ESC: English Studies in Canada

INTEGRATED CONSCIOUSNESS AND DIALECTICAL STRUCTURE IN TRISTRAM SHANDY MARCO LOVERSO Concordia College Non enim excursus hie eius, sed opus ipsum est. (Sterne 7.title page.573)1 R ecent criticism has linked gender and sexuality with the notion of literary structure. Susan Winnett, for instance, cites Robert Scholes’s argument that “[t]he archetype of all fiction is the sexual act” (506), but she then goes on to point out that for Scholes and others, whether they realize it or not, this archetype is essentially a male model, a narratology based on the male dynamics of “tension and resolution (‘tumescence and detumescence,’ ‘aroused and significant discharge’)” (508), as described by Peter Brooks in Reading for the Plot. She argues that this model does not take into account female pleasure, so she explores what would happen if typically female experiences, such as birth and breast-feeding, were substituted for what she calls the male narratology— her point being, not that these are the models for all female narrative, but that they suggest the possibility of numerous alternative models. This is certainly a provocative argument and is a useful starting point for considering the structure of a text such as Tristram Shandy. For it is a novel that has inspired considerable diversity of opinion concerning Sterne’s use of male and female sexual paradigms,2but these differing readings have led to inconclusive or incompatible insights about the structure of Tristram Shandy. Elizabeth Harries, for instance, reads Sterne’s book as a patriar­ chal text in which “there is hardly any room for women” (112); in fact, she questions if there are any “female minds” (115) in Tristram Shandy. But her reading does not help her to answer her own question about “the relationship between the novel’s sexist bias and its self-conscious, fragmented, digressive narration” (116-17). Ruth Perry’s approach is similar, but she does at­ tempt to explain the book’s structure. She considers Tristram Shandy to be phallocentric. It is a book whose “verbal play . . . is co-extensive with the sexual relations of the ‘story,’ ” both of which “are rooted in the primacy of male friendship and in a subliminal distrust of women” (30), a book that, in its treatment of issues such as childbirth, “demonstrates the author’s fail­ ure to take seriously the woman’s point of view” (34). Consequently, when 377 she attempts to describe the novel’s structure, Perry can see only the male paradigm: “As if to illustrate the assertion that when discourse has a phallic focus, women can never be speaking subjects, this novel is structured as a series of all-male conversations” (39). She then lists examples of male con­ versations; but her argument does not cover the entire novel. Instead, she suggests that all of the material that is not part of “all-male conversations” (after all, there is a great deal of it) is Tristram’s literary performance, his “spinning tales, telling stories, self-consciously and explicitly imitating the whimsy of Cervantes or the bawdy of Rabelais, dancing and prancing, di­ gressing and zigzagging his way through the volume” (39). In other words, Perry attempts to answer Harries’s question about Sterne’s narrative method by attributing this “digressing and zigzagging” to phallocentric play. But this approach fails to take into account the metaphoric level of the sexual material in Sterne’s book. As Paula Loscocco has pointed out, the tradition of English literature from the late Middle Ages was to treat the Fall of Adam and Eve metaphorically so that references to “male” and “female” were associated with'the reason and the flesh, respectively, of all individu­ als, whether male or female. And within this tradition the ideal was for all individuals, whether male or female, to achieve a prelapsarian state in which “male” reason controlled “female” flesh. Loscocco argues that to interpret these terms in gender-specific and literal terms — that is, to say that only men are creatures of reason and only women are creatures of the flesh — is to think misogynistically, as Walter Shandy does. And, in essence, this is what Perry does when she focusses on the gender-specific aspects of Tristram Shandy by...