I gotta confess, AWB -- and sheepishly await your expiation. I was reading along in Tristram Shandy, left off long about Book IV to do some other reading (Jennifer Egan whom I find I cannot recommend often enough) -- as I've been doing my other reading I reflect back on TS and it hits me, I'm just not getting much out of it. I want characters with whom to sympathize and through whom vicariously to feel passionate; and Sterne is not giving them to me. His characters don't have any depth, they are just cardboard cutouts with a tape recorder pasted on the back of the cutout playing Sterne's ramblings and jokes. Sometimes the jokes are funny -- nothing wrong with a funny joke but it's not really worth the setup. What am I missing here? Are the jokes like really, really funny, hilarious enough to make them worth the setup and I'm missing out because my sense of humour is not fully-enough developed? Are the characters really complete and human, and I'm not noticing that because I'm prejudging the book as cryptic? Any ideas? Should I say some rosaries?
Regards,
The Modesto Kid
The Jefferson quote is breathtaking indeed. I wonder if the "literary" biographers of Jefferson, fellow polymaths, have ever picked up on that. I'm thinking of Albert Jay Nock, between the wars; I'll have to go look.
Your 2) speaks to the quality in that first comment of mine on the first thread, that confused you at first. It's as if you've begun to hear a family's narrative of itself, and even their efforts to ellucidate only deepen the references you don't get. The special charm comes from that, that it perfectly captures the sense that getting to know people takes time, and will be an incomplete process at best, so that something elementary may escape your notice for a very long time. Most literature — think of Jane Austen — doesn't do this, but shows you everything you need to know, what you will never know in life.
So, there's a part, I think during Tristram's birth or near thereto, in which Toby (or Walter, but I think Toby) is talking, and at one point instead of using a word to refer to an object that he wants to discuss, he just pulls one out and, with a gap in his speech, ostends the object to his listeners, then resumes talking.
My challenge to you all: Where in the book does this occur?
It's Walter.
Do you remember what the object is, Ben or Bitch? And where?
I guess I thought of the part where Toby is trying to describe the life of an unmarried man to Trim in IX.4 and makes a flourish with his stick (represented by a squiggle in the book) that the narrator claims is far more eloquent than any words on the subject.
And TMK, I guess I'd say it's possible that you might be one of the ones (my boyfriend included) who simply don't like TS. However, I'd urge you to continue with it, as it does get increasingly deeper and more actually funny as it goes on. Book IV is usually where people leave off, because it's the most intolerably "clever" and not-funny. Just about when you lose hope, good things that you will like do happen.
IDP - And that's why I love long books. No short novel can ever really achieve this mass of detail about characters. I cry at the end of almost all long books, even ones with mean and unpleasant characters like The Tunnel, just because I've lived with them for so long.
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