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.
3 comments:
I really enjoyed reading your analysis of the bodily, or maybe I should say lack of, aspects of Tristram Shandy. I found the references in the text to the humors interesting, although, I did not know what to make of it at the time. I think your observation regarding balance satisfies my questions on this point.
You've developed some very insightful readings of body imagery and theory in the novel. I think such reflections help us usefully compare TS to novels named for women in the period--Pamela, Clarissa, Evelina and so on--and the body of the suffering woman that is put on display in those.
However, I'm particularly interested in your last detour--your claim that "The body of Tristram Shandy the novel is not a body at all, but a machine." Can it possibly be both? There was exploration in the era of the difference between man and machine, true, but that difference was not completely worked out. Certainly the BAconian idea of the body AS machine had not died out. Recent works that take up the task of sorting through these complex and contested representations include Alison Muri's The Enlightenment Cyborg and Julie Park's The Self and It. Certainly an analysis of the body as/vs. machine in Tristram Shandy would make an important contribution the ongoing research in this area.
This post about the body of the text operating as a machine is very interesting to me. I am left wondering, what is the purpose or function of such a machine? Generally, we judge a body or a machine based on its productivity, and yet Tristram Shandy seems to produce nothing of use to its reader. With chapters on whiskers, buttons, chapters, etc. and digressions that prevent the progress of the novel, a story is never told. The fact that there must be some debate about whether Sterne even finished the work places a doubt on the machine's productivity. I wonder if this intervenes in your thoughts about body at all?
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