Tristram Shandy/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.