From Richard A. Lanham’s Tristram Shandy: The Games of Pleasure (pg. 52-53). A needed reminder after over a year off of why I started doing this in the first place.

In Walter Shandy, the commentators seem to agree, Sterne has created an antitype of this ideal portrait, an exhibi-tionistic, perfectly impotent theorist. “A full account of [his] epic frustrations would,” we are told in a recent article, “encompass a major part of the novel.” He is frustrated as philosopher, as father, as husband, as brother, as orator. Rather than exercising his philosophic principles, he hides behind them, “constantly exacerbated by his inability to control the accidents of everyday existence through his carefully contemplated hypotheses.” Plagued, as it seems to him, by chance, his real problems come not from circumstances “but… from his own impractical nature? As still another student points out, he is always isolated from the action he wishes to direct.’ He cannot “bring affairs to a satisfactory conclusion.” He can never communicate with his wife, find in her anything but an infinitely yielding, flaccid placidity. This failure is part of a general “failure to communicate, to make the essential connections between himself and the world around him.” Like Ovid, he is too witty for his own good: “Walter’s hypotheses begin in jest but end in earnest; his judgment at length becomes the dupe of his wit.” And, of course, his Ass that Kicks hardly represents the satisfactory sexual orchestration a modern therapist would recommend. Beyond all this, he enacts that most balked and baffled of men, a natural-born orator without an audience. Listen to him Uncle Toby willingly does; appreciate his art he cannot. Finally, if Professor Ralph Rader’s rumored speculation is correct, we are to deny Walter even the paternity of Tristram. He becomes the paradigm of modern man, powerless before an indifferent universe but manfully bearing up. Perhaps this side of his character has been sufficiently emphasized. As a corrective, we may want to recall that he does occasionally triumph, does manage, win or lose, to enjoy himself a good deal. He has, after all, chosen to live this way, finds retirement more agreeable than bartering as Turkey merchant with the mysterious Middle East. Walter is impotent, everyone seems to agree, when he confronts the real world. But viewed from the pleasure-principle vantage, this generalization carries less conviction. The novel’s point may be this: the world Walter Shandy confronts successfully and with pleasure, the world of speculation, is the real world. His successes, not his failures, constitute his raison d’être. “Arguments,” our author tells us, “however finely spun, can never change the nature of things – very true – so a truce with them.” Through Walter, Sterne negotiates his truce in Tristram Shandy.

And a bit later on pg 57:

Readers who find Walter a paradigm of frustration may be bringing to the novel a conception of rhetoric-or more largely of language different from that which Tristram brings. We tend to think that language communicates conceptual truth. Such manages the world. Not much managing gets done in Tristram Shandy, and one naturally concludes that language is at fault, that, as Traugott brilliantly makes clear, the book is in fact about how language is at fault. But if we think of language as, essentially, not controlling concept but yielding pleasure and Tristram conceives of it in this way -much of the frustration evaporates. The occasion here is death and Walter has a grand time with it. What more could any philosopher do? If language continually fools us – and Tristram is often at pains to tell us that it does – here we are getting back some of our own. Perhaps it is still fooling us, but at least it is in a pleasurable way.

We can call Sterne’s humor philosophical in this sense if we will. It clearly is meant as something for us to generalize upon. Yet I hardly think he saw this kind of thing as what man should or should not do, so much as simply what he does do. He is not at all cheering us up in the way Thackeray thought – or some modern critics think – the humorous moralist should do. He is simply telling us how language is used, how – let us vary the wisdom of a modern popular philosopher – what is spoken is often less important than the act of speaking. The operative force is not philosophy but rhetoric, not wisdom but pleasure.