The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne [5]
Given Tristram’s characteristic style, it is hardly an accident that critics still remain in a state of uncertainty as to whether Tristram Shandy was finished or not. Perhaps John Noorthouck, one of Sterne’s contemporaries, said as much as we can, despite the gains of modern scholarship: “after publishing a ninth volume only, he desisted from prosecuting a frolicksome work, which could not either be properly said to have been left finished or unfinished.13
The claims of the finished and unfinished Tristram Shandy deserve some consideration. Wayne Booth has made the best case for the book as intentionally complete in the form we have it; and his essay was especially salutary coming at a time when this novel was generally taken as formless, if not meaningless. He notices that except for the last volume, which appeared by itself instead of being paired as the others had been, all of the installments promised more to come in their concluding chapters. These promises refer not only to Tristram’s skill and problems in writing the book, but also to specific forthcoming revelations about events in the lives of Tristram and Uncle Toby. Booth infers that “[i]f Sterne intended to write further volumes, it seems rather curious that, having shown through eight volumes his knowledge of how to titillate his readers’ curiosity, he should suddenly lose that knowledge or decide not to apply it.”14 He also observes that only in the last chapter of Volume IX do we find all the major characters—the brothers Shandy, Mrs. Shandy, Yorick, Trim, Obadiah, and Slop (all but the disappointed Widow Wadman and the unborn Tristram)—gathered together in a scene that, as he notes, “is … strikingly like a parody of the conventional conclusion” in which everything is cleared up comically.15 The major promises have been kept. Toby’s affair with Widow Wadman has been brought to a conclusion, and Tristram’s early sorrows have been recounted. The last volume tells the long-awaited story of Uncle Toby’s “Amours” in full detail. Then, too, Booth draws attention to the last sentence in the novel, Yorick’s statement that everyone has been listening to a story of “a COCK and a BULL,” a phrase not only appropriate to Obadiah’s troubles of the moment, but to Toby’s love affair and Tristram’s narrative. He mentions that it was common for earlier facetious writers to call their entire books “cock-and-bull stories,”16 though he does not observe that Swift’s A Tale of a Tub, one of the major models for Tristram Shandy, not only has a title that means a cock-and-bull story but also is an example of a book that disrupts normal expectations about progression and closure. In short, the Tristram Shandy he presents is structurally complete, while it plays with the construction of traditional endings. The notion that the book is centrally about Tristram Shandy’s “Life” is part of the joking structure of the whole. In Booth’s reading, the book is well planned and has a discernible artistic structure evidenced by its fully satisfactory conclusion. Booth wishes to show that the ending of Tristram Shandy was to a large degree apparent to Sterne when he began it.
Drawing on art theory, Marcia Allentuck makes the opposite case. Her essay “In Defense of an Unfinished Tristram Shandy: Laurence Sterne and the Non Finito” describes “a work which the artist intended to leave unfinished, like a torso or a sketch, a work still whole within itself.… For an artist composing a work of the non finito kind, what is finished is dead.…”17 This statement catches something of the flavor of Sterne. Allentuck does even better in noting David Hume’s approval of Pliny’s observation that “the last works of celebrated artists, which they left imperfect, are always the most prized.… These are valued even above their finished productions: The broken lineaments