Narrative Structure and Philosophical Debates in “Tristram Shandy” and “Jacques le fataliste by Margaux Whiskin (review)

Ms. Whiskin asserts the connection between Tristram Shandy and Jacques le fataliste as texts that present “philosophical debates” through a range of narrative stratagems, including “ludic” games, creative “mindscapes,” and “grotesque” sentimentalism. Their dialogic relationship, which functions through parodic reformulation but does not privilege one point of “origin,” supplies the basis for her discussions. She analyzes how ludic qualities—such as puzzles and games—enable both Sterne and Diderot to propose “philosophical debates” but leave them inconclusive. They proffer but “withdraw” “information” from their readers through a series of riddles, blanks, and digressions that “serve to establish a method for practical philosophical demonstrations without imposing one particular authoritative philosophical system.” Quite what these “philosophical systems” might be is never entirely clear: possibilities are touted but not fully explained. The “debate over free will and determinism,” for instance, is only partially situated within the context of “traditional” novels and readers’ supposed “expectations” of their endings.

A small glance here toward fictional prose narratives in this period might have underpinned such assumptions about genre more securely, or helped to revise them more fruitfully with a view to the ensuing chapter, “Ideas and Examples.” Here, Ms. Whiskin mounts an engaging argument regarding how the familiar notion of “entertainment and instruction” in fiction finds fresh expression in Shandy’s and Jacques’s deployment of “concrete illustrations” to explain didacticism’s “abstract ideas,” only to undermine the solidity of these explanations. This contributes to both texts’ tendency to initiate debates but refusal to bring them to completion, a celebration of “open-endedness” that feeds into the subsequent discussion of “Mindscapes,” perhaps her most satisfying chapter. The partially drawn pictures of both novels’ characters and the “landscapes” in which they operate, complemented by some intriguing comments on geometry and spatiality, contribute to their resistance to supplying totalizing “pictures” just as much as ideas.

Ms. Whiskin risks missing an important point here, one that returns us to the first chapter’s partially articulated philosophical principles: while she argues cogently enough that the refusal to convey a “monologic” “message” may well characterize one mode of textual play, she does not fully counter the potential danger of assuming that no truths are conveyed through these fragmented and digressive texts. Some differentiation between these authors might have been valuable here; significant critical work (by Melvyn New or Elizabeth Harries, for instance) has, for one thing, unraveled to what extent Sterne’s games and “fragments,” far from being an avoidance of ultimate truth, gesture toward a greater (theological) truth aligned with Sterne’s Anglicanism—a suggestion lacking in Ms. Whiskin’s analysis. It is possible, surely, that Sterne and Diderot construct fragmentary and ludic narratives for quite different ends.

The final chapter’s discussion of sentimentalism provides more solid points of contact between the two books, with a glance also at A Sentimental Journey. Ms. Whiskin explores how both authors deploy the grotesque and the carnivalesque to probe sentimentalism’s unsatisfactory elements, neither to “valorise” nor to “invalidate or annul” sensibility’s qualities but to promote its sociability through laughter. These ideas are not new to either author, or to sentimentalism; it is one drawback of this chapter that it fails to engage with much of recent critical commentary on sentimentalism. Gardner D. Stout’s 1963 article on A Sentimental Journey is hardly the most up-to-date reference for discussing that novel’s ambivalence toward sentiment; and while John Mullan’s Sentiment and Sociability (1988) remains significant, more current critical voices might have complemented his interpretation, although it was a relief to discover Ms. Whiskin has read Paul Goring. This detachment from critical assessments of sentimentalism leads to reductivism, and is matched by a corresponding lack of contextualizing discussion of these two novels’ place within the discourse of sensibility, both theoretical and creative: Adam Smith and Hume are given scant attention, a passing reference is made to The Man of...