Laurence Sterne and the Argument about Design

Loveridge, Mark

doi:10.1007/978-1-349-05600-2

Cited by 7 publications

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“…And even the specific engagement with Locke's treatment of wit and judgement, itself arguably an unfair interpretation of Locke, doesn't seem to reflect in any way on the conversation preceding the preface. 5 Attempts to bolster the philosophical achievements of the sequence might claim that there are at least two implicit anti-Lockean arguments here.…”

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Uneasiness: the line between Sterne’s novel and Locke’s Essay

Davies

2017

Textual Practice

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Commentators often speak of the restlessness or agitation of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, its inability to leave the reader alone to follow and to observe the following of a narrative line. Such a line, if it would tell or stand as the image of a life, ought ideally to be straight. Tristram acknowledges and bemoans the fact that he has so noticeably failed to meet this demand and intervenes in the telling of his life, one more time, to try to convince us that at least matters are improving, if we are willing to indulge him one or two extra deviations. 1 Kant, for one, applauds and seems amused by the constant doing and undoing of Sterne's writing, 2 and Nietzsche, for another, is drawn to the manner in which Sterne leaves neither place nor time for the reader to know what is meant to be taken seriously and what is not. It is just this quality of constant and exhaustive disruption that exasperates Thackeray. 3 Yet there is also throughout the novel, a deliberate slowness and stillness. This is marked most obviously in the perpetual inability to accomplish even the smallest of tasks, an ability stretched across the generations (for example, the irritations of the parlour door hinge), but it also comes to the fore in one of the key sections of the novel where significantly Locke's philosophy is invoked. The topic is duration. It is worth noting the way in which the communicating of a thought and an experience, and the naming of the doctrine tasked with explaining that experience, are here reduced to a sort of paralysis, the result being, for Walter and Toby, sleep and, for author and reader, an opportunity finally for a preface.Walter Shandy, looking at his watch, reports that it is two hours and ten minutes since the arrival of Dr Slop and Obadiah. Yet 'I know not how it happens, brother Toby -but to my

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confidence: 99%