Sterne and the Narrative of Determinateness

Sterne and the Narrative of DeterminatenessMelvyn New The reader who demands to know exactly what Steme really thinks of a thing ... must be given up for lost.1 Friedrich Nietzsche I will begin with a seemingly non-controversial observation by a recent critic of Tristram Shandy, anonymous simply because it is the sort of comment any one of a hundred might write today: "Sterne's point," he asserts, "is clear enough: life is a confused muddle of intent and accident." It is the sort of generalization many have accepted at least since E.M. Forster in 1927 declared "muddle" to be the God ruling over the work.2 However, a closer examination of this particular formulation, not a jot different from that of countless others, might suggest an interesting problem. Simply put, if the point of Tristram Shandy is clear, then the work must be significantly divorced from the life— defined as a "confused muddle of intent and accident"—it portrays. Or, from another perspective, critics who find Sterne's point "clear enough" are themselves divorced from a work they argue is a muddle—and from a life that also does not allow the clarity they believe it can have in Tristram Shandy. Can one reformulate the observation? Perhaps we might say that "Sterne's point is obscure and muddled; life is a confused muddle 1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. RJ. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 238-39. 2 "Obviously a god is hidden in Tristram Shandy and his name is Muddle, and some readers cannot accept him," Aspects ofthe Novel (New York: Harcourt, 1927), p. 146. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 4, Number 4, July 1992 316 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION and so I, as a reflective reader, become muddled when I try to understand his imitation of that muddle; it is seemingly successful as an imitation, although I cannot be quite clear on that point either." Frankly, I do not foresee this becoming the new mode of critical discourse. In this essay I would like to suggest why not, drawing on what I believe to be Sterne's own encounter with the paradox of the interdeterminate text in human hands. Using Tristram Shandy as my model, I specifically want to explore a key means by which its narrative, while pretending to suspend judgment about itself (to remain muddle), simultaneously reminds us of the impossibility of reading without judgment; we are unable to refrain from seeking the definitive statement of what is clear about the work. Since the narrative of Tristram Shandy is nowadays taken as a prime illustration of disruptive, fragmented, open, disjunctive narrative,3 it helps us at times to keep our attention not on any particular interpretation, but more broadly on the contrasting "stories" people tell about the work, the narratives they initiate in order to organize or possess or subdue Sterne's mysterious text. In brief, while these modernist readers insist that Tristram Shandy is an open narrative, they all impose strategies of closure and clarity in their own writing upon it.4 Sterne had anticipated just such efforts in the characters of Walter and Toby Shandy, both of whom ride very hard the hobby-horse of explication and explanation. What Toby wants to do on the bowling green is to make very clear to the observer exactly what happened during the muddle of a real-life battle; what Walter wants to do with his theories , his consultations, his documents, is to find very clear solutions to the muddle of a real life. In addition, the text of Tristram contains numerous interwoven narrative sub-texts that serve as commentaries upon the primary narrative—the marriage contract, the Memoire of the Sorbonne doctors, the sermon, Ernulphus's curse, passages from Burton and 3 See, for example, J. Hillis Miller, "Narrative Middles: A Preliminary Outline," Genre 1 1 (1978), 375-87; Ralph Flores, "Changeling Fathering: Tristram Shandy," in The Rhetoric ofDoubtful Authority: Deconstructive Readings of Self-Questioning Narratives, St. Augustine to Faulkner (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), pp. 1 16-44; and Jonathan Lamb, Sterne's Fiction and the Double Principle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 4 The most glaring instance is Wolfgang Iser...