Tristram Shandy vs. the Literate Tradition
“Writing, when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.” Tristram Shandy
While there were many genres of literacy established after the printing press was invented in 1440, the modern form of the novel was not acknowledged as a new development until the early eighteenth century. With the growth of the middle class, and a rising number of educated and at least semi-literate citizens, print and typography were becoming increasingly internalized. In the mid-eighteenth century, with the rise of the novel and expanding familiarity to typography, Laurence Sterne wrote Tristram Shandy, treating this text less typographically and more orally than other pieces of the time. In an essay by Christopher Fanning on Sterne, Fanning says, “At the ontological level, Tristram Shandy as material book, published at the dawn of the age of mechanical reproduction, is a studied attempt to problematize issues of originality, using the very physical form of the book to question the technology that produces identical copies of a supposed original (Fanning, 391).” His style in the novel was a reaction to the rise of print, a satire deliberately exposing the inadequacies of narration based in typography. Sterne used orally based conventions, as defined by Walter J. Ong, in Tristram to convey an intentional shift away from the typological standards of the time.
The first oral quality within Tristram Shandy is its tendency to structure sentences additively rather than subordinatively. Ong describes ‘additive’ as a series of words such as ‘and’, ‘when’, ‘then’, etc., saying, “Written discourse develops more elaborate and fixed grammar than oral discourse does because to provide meaning it is more dependent simply upon linguistic structure (Ong, 38).” Sterne does not use words to provide addition, but actually omits any kind of conjunction that is not purely stylistic. In fact, the entire first page of Book 1, Chapter 1, is one sentence—interrupted only by dashes, semi-colons and commas; there are two sentences within the whole first chapter.
Next is Ong’s oral characteristic of redundancy and copiousness. In order for an oral story to keep the focus of attention on itself, and because oral utterances vanish as soon as they are uttered, it is necessary to repeat what has already been said, to keep both hearer and speaker on track. Sterne takes this requirement of orality and turns it on its head—he has written Tristram to read as thought spoken orally, but offers no aid for the reader to keep up. Instead of going over what has possibly been missed or misunderstood by the reader, Sterne continues on his tangents and gives no regard to the intended confusion of the audience. Ong says, “sparsely linear or analytic thought and speech are artificial creations, structured by the technology of writing (Ong, 40).” Perhaps Sterne is mocking the developing literate tradition— his writing is neither linear nor analytic, but convoluted and chaotic.
In addition to Tristram’s tendency to be complicated, it is inclined to be aggregative rather than analytic, which is, as Ong defines it, “formulary baggage which high literacy rejects as cumbersome and tiresomely redundant because of its aggregative weight (Ong, 38).” The oral tradition creates “formulary expressions” in order to organize and keep track of things which might be forgotten otherwise. In Tristram, Toby is always, except for his introduction, referred to by the narrator as “my uncle Toby,” and never just as “Toby,” or “my uncle.” This was originally, says Ong, because “once a formulary expression has crystallized, it had best be kept intact. Without a writing system, breaking up thought—that is, analysis—is a high-risk procedure (Ong, 39).” Sterne employs it in his novel, perhaps not consciously, in an attempt to recreate the sense of orality that has been lost with the emergence of typography.
Another characteristic of orality is its propensity to be agonistically toned—that is, challenging the listener through riddles to engage him in intellectual combat. Tristram is basically a riddle in itself; it offers a series of clues and sequences (not in chronological order) to be unraveled by the reader in an attempt to piece together the narrative of Tristram’s life. This challenge is a common theme throughout the book, as well as in Sterne’s contemporaries’ works. Called “learned satire,” it was as much an attempt to challenge the reader as it was to ‘show off’ intellectually. Riddles were not only used to store knowledge within the oral tradition, they were also used to engage listeners in combat.
Sterne engages his audience through these riddles, enhancing the book’s tendency to be “empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced (Ong, 45).” Unlike most work within the typographic tradition, Tristram is constantly making reference to the reader, addressing him or her personally by posing questions or challenges. In Book 1, Chapter 20, Tristram converses with his own imagined audience.
---How could you, Madam, be so inattentive in reading the last chapter? I told you in it, That my mother was not a papist.---Papist! You told me no such thing, Sir.---Madam, I beg leave to repeat it over again, that I told you as plain, at least, as words, by direct inference, could tell you such a thing.---Then, Sit, I must have missed a page.---No, Madam,---you have not missed a word.---Then I was asleep, Sir.---My pride, Madam, cannot allow you that refuge.---Then, I declare, I know nothing at all about the matter.---That, Madam, is the very fault I lay to your charge; and as a punishment for it, I do insist upon it, that you immediately turn back, that is, as soon as you get to the next full stop, and read the whole chapter over again.
At this point, Tristram goes into a divergence on the nature of stories and the audience’s responsibility to reflect and draw conclusions on the way.
---But here comes my fair lady. Have you read over again the chapter, Madam, as I desired you?---You have: And did you not observe the passage, upon the second reading, which admits the inference?---Not a word like it!
On many occasions, Tristram refers to his reader as a Sir or a Madam, and asks him or her to re-read, to pay close attention, or to reflect presently upon what has been read. Sterne wrote his novel to include a participatory aspect, to keep the reader within proximity. He breaks the convention of the first person narration, giving Tristram the qualities of an orally told, empathetic story.
Tristram invites the reader to participate, not only by addressing him, but by asking him to join in his word-play, which is reflected in orality’s tendency for words to be homeostatic. As Ong puts it, “Words acquire their meanings only from their always insistent actual habitat, which is not, as in a dictionary, simply other words, but includes also gestures, vocal inflections, facial expression, and the entire human, existential setting in which the real, spoken word always occurs (Ong, 47).” Typographic societies have dictionaries, and words are therefore not homeostatic, but rather available at any moment with constancy. In Tristram, however, Sterne employs a device that makes words homeostatic and situational—the asterisk. In Chapter 13 of Book 3, Tristram says, “do I know, Captain Shandy, what might have become of the garrison above stairs, in the mutiny and confusion I find all things are in at present, but for the subordination of fingers and thumbs to ****** …(Sterne, 147)” Then, in Chapter 14, he says:
Let us go back to the ****** ---in the last chapter. It is a singular stroke of eloquence (at least it was so, when eloquence flourished at Athens and Rome, and would be so now, did orators wear mantles) not to mention the name of a thing, when you had the thing about you in petto, ready to produce, pop, in the place you want it (Sterne, 147).
The words in asterisks are completely dependant on the situation, as well as the reader’s relationship with the text. Fanning says:
Tristram draws attention to texuality, here the ambiguity of the asterisks: Are they a deliberate oratorical gesture on the part of Toby? …Tristram’s analogies stress the intermingling of physical text and oratorical rhetoric, the concrete uses of abstract language… We encounter here, as so often in Tristram Shandy, the power of the physical text to convey more than the mere words it presents (Fanning, 362).
This ambiguity within the text encourages the audience to be aware of the words as physical things.
The awareness of physical form, whether in the gestures of an orator or the physics of communication suggested by the frozen words, ultimately leads to an acknowledgment of the expressive use of print (Fanning, 365).
Sterne draws attention here to the inadequacies of the print to convey any kind of physical reality, thus subordinating literacy to orality.
Ong claims that the print culture is comfortable with finality. He says, “Once a letterpress forme is closed, locked up, or a photolithographic plate is made, and the sheet printed, the text does not accommodate changes (erasures, insertions) so readily as do written texts…Print is curiously intolerant of physical incompleteness (Ong, 130).” This is a perfect example of Tristram’s unwillingness to conform to the constructs of typography. Sterne insists again on defying the rules of print by inserting pages that are blank, marbled, or drawn-in. Fanning says about the pages:
In addition to perplexing readers about its meaning within Tristram Shandy, the marbled page is the locus classicus for the problem of identicality and originality with regard to the nature of the print medium, for eighteenth-century marbling never produced the same result twice. Diana Patterson describes this phenomenon: “highly individual results create truly unique ‘copies’ of Volume 3 of Sterne’s novel. No two readers could have precisely the same experience of reading Volume 3 because of that leaf, and no reader without a leaf could have had a proper experience of the novel (Fanning, 391).
Sterne recognized that, though he was attempting to write an original novel, the experience of the audience could not be unique without ambiguity.
The ambiguity of the text is also reflected in its lack of chronology. This is a distinctly orally-based tradition, because, as Ong says, “Before writing was deeply interiorized by print, people did not feel themselves situated every moment of their lives in abstract, computed time of any sort (Ong, 97).” Tristram begins attempting to explain something, only to realize he is “getting ahead of himself,” that he has probably not even been born in the chronology of the book, and must therefore attend to those matters later in the book. The text jumps back and forth between the story of his birth, the story of the mid-wife, the story of his father, the story of his uncle, etc., until the audience has no need to read the book in order at all. In fact, at one point, Tristram admits that the reader could probably read the book in any order and still get the desired effect. Returning to the oral tradition, Sterne has proven Ong’s point: “There was no list of episodes nor, in the absence of writing, was there any possibility even of conceiving of such a list. If he were to try to proceed in strict chronological order, the oral poet would on any given occasion be sure to leave out one or another episode at the point where it should fit chronologically and would have to put it in later on (Ong, 140).”
So why does Sterne seem to embrace the oral tradition and dismiss the rules of typographic writing? Why return to such a basic form that has not only been “outdone,” but that is archaic? Tristram constantly plays with the idea that the conventions of literacy can be stretched and manipulated. While an increasing number of people in the eighteenth century had access to books, typography was becoming a standard to which all novels would adhere. But Sterne sought to break the rules of his time, and in doing so, proved that the oral tradition could in many ways still surpass the dominant literate tradition. Tristram says that in setting about writing his history, “I shall confine myself neither to his rules, not to any man’s rules that ever lived.”
But perhaps Ong said it best: “There is no way to refute the world of primary orality.”
