LAURENCE STERNE'S FUTILE & IDLE MEN

ON TRISTRAM SHANDY

Four years ago, I tried to read Laurence Sterne’s The Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy. After grueling slog thru the first four volumes, —drowning in tedium and incomprehension, —I quit.

Now what do we expect out of reading?

I’m a boxing coach. When I get a new zero-start dolty dumbfuck client, I don’t feed him to the wolves and make him spar some sharp shark—, bloodthirsty and ready for the Ringmasters. That would be mean and unwise.

Instead we learn the combos, we drill the technique. We work our way up slowly. It might take a year of hard training before you’re ready to spar. And even more before you’re ready to compete. When I fought in the NCBA Finals, it was my 16th fight. I was ready. You can’t reach no summit of no joy without some real hard work.

My first try with Tristram Shandy I was flat done beat down and cooked. This go-around I realize it’s one of the warmest, kindest, most humane, hilarious, exuberant, (and the #1 most) inventive novel in world literature.

I don’t like the way people talk about this book. Often it’s completely vacant of pertinent information.

They say it’s funny and inventive and (puke emoji) satirical. —The satirical thing especially makes me surly; cause it suggests that to enjoy the book you gotta know what he’s satirizing: as if gleaning all the winking references in a book is any pleasure at all. I think that’s horseshit. It ain’t necessary to go allusion-digging.

——A great work of literature is naturally allusive cause it’s swimming in the ocean of preceding human thought; it’s another brick in the big contiguous brick edifice of LITERATURE. You won’t find a Great Work that’s not in conversation with other Great Works. And it’s not out of cleverness. It’s just the essential bones of the whole operation.

How you gonna write something Great if you ain’t been mouth-wide-open glugging at the busted fire hydrant of LITERATURE. Yes, maybe rooting out some allusions gives you a nice mental buzz, and it can certainly deepen your understanding.

But that dense web of allusiveness and engagement gives the work a natural architectural heft and solidity that you imbibe by virtue of its being woven into the work. You don’t need to— understand it all, —to feel it.

I mean look at Sterne’s points of contact. —I read John Locke as a philosophy undergrad and it’s sieved all outta my brain by now; I read the first book of Rabelais, that’s all; and I ain’t read any Jonathan Swift since I read Gulliver’s Travels in 5th grade sitting in the waiting area while my mom was working out at Curves.

What’s miraculous about Sterne isn’t that he references A Tale of Tub all the time.

—And it is miraculous that Laurence Sterne, a priest, who didn’t write nothing but sermons until he was 46 years old; who was sick as a dog with tuberculosis his whole life and literally dying as he wrote the last volumes barely into his 50s; that he wrote this glorious book that anticipates every innovation in narrative fiction—literally I dare you to find something that you think is clever or original that isn’t in Tristram Shandy——; a book that had such a wide reach that it could stir the heart of an epileptic mixed-race kid from Rio de Janeiro named Machado,— and change the course of brasilian literature forever.

—What’s miraculous and marvelous about the book are all the accessible and human elements. The overabundance of joy and feeling. The ridiculous—yet somehow relatable—characters. And the lewd insatiable bawdiness!——

Ok. Nobody says what the book is actually about.

On a large scale, the book is about idle men (I guess, —though it seems like a particularly pestering pesterity in the very recent past and present, —men have always been idle and useless; there’s 24 hours a day, you gotta find something to do, —you can’t m*s*u*b*t* the whole time) finding a way to beat off ———rather, reader, we’ll say ——beat away——the idleness.

On a small scale, the book is about Tristram’s uncle Toby—one of the kindest, most humane, generous, and wonderful characters in literature ——(he’s a paragon of all the best human instincts in the book)—overcoming his PTSD from war and falling in love.

Doesn’t that sound like a really nice story?

But I’ll get to Uncle Toby’s romance later.

Shockingly The Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is not really a book about the eponymous Tristram Shandy—though he narrates it.

The book starts out as ab ovo (from the egg; you gotta follow these minor latinisms if you gonna read this thing) as a damn book could be: we get the supposed moment of Tristram’s conception narrated in the first chapter.

But that’s where the games start, cause I don’t think —though Tristram doesn’t know it— that that’s the day he is really conceived.

His father, Walter Shandy, is a pedant, an unknowing buffoon, and a philosopher of minutia —his concern is the world of books; not even necessarily good books: arcane books. His favorite philosopher is Slawkenbergius (Sterne’s invention) who is an expert on noses —I’ll get back to the topic of noses later.

Walter is uniquely futile. —And really, reader, what’s more relevant in the Year of our Lord 2025 than a book about male futility ——cause yeah that’s what I meant earlier; the book’s about not necessarily just idleness —but futile idleness.

While Tristram is growing up, Walter sets out on a great work regarding his education, the Tristramoepedia which is serially rendered obsolete by the fact that like —when Walter is writing what Tristram’s education should be like when he’s three years old, he’s already four!

Walter Shandy is a consummate wheel-sputterer.

—So back to Tristram’s conception. Walter was one of the most regular men in everything he did, a slave to extreme exactness. He decides that on the first Sunday of every month he was gonna wind-up the big house clock.

Walter saw this as a chore. And in order not to be plagued and pestered by this and the other chore he loathed: —his conjugal duties. He decides to get them out of the way on the same day. i.e. when he wound the clock he would **** Mrs. Shandy.

Mrs. Shandy,

could never hear the said clock wound up—but the thoughts of some other things unavoidably popped into her head.

(It’s ambiguous here what effect her husband’s looming penis has on her, but knowing their relationship it must’ve induced a wave of at least extreme tedium, —if not slight nausea.)

Tristram ascertains the date of his conception as March 6th, 1718 cause he was born on November 5th, exactly eight months after or,

as near nine calender months as any husband could in reason have expected.

And Walter was too laid up with sciatica during December, January, and February to perform his duties —and he goes out of town at the end of March (because back then he was still working as a traveling salesmen).

So the only possible date Tristram could’ve been wrought by Walter’s seed is March 6th.

It’s a quiet joke thru-out (quiet cause Tristram himself don’t realize it) that Walter isn’t really Tristram’s father. After the opening paragraph about how his father and mother should’ve been more cognizant of what they were doing when they brought him into the world, here’s the conception scene:

Pray, my Dear, quoth my mother, have you not forgot to wind up the clock?———Good G—! cried my father, making an exclamation, but taking care to moderate his voice at the same time,——Did ever woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question? Pray, what was your father saying?———Nothing.

The narrator Tristram, talks to invisible interlocutors thru-out. That’s us, the reader asking, Pray what was your father saying? And the answer is nothing cause he wasn’t saying anything. He was laying pipe.

And Mrs. Shandy is so bored by the dicking that she’s thinking of clocks. Walter’s interrupted in his—presumably—very regular and methodical strokes, and I doubt that he can ever get back to it in order to finish.

—Though, the Shandy men know so little about women that it would be surprising if they even knew how to knock one up. It’s the hallmark of a futile man to not know anything of a woman’s needs.

Tristram isn’t the answer out of this futility. I think Toby is the only one of the Shandys who approaches usefulness —the contrapunct to futility and the central necessity of every man’s life— through the story of his love affair. But I’ll save that for later because really it’s the juiciest morsel of this whole essay.

Here’s a conversation Mr. and Mrs. Shandy have later in the book: carrying on the joke of uncertain paternity. —This is an exemplary conversation between them. Mrs. Shandy always agrees with whatever he says cause disagreeing with him would mean having to talk to him at length and that is absolutely too annoying for her to endure.—:

But indeed he is growing a very tall lad,—rejoined my father.

——He is very tall for his age, indeed,—said my mother.——

——I can not (making two syllables of it) imagine, quoth my father, who the deuce he takes after.——

I cannot conceive, for my life,—said my mother.——

Humph!——said my father.

(The dialogue ceased for a moment.)

——I am very short myself,—continued my father gravely.

You are very short, Mr. Shandy,—said my mother.

Humph! quoth my father to himself, a second time: in muttering which, he plucked his pillow a little further from my mother’s—and turning about again, there was an end of the debate for three minutes and a half.

They have a lot of these conversations in bed; this is one of my favorites:

Now my father was then holding one of his second beds of justice, and was musing within himself about the hardships of matrimony, as my mother broke silence.———

“——My brother [in law] Toby, quoth she, is going to be married to Mrs. Wadman.”

——Then he will never, quoth my father, be able to lie diagonally in his bed again as long as he lives.

It was a consuming vexation to my father, that my mother never asked the meaning of a thing she did not understand.

——That she is not a woman of science, my father would say—is her misfortune—but she might ask a question.—

My mother never did.——In short, she went out of the world at last without knowing whether it turned round, or stood still.——My father had officiously told her above a thousand times which way it was,—but she always forgot.

One of the hardships of matrimony that obstinate annoying Walter is fixated on is that he can’t lie in his bed diagonally anymore!

I find Mrs. Shandy delightful—and it’s obvious that the narrator misunderstands her (and all the other women). One of the things you could take Sterne to task for is how the women are sidelined, but that’s the point, I think.

The men sideline them to their detriment. Without the women their pie-in-the-sky philosophizing and ridiculousness flies off like a rogue hot-air balloon.

And plus, Mrs. Shandy is happy to be out of this story! She gets enough of Walter. When young Tristram goes on his Grand Tour, Uncle Toby and Walter go with him and she stays home cause she wants to.

I think we can imagine nicely and veraciously that Mrs. Shandy is having a fulfilling sexual and intellectual life right outside the narrative.

Before I tell you about Uncle Toby’s love affairs which is really what the whole book and this whole essay are about, —let me tell you something else. Laurence Sterne was very sick when he was writing this book. Here’s what he writes (as Tristram, his fictional stand-in) at the end of Volume 4:

I think, I said, I would write two volumes every year, provided the vile cough which then tormented me, and which to this hour I dread worse than the devil, would but give me leave… I swore it should be kept a going at that rate these forty years if it but pleased the fountain of life to bless me so long with health and good spirits.

So yeah, you heard that right. He’s putting two volumes out a year. He does basically that from 1759 to 1766. Nine volumes are published in total. Insanely, two hundred and fifty years ago, he’s basically satirizing Knausgaard’s project.

Promising a minute detailed extensive autobiography following him up to the present day; —Sterne is already a perspicacious commentator on autofiction cause he realizes that when you’re committing a life to paper and placing it in time, the fiction has already begun: as soon as you say I did this then, it’s now a novel.

But unlike Knausgaard who has a keen sense of progression, Tristram, doesn’t have any clue how to move forward—(like his putative father, Walter, he can’t bust; narratively speaking)—just talking about his conception, he’s like well I gotta talk about the clock, I gotta talk about this, I gotta talk about that: there’s no end to where you can expand the story, so it balloons so magnificently that Tristram ain’t even born until literally halfway thru the whole novel.

This is what happens in Tristram’s life over the course of the book.

–he’s conceived (kinda)

–he’s born (after a whole imbroglio [embryo-glio, —hey that’s a pun!] with Dr. Slop and the midwife

–his nose is crushed by Dr. Slop’s forceps on the way out (to Walter’s infinite dismay —more about noses in a second)

–he is misnamed (Walter who is obsessed with nominative determinism wanted to name him Trismegistus after Hermes Trismegistus the hermetic legend but after a misunderstanding, his name is codified as Tristram—the WORST NAME POSSIBLE, in Walter’s view)

–when he is five years old, a window falls down on his dick and circumcisizes him (yes, really)

–and in volume 7, he’s an adult taking a brief trip thru France (some good things in there but my least favorite volume)

So he doesn’t really account for much of the promised Life of Tristram Shandy. The most important thing he gets to is his Uncle Toby’s romance with the widow Wadman. Which I’ll tell you about so soon! First, let’s talk about noses.

One might suspect that Tristram Shandy is a phallically (and I don’t mean phallus-lickally, —yo reader, pause.) enamored book. But Tristram tells us before he sets out on his chapter about noses,

to guard against the temptations and suggestions of the devil, and suffer him by no art or wile to put any other ideas into their minds, than what I put into my definition. —For by the word Nose, throughout all this long chapter of noses, and in every other part of my work, where the word Nose occurs, —I declare, by that word I mean a Nose, and nothing more, or less.

THE NOSE IS NOT A PENIS, DEAR READER.

A big reason the Shandys aren’t great lovers —Of course, would you expect any differently from the most futile clan of men ever assembled?— is cause of a family history of very short and small noses.

Tristram laments,

so many of the whips and short turns, which in one stage or other of my life have come slap upon me from the shortness of my nose, and no other cause, that I am conscious of.

Come on Tristram, it’s how you use that short nose!

Also there’s a whole interpolated story about the guy with the Biggest Nose in the World, but I won’t go into that here. This playfulness is present from start to finish. A mode which Sterne calls Cervantick.

Cervantes is a very important writer for Sterne. Which perplexed me before I read the book cause I think of Don Quixote as the novel’s novel. The quintessential example of the form. And the way people talk about Sterne is as if, Tristram Shandy is the complete opposite.

But they both are at the core about something that is essential to humanity’s functioning: transforming the very difficult and serious world through fictional play.

Cause, I mean—hark reader!—Sterne and Cervantes—both of them—lived in a world covered in shit and misery; both personally and socially: Sterne with his tuberculosis, and Cervantes with his hacked-off left hand and imprisonment.

But Don Quixote gets brutally sad at the end when Sancho and Don Quixote stop playing. Here’s Sancho’s exhortations to him at the end, as his master is laying depressed and dying,

“Oh!” responded Sancho, weeping. “Don’t die, Senor; your grace should take my advice and live for many years, because the greatest madness a man can commit in this life is to let himself die, just like that, without anybody killing him or any other hands ending his life except those of melancholy. Look, don’t be lazy, but get up from that bed and let’s go to the countryside dressed as shepherds, just like we arranged: maybe behind some bush we’ll find Senora Dona Dulcinea disenchanted, as pretty as you please. If you’re dying of sorrow over being defeated, blame me for that and say you were toppled because I didn’t tighten Rocinante’s cinches; besides, your grace must have seen in your books of chivalry that it’s a very common thing for one knight to topple another, and for the one who’s vanquished to be the victor tomorrow.”

“Senores,” said Don Quixote, “let us go slowly, for there are no birds today in yesterday’s nests. I was mad, and now I am sane; I was Don Quixote of La Mancha, and now I am, as I have said, Alonso Quixano the Good. May my repentance and sincerity return to me to the esteem your graces once had for me…”

And then he goes on to write his will, and he dies.

The whole time you’re desperate for him to get up and get back to his pointless, stupid adventures. Nabokov said that Don Quixote was the cruelest book ever. And it’s true that Cervantes made his hero suffer brutally, getting beaten, and battered, and all for what? To end up dead in a bed, rejecting the only meaningful part of his entire life. But maybe that’s how Cervantes felt the world treated him. On the flipside, Tristram Shandy might be the sweetest and the kindest book ever.

Ok! It’s time to talk about Uncle Toby!

So Uncle Toby is so inept when it comes to the female world, that even his brother Walter says he doesn’t know the right end from the wrong end of a woman—which I don’t think Walter knows either. —Though, reader, both ends suffice.

But compared to Walter, Toby is infinitely more gracious when speaking to and about women. For example, when the men are all downstairs idling while Mrs. Shandy is upstairs engaged in the heavy business of parturating Tristram, Uncle Toby is the only one who has any sympathy for her:

Tis a heavy tax upon that half of our fellow-creatures, brother Shandy, said my uncle Toby—’Tis a piteous burden upon ’em, continued he, shaking his head—Yes, yes, ’tis a painful thing—said my father, shaking his head too——but certainly since shaking of heads came into fashion, never did two heads shake together, in concert, from two such different springs.

Walter’s thinking,

damn em all

Toby’s thinking,

god bless them all

So what you need to know about Toby is this: he was a soldier and he suffered a groin injury in the war.

Now, he is completely obsessed with military fortification. He, and his buddy Corporal Trim; who served with him and was injured in the knee and is now his servant: —they are so grateful for eachother’s friendship that often they’re brought to tears by it:

And I believe, continued Trim, to this day, that the shot which disabled me at the battle of Landen, was pointed at my knee for no other purpose, but to take me out of his service, and place me in your honour’s, where I should be taken so much better care of in my old age——It shall never, Trim, be construed otherwise, said my uncle Toby.

The heart, both of the master and the man, were alike subject to sudden overflowings;——a short silence ensued.

They build war reenactments on Toby’s lawn. That’s what they do with all their free time. One day, Toby’s neighbor, the widow Wadman, decides she’s in love with him.

She starts pulling up to his war games and enacting a siege of her own—on his heart. She asks him about the planned attacks and all that and he’s so giddy he blabs diluvially while she sidles up to him and touches a finger here, brushes her leg against him there. The whole thing is very cute. Especially since Toby is so unaware and innocent of all of it.

What finally does it though, is after Trim and Toby reenact their whole campaign and there’s nothing else to do, one day, the widow Wadman tells Toby she got something in her eye and tells him to look into it, Tristram narrates,

I see him yonder with his pipe pendulous in his hand, and the ashes falling out of it—looking—and looking—then rubbing his eyes—and looking again, with twice the good-nature that ever Gallileo looked for a spot in the sun.

——In vain! for by all the powers which animate the organ——Widow Wadman’s left eye shines this moment as lucid as her right——there is neither mote, or sand, or dust, or chaff, or speck, or particle of opake matter floating in it—There is nothing, my dear paternal uncle! but one lambent delicious fire, furtively shooting out from every part of it, in all directions, into thine——

——If thou lookest, uncle Toby, in search of this mote one moment longer——thou art undone

And Toby is undone. He don’t realize it though until one day he’s riding in his carriage—and he’s been had a blister on his ass and the blister pops but he still got his pain and this weird feeling that he thought was due to the blister, but then it pops and he realizes that the pain is actually in his heart and he exclaims to Trim,

I am in love, corporal!

Toby don’t play no games! He feels that he’s in love, he shouts it from the rooftops, then he goes over and expresses it to the Widow. I was truly and deeply charmed by the love story and courtship between Toby and the widow Wadman. It’s the sweetest most romantic thing I’ve read in some time.

But there is still one big problem to settle: Does Toby’s dick work?

Toby is so sweet and innocent he goes, when telling Trim all the things he loves about her,

Trim, that which wins me most, and which is a security for all the rest, is the compassionate turn and singular humanity of her character… she could not make more constant or more tender enquiries about my sufferings.

She won’t stop asking him about his groin injury! but not out of an overabundance of sympathy but cause she needs to know if he’s gonna lay that pipe!

He dick does work, though—we are led to believe. Unless him and Trim are lying, and I don’t think they do that. But we never see if him and the widow get married. Maybe Sterne never got around to writing it cause he died; or maybe he didn’t think the story needed that resolution.

The ending we have is a great one and appropriate for the whole novel. We get a story about another futile Shandy: Walter’s bull. They keep bringing cows over to the bull and he goes through the business with a grave face (which endears Walter to him, of course). But ain’t no calves being reared. He’s impotent.

Someone goes,

what’s this story all about?

And the parson Yorick (who I haven’t talked about) goes,

A cock and a bull, and it’s the best of its kind I ever heard.

Of course, a cock and a bull story is a nonsense story. And that’s what this has all been, Sterne wants you to think: a whole bit of playful nonsense.

BUT AIN’T THE WORLD NONSENSE?!

Sterne turns everything into a lewd ridiculous gag, but at the heart of it all is a warm enduring kindness, a generative generosity of spirit, a bravery of feeling, that makes his work, I think, enduring and essential. Take heed you futile & idle bastards, there is a path to be fruitful.