BOOKS Sterne's Strange Adventure
By TONY TANNER
p is somewhat shaming that this unusually 'thorough and appreciative study of Sterne's work should have been written by a Frenchman.* Shaming, too, that Fluchere, in summing up the English response to Sterne over the last hundred and fifty years or so, should have to record so many mean moralising comments of disapproval Passed on a man whose genius was, as Fluchere says, 'one of the most attractive forms the human spirit assumed in the century that gave it birth.' Writers in very different cultures responded to his genius—for example, Machado de Assis, and Jorge Luis Borges; and critics in other countries —America and France in particular—have grasped the profound relevance of Tristram Shandy for modern fiction and, indeed, for modern man. But in his own country, the prophet (for he was one, in a sense) has been without honour. Why?
Perhaps because of the kind of novel he wrote. The English—perhaps because of their trium- phant mastery of matter in the real world—tend (,,to prefer novels in which the relationship between the author, his subject, and his language is firm, clear, and unproblematical. There is the writer on one side: on the other is his 'story,' that is, his selection of significant incidents from the real world. The writer's style is simply a tool, an efficient means of bringing the story in front of the reader. The important problems are out there in the world, not in the mind actually experienc- ing the world and trying to formulate it. The humane but authoritative handling of external reality in Fielding has proved more congenial than the spirited internal struggle against bewilderment that we find in Sterne. An age Which responded to the genius of, say, George Eliot, was perhaps disinclined to waste its time in the strange world of Tristram Shandy. For there We find that the writer, his subject-matter, and his language have become one. Instead of a masterly disengaged narrator, we find an author Whose subject-matter is himself and- whose style does not tell the story because it is the story. To wart Age whose energies and attentions were all directed at the heavy massed realities outside the head this inner dalliance must have seemed like Pure perversity.
And yet Sterne was really asking questions as important as any that fiction can raise. What is it to be an experiencing self? What is the relation between our ideas and our bodies, our thoughts and our things, our words and our fates, our theories and our feelings? Locke, after all, had said 'Self is that conscious thinking thing, what- ever substance made up of . . . which is sensible or conscious of pleasure 'and pain, capable of happiness or misery, and so is concerned for itself, as far as that consciousness extends.' And if the self was equal to the conscious- ness, and if the consciousness shifted as it received and accumulated more impressions --then who could say that they were the same Person yesterday and today? Implicit in this * LAURENCE STERNE : FROM TRISTRAM TO YORICK. BY Henri Fluchere. Translated by Barbara Bray. (0.U.P., 84s.) redefinition of the self is that 'dissolution of the ego' which has influenced so much modern thought. If a man is the sum of the thoughts prompted by the impressions he receives, then individual identity is washed away in the tides of experience. Sterne, as Tristram Shandy, shows that he is well aware of the implications of Locke's work ('And who are you? said he— Don't puzzle me, said I.') but he does not, as some think, merely capitulate to it or parody it. He shows a mind working doggedly to achieve a sense of identity throughout the experience of dissolution, to discover continuity amid manifold discontinuities and distractions; a mind unusually, and good-humouredly, aware of the endless difficulties involved in the paradoxical attempt to extract some order and form from the flux of contingencies which make up his fate. Art is always a reproach to Chance : and the unfailing sanity and good humour of Sterne's writing represent a triumph over the absurdities, frustra- tions and disasters of his life.
The nature and extent of this triumph Fluchere explores with admirable patience and minute care, often arriving at brilliant insights. He, at least, can see what is going on. 'Sterne sub- stituted for story, plot and perhaps character as well, the vigil of the consciousness, and in so doing opened up unlimited perspectives for the novel of the future.' The book is a vigil. Life tends always to fragmentation : it requires 'a continual effort of the intelligence' to 'give a final impression of coherence.' It is very difficult to tell a story—as difficult as Trim finds it to recount the history of the King of Bohemia and his seven castles. Language lapses continually into iniprecision and often furthers confusion when it is intended to facilitate communication—as between Walter Shandy and Uncle Toby. Tris- tram has both to do justice to confusion and to surmount it. Thus he can honestly claim: 'my work is digressive, and it is progressive too— and at the same time.'
He has to digress, to chase after the life continually flowing away from him on all sides. But in so digressing he is progressing—for some- thing is caught and stayed. In a perpetually disintegrating world, not all is allowed to vanish. Fluchere is wise to make clear how different Tristram Shandy is from later novels using the 'stream of consciousness.' For Sterne does not opt for passivity and automatism: 'Sterne is always present and always vigorously on the alert. Sterne does not let himself be swept along —he stands still while things flow past him.' Indeed one could say that he swims against the current, for in a world where 'Time wastes too fast' as he complains, his writing is a continual act of salvage and preservation. He does not ignore the fluid mystery and contingency of life —unlike his father who constantly tries to trap reality in a series of rigid theories and systems, and as constantly fails, thwarted by the vexing unpredictableness of life.
Indeed, Tristram is ironically aware of the impossibility of making life submit to the pre- scriptions of language. Our conduct is comically independent of our rhetoric ('Let love therefore be what it will—my uncle Toby fell into it.') What he does is give us 'the very rhythm of intellectual activity itself'—the mind grappling with every- thing that happens to it in an attempt to achieve some subjective organisation. For Tristram, the deformed product of an interrupted copulation, is too aware of the cruel and freakish impositions of life outside the mind to be anything but ironic about man's ability to organise external reality. Fluchere has grasped the full importance of all this. As he says, 'his book is fundamentally a meditation on the world.' But not a fixed inde- pendent router world : `to paint the world is to paint the mind : the picture of thought is the world.' There is, indeed, a very real world in the novel, but this world does not come to us inde- pendently—for it only exists as it has intruded on
Tristram's consciousness and lodged itself in his memory. With this emphasis on the distrac- tions and resources of the inner world it is not surprising that Sterne concentrated on the experience of Time in a way which was not to be fully appreciated for over a hundred years. Fluchere handles this side of his work very well. Man lives in the world of history where, indeed, many entirely unexpected things happen to him (not least, being born). But Tristram refuses to submit to that relentless chronology. For the mind has a wider freedom than the body. It can circle, explore, return to the past, speculate, or stand still. It cannot ultimately triumph over `the irrevocable flight of the present into the future' just as the characters in the book cannot escape from history (there is in fact a very definite sequence of events recorded in the book). But sheer chronology is not experienced life— and psychological time, in which the mind can move in all directions, is richer and more real than `objective Time' which is simply the cold tick-tock which accompanies our physical decline.
Sterne makes wonderful play out of this dis- crepancy between inner and outer time, but this play is also, as Fluchere says; `a way of rejecting the authority of Time over the novel, a denial of the subjection of matter to chronology, a jesting assertion of the a-temporality of the mind in its ironic struggle against Time.' Sterne never for- gets that our minds are involved with our bodies —hence his intense scrutiny of gestures, positions, mannerisms, etc.: indeed, it is our bodies that remind us what comparatively helpless victims of nature and contingency we are. But for Sterne the mind could help us to achieve some mastery over the continual vexations which occur to us, by maintaining a resilient good humour and by that continual ironic awareness which somehow transcends absurdities in the act of recognising them.
There is no space to summarise all the many aspects of the book which Fluchere discusses— he continually reinvigorates and enhances our sense of the wonders to be found in this uniqtie book, and he has some pertinent comments about the shift from intelligence and perception .to sensibility and frisson manifest in Sterne's later work. But one of his points is worth stressing. The English, amazing people, have persisted in finding Tristram Shandy a dirty book. As Fluchere points out, Sterne is interested in procreation, pregnancy, birth and indeed many matters pertaining to the body, because it is man's fate to be physical. The book starts with the subject of procreation `to emphasise the primary importance of the act which precipitates every creature into existence and gives fate its raw material.' The story of a man is not so remote from the famous `cock and bull' story which ends the book. And if we find it obscene to be reminded of the fact we must answer Walter Shandy's last, and truly serious, question : 'where- fore, when we go about to make and plant a- man, do we put out the candle' whereas 'the act of killing and destroying a man . . . is glorious.' When his son Bobby's death is announced in the house, all react in different ways, but the most eloquent and decisive response comes from the `foolish scullion' who, when told •he is dead, says `So am not I.' And that is what Tristram Shandy is really about—the experience of not being dead. The subtitle is ironic for instead of giving us a `life,' it portrays the condition of being alive, of being aware of a self and a surrounding world. And why should not such a book hover around the inexplicable mystery of birth—that moment when the strange adventure of consciousness so inexorably begins?
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