'Moved—Stopp’d--Shall I Go On?—No'

The professor asked me to write a paper on Tristram Shandy, the novel she had introduced to us in her eighteenth-century English fiction class. It was her favorite novel. Its bawdy humor matched her own. For me it was love at first sight – for the novel, I mean. I was already a partisan of Nabokov, whose elegant trickery echoed Sterne’s. I still find their prose the most intoxicating in English – and the most dangerous to imitate. 

With help from the professor I did a literature search the old-fashioned, pre-internet way and read lots of academic articles in bound volumes. I remember virtually none of them but recall an essay by Norman N. Holland who was teaching humanities at MIT: “The Laughter of Laurence Sterne,” published in the Autumn 1956 issue of The Hudson Review. Now I recognize its dialect as dry mid-1950s academese. I dimly remember the article, I think, because my theme was the imminent death of the narrator, the eponymous Tristram Shandy, who believes he will remain alive so long as he continues writing. Like his creator, he will die of tuberculosis. Holland looks at the three characters who die -- on stage, so to speak -- in the novel: Yorick, Tristram’s brother Bobbie and Le Fever. That final death is recounted in typical fashion, with an echo of Beckett:

 

“Nature instantly ebbed again,--the film returned to its place,--the pulse fluttered—stopp’d--went on—throb’d—stopp’d again—moved—stopp’d--shall I go on?—No.”

 

Academics on the job are not renowned for a sense of humor. They are generally an earnest bunch, especially when they take on comic writing and feel compelled to explain why it is funny. Holland retains a vestigial comic sense but you can see him sweating:.   

 

“This is the paradox of Sterne’s sense of humor. Hobby-horses are ridiculed (in their vulnerability to little things, hot chestnuts, or knots), but respected (in their resistance to big things, birth, and copulation, and death). Sterne ridicules reality itself by juxtaposing it with hobby-horses that refuse to take it seriously unless it is a squeaking hinge; but since the hobby-horses are themselves ridiculous, some seriousness, even about death, remains.”

 

Well, yes, but isn’t that apparent to most readers who remained conscious while reading the novel? My impression is that academics writing about literature either point out what you already know or concoct theories that are patently ridiculous. Of course things have gotten abysmally, laughably worse in subsequent decades. I see Holland was seduced by the application of psychanalysis to works of literature, another dead-end pleasure-killer. Looking for more depression fodder? Along with Holland’s essay in that issue of The Hudson Review you’ll find:

 

Yvor Winters’ “Problems for the Modern Critic of Literature,” soon to be republished in The Function of Criticism: Problems and Exercises (1957); three poems by Charles Gullans; a review of La Strada by Vernon Young; and reviews by Anthony Hecht and Hugh Kenner. They don't make quarterlies like that any more.

 

Sterne was born on the date, November 24, in 1713 and died in 1768 at age fifty-four.