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So that when I stretch’d out my hand, I caught hold of the Fille de Chambre’s——

END OF VOL. II

Anyone who has been through the typographical hijinks of Tristram Shandy cannot take this conjunction of the narrator’s last words and the traditional words at the conclusion of a volume as merely fortuitous.27 The plot concludes with the reader’s surmise about what has happened at the end of the volume. As a conclusion it is bravely comic. Yorick is going about his business, concluding as he began, in midsentence, and once again, sentimental traveler that he is, he will be seduced out of his path.

Yet, as both form and content make clear, no consummations are devoutly to be wished. Tristram and Yorick do not stand about like Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon waiting for Godot or waiting for the end. By seizing every handle they humanize the desert world in which they live. And their vision is anything but apocalyptic. A Sentimental Journey was written, as Sterne told Mrs. James in a letter, and as Yorick asserts in similar language in the book itself, “[t]o teach us to love the world and our fellow creatures better than we do——” (Letters, 401). He might have said as much of Tristram Shandy as well.

Sterne was a Latitudinarian. Although controversy exists over what such views entailed, these members of the established church downplayed doctrinal differences among Protestants and were apt, like Sterne, to see philanthropy (in its etymological sense: love of mankind) as central to their Christianity. Within this book about impotence, solipsism, vulnerability, and morality, there is a virtuoso triumph of communication and continued existence. Through a characteristically odd choice of narrative convention, the use of an omniscient first-person character to tell his own story, Sterne has contrived to let us know precisely those things that his characters cannot know, and his narrator shares this knowledge with us in a way that enables us to know him. Walter and Toby’s discussion concerning pregnant women leads them to shake their heads together in antithetical concert:

God bless

Duce take

’em all—said my uncle

Toby and my father, each to himself. (IV, xii, 225)

If this is a discordia concors, a harmony through discord of the sort that animates so much eighteenth-century writing, it is so only through the encompassing consciousness of Tristram Shandy.

If impotence, as has often been noted, hovers over all the Shandys, including the bull, the book is nevertheless big with jest and attests to the power of words, and their ability to invoke gestures. Sterne’s love of words is one of the things that separates him from John Locke, whose epistemology was important for the writer. Sterne finds Locke’s theory on the association of ideas fertile ground for his comedy and both uses and critiques Locke. (In this, he parallels David Hume, who backhandedly recognizes Sterne’s achievement in a letter calling Tristram Shandy “the best Book that has been writ by any Englishman these thirty years…, bad as it is.”)28 Sterne perceives that Locke not only analyzes the problems that arise from the association of ideas and the misuse of words, but also becomes an instance of such problems in the metaphors of his own usage, which Sterne parodies (see, for example, the “sealing wax” of II, ii). Walter, not Tristram, is an orthodox Lockean when it comes to epistemology (though his parroting of Locke only puzzles Toby). In politics Walter follows Locke’s opponent, Robert Filmer. He has not just opinions but theories, and the life of Tristram runs counter to all those that matter most to him. Sterne’s verbal fecundity finds room for neologisms, archaisms, puns, nonce words. He even anticipates Lewis Carroll’s portmanteau words, which pack two words with their different meanings into one. His last jest in both Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey is that we are listening to the stories (whether cock-and-bull or not) of a jester who is “quite chop-fall’n,” as Hamlet puts it, speaking of his father’s jester, Yorick.