The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne [2]
’twas an eye full of gentle salutations——and soft responses——speaking——not like the trumpet stop of some ill-made organ, in which many an eye I talk to, holds coarse converse——but whispering soft——like the last low accents of an expiring saint——“How can you live comfortless, captain Shandy, and alone, without a bosom to lean your head on——or trust your cares to?”
It was an eye——
But I shall be in love with it myself, if I say another word about it.
——It did my uncle Toby’s business. (VIII, xxv, 467)
This talking eye is one sort of nonverbal communication in Tristram Shandy. Another, the stop and gesture, like the aposiopestic break, gives mute eloquence to Trim’s account of the death of Bobby when, dropping his hat, he brings a kitchen full of self-obsessed consciousnesses into communal awareness. Or, for that matter, it takes a highly original form when Trim flourishes his walking stick in favor of celibacy in a gesture visually represented in the text. The fabric of Sterne’s fictions is composed of such humanizing interruptions. We can find them in the digressions and multiplicity of chapters of Tristram Shandy and in the very project of A Sentimental Journey.
The two kinds of time evoked in the Garrick anecdote significantly appear elsewhere in Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey. Tristram opposes his digressive manner to a rather different sort of historical journey:
Could a historiographer drive on his history, as a muleteer drives on his mule,—straight forward;----for instance, from Rome all the way to Loretto, without ever once turning his head aside either to the right hand or to the left,—he might venture to foretell you to an hour when he should get to his journey’s end;-----but the thing is, morally speaking, impossible: For, if he is a man of the least spirit, he will have fifty deviations from a straight line to make with this or that party as he goes along, which he can no ways avoid. (I, xiv, 28)
Tristram explains that his “unforeseen stoppages” suggest an unpremeditated method, “and that is,---not to be in a hurry;---but to go on leisurely, writing and publishing two volumes of my life every year;----which, if I am suffered to go on quietly, and can make a tolerable bargain with my bookseller, I shall continue to do as long as I live” (I, xiv, 29). Much later, in his famous visual representation of his work, he contrasts the curves of his movement through the first five volumes with “a line drawn as straight as I could draw it, by a writing-master’s ruler, (borrowed for that purpose) turning neither to the right hand or to the left”—the sort of line favored by Christian clergymen, classical writers, and cabbage-planters. Although Tristram is in the midst of promising “to go on with my uncle Toby’s story, and my own, in a tolerable straight line” (the promise itself forms a short digressive chapter), we know through his asides and interjections, before he suggests as much, that “men of wit and genius have all along confounded this line, with the line of GRAVITATION” (VI, xl, 379). In Tristram Shandy both life and writing are a journey. In A Sentimental Journey the metaphor of life as a journey turns into the literal substance of the work, and the sentimental traveler is set against Mundungus, who made the grand tour “without one generous connection or pleasurable anecdote to tell of; but he had travell’d straight on looking neither to his right hand or his left, lest Love or Pity should seduce him out of his road.”6
One is seduced out of his road (literally, “seduced” means “led away from”—a typically sly usage) by others. Communication with others, whether by word or gesture, is at the heart of Shandeism. The difference between the human time of Garrick’s acting and the inhuman time of the critic’s stopwatch is that Garrick’s break serves to communicate with others, and in communicating makes time humanly meaningful.