Tristram Shandy’s Bodies

Bodies are all over Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.  There are dead ones, live ones, textual ones, bodies national, female bodies, male bodies, injured bodies, infant bodies, bodies with the wrong names; and these bodies are doing all sorts of things.  They are being born, dying, creating other bodies, birthing, begetting and carrying other bodies, walking around, running, getting injured, etc. 

The boundary of bodies is continually questioned throughout the novel.  Tristram wonders, at a point, about “the effects which the passions and affections of the mind have upon the digestion” (59), suggesting a correlation between one’s mental/emotional capacities and the functioning of one’s body. 

But it is not only passions and emotions that affect the body; the process works in the reverse, as well.  Tristram’s father reinforces these ideas when musing “the great difference between the most acute and the most obtuse understanding…arose merely from the lucky or unlucky organization of the body, in that part where the soul principally took up her residence” (106).  The extent of one’s knowledge, in other words, arises directly out of the make-up of one’s body. 

Bodies, then, as we think of them today, can’t seem to be contained in the novel.  There is nowhere to look and say “this—this is a body” and “that—that is a feeling.”  Angry emotions are bodily; knowledge of Descartes tells something about the physical construction of one’s body.

This is perhaps connected with the desire in the text to regulate or contain these bodies—to pin them down to an understanding of them.

Near the beginning of the text, in fact, we find Tristram lamenting polluted surnames.  The changing of one’s surname, he argues, is a “villainous affair,” and “will one day so blend and confound us all together, that no one shall be able to stand up and swear, ‘That his own great grand father was the man who did either this or that.’”  Whereas names served to differentiate two bodies previously, this instrument is slowly becoming useless.  Although Tristram believes that emotions/knowledge/etc. arises out of the body’s constitution, he cannot see visible proof of a well-working “pineal gland,” or a disrupted digestive tract.  Here, he recognizes the need for outward labels—for family names that symbolize hereditary bodily traits.

And of course, the dominion of the body doesn’t stop at the emotions or knowledge-base.  Bodies are extrapolated into nations, texts, and various abstractions in order to make sense of them, and ground them natural science. 

For instance, in the novel, the current of men and money flowing toward the city of London is “identically the same in the body national as in the body natural, where blood and spirits [are] driven up into the head faster than they could find their ways down;—a stoppage of circulation must ensue, which [is] death in both cases” (33).  Here, an imbalance in the nation (too much capital and men in one city, crippling the rest) is likened to an imbalance in the body, which imbalance arises out of the inability to regulate blood flow. 

This echoes Tristram’s description of Uncle Toby’s recovery, wherein “his recovery depending…upon the passions and affections of his mind, it behoved him to take the nicest care to make himself so far master of his subject, as to be able to talk upon it without emotion” (63).  In order to heal his body, Uncle Toby had to regulate his passions—not let them flow wildly—and return to equilibrium. 

But then, if equilibrium is so important, what of this monstrous textual body?

The novel is literally named Tristram Shandy—is literally identified as a body of lack and misfortune.  It is also given a creator, and a life of its own, both within its pages, and in print culture.  Tristram writes of his own work that it is “digressive, and it is progressive too,—and at the same time.…I have constructed the main work and the adventitious parts of it with such intersections, and have so complicated and involved the digressive and progressive movements, one wheel within another, that the whole machine, in general, has been kept agoing” (52).

While Tristram’s textual body seems unruly, unregulated, and uncontained, he assures us, at various points, that it is controlled.  What is interesting, is that rather than change the way his textual body is made up—to make it seem more at stasis—he changes the body that his text wishes to represent. 

The body of Tristram Shandy the novel is not a body at all, but a machine.

And as such, it is emancipated from the traditional life cycle, from indigestive emotions, from handicapping “pineal gland[s],” from unnatural birth processes, or grievous accidents.  Tristram Shandy the novel, though given a name identical to its (arguable) protagonist, is all of a sudden outside of the bodily world.

Blinded by Pamela

While reading Pamela, it made me crazy that I could never get outside of her worldview.  All of the letters we have are from her.  All of the narrative, her.  The portrayal of Mr. B, Mr. Williams, Mrs. Jewkes, Mrs. Jarvis—her.  This is especially frustrating when Mr. B and Mrs. Jewkes seem so convinced of Pamela’s disagreeable nature, and during Mr. B’s suspicion of another lover.  It makes one wonder if Pamela is telling her own story straight.  If she isn’t leaving certain things out.  But that is, I suppose, the power of the writer, and ultimately, why Mr. B is upset with her in the first place—he has the power to elevate her in marriage; she has the power to decimate him in print. 

Another thing that’s bothersome about the novel is that we never get to see the action as it’s happening.  Though it may seem like we’re voyeurs of Pamela’s near-suicide, or her emotional return to Mr. B, in reality, it happened days ago.  We’re simply reading it in a letter, written after the fact.  The Pamela we really see is the one right in front of our faces: the one recounting the stories, sitting at a table, with a pen and paper, and continuously, masterfully, letterwriting. Since we see none of the events actually happen to her, we can never quite be sure of their validity.  We must take her word for it—a word that is, throughout the course of the novel, challenged by Mr. B, Mrs. Jewkes, and even the trusty Mrs. Jarvis.

Certainly, the argument could be made that we are always receiving a story from a narrator’s perspective—never viewing the events except through their slant, and never really able to see behind their interpretations.  In this case, however, the narrator becomes the scope through which the reader accesses the story—the reader has no other choice.  In Pamela, however, we are actively aware that there are other sides of the story—other characters who see things differently than the narrator, and the narrator’s version of things is being constantly challenged.  In this novel, then, Pamela is not so much the scope through which the episodes can be seen, but the blind spot that must be navigated around in order to find the true story.

Of course, all of this wouldn’t bother me nearly so much if Pamela weren’t portrayed consistently throughout the novel as hopelessly passionate and impressionable.  First of all, she is fifteen, and though she has had a generous education from her Mistress, it is apparent in the novel that she lacks worldly experience.  Upon receipt of the letter from her mother, exhorting her to safeguard her virtue, Pamela is wary of Mr. B.  At first, she questions her mother’s interpretation; however, Mr. B’s actions in the summer house serve to validate her mother’s concern, and color her impression of Mr. B.  After this singular action from Mr. B, her mother’s worried letter becomes the prism through which she sees the remainder of the novel’s events.  She never again questions it.  Even when things are beginning to improve with Mr. B, and she receives an anonymous letter from a very suspicious gypsy, she still takes it at face value.  She never questions its truthfulness, never goes to Mr. B about it, never confronts the issue directly.  Not only is this simply irritating, but it also puts Pamela’s credibility as a narrator in question.  If she so easily latches on to one fear and never looks deeper (the fact that all of her fears were initially confirmed in Mr. B is really beside the point), how can she accurately and fairly portray all of the story’s characters.

But, that is precisely the point in Pamela.  The characters aren’t accurately and fairly portrayed, and the novel forces us (whether consciously or unconsciously) to come to terms with the stories we cannot read—the ones Pamela cannot tell.  We are blinded by Pamela’s story, and cannot see what’s behind it—the true events.  What is really being displayed in Pamela, then, is the act of writing itself, and a servant girl spinning a wonderful story. 

And then we remember that it was not a servant girl spinning.  It was a man.  And even if it had been a servant girl, it still would have been edited—first by herself, and then by a man.  So what we have in Pamela, is a novel with an intriguing story about social mobility and virtue, laid upon a secondary story about the physical act of writing, of editing, and finally, publishing one’s story to the world.  If the burgeoning of print allowed for an author’s upward mobility (if not with society at large, at least in certain individuals’ minds—which is all that is at stake in Pamela), how could one ever be sure that the story the author was telling was worthy of such mobility?  It is this question that seems to be plaguing Richardson’s novel, and perhaps this, if not an immorality in himself, that unconsciously casts suspicion upon her virtue, her motives, and her credibility as an author.