Frye himself would have answered this question, I believe, by pointing out that modal complexity represents the hallmark of great literature. The tragic action of Tristram Shandy, as we have seen in Chapter 4, can be partly categorized under Frye's “high mimetic” mode, in which protagonists Yorick and Tristram stand strong in their bold criticisms of grave, reputable dullness. Yet ironically, as Yorick and Tristram come to recognize, their strong moralrhetorical stances leave them weak, vulnerable to the swarms of the dull who come together long enough to slander and destroy.
We have also seen the tragic action of Tristram Shandy blend with comic action as it falls to what Frye would call the “low mimetic” stories of Walter and Toby, stories inseparable from Tristram’s. In telling the stories of his precursors, Tristram illustrates the benevolent “moral character” he would place at the center of a new comic Shandean society, which he would populate with his “hearty, laughing” friends (2: 132; 4: 402). But as we have discovered, within the fictional world created by Sterne, neither Tristram nor his forebearers succeed in drawing friends, in renewing life on the foundation of society's ruins. Tristram, Walter, and Toby may all be fairly counted among the protagonists of “low mimetic” tragedy, for they find themselves excluded from the society they would regenerate (Frye 1957, 39). But this bimodal action, we have found, does not resolve tragically, as Tristram resurrects Yorick regularly and ends his cock-and-bull story with a joke, not with a catastrophe. Neither does the action resolve comically, for despite the joking at the end, we find no harmony, no regeneration, and no shared vision—only Toby's embarrassment, Mrs. Shandy's confusion, and Walter's rhetorical nonsense (9: 803–9).