exclusively for men. Worse, he is a spokesman for corrupt attitudes toward women. One very recent critic, echoing Reeve, has called Tristram Shandy 'a man's book, if ever there was one,' and a number of other readers hear, in Tristram's lubricious meanderings, the voice of patriarchal oppression. The new, genderbased, attacks on Sterne are not, obviously, the same as those made two centuries ago, and the differences need to be looked at; at the same time, such continuities as do exist also merit examination.
The most significant difference involves a change in attitudes toward the portrayal of sexuality in all forms. The eighteenth century was franker in many ways than the century or century and a half that followed. Yet if Sterne's contemporaries were not Victorians, a comment like Reeve's suggests that, at least for some, there was a distinction made between materials suitable for men and for women. The recent attacks on Sterne, of course, have nothing to do with an attempt to revive paternalistic restriction of women's reading; no serious reader today invokes the standard of that which brings a blush to the cheek of a young girl as the line of censorship or condemnation. The feminist critique of Sterne (and it is not universal) is based not on the fact that much of the material in his fiction is sexual, but on the way that sexuality is represented. From this point of view, the book's sexual interests and humor are exclusively male, and women appear only as objects of erotic desire or (more commonly) sexual frustration. Moreover, there is the unflattering portrait of 'Madam,' the imaginary prude in his audience whom Sterne addresses whenever the fog of innuendo becomes especially thick. By reducing women almost exclusively to a sexual -176- function, the argument says, Sterne perpetuates stereotypes; and by relying on the existence of a male preserve of sexual humor, he has reinforced one potent image of oppression.
For anyone interested in the unfolding shape of Sterne criticism over time, it is remarkable to see the way the debate has returned to one of its original roots. In part, this reflects the new didacticism of much criticism generally, a didacticism which, after all, though it claims to be political, has the effect of reintroducing to the evaluation of literature the kind of moral concern that dominated literary criticism for much of its history. But Sterne seems to have a special ability to provoke moral reactions-a clergyman shouldn't write this, innocent women shouldn't read it, these books have no place in a world of transformed gender relations, and so on. We have moved away from the ad hominem tone of much of the early moral reaction, and we have left completely behind the paternalistic censorship that would make Sterne available only to those with a key to the club library. But if we step farther back, we cannot help but be struck by the way moral issues continue to inform the critical discussion. My opening query-why read Sterne? — remains for many a pressing moral question.
It is not easy to defend Sterne from some of the recent feminist opposition to his work. Tristram Shandy is relentlessly phallocentric, and reading it we can feel ourselves in a kind of literalized Lacanian universe, where quite nonsymbolic phalluses are indeed a universal ground of signification: everything refers to, because all meaning is generated by, the male genital. Sigurd Burckhardt has shown quite well how the law of gravity in the novel always pulls us down to that very spot. That is the place where fortifications and windows and hot chestnuts fall, where the Widow Wadman longs to put her finger, where even an innocent word like «nose» ends up. What's more, women are largely absent from the stage, and their cameo appearances are usually in the service of some joke at their expense. Tristram Shandy creates a world of male talk, and the novel often seems like an extended example- or series of examples-of that peculiar English custom, the segregation of the sexes for after-dinner conversation. Figuratively, we are always sitting with the men over their port.
Despite all this, Sterne has his defenders. The main line of defense is based on the idea that Sterne is not representing male oppression in order to endorse it, but to satirize it. Walter's mechanical lovemaking and his wild theories of child rearing; Toby's infantile retreat to a world -177- of toy soldiers; the man-midwife Slop's 'vile instruments'; Tristram's inability to escape the whole catalog of male sexual anxieties (impotence, size, deformity, castration) — all this and more shows that Sterne's intention is to make fun of men. The long section of the narrative that is, at least intermittently, concerned with Tristram's birth gives us plenty of evidence for both sides of this argument. Here, while the important business of Mrs. Shandy's labor proceeds upstairs and out of sight, we have an extended conversation involving Walter, Toby, Trim, and Dr. Slop. Trim reads Yorick's sermon, issues of politics and religion are discussed, pipes are smoked, and so forth. The worlds of men and women do not meet, except for Slop's incompetent and nosedisfiguring intervention at the very end. From one point of view, this scene reinforces the idea that women's labor (not only childbirth, but generally: Mrs. Shandy is surrounded by women working to help her) is not worth our attention. Moreover, women and their work are reduced to purely reproductive roles-their business is birth. On the other hand, however, Sterne makes it clear that the whole crew of men are useless-they idly sit and smoke, their talk is mostly trivial and selfinterested, they have nothing to do. Men are narcissists and bores, and they insist on hogging the stage. As is so often the case, however, the overall effect of this part of the narrative is difficult to characterize definitively. It's easy to laugh at this fraternity; but, because they are all we have on which to focus our attention, they consume our interest and we become in some way engaged with them. This is satire, surely, but it is satire in which Sterne seems to concede not only that women are worthy of respect (they, after all, are accomplishing something), but that they are outside his ken, or at least outside the bounds of what he is interested in talking about. It's easy to see how female readers can recognize Sterne's satire on men and still feel themselves without a foothold in the book. The men may very well be making fools of themselves; Sterne may understand quite accurately how the walls that contain them also limit and cripple them; but nonetheless the separation remains. It is perhaps worth remembering that both of the primary female characters in the novel, Mrs. Shandy and the Widow Wadman, are shown in the posture of eavesdropping.
To conclude, there is no single answer to the question, why read Sterne? — just as there is no one reason we should not. Rather than catalog either set of reasons again, however, I will take a small risk and say -178- that, at least today, those who like Sterne enjoy him because they still find him to be funny. Comedy does not travel well, and it rarely keeps. A change of place or the passing of time will spoil many of the best jokes, and Sterne has not survived these perils unscathed. Much of the humor of Sterne's fiction is thus lost to us; and footnotes and annotation and commentary only twist the knife, for what is most fatal to a joke, even worse than time and place, is an explanation. 'Oh, now I see,' the reader says, and glumly turns the page. And yet, for some, enough jokes do survive that Sterne's stated ambition-to make us laugh-still finds fulfillment.And many of those who still laugh at Tristram Shandy laugh loudest at its fractured form. Sterne may be, as the title of this chapter suggests, both a comedian and an experimental novelist, but his experiments are some of his best comedy. To return to a point made earlier, he does not experiment to revolutionize the novel (though, from our vantage point, it often looks that way), but to have fun with the conventions he saw hardening all around him in the genre's first half-century or so- conventions of progression, of unity of action, of a fourth wall standing between book and author on one side and the audience on the other. The way he exposes those conventions, primarily by refusing to obey them, is the best continuing joke that he has, and because the novel has proven to be such an enduring and popular literary form, the fun Sterne has at the expense of its standard conventions can evoke laughter today. His oddity has never lessened, and his irresponsibility can rankle even after two centuries-but the gift of laughter is the soul of Sterne, and for those who see it, that gift is still enough.
