only a jester. The individuality of association and the resultant peculiarity of mind are undoubtedly sources of humor, but they seem to be more, and to be bound up with both the way he constructs character and the way he builds structure. But how far? If we think of character, what Sterne learned from Locke allowed him to formulate an intellectual basis for the creation of fictional people who look very much like characters in the old «humours» tradition. The one-track mind of Walter or Toby can be explained in a Lockean way, but their provenance in the comic world is ancient. Ben Jonson could create an enthusiast without reference to Locke and so, one suspects, could Sterne. His use of the Essay to «explain» such a traditional character type may be less an attempt to be realistic than it is another joke at the expense of learning: Locke's version of the Principia only leads Sterne back to the funnymen of the Roman or the Elizabethan stage.
The more important issue is structure, for the form-or lack of it-of Sterne's work has bedeviled many readers and is doubtless one source of Johnson's complaint that Tristram Shandy was odd. What we might call the strong Lockean position on this matter is aptly summarized by James Work, one of Sterne's best editors: 'The most important structural device [in Tristram Shandy] is the principle of the association of ideas upon which the whole progression of the book is based.' It is true that mental associations are one principle at work in the book: we have seen Mrs. Shandy's wry connection and Toby's unwavering focus on the science of siegecraft. As far as «progression» goes, Tristram's narration of his life and opinions often seems based on some personal internal logic: recounting his birth makes him think ahead to his baptism, which leads him to remember a French debate on prenatal baptism he -172- has read about, which becomes a bawdy joke. However, to say that these associations are 'the most important structural device' or that the 'whole progression' of the book is based on them may be a bit grandiose. Certainly, Work's comment (and this viewpoint has been quite influential, at least until recently) seems to reflect the taste of a few decades ago, when critics were loath to appreciate any literary work whose unity they could not demonstrate. Thus, to insist on a Lockean structure in Sterne, for all its apparent historicity, may be another modern imposition.
Again, as with the muleteer-historian, the central question is the extent of Sterne's commitment to realistic representation. To say that he has adopted Locke as the source of structure and the engine of progression is to imply a desire on his part to consistently imitate not an action but a consciousness (Tristram's, mostly), and to imitate it on the basis of assumptions borrowed from Locke. The beauty of teleology is that it can almost always be imposed on any sequence we can look at retrospectively (like a plot), and the divagations of Tristram's mind are no exception. But are we actually to assume that, say, Slawkenbergius's Tale is interpolated in precisely the place that it is because Sterne is putting it in the service of an attempt «realistically» to re-create (along Lockean lines) the way a mind like Tristram's would work? Nonsense. Sterne placed it there because it was funny. And yet, that is not quite the end of the matter either. For if the kind of systematic mimetic structure the strong Lockeans have discovered in Tristram Shandy is a critical imposition, we should also acknowledge that in some Sternean and very unsystematic way, mimesis does take place. A picture of a consciousness does emerge-forcefully enough, as we have seen, that many of those first readers wanted to meet the man whose consciousness they presumed they had already encountered in the pages of his book. However artificially Sterne has manipulated the idea of Lockean association, his manipulation is not so artificial that all we are left with are the jokes. There is a doubleness at the heart of Sterne, a doubleness that is difficult to accept. As readers, we tend to be like the Widow Wadman: we long to put our fingers on 'the place,' the place where ambiguity disappears and we can say with certainty, Sterne's aims were mimetic and Locke was his model; or, Sterne's goals were satiric and Locke was his target. It is a harder task to comprehend how he could do both.
We can return now to a question raised above: if Sterne is a satirist, what is his satire about? We have seen the ways in which both sensibil-173- ity and Lockean psychology are and are not targets in the way that satire traditionally establishes its objects of attack. Lurking behind and between those issues, however, is a more central one, one I have touched on already: representation. For it is with representation that Sterne's doubleness is most apparent. If Sterne has one great satiric target, it is the novel itself, and yet he has embodied that satire in a work that stubbornly-against all odds, I am tempted to say-remains a novel.
Jean-Jacques Mayoux has beautifully articulated this fundamental truth about Sterne; speaking of Tristram Shandy, he says, 'If every representation is in some degree a parody, is not every parody in danger of becoming in some way representative?' Mayoux's point, of course, is a general one: both parody and mimesis, as selections from and stylizations of reality, exist on a continuum, and the difference between them is a difference of degree and not of kind. Yet the way they shift in Sterne, one into the other and then back again, is central to our experience of reading him. A great deal of Tristram Shandy does seem directed at exposing by parody the difficulties of fictional representation: Tristram's ludicrously delayed birth, to take one large example, the narrator's hilarious inability to get Walter and Toby down the stairs, to cite a smaller instance. Defoe's density of detail, Richardson's moment- bymoment rendering of the sensitive consciousness, Fielding's godlike narrator-all this and more falls apart in Tristram's bumbling hands. But even as Tristram's problems expose the fallacies of mimesis and the contradictions of fictional convention, the picture shifts, and the muddle of writing suddenly looks like the muddle of life. A parody of realistic writing becomes, ironically, an effective representation. How very odd.
Thus, in 1948, did F. R. Leavis exclude Sterne from The Great Tradition, his influential study of the English novel. The fact that the dismissal was relegated to a footnote-perhaps the most quoted footnote in modern literary criticism-only emphasizes the magisterial contempt it conveys. Leavis hardly commands the deference today that he once did, and in fact, people went on busily reading and writing about Sterne even in the years of his greatest influence. Yet we cannot dismiss Leavis's few, biting words as easily as Leavis dismissed Sterne. Charges -174- that Sterne was somehow improper, and so not fit to be read, dogged him when he first published, and-appropriately transmogrified-they dog him today. To many, his oddity has been less troubling than his wickedness. What, then, have been the attacks, and what defenses have been made?
Bishop Warburton, rumor had it, bestowed a purse upon Sterne at the time of Tristram Shandy's first appearance, but he also had words of advice for the clergyman-novelist. He wrote Sterne during the composition of volumes 3 and 4: 'You say you will continue to laugh aloud. In good time. But one… would wish to laugh in good company, where priests and virgins may be present.' This was not, needless to say, the audience Sterne aimed to please, and the novel that began with a fateful instance of coitus interruptus proceeded in the next installments to recount the tale of Slawkenbergius's extraordinary nose, the sexualization of the word «whiskers» in sixteenth- century Navarre, and the Beguine's masturbatory therapy for Trim. And that is only a small selection.
There were two problems for contemporary readers. The sexual content itself troubled some; beyond that, there was the fact that such content issued from the pen of a clergyman. This double provocation to public morality is summed up by a comment about Tristram Shandy made by Lady Bradshaigh in a letter to Richardson, her great friend: 'Upon the whole, I think the performance, mean dirty Wit. I may add scandelous considering the Man.' (By contrast, after the publication of Sir Charles Grandison, Richardson's last novel, she gushed to the author, 'Oh, Sir, you ought to have been a Bishop!') The scandal of Sterne's profession, 'the shiten shepherd' as Chaucer puts it, was a strictly contemporary issue, but the discomfort inspired by the sexuality of Sterne's fiction has never disappeared. In particular, as Warburton's comment partially foretold, Sterne has consistently presented problems for female readers.
While Sterne's initial readership was not exclusively male, there is evidence that a number of women were uncomfortable with Sterne's bawdy. As the wife of one clergyman said of Tristram Shandy: 'I have [not] read, or shall read it;… as I cannot presume to depend on my own strength of mind, I think it safest and best to avoid whatever may prejudice it.' Such self-censoring tendencies were overcome by Clara Reeve, the author of the early Gothic novel The Old English Baron, but she clearly regretted her courageousness: 'It is not a woman's book… I have never read this book half through, and yet I have read enough to be ashamed of.' A few decades later, Coleridge, while dismissing the -175- possibility that Tristram Shandy could do moral harm, insisted that it was, as Reeve implied, a man's book: 'Sterne's morals are bad, but I do not think can do much harm to any one whom they would not find bad enough before. Besides, the oddity and erudite grimaces under which much of the dirt is hidden take away the effect for the most part; although, to be sure, the book is scarcely readable by women.' It is not clear whether Coleridge thought a woman's reading Sterne would corrupt her-probably not; what he implies, however, is a masculine preserve of humor from which women should be kept.
Troubled reactions to the sexual content of Sterne's fiction have never disappeared, as Leavis's comment indicates; however, the connection between that content and a female readership has again become a serious critical issue. For some readers in the last ten years or so, Sterne has reemerged as a writer who is almost
