'Wide Enough to Hold Both Thee and Me'

On June 16 we observe Bloomsday. Why not November 5, the date of Tristram Shandy’s long-deferred fictional birth in 1718? Sterne announces his arrival in Vol. I, Chap 5: 

“On the fifth day of November, 1718, which to the æra fixed on, was as near nine kalendar months as any husband could in reason have expected,—was I Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, brought forth into this scurvy and disastrous world of ours.”

 

I know readers who detest Sterne’s novel, including some who have never been able to finish it. I sympathize. Those expecting an orderly, this-follows-that plot quickly grow impatient. My experience is that re-reading Tristram Shandy is preferable to reading it for the first time, which I did as a sophomore in an eighteenth-century English novel class. My professor was an enthusiastic Shandean and urged on us Tristram’s vow: “I write a careless kind of a civil, nonsensical, good-humoured Shandean book, which will do all your hearts good.” I was already a fairly seasoned reader of Joyce and Nabokov, and lesser moderns and post-moderns, so I wasn’t naïve and wasn’t expecting Trollope. Still, 220,000 words that appeared organized by little more than whimsy, and a novelist not above the occasional longueurs, was excessive. It’s a novel that teaches us how to read it.

 

Tristram Shandy is a novel in which it’s impossible to know what’s coming next, even at the sentence-by-sentence level. Sterne might have fit anything into his book. Take this passage  from Book II, Chap. 3:

 

“But desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it. The more my uncle Toby pored over his map, the more he took a liking to it!—by the same process and electrical assimilation, as I told you, through which I ween the souls of connoisseurs themselves, by long friction and incumbition, have the happiness, at length, to get all be-virtu’d—be-pictured,—be-butterflied, and be-fiddled.”

 

Sterne favored rare words, the sort we never speak and happen upon only in old books. Incumbition: “the action of lying or pressing upon.” The OED deems it both “obsolete” and “rare.” The only citation offered by the Dictionary is Sterne’s. I chose this passage largely because of “be-butterflied,” which suggests both Sterne’s playfulness and a prescient echo of Nabokov, who admired Sterne and worked his spirit into Gogol (1944) and Bend Sinister (1947).

 

Also, the title character’s Uncle Toby, with his groin wound suffered at the siege of Namur and obsession with military fortifications, is the human heart of the novel – simple, innocent, likely to speak common sense and even likelier to comfort others. Leave theory to Walter Shandy, Dr. Slop and others. In Book II, Chap. 12, Toby substantiates a cliché by not hurting a fly:

“Go—says he, one day at dinner, to an over-grown one which had buzz’d about his nose, and tormented him cruelly all dinner-time,—and which, after infinite attempts, he had caught at last, as it flew by him;—I’ll not hurt thee, says my uncle Toby, rising from his chair, and going a-cross the room, with the fly in his hand,—I’ll not hurt a hair of thy head:—Go, says he, lifting up the sash, and opening his hand as he spoke, to let it escape;—go poor devil, get thee gone, why should I hurt thee?—This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me.”