Reprinted From:
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT Volume 9 Number 3
INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITIES PRESS, INC., Madison, CT
"and let me go on":
Tristram Shandy, Lacanian Theory,
and the Dialectic of Desire
MITCHELL WILSON, M.D.
Speech as comedy: a "fundamental failure" of action
in order to return to the desire which resides there,
a ceaseless fading of the object. a scorn for
knowledge, an ambiguity of' meaning in witty words,
mutual misunderstandings among the characters on
stage. Lacan the actor pulls out all the gimmicks
through which a theory of desire unfolds. The use of
these classic tricks and the secret of the theory mold
the same gestures and the same cuteness. What takes
place there is something like the laugh provoked by
the undefined misfiring of the action and of the things
themselves. Such a smile appeared on the faces of
gods who were not tricked. But, in order to become
human, Lacan identifies himself with the "tragic
dimension" of the "being-fin•-death." For him, the art
of laughing is an art of (lying. This art is constantly
rebore from the impossibility which brought it forth.
It is even haunted by a fury against those presences
whose quiet stability hides their destiny of
disappearing in order to nourish desire.
The author gratefully acknowledges Michael Nash. Lynn Wardlev, Lee Monk, Pamela
Radcliff. and Steven Knapp for their insightful comments on various drafts of the paper.
Dr. Wilson is a resident in psychiatry at the Langley Porter institute, University of California.
San Francisco. He received an M.A. in English literature from University of California at
Berkeley in 1982.
Michel de Certeau,
"Lacan: An Ethics of Speech"
Tristram Shandy is the most psychoanalytical novel in all of
world literature.
Jacques Lacan, as told to Richard Macksey, "Sterne Thoughts"
INTRODUCTION
Literature has always held a privileged place within psychoanalytic discourse. While psychoanalysis, beginning
with Freud, has claimed a scientific status for itself, at the same time and somewhat paradoxically, it has granted
literature (or "fiction," if you will) the status of fact. No less so than the "material" generated during the analytic
hour, fictional works of the imagination serve as "proof" of analytic principles. This tension between fact and
fiction so endemic to the analytic enterprise is embodied in the word material itself; material implies matter.
Yet the material that offers itself for the analyst's inspection is not the pathological slide or the gross specimen;
the immediacy of the visual, the practice of inspection in the strict sense, is but a secondary aspect of the analytic
endeavour. The primary aspect is the mediacy of the aural through a necessary reliance on the word. Words are
material in that they are sounds; they are not material in that they have sense. The relative ease with which
psychoanalysis has turned to literature for evidential support can be accounted for by their commonality of
subject matter, nearly all of which can be subsumed under the phrase "human desire." More precisely, this strong
kinship is possible because both literature and psychoanalysis are fundamentally interested in desire's
representation—the ways in which human desire is represented by words.
Recently, several analysts (Schafer, 1980 a, b; Spence, 1982 a, b; Friedman, 1983) have written impressively, not on
literature as so much data for analytic investigation, but on how the essential clinical concern in the analytic process
is the generation of meanings and the arduous project by patient and therapist of organizing these
meanings into coherent stories. Freud's well-known statement to Helene Deutsch, "I invented
psychoanalysis because it had no literature" (cited by Hertz [1979, p. 296]) takes on new
meaning in this trendy "hermeneutic" climate. With the current emphasis on "narrative truth,"
historical validity (of reconstructions and the like) becomes the profoundest fiction, and the lines of
narrative created out of disparate and disconnected clinical material are granted primary
epistemological status. The emphasis here is not on the content of literature as proof, but on
the formal similarities between literature and the clinical psychoanalytic situation. Thus, rather
than casting literature in a certain psychoanalytic light, psychoanalysis increasingly casts itself in a
certain literary light, where clinical discourse is organized on a narrative grid that should be
interpreted, like the literary text, with full appreciation of the linguistic frame in which it finds
itself.
More generally speaking, this formal similarity between psychoanalysis and literature not
only allows but suggests a certain reciprocity between them. If psychoanalytic theory can illuminate
a literary work or find theoretical support from its content, a work of literature can also reveal much
about analytic theory, and allow us to judge that theory in view of what literature has told us about
it, even to the point of allowing us to see that theory's flaws.
In this paper we offer an extensive reading of Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1760),
informed primarily by Jacques Lacan's work, and secondarily by the work of other so-called
structuralist or poststructuralist writers, most notably Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. Among the
great early novels in the English canon, Tristram Shandy's presciently modern sensibility can be
measured by the great degree to which it continues to elude convincing literary critical exposition.
In Tristram we in fact witness an uncannily faithful representation of the workings of the world
according to Lacan. We will see how Lacanian theory lends itself, through the key concept of
Desire, to a rather simple formulation of a theory of narrative. Our formulation of the relationship between
Desire, narrative, and closure (or Death) will allow a way of reading a text that is very different from the more
traditional approaches of psychoanalytic literary criticism. Our reading of Tristram will not disclose its meaning,
latent or otherwise, but will trace the ways in which the text does not mean. We will see how the text structures itself
against the possibility of its signifying precisely, and, consequently, against the possibility that it be read definitively.
The impossibility of a definitive reading is the precise condition that it be read indefinitely. For Tristram, above all,
wants to keep itself going by forever fueling desire's flame, by desperately avoiding presence and closure, by keeping
itself forever being read. What we witness, to borrow from the first epigraph above, is a "ceaseless fading of the
object ... in order to nourish desire."
Tristram Shandy is informed by a primary fantasy: the fantasy of escape from an imagined inevitable and
absolute closure. Implicit in such a fantasy is the belief that closure in an ultimate sense is itself possible in our human
world. Both an imagined closure, or Death, and an escape from it are two aspects of the same fantasmatic polarity,
each the negative of the other (amounting to the same thing)—a polarity not, strictly speaking, of our world but
more precisely defining the limits of it. By tracing the textual derivatives of this fantasy against the backdrop of
Lacanian theory, we will begin to perceive a kind of specular play between the two discourses, so that figure becomes
ground and vice versa: we discover against the Shandean backdrop that there is an important sense in which Lacan's
writings are also, like Tristram, works of the imagination, generated—both theoretically and stylistically—by
an identical fantasy of escape from closure; a fantasy, to put the issue in Lacanian terms, of the indestructability of
unconscious Desire. If our reading of Tristram leaves the Lacanian world fully intact, it does so by reflecting this
world's imaginary quality; at the same time, this reading implicitly impugns Lacan's claim to have described,
through his theoretical discourse, the "truth" of the human subject.
It is something of a surprise that writers of psychoanalytical literary criticism have had little to say about
Tristram Shandy in relation to Lacanian theory. (The sole exception to this fact is the recent paper by Macksey
[1983].) Some have noted (Alter, 1968), in for the most part anecdotal fashion, Tristram's incipient "Freudianism": the
obsessional preoccupation with sexual themes, the transparent and pervasive use of sexual symbols, the seeming "free
association" that marks the text. However, the Lacanian correspondence, primarily with Tristram Shandy, but
also with Sterne himself, is much more thoroughgoing and suggestive. For example, both Sterne and Lacan were
in the business of "holding forth." Sterne by profession was a prebendary, a man of the cloth, and gave weekly
sermons to his congregation; Lacan, for most of his professional life, held a weekly seminar for analysts in training
and others of the Parisian intelligentsia. In these oratorical settings, each was involved with speech as rhetoric,
speech as a stance, a pose, an ethos. John Traugott (1954), in his now classic Tristram Shandy's World, states
that Sterne "was a rhetorician, not a 'novelist' " (p. xii). Stuart Schneiderman (1983), an American trained at Lacan's
Ecole freudienne, has said that for Lacan "[a]nalysis was closest to rhetoric" (p. 169). Perhaps the most
important point to make about such statements is that the conscious assumption of a "rhetoric" strongly suggests a
specific attitude toward language. This attitude is marked by the conviction that language is suggestive because
it lacks specificity; it both manipulates and is manipulable; it has no fixed or definite relationship to what it
supposedly represents. In the vernacular of structural linguistics, this attitude involves the recognition of the
fundamentally arbitrary relationship between signifier (word as sound) and the signified (the object, image, or
concept to which the sound conventionally corresponds).
This arbitrary relationship between the signifier and signified allows for a looseness or play in language; an
inherently excessive quality which Lacan associates with desire. At the cost of some oversimplification, we will take
the next few pages to elaborate Lacan's notion of desire and its fundamental relationship to language.
For Lacan (1977), Desire is that essential constitutive element in the human subject without which the
subject as we know it would not exist. By definition, the human subject desires. Desire subsumes the Freudian
notion of "wish"—a wish is circumscribed in the sense that its object is specifiable—and takes on the character of
a life force, a pulsion whose energy is unquenchable, whose very becoming constitutes its fundamental excess, its
fundamental insatiability. This fundament of excess derives from the absence of Desire's true object, which Lacan
calls the unconscious Other (a composite term that has several senses; in this case it represents a kind of symbolic
mother). Born of absence, Desire is a constant reminder, the result of the inevitable difference between the subject's
demands and the other's always insufficient reply to such demands.
Difference, as that which allows Desire to be born, is, in Lacan's view, no less essential to the constitution of the
human subject. For Lacan, difference arrives when the child faces the inevitable struggle of the oedipal
triangulation, and in the arrival of difference—both sexual and phonetic—the human subject is born. Language,
too, is based on difference—a set of ordered differences, as de Saussure (1915) long ago noted—and it is no great
leap for Lacan to assert that the recognition of sexual difference by way of the castration threat enables Desire to
find its way into the subject's speech. But because of the arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified—a
relationship determined by a "barrier resisting signification" (Lacan, 1977, p. 149)—and the equally arbitrary but
more definite relationship between signifiers—"no signification can be sustained other than by reference to another
signification" (p. 150), the signifier itself is errant, its hold of its ostensible signified is forever unsteady, as the
signified "incessantly slid[es] under the signifier" (p. 154). The signifier defiles its putative signified; as
represented, the signified is marked by the signifier as necessarily absent. The fundamentally excessive nature of
Desire and the manifold (and uncontrollable) allusiveness of the signifier are seen as mutually constitutive.
In this linguistic context—one that, for Lacan, is all-encompassing—the phallus, as the essence of difference, is
"that enigmatic signifier of sexual trauma" (1977, p. 166): the original, petrified fact that enables speech, born of
difference, to proceed, but which can never be spoken in speech. The phallus, Lacan says, can "play its role"—
its unconscious symbolic role—"only when veiled, that is to say, as itself the sign of the latency with which any
signifiable is struck, when it is raised to the function of the signifier" (p. 288). With the loss of the narcissistic
(mirror) relationship to the mother in the advent of the father's law, and the subsequent giving up, through repression, of the phallic position vis-à-vis the mother, the child at once is born into language and unconscious desire.
Language renders "latent" those crucial signifieds that necessarily go "below the bar" separating signifier from
signified; this is the castrating nature of language itself.
The subject, then, through the castration threat and the workings of the discourse to which he accedes, is
constituted by Desire. We may ask: Desire for what? Lacan answers: Desire for the Other, for its presence, and
the love and recognition it inevitably withholds. Instead, it gives language, "already a presence made of absence"
(1977, p. 65). At bottom, the "for" (telos) of Desire is presence, the obliteration of difference, the closure of all
gaps, the end of the threat of an end. The Desire for presence is the Desire to stop desiring. Put differently, this is the
subject's Desire to stop his discourse, his talking: to cease to speak that which is impossible to be spoken in speech.
Death, then, is Desire's ultimate object. Freud (1920), in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," declares that "the
aim of all life is death" (p. 32). The well-known, charming story of the grandfather, Freud, watching his
grandson metaphorize his mother's leaving through play and represent this leaving by the exclamation of a pair
of differential sounds—the story of the Fort! Da!—gives rise to speculations on the meaning of
repetition that climax in the sweep of the above quoted statement. For Lacan, too, the story has
something to say about Desire's relationship to Death: if Desire necessarily houses its own selfdestructive seeds in its quest for presence, it is also the product of a kind of destruction or murder,
the murder of the signified (the mother) by the signifier ("fort" and "da"). "Thus the symbol," says
Lacan, "manifests itself first of all as the murder of the thing, and this death constitutes in the
subject the eternalization of his desire" (p. 104).
TRISTRAM SHANDY AND THE SHATTERED TEXT
The literary narrative, like speech, finds its impulse in Desire. As characterized by Lacan, Desire is
metonymy—defined as the perpetual displacement of Desire's signified by speech's movement from
one signifier to another. This is the "eternal.. . stretching forth of a desire for something else" (1977,
p. 167)—that is, for yet another signifier—which gives rise to a signifying chain that constitutes
the subject's speech or the text's narrative.1 Desire is, by definition, for what is lacking and, as D.
A. Miller (1981) has said, what is "narratable." In his critical study, Narrative and Its Discontents, Miller
considers the intimate and troublesome relationship of Desire and narrative in the so-called
"narratives of happiness" of Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Stendhal. Miller elegantly argues the
rather simple point that "[t]he narrative of happiness is inevitably frustrated by the fact that only
insufficiencies, defaults, deferrals can be `told' " (p. 3). This frustration is maximized at the very
point where narrative attempts closure, where all the lacks that have given rise to the text must
be filled. Miller says in effect that Desire—the very condition of narratability—can never be
quenched, but only repressed or encrypted by the text, in the text, as the text approaches its
seemingly inevitable but ultimately duplicitous end. To close with ostensible finality is to dissemble,
1
This definition of metonymy is not that of classical rhetoric—the use of the name of one thing (e.g., "the crown") for
that of another associated with or contiguous to it ("the king")—but is Lacan's intriguing extrapolation from the notion
of contiguity central to that definition. It should be noted that Lacan's concept of metonymy has important similarities to
Freud's concepts of "propping" and "anaclisis"; see Laplanche (1976, pp. 15-17, 131-137).
because the text can never rid itself of its dialectic of frustration and fulfillment.
Tristram Shandy is also organized on a grid whose axes are Desire and closure, or more precisely,
Desire and Death. Yet, unlike the "narratives of happiness," in which the text can only close by
forgetting something (usually the unsettling desires of a minor character), thereby implicitly
undermining the authority of the happy ending, Tristram Shandy is concerned with precisely the
opposite enterprise: to avoid closure at all costs, even if this means losing the integrity of the
narrative itself. Both Tristram as text and Tristram as character (or subject)—we will discuss the
complex relationship between text and subject in terms of the proper name—are constituted by a
battle against Desire's always present telos: the end of itself. The text, as a result, continually
flees from closure and consummation. In short, the text continually flees from Death. Tristram
tells a brief story that nicely illustrates this crucial point. Ostensibly capricious, the vignette
arises in the middle of Vol. VII, in which a sickly Tristram tells of his frantic tour of Europe on
which he flees after "DEATH himself knocked at my door" (p. 479).
Chapter XXXI
O! 'There is a sweet aera in the life of man, when, (the brain
being tender and fibrillous, and more like pap than anything else)—a story read of two fond lovers, separated from
each other by cruel parents, and still more cruel destiny—
Amandus—He
Amanda—She—
each ignorant of the other's course,
He—east
She—west
Amandus taken captive by the Turks, and carried to the
emperor of Morocco's court, where the princess of Morocco
falling in love with him, keeps him twenty years in prison,
for the love of his Amanda—
She—(Amanda) all the time wandering barefoot, and
with dishevell'd hair, o'er rocks and mountains enquiring
for Amandus—Amandus! Amandus!—making every hill and valley
to echo back his name—
Amandus! Amandus!
at every town and city sitting down forlorn at the gate—Has
Amandus!—has my Amandus enter'd?—till,—going round, and
round, and round the world—chance unexpected
bringing them at the same moment of the night, though
by different ways, to the gate of Lyons their native city, and
each in well known accents calling out aloud,
Is Amandus
still alive?
Is my Amanda
they fly into each others arms, and both drop dead for joy
[pp. 520-521].
Much can be said of this passage, not the least of which is the cutting off of a letter in the proper
name to differentiate (and separate) the sexes, in order to generate the kind of Desire the story is
about. My point, however, is much simpler: in Tristram Shandy, to quench or satisfy desire is to die. This is the
fundamental assumption against which the text structures itself.
Death is the only certitude in Tristram; it is; to borrow from Lacan, the "real" in the book, the
brute fact before which all else falters. Death takes the unfaltering, direct path of an absolute. The
movement of the narrative, on the other hand, is anything but direct—it is absolutely indirect. That
Death is figured as a straight and narrow is plainly suggested in the kitchen scene that takes place
after Tristram's brother, Bobby, dies. Corporal Trim, surrounded in the kitchen by members of
the Shandy staff — the chambermaid, the scullion, and others — declares all in the world trivial
compared to the significance of Bobby's unexpected death. "Are we not here now, continued the
corporal, (striking the end of his stick perpendicularly upon the floor, so as to give the idea of health
and stability)—and are we not—(dropping his hat upon the ground) gone! in a moment!—" (p.
361). While the power of Trim's words are not lost on his audience—"Twas infinitely striking!
Susannah burst into a flood of tears ... Jonathon, Obediah, the cook-maid, all melted"—
Tristram apparently fears his own audience will not be so affected. So, for the reader's sake, he
repeats the scene, with commentary upon it. He particularly stresses:
[t]he descent of the hat [which] was as if a heavy lump of
clay had been kneaded into the crown of it—Nothing could
have expressed the sentiment of mortality, of which it was
the type and forerunner, like it,—his hand seemed to vanish from under it,—it fell dead,—the corporal's eye fix'd
upon it, as upon a corps, and Susannah burst into a flood
of tears [p. 362].
The hat is the materiality of Death, but it is only so because of the particular descent it takes. In
fact, as Tristram points out, the hat means nothing in itself; it is the way the hat moves that
determines the precise meaning of its movement:
Now—Ten thousand, and ten thousand (for matter and
motion are infinite) are the ways by which a hat may be
dropped upon the ground, without any effect.—Had he
flung it, or thrown it, or cast it, or skimmed it, or squirted,
or let it slip or fall in any possible directi on under
heaven,—or in the best direction that could be given to
it,—had he dropped it like a goose—like a puppy—like an
ass—or in doing it, or even after he had done, had he
looked like a fool,—like a ninny—like a nincompoop—it
had fail'd, and the effect upon the heart had been lost [p.
362].
The "infinite" possibilities that "Tristram describes here serve as a direct contrast to the one and only
certainty of Death, and the exactitude with which a hat must fall in order to signify this certainty.
Moreover, the arbitrary movement of the language in this passage from thing to thing, the way the
language "fall[s] in any direction under heaven," stylistically echoes the "infinite ways" that are the
subject of it. Though an arbitrary movement, not exactly, because this movement of language is
more precisely its horizontal displacement from thing to thing, motivated by Desire, which, like
the hat itself', can only be "flung," "thrown," "cast," "skimmed," and "squirted" about. In this
sense, Desire gives rise to a discourse characterized by a kind of motivated arbitrariness, an
energized discourse always on the move. Death, contrariwise, is the sudden and permanent stopping of movement after an almost frictionless, vertical descent; here, motivation and Desire cease.
The text of Tristram, like the above quoted passage, moves precisely in this imprecise way. It
forever stands unsteadily against the implacable threat of death, unsteadily because only by
continually undermining itself can it keep itself alive, can it keep Desire desiring. Closure is
anathema in Tristram, as the text explicitly and obviously deconstructs itself. How does this stable
instability come about?
Recall that Desire is generated by the lack or absence of its object. And since "desire must be
considered the very motor of narrative" (Brooks, 1982, p. 281), it is not surprising that the first two
words of Tristram are "I wish." As Lacan has said: "desire is constructed in the pathway of a
question: not to be, or the undoing of one's being born" (Green, 1983, p. 168). Thus, the opening
sentence of Tristram:
I wish either my father or mother, or indeed both of them,
as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded
what they were about when they begot me; had they duly
considered what they were doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that
possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his
genius and the very cast of his mind ... Had they duly weighed and
considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily
persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the
world, from that in which the reader is likely to see me [p. 4].
Tristram establishes at the outset what Traugott (1954) correctly though somewhat superficially calls "the
technique of equivocation and doubt" (p. 135). Much more than a formal technique, however, equivocation and
doubt are essential elements in a book that is obsessed with its own insufficiencies and is forever compelled to put
them on display. The beginning, then, is marked by the presence of a "lack" made so only by a desire for its being
filled: out of this dynamic the narrative moves faultily forward.
Perhaps the most fundamental aspect of the text's insistence with its own faulty status is its meditation on the
inadequacy, the imprecision, the very dangerousness of words. Like Lacan, Tristram continually stresses the essential
drift of language. Tristram notes "the almost insurmountable difficulties [my uncle Toby] found in telling his story
[of his groin injury] intelligibly." “‘Twas a difficult thing, do what he could, to keep the discourse free from
obscurity" (p. 82). Though Tristram says "[w]ell might Locke write a chapter on the imperfection of words" (p.
360), for him, this is not a lamentable situation. He asserts that "—to define is to distrust" (p. 218). If this is so,
there is a kind of stability in not trying to fix meaning unequivocally. The text is on surer footing if its attempts to
master meaning are relinquished; all is up to the "defiles" of the signifier to determine the indeterminacy of the text.
Yet, if Tristram Shandy represents a fantasy of escape from an equally fantasmatic closure, Tristram's insistence on
the inaccuracy of words is not exempt from the import of its own statement: the statement itself must be distrusted:
words may signify precisely, meanings may be unequivocally fixed. That these fantasmatic polarities—absolute
indeterminacy or absolute determinacy of semantic meaning—turn on each other is evident. The imagined
possibility of unequivocal signification is both Tristram's profoundest belief and fear.
This fear can be localized more precisely. The signifier's unanchored status is the strongest impetus for an
anchor, for a singular object to which it can refer. If words are constantly "at play" in Tristram, then they are
always playing at the same game. We have spoken of Lacan's description of the signifier as "the murder of the
thing," what Geoffrey Hartman (1978) has called "the wound ... of signification" (p. 90), the rupture or cut
which language necessarily inscribes in human subjectivity. These are metaphoric descriptions of the castrating
nature of language itself, with the further assertion that language is meaningful (as a set of differential signs
assembled according to grammatical laws), only with the actual recognition of the castration threat (the father's
law). The orderly workings of language, then, and the father's law, are coextensive. Speech, as the sensible or
aural expression of Desire, and in ways beyond the control of the articulating subject, reveals, through slips, puns,
and jokes, that Desire itself is its very subject matter. In Tristram, the ostensible manifold suggestiveness of words in
the end always suggests one thing: sex. Tapping what Sterne apparently thought was a universal prurience of
mind in the reader, he recruits him in a lascivious complicity. Tristram's meditation on "whiskers"; the ubiquity of
the "nose" as a source of anxiety for the Shandy men, and as the basis for the sexual farce, Slawkenbergius's tale;
less extensive but explicit use of other words such as hinges, thrusting bridges, trumpet, and cabbage—all refer to
one thing, find their way to one place: the genitals.
Sigurd Burckhardt (1961), in his remarkable essay, "Tristram Shandy's Law of Gravity," makes this point.
A messy fatality attends the falling bodies of the novel [e.g., chestnuts,
sash windows, rocks], the things that stupidly plummet: they
always land on the genitals ... And words, unlike ideas, have body;
that is the price we have to pay for their being communicable ...
Sterne's sexual innuendo is an almost continuous demonstration that
words in flight will curve downwards and hit the hearer's concupiscence instead of his reason [p. 73].
It would be indulging in facile psychologizing to claim that what Tristram fears is castration. It is more accurate to say
that, in spite of the persistent claim that words are errant, wayward, and therefore implicitly weak, this putative
weakness often translates into a certain power of words to hit their explicitly unintended but nonetheless ultimate
mark. This accuracy is repeatedly figured in Tristram as castration. As Burckhardt correctly points out, words, like
other objects, have body; once let loose, they cannot be recalled no matter how vehement the disclaimer.'2 And if
they hit their mark, it is always in the same place.
2
In A Tale of a Tub, Jonathan Swift (1710) says: “The deepest Account, and the most fairly digested of any I have yet
met with, is this, That Air being a heavy body, and therefore ... continually descending, must needs be more so, when
loaden and press'd down by Words; which are also bodies of much Weight and Gravity, as it is manifested from those
deep Impressions they make and leave upon us...” He ends this thought with a Latin couplet, translated as "'Tis certain
then, that Voices that thus can wound/Is all Material; Body every sound" (p. 295).
Perhaps the clearest example of the close relationship between words and castration is the ramifications in the
book of uncle Toby's injury, which he incurred at the Battle of Namur in 1695 when a cannonball fell on his
genitals. Years later he is pursued romantically by the widow Wadman, and the issue of his genital injury
becomes the central, unresolvable concern in their interaction. Indeed, this "wound" is precisely what keeps the
widow Wadman and uncle Toby from disclosing their amorous feelings for one another. Mrs. Wadman wants to
know if uncle Toby's injury has compromised his ability to perform his sexual duties. This is a question,
obviously, of the position of the phallus, which cannot be specified as present or absent. And this inability to specify
engenders, or is at least associated with, an infirmed language. When Mrs. Wadman asks Toby where he was
wounded, he mistakes what she intends to mean by the word place. 'Toby interprets the word place geographically: he says, as he enthusiastically unfolds his map of western Europe, that he was wounded at Namur in 1695. "You
shall lay your finger upon the place," he tells her (p. 625). Mrs. Wadman intends a different geographic sense; she
hopes that Toby will expose himself and show her the exact location of his genital injury. Here we have a fanciful
rendition of a basic Lacanian truth: the question of the position of the phallus—the presence or absence of which
is put in question by the threat of castration—gives rise to speech that can only talk around the source from which it
arises. Talking around the phallus is the only way to talk about it.
If words are wayward (in every respect except as sexual tropes), then those structures for which they are
building blocks are equally so. In Tristram, sentences are often cut short, diverted, or misunderstood. Speech is
aborted by the speaker himself, or rudely interrupted by external forces. Like sentences that cannot be put
together reliably, stories have a difficult time being told. Speaking of himself, Tristram states: "If he is a man
with the least spirit, he will have fifty deviations from a starting line to make with this or that party as he goes
along, which he can no ways avoid" (p. 37). And though he is one year older than when he started writing
Tristram and is now in the middle of the fourth volume, he is, he says, "no farther than to my first day's life." Thus,
"instead of advancing, as a common writer... I am thrown so many volumes back.... It follows, an' please your
worships, that the more I write, the more I shall have to write—" (p. 286). Tristram presents us with a text that, as
Wayne Booth (1961) has said, is more than anything else the "dramatic presentation of the act of writing" (p.
229).
Finally, enough never being enough, the text is further undermined by "extratextual" means,
that is, by Sterne's use of footnotes.' In Tristram, the footnotes are often Sterne's—or rather, not
Tristram's—and they serve as a direct commentary on what Tristram has just written. Benstock
(1983) says that "the notes openly point to authorial errors and narrational gaps, thus
simultaneously extending and undetermining the text" (p. 220). If the text must be augmented,
then it is, by definition, insufficient; if the text is augmented, then whatever portion of sufficiency it
possessed is undermined and rendered insufficient. Footnotes 3 put pressure on the text, and give a
lie to its putative status as a "finished corpus of writing." Their presence is the simultaneous
operation of addition to and subtraction from the text.
This double operation implies that, however thorough this textual self-sabotage is, Tristram is not
3
This general notion is developed by Shari Benstock (1983) in her recent paper, "At the Margins of Discourse:
Footnotes in the Fictional text."
unintelligible, but rather lives in a middle ground or territory of meanings that is bounded by
the absolutely intelligible or unintelligible: that area into which it is simply impossible for the text to go.
As was stated earlier in the essay, an absolute unintelligibility is no different from a permanently
fixed univocal meaning: each is the obliteration of difference, a radical flight into non-sense,
which would end the perpetual shifting and sliding of the moorings of language in which Desire,
meaning, and the narrative live. Though there is an important sense in which Tristram's is a
fantasy of life without language, in Tristram a range of possible meanings are created through these
odd manoeuvres of compulsive wandering and self defeat. And the text establishes the limits of this
range by adopting a desperately antipathic stance toward what it imagines to be the implacable
condition of its existence: Desire's end, its closure and Death. The text forever fears it will close, end,
stop. It fears the possibility of unequivocal signification, and its own possibility to be straight, precise,
and accurate. In continually undermining the possibility of permanently fixed meanings, the text
continually asserts this very possibility.
THE EROTICS OF READING
This unavoidable opposition between dys-closure and closure is a double edge, or, to borrow
from Barthes (1975), a "seam," a suture line that marks the text as fissured or cut. This is a more
suggestive way of saying that the text continually structures itself around difference, maintaining
itself as desirous in order to keep itself being written. If this is so, the text also wishes to keep itself
desirable: it wishes to be read, not once, but repeatedly, always, infinitely. Reading, in fact, is
placed in the foreground in several ways. The text, for one, is shamelessly exhibitionistic, forever
soliciting the eye in a kind of textual foreplay with a panoply of visual appurtenances: asterisks; colophons; blank pages; black pages; marbled pages; foreign phrases, passages, and essays (a
French treatise on baptism is reprinted whole); italics, dashes, and squiggly lines (we recall, with this
reference to Corporal Trim's "flourish" with his stick [p. 604], that Death is nothing but a straight
line). These are, in the main, visual invitations, which, in calling attention to the text, necessarily
call attention to the reading of it. This solicitation is not confined to such nonverbal lures. The
wordplay that abounds constitutes a multiplication of the reading experience: to read once is to
read two or three times; or, caught in constellations of meaning, rereadings are called for, since
several meanings are suggested. The process of reading is further stressed as we soon realize that
stories begin and end more for the pleasure of such stops and starts than for any thread of
logical connection to what is behind or ahead. Reading, in short, becomes an end in itself, since
it will never end. To complete the quotation used to stress the never-ending process of writing: "It
must follow, an' please your worships, that the more I write, the more I shall have to write—and
consequently, the more your worships read, the more your worships will have to read" (p. 286).
If the text places reading in the foreground, it also lays a particular emphasis upon it. To say
that Desire motivates an incessant, exhibitionistic writing whose ultimate object is itself rather than something
always beyond its reach, is also to say that Desire motivates a voyeuristic kind of' reading, a perpetual, active
witnessing of textual exhibition.'4 Reading is sexualized. The reader's position as the teased voyeur is established at
the novel's outset when his voice is introduced in the midst. of the coitus interruptus taking place in the Shandy
bedroom: "Pray, what was your father saying?" 'Tristram replies: "—Nothing" (p. 5). All the linguistic free play
represents textual foreplay in which the reader is forever caught looking, the victim of a flirtation meant to
permanently delay the inevitable, to delay consummation. The text, however, is not merely the object of pleasure:
rather, reading is the experience of pleasure in the flirtatious relationship between reader and text. We are broaching
here the kind of "erotics of reading" suggested so provocatively by Barthes (1975) in The Pleasure of the Text.
Barthes says the pleasure of reading arises from a redistribution of language in the text:
Now, such redistribution is always achieved by cutting. Two
edges are created: an obedient, conformist, plagiarizing edge (the
language is to be copied in its canonical state, as it has been
established by schooling, good usage, literature, culture), and another
edge, mobile, blank (ready to assume any contour), which is never
anything but the site of' its effect: the place where the death of
language is glimpsed [p. 6].
Such is the structuring of pleasure, that place or site, to put things more simply, between the double edge of
linear and nonlinear movements in the text, that moment of redistribution between vocation and equivocation. But
Barthes stresses the texture of the text, its suggestively clothed quality. "Neither culture nor its destruction is
erotic," Barthes concludes, "it is the seam between them, the fault, the flaw, which becomes so" (p. 7).
The word seam, of course, suggests the most erotic of visual attractants, the fetish, the "skin
flashing between two articles of clothing ... between two edges ..." (p. 10), or in Tristram's
words, the "... slits in petticoats [that] are unsew'd up—" (p. 539). As the seams, faults, and flaws in
Tristram are provocatively flaunted, so the text becomes a fetishistic object, the reader's fetish. As
for Lacan, in Tristram the elusive image that marks the fetish is the phallus. So Tristram, after
warning the reader: "Now don't let Satan, my dear girl, in this chapter [on "the various uses and
seasonable applications of long noses"], take advantage of any spot of rising ground to get
astride of your imagination," introduces Tickletoby's mare, the appelative being a cant term for penis:
Who was Tickletoby's mare! Read, read, read, read, my unlearned reader! read,—or by the knowledge of the great
saint Paraleipomenon [Greek for "things omitted"]—I tell
you beforehand, you had better throw down the book at
once; by which your reverence knows I mean much knowledge, for without much reading, you will not be able to penetrate the moral of the next marbled page (motley emblem
of my work!) than the world with all its sagacity has been
able to unravel the many opinions, transactions and truths
which still lie mystically hid under the dark veil of the black
one [p. 226].
Likewise, reading, and the reader who reads, become a fetish of the text, an object of the
text's desire and the condition of its status as never-ending and always desirable, as always
4
What Jacques Mayoux (1968) has called "a curious and subtle exhibitionism" (p. 110).
suggesting there is something behind the veil whose exposure would desexualize the text; the
teasing exhibition and the arousal it generates in the reader would vanish with full exposure of
what is behind, of the "object itself." To the extent his gaze must be teased and deflected, the
reader is an object of fear, a fundamental source of "textual paranoia." The text creates these
suggestive yet unfulfilling conditions for its own perpetuation, for its eternal stretching forth for
something else.
TRISTRAM AS DECENTERED SUBJECT
We now turn to "Tristram himself," another aspect of the text that houses an essential instability.
The marks of quotation serve to suggest such instability, both regarding the validity of the notion
of the discrete "character" in any text, and regarding the character Tristram himself and the
degree to which he is unified and whole. In answering the first question, there is a sense in which
the character-in-fiction is more a structural function of the text than a discrete entity that rises above
it, though the opposite is equally true. The nature of the proper name in fiction allows for this dual
function.
Barthes (1974) associates the proper name's purely structural function with what he calls the
"figure." The figure is "an impersonal network of symbols combined under the proper name ..."
(p. 94). As "... an illegal, impersonal, anachronistic configuration of symbolic relationships
(outside chronology): the symbolic structure is completely reversible: it can be read in any
direction" (p. 68). The proper name in this case is not totalizing; that is, it is not proper to any
particular "person," but represents collections of differential symbols or antitheses that are
necessarily reversible, and to these collections can always be added other symbols or "units of
meaning" (what Barthes calls "semes"). Imbricated in the texture of the text, the name loses all
pretense of being proper.
In contrast to the "figure" is the "character," the textual effect of the proper quality of the
name, its synthetic aspect rather than its additive and incomplete aspect. Barthes says:
When identical semes traverse the same proper name several times and appear to settle upon it, a character is created.... The proper name acts as a magnetic field for the
semes; referring in fact to a body, it draws the semic
configuration into an evolving (biographical) tense [ 1974, pp. 6768].
Elsewhere Barthes continues:
What gives the illusion that the sum [of the semes] is supplemented
by a precious remainder (something like individuality, in that,
qualitative and ineffable, it may escape the vulgar bookkeeping of
compositional characters) is the Proper Name, the difference
completed by what is proper to it. The proper name allows the
person to exist outside the semes, whose sum nonetheless
constitutes it entirely [ 1974, p. 191].
Barthes' description of the character is telling for several reasons; one is its striking similarity to Lacan's concept
of the "mirror phase" and his more general notion of the Imaginary. The comparison of the character and the
Imaginary is both instructive in terms of the proper name and Tristram, and also as a prelude to broader issues to
be discussed in the final section of the essay. In the mirror phase, the preverbal infant is said to confront his own
mirror image, or more generally and less metaphorically, to perceive the larger and infinitely more coordinated
body of the parent as the parent presents itself to the child. The mirror or parental image is the basis of primary
identifications that constitute the subject's ego (or I); yet these identifications thrust the infant in a distinctly narcissistic
and fictional direction since the infant's own bodily state is, by comparison, fragmented and uncoordinated. "Still sunk
in his motor incapacity and nursling dependence," Lacan (1977) says, "... the subject anticipates in a mirage the
maturation of his power [which] is given to him only as a Gestalt, that is to say, as an experiority ..." to which the
infant can only point (p. 2). The infant is "captured" by this specular ego—the "statue into which man projects
himself' (p. 2)—which takes on the form of an ideal (the ego ideal). Obviously, we are in the realm of the
visual here, before language, before the child becomes the "subject of the discourse"—a play of
percepts which are adopted as ideals in the face of bodily in coordination and fragmentation. These
identifications give rise to what Lacan calls the Imaginary, a term meant to connote the imagistic,
narcissistic, and illusory qualities of the ego. 5
Barthes' description of the character is cognate with Lacan's portrayal of the infant's experience in
the mirror phase. Both descriptions take the body as their reference point, and involve the seizing
of an illusion of totality because of the need for supplementation. As the character (merely a
collection of semes) rises as an identity above the static structure of the text, so the flailing infant (a
collection of body parts) sees in his image his own mythical oneness. Outside structures of difference,
the character is inside an illusory historical movement or "tense," and becomes, so to speak, a life
moving through time. This is the character as myth. "[M]yth," Barthes says in his essay "Myth Today"
(1957), "is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things: in it, things lose the memory
that they were once made" (p. 142). Rather than a collection of semes, a textual landscape of
potentially shifting meanings, that, by definition, is implicated in "a dialectical relation between
activities, between human actions" (i.e., that it is made or produced), the character as proper name is
"emptied ... of history" and "filled ... with nature," thereby "making contingency appear eternal" (p.
142). For now, we simply wish to note the suggestive resonances between the Imaginary, the
character-as-myth, and Barthes' use of the word eternal. Lacan, of course, used this word to describe
the subject and the "eternalization of his desire." We will return to this issue of the Imaginary and
Desire toward the end of the paper.
The "proper"—bodily—property of the name, their, is able to give rise to the image of an
autonomous character that exists outside the serves, a character that is unified and whole. However,
the relationship of Tristram the text to Tristram the proper name (or character) radically broadens this
5
Also implied here is the fundamentally paranoid and aggressive aspects Of an imaginary ego that forever wants to
keep its form intact.
conception, for the simple reason that the entire text of Tristram constitutes the character Tristram.
Since the text is his "life and opinions," the "history of all that passes in one man's mind" (p. 85), all
that is written in the text is Tristram. Moreover, the specular force of the proper name, given this
unique status of the reciprocity of Tristram and Tristram, confers on the text a seeming totality,
its own "proper" property. In short, the whole and proper character Tristram is the whole and proper
text Tristram.
Just as the character exists outside the semes as the fantasy of the total body, so the text may be
said to possess a similarly idealized quality. However, in Tristram, this quality remains forever
idealized and always fictive, a lost bodily unification, because, as we have seen repeatedly, the text
continually shatters itself to keep itself intact-but-shattered. Since Tristram as text and Tristram as
character are mutually constitutive, the notion of Tristram "himself '—the character—as unified, as a
complete and present "self'—a body—is itself shattered. As the text indulges in moves of selfmutilation, so Tristram necessarily crumbles as a whole character."6
For a closer look at the breaking apart of this illusion of the intact character, Tristram, one
need only look at the proper name "Tristram," which houses within it a fundamental discord, a
dehiscence, that seems to render the character Tristram forever lacking, always incomplete.
Tristram's father, Walter Shandy, insists upon the "strange kind of magick bias, which good or
bad names, as he called them, irresistably impress'd upon our characters and our conduct" (p.
50). Names, for Walter, have a tremendous and irrevocable effect upon the person so named.
Tristram says of his father: the "injury [of "a vile name ... wrongfully or injudiciously given"]
... could never be undone; nay—he doubted even whether an act of parliament could reach it ..." (p. 54).
Instead of a celebratory scene of nomination, an injudicious naming is nothing other than a denunciation, a
wounding that causes an injury so extensive as to be unreachable and permanent Because of Walter's own strange
kind of magic bias, "he had the most unconquerable aversion for Tristram;—he had the lowest and most
contemptable opinion of it of anything in the world, —thinking it could possibly produce nothing in rerum
natura, but what was extremely mean and pitiful ..." (p. 55). Thus, Tristram says he was Tristram'd," irremediably
harmed by a "melancholy disyllable of sound" which to Walter's "ears was unison with Nincompoop, and every
name vituperative under heaven" (p. 56).
The "melancholy disyllable of sound" is a clue to why the name "Tristram harbors a lack severe enough to be
injurious. In the family discussion that follows the episode of Tristram's misnaming, Kysarcius notes that it is the
"radix of each [name]," the "root," that determines the "sense and meaning of them," in contrast to the
"terminations"—the subsidiary syllables of the name—which have no effect on the name's meaning (p. 327). The
radix or root of Tristram is "trist." The Oxford English Dictionary gives three senses to the word "trist": (1)
sorrow, sadness; (2) an appointed time or place or meeting; (3) trust, faith. The latter two meanings are clearly
related since to agree to meet or connect at an appointed place is to put trust in the person's word that such an
appointment will take place. But words, within the very concerns of the text, always contain a promise unfulfilled:
6
This is why it is more accurate to write: Tristram Shandy than to write it either as the title of a book (in italic) or as the
character independent of its text (not in italic). A broken litre signifies that character and text are both coextensive and
"broken," rife with gaps.
they do not locate, they dislocate; they as much sever as bond. To assign a meeting place, to appoint a station, is to
preclude the chance of ever meeting. And the response to a failed trist (or tryst) is trist, is sorrow and sadness.
The name Tristram, then, possesses its own kind of falling short, its own missed connections and the sadness that
ensues from them. This, of course, is a telescoped version of the larger, broken text. Like the text, the name augments
the character's status as a fractured entity. Under these textual and nominal conditions, Tristram will always miss
himself; he will remain ever split. By missing or lacking, he is implicitly excessive—either way, he is never whole.
Even in the letters (characters) of his name can be discerned similar movements of meaning: there is both an
excess and a split. The repetition of the letters "tr" stresses the nominality of the name and the illusion of a
doubling—hence excessive—unity. Between the "is" and the "am" can be found the aporia of self-reflection, the
impossibility of being at once both subject and object to oneself: adjoining the verbs with their appropriate
pronouns, "he is" and "1 am," Tristram is split in the never-ending process of movement between himself as object
("he is") and himself as subject ("1 am").7 From meanings down to letters, Tristram is constituted by a fault, a split
in the terrain that locates him as dislocated. He is cognate with the human subject described by Lacan (1977):
Tristram thinks where he is not, and is-where he does not think (p. 166). Tristram himself says, in a similar though
less severe spirit: "Certainly it was ordained as a scourge upon the pride of human wisdom, that the wisest of
us all, should thus outwit ourselves, and eternally forego our purposes in the intemperate act of pursuing them" (p.
378).
This thoroughgoing excess and waywardness that seems to mark Tristram as name-character-text is
further thematized in the naming of Tristram, the mis-giving of his name. This episode is itself the result of
excess, a missed connection, a destination overshot. Walter Shandy's carefully considered name for his newborn
son is Trismegistus, which means "thrice king."8 Susannah, the chambermaid, is charged with carrying the infant's
would-be name to the lying-in room where the curate waits holding the freshly passed infant. But Walter, in
light of the stock he puts in the power of proper names, is skeptical. "[T]hou are a leaky vessel, Susannah," he
says; "canst thou carry Trismegistus in thy head, the length of the gallery without scattering[?]" If she is able, by
chance, to remember the name, Walter continues, "I'll be shot"—full of holes, or scattered about, presumably. Susannah,
offended by Walter's questioning of her retentive abilities, scurries away in a huff to the awaiting curate. Once there,
she can only remember the first syllable: Tris. Walter, afraid for this very occurrence, follows "... Susannah with
his nightgown across his arm, with nothing more than his breeches on, fastened thru haste with but a single
button, and that button thru haste thrust only half into the button-hole" (p. 288). Susannah, in her haste, forgets
half a name, Walter in his •forgets half a button. Upon reaching the lying-in room he asks if Susannah forgot the
name and is told mistakenly "no, no." This both recapitulates and finalizes the original mistake. The button of
Walter's breeches then falls out of the buttonhole and the bodily mishap reenacts the verbal. The logic of this
episode is thorough and complete: a connection is missed that concerns the naming of a name that had to be
disconnected to arrive at itself, a name that signifies both connection and sorrow, thereby implicitly containing the
message of its own failure, the sorrow that necessarily accompanies the simultaneous intention and failure to
7
This is a fundamental philosophical problem that has been the object of attention of philosophers in the
phenomenological tradition, most notably Merleau-Ponty (1968); see also Gasche (1979, p. 185).
Walter chooses such an inflated name to compensate for the tragic event that marred Tristram's birth: his nose was
crushed by Dr. Slop's forceps during delivery.
communicate, to connect, to name—the failure, in other words, of the button to stay in its hole: "—error, Sir, creeps
in thro' the minute holes and small crevices, which. human nature leaves unguarded" (p. 146).
THE ABSENCE OF THE PATERNAL FUNCTION, THE
PROBLEM OF ORIGINS, AND THE ECONOMY OF DEATH
While Tristram's misnaming is a comical, almost slapstick rendition of Desire's effects, it renders problematic the
notion of an origin or starting point, because the starting point—the naming—is "scattered" and "shot full of holes."
Yet this scene of slippage is only a recapitulation of a more fundamental uncertainty surrounding Tristram's
conception (his "original origin"). At issue is his paternity, a query the text continually raises only to reinforce its
inability to answer it. In Lacanian terms, both Tristram as character and Tristram as text are faultily constituted by the
scandal of the absent paternal guarantee. As Miller (1982) has noted, "The `birth of narrative' marks an apparent
gap in the novel's system of knowledge" (p. 142); the question of Tristram's siring is precisely this gap, the nodal
point of absence which generates the narrative. In other words, the question of Tristram's paternity (or: who has the
phallus?) is what gets him started in writing a narrative about himself, a narrative about beginnings that attempts to
start at the beginning: Tristram's putative conception. Character and text arise, as we shall see, from the "same"
unspecifiable origin.
The question of the Father involves the very same concerns we have discussed thus far, though, in this case, these
concerns relate explicitly to sexuality, to the copulative situation. As with the phallus, there is a thematic obsession
with copulation, a preoccupation with the failure of sexual intercourse and one's ability to keep things, as it were,
straight. Like the intercourse of speech, like the intercourse of reading, the intercourse of sex is deferred and
deflected, always leaving a residue of arousal and excitation because Desire is never fulfilled. The failure to
consummate the sexual act—in this case Walter Shandy's failure—renders the question of Tristram's origins
unanswerable.
As was mentioned in our discussion of the reader-as-voyeur, Tristram begins with an opaquely told episode
of coitus interruptus. The sexual act that marks Tristram's ostensible conception is interrupted by speech, or, as
Lacan puts it, "Through the word ... absence itself comes to giving itself a name in the moment of origin" (p.
65). In the midst of their (one imagines) less than charged domestic excitement, Mrs. Shandy asks Walter:
[h]ave you not forgot to wind the clock?—Good G—! cried my
father, making an exclamation, but taking care to modulate 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 [p. 5].
Whatever evidence we need to confirm our suspicion is given three chapters later when we are
told that Walter winds the clock and sleeps with his wife only on the first Sunday night of each
month, thereby getting two "family concernments ... all out of the way at one time" (p. 8).
Mrs. Shandy's question—have you not forgot to wind the clock—takes on the kind of bawdy
double entendre that pervades the book. By cutting out one letter, c-l-o-c-k becomes co-c-k,
suggesting that Walter is having difficulty keeping his own machinery ticking. Since this episode
of coitus interruptus is on the night of' Tristram's supposed conception, it is not surprising that
the reader gets many hints, though no definitive statements, that Walter is not Tristram's father. "My
Tristram's misfortunes began nine months before he came into the world," Walter says to his wife and uncle
Toby. On the former his meaning is lost, but, Tristram says, "my uncle, Mr. Toby Shandy, who had
been informed of the affair,—understood him very well" (pp. 6-7). Afflicted with sciatica all
December, January, and February before Tristram's conception, and interrupted by his wife's
inane question or his own inabilities during the only possible time he could have contributed to
Tristram's origin—"the night between the first Sunday and the first Monday in the month of
March" (p. 8)—Walter's siring of Tristram is put in serious doubt. Moreover, since Tristram was
born November 5 of the same year, Walter's fathering him is more dubious because this is eight
months after the apparently uneventful night in March, and one month less than the normal
gestation period. (Both Macksey [ 1983] and Ralph Rader [personal communication] have made this
observation.)
More important than the specific thematics of sexuality, as we have already suggested, is the
destabilizing effects on both text and character that such a problematic origin necessarily entails.
Since the text begins by rendering the question of Tristram's conception resolutely enigmatic, the
economy of excess and frustration that marks both character and text is operational from the
very "start." Tristram and text can only begin by deferring the beginning, placing it, in the advent
of speech (Walter and Mrs. Shandy's), as Derrida (1967) would say, "under erasure." This is a text
that did not begin and then go awry; it is always already awry, always already in need of
collection. The failure of paternal authority is an essential element in this textual waywardness, not
only because of the deferred and enigmatic origin which it informs. The lack of paternal authority is manifested by a text that refuses to be governed by the laws of language, in which
"digressions are the sunshine" and authority itself is continually called into question ("But this is
neither here nor there—why do I mention it?—Ask my pen,—it governs me,—I govern not it"
[p. 416]). Tristram as character, of course, is no less scattered. The well-known "puzzled skein" in
which he finds himself while he is fleeing Death on the continent is exemplary of this:
There is but a certain degree of perfection in everything;
and by pushing at something beyond that, I have brought
myself into such a situation, as no traveller ever stood before me: for I am at this moment walking across the marketplace of Auxerre with my father and my Uncle Toby, in
our way back to dinner—and I am this moment entering
Lyons with my post-chaise broke into a thousand pieces—
and I am moreover this moment in a handsome pavillion
built by Pringello, upon the banks of the Garonne, which
Mons. Sligniac had lent me, and where I now sit
rhapsodizing all these affairs.—Let me collect myself, and
pursue my journey [pp. 516-517].
It is no accident that this "perfect" circumstance—Tristram's need to "collect" himself—should
occur in the middle of his flight from Death described in Vol. VII. His desperate attempt to
forever fuel Desire's flame, to keep it lit, has a direct relationship to beginnings and endings, to
narrative's initial spark and final flicker. An origin that is not truly originary because it is
"always already," suggests that Desire is never not extant, and implies it will always be. If for
Tristram and in Tristram the origin is, as he says, "scattered and dispersed" (p. 5), then the end may
be as well. Death, it is imagined, can be deferred indefinitely. Derrida (1978), in his article
"Freud and the Scene of Writing," states quite powerfully the essential relationship of origin and
deferral, Death and Desire:
In accordance with a motif that will continue to dominate
Freud's thinking, this movement ["of deferring"] is described as the effort of life to protect itself by deferring a
dangerous cathecsis, that is, by constituting a reserve. The
threatening expenditure or presence are deferred with the
help of breaching or repetition. Is it not already the detour
which institutes the relation of pleasure [i.e., desire] to reality? Is it not already death at the origin of life which can
defend itself against death only through an economy of
death, through deferral, repetition, reserve? For repetition
does not happen to an initial impression; its possibility is
already there.... Resistance itself is possible only if the
opposition of forces lasts and is repeated at the beginning.
It is the very idea of a first time which becomes enigmatic
[p. 202].
Thus, in Tristram, with the "killing" of the "first time," by the deferral and digression which
constitute the entire narrative, is the hopeful—desperately wishful—promise of the killing of' a
"last time," the death of Death, and the triumph of a desire whose object is forever beyond its
reach.
THE GAME PLAYED AT THE EXTREMES
In a well-known letter, Sterne comments that he wrote Tristram Shandy as a "scourge for criticks"
Traugott, 1968, p. 3), intended forever to elude their apprehension, and to frustrate their
"vicious taste ... of reading [the text] straight forwards" in an attempt to master it (1760, p. 56).
For Sterne's Tristram, the "hypercritick is intractable" (p. 104), one who must be instructed that
"attitudes are nothing ... 'tis the transition from one attitude to another ... which is all in all"
(pp. 276-277). "Attitudes" specifically refers to bodily poses, but more generally and
metaphorically it refers to that which is static and therefore graspable; attitudes can be
allegorized, made meaningful. For Sterne, the impulse to allegorize and attach meanings is the
essential function of the traditional literary critic. Transitions, on the other hand, can only be
appreciated and followed but not stopped. To attitudes, then, can be attached signifieds;
transitions are marked by the metonymic movement of the signifier.
Sterne's criticism of critics prefigures a modern one concerning the "traditional" project of
psychoanalytic literary criticism. Felman (1980) writes of "the traditional expectations and
presuppositions involved in the common psychoanalytical approach to literature and its invariable
search for hidden meanings" (p. 140). "Psychoanalysis," Felman (1982) says elsewhere:
[o]ccupies the place of the subject, literature that of the
object; the relation of interpretation is structured as the
relation of master to slave, according to the Hegelian clefinition: the dynamic encounter between the two areas is in
effect, in Hegel's terms, a "fight for recognition," whose
outcome is the sole recognition of the master—of (the truth
of) psychoanalytical theory; literature's function, like that
of the slave, is to .serve precisely the desire of psychoanalytical
theory—its desire for recognition; exercising its authority
and power over the literary field, holding a discourse of
masterly competence, psychoanalysis, in literature, thus
seems to seek its own satisfaction [pp. 5-6].
Tristram Shandy emphatically repudiates the critic's "discourse of masterly competence." Is not
Tristram, above all, a history book of what passes in one man's mind concerning the very
impossibility of mastery itself? Indeed, our reading of Tristram has not revealed what the text means,
but how the text, through its various willful moves of self-subversion, does not mean, and the
extremes to which the text goes to prevent any definitive reading as the precise condition that it be
read indefinitely. In Tristram, as for Lacan, the signifier reigns; the signified, itself a signifier of
that place where word and thing are one and meaning is self-evident, is perpetually deferred.
Tristram thus attempts to thwart Desire's self-extinguishing momentum, and the critic's own
attempt to fix meaning, locate signifìeds, and kill Desire once and for all. Tristram disavows the
possibility of the text becoming a dead object at the critic's hand, the reading of which is the simple
process of easy incorporation.
Yet, for Tristram, the possibility of a definitive, closural reading of his text by reader or critic is
conceivable only if it is simultaneously denied. Put differently, this denial amounts to Tristram's imagining
that a murderously correct interpretation of his text is possible. Such a possibility involves the fantasy of a
signifier unequivocally fixed to its signified, of a discourse whose meaning is heard so loud and clear
that it no longer has any reason to be. And indulging such a fantasy allows Tristram to imagine
and privilege its opposite: a discourse marked by the unfixability of the signifier, by the radical
impossibility of closure—to imagine, that is, the never-ending status of text, discourse, and Desire.
The fact that an interpretation of a text is never exactly right or thoroughly wrong—these possibilities
amount to the same thing—but is always somewhere in between, interests us not as a criterion for
judging Tristram, but to help us perceive the primary fantasy that informs Tristram's view of the
matter. Tristram, of course, is a product of the imagination, a remarkable work of fanciful
invention, whose last claim is the embodiment of theoretical truth (e.g., interpretation can never
find its true object). On the other hand, Lacan, for all his willful obscurity, aims at something close to
"truth" (however linguistically conditioned) in his description of the human subject; yet he seems to indulge the same
fundamental fantasies that so powerfully inform Tristram Shandy. Thus, Lacan (1981) echoes Sterne when he says:
"Interpretation concerns the factor of a spacial temporal structure that 1 have tried to define in the terms of
metonymy. As it draws to its end, interpretation is directed towards desire, with which, in a certain sense, it is
identical" (p. 176). In light of the emphasis Lacan gives Desire—its metonymic nature, its "eternal stretching
forth for something else"—the above quotation states quite straightforwardly that interpretation is metonymic;
like Desire, it is indestructible."8 Desire is the essential data and substance of interpretation, and, as
interpretation's ultimate "end," it has no e n d i n g . I n t e r p r e t a t i o n , t h e n , w i l l l i v e — i t i s
imagined—indefinitely.
One may argue that Lacan often eschews such imaginary polarities. His equation for Desire, for example, says
that Desire finds its object to the extent the subject's needs, expressed as demand, are met by the Other (demand
minus need equals Desire). Demand, because it is expressed in language, will always exceed need. This characterization
of Desire rests firmly in the (Oedipal) world of language and discourse, what Lacan calls the Symbolic. Yet,
there is a much stronger sense in which Lacan is "captured" by a picture of Desire that has little to do with a
dialectic of perpetuation and destruction, but involves more primitive, specular forms of reflection and inversion.
In our discussion of the proper name and the character-as-myth, we saw how the "loss of the historical quality of
things" confers on the character an Imaginary "eternal"-ness in spite of its being merely a collection of units of
meaning, a product of human actions. Lacan's subject, constituted by a Desire that is "eternal," thus seems more a
product of a play of reflections than the play of language. Like the dream material to which Lacan (1977) points as
unconscious derivatives of the Imaginary—the statue, stadium, and fortress and a kind of paranoia that is generated
out of fear of destruction of these primitive forms of ego (p. 5)—Desire itself is characterized as a fortress:
indestructible. This portrayal of a desire which has lost its historical quality frankly disavows though implicitly
supports the fantasy of the possibility of its destruction. Thus, instead of a Desire that lives in a human world
marked by degrees of frustration and fulfillment, Desire here, to use Lacan's words, is "divid[ed] into two opposed
fields of contest ..." (p. 5). Desire, in short, is idealized. Lacan himself is not free from these Imaginary turns: his
insistently elusive discourse, like Tristram's perpetual digressiveness, is an attempt to thwart a definitive and
canonized reading of it. As Jackson (1984) has aptly noted: `just as [Lacan] detested philosophies of meaning, his
central fear was that he would become central, static, dead" (p. 646).
The clearest theoretical example of Lacan's commitment to this game played at the extremes is his
vitriolic polemic against American ego psychology. Lacan characterizes Hartmann's (1958) project for a
general psychology with a certain wilful naiveté. For Lacan, an ego that is situated between internal and external
worlds that are processed, integrated, and mastered by it, can only function as a defense against—and here we have
the other extreme—the infinitely more problematic conditions determined by the indestructibility of unconscious
Desire, conditions which decisively establish the radical impossibility of control and mastery. While Lacan gives ego
psychology rather short shrift in order to show what he is not, he has correctly hit upon the primary fantasy that seems
to motivate their discourse: the fantasy of an integrated ego that masters the Desire that informs its internal and
external worlds. Lacan's view of ego psychology is similar to Tristram's view of the literary critic: their
"discourse of masterly competence" is anathema. As with Tristram, Lacan's attempt to free himself from such a
fantasy only intensifies his attachment to the entire dynamic of oppositions of which the fantasy of mastery is one of
8
This implies, of course, that interpretation, like desire, is necessarily at odds with itself: to the extent it is correct it
"destroys" itself; to the extent it is incorrect it generates its own need to be because more interpretation is called for.
two parts. Thus, Lacan has seized upon and privileged the inverse fantasy: the ego, from the start, is illusory and
structurally incapable of mastering Desire and its effects.
The identity of the worlds according to Lacan and Tristram is by now clear. The primary fantasy that secures
their discourse in its perpetual insecurity is the insistence on a kind of immortality of the life force, the fundamental
unquenchability of Desire. To entertain such a fantasy, however, is to exaggerate Desire's thoroughly dialectical
nature—its inherent pulsion to subvert itself—into an omnipotent self-destructiveness. While Desire necessarily
houses its own self-destructive seeds, for the human subject such "destruction" is always merely metaphoric, local, and
limited rather than absolute. Both Lacan and Tristram, moreover, tell us that language constitutes the world in
which the subject lives. This is no fantasy, but what may be, as a corollary of Desire's putative indestructibility, is
their insistence on the radical freedom of a language that forever exceeds the conscious intention or knowledge of the
speaker, a discourse that will always, as Tristram says, "slip or fall in any possible direction under heaven" (p.
362). What cannot be imagined is the vast middle ground in which Desire is both excessive and self-subversive,
where, therefore, language sometimes misses and other times hits, where an object is not forever lost but often
found, or at least, as Freud would say, "refound."
It is not only Tristram, but, more surprisingly, Lacan —Tristram's modern, if somewhat refracted, mirror
image—who writes and speaks in the spirit of the "fictive," who contributes to a "literature" the primary move of
which is one of the imagination: where Desire runs free and its death is perpetually invoked only to be perpetually
deferred. This dynamic is most powerfully stated in Tristram in Vol. VII. With Death threateningly close as he
rushes from place to place, Tristram invokes Priapus, the Greek god of male generative power. 'Tristram considers
in a tone at once grave and fanciful, a heathen world in which the "... Christian faith ... will be ... worn out ..."
and sexual Desire will be expressed and exhausted with abandon.
Blessed Jupiter! and blessed every other heathen god and goddess!
for now ye will all come into play again, and with Priapus at your
tails—what jovial times!—but where am I? and into what a
delicious riot of things am I rushing? I—I who must be cut short in
the midst of my days, and taste no more of 'em than what I
borrow from my imagination—peace to thee, generous fool!
and let me go on [p. 495].
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Department of Psychiatry Langley Porter Institute
University of California San Francisco, California