Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Relicks of Learning: Sterne among the Renaissance Encyclopedists

2000; University of Toronto Press; Volume: 13; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ecf.2000.0001

1911-0243

Jack Lynch,

Renaissance Literature and Culture

The Relicks of Learning: Sterne among the Renaissance Encyclopedists Jack Lynch Part of Walter Shandy's scheme in his Tristrapœdia is to make the young Tristram "conjugate every word in the dictionary, backwards and forwards the same way;------every word, Yorick, by this means, you see, is converted into a thesis or an hypothesis. ... The force of this engine, added my father, is incredible, in opening a child's head."1 Whether this curious lexical obsession will open young Tristram's head is doubtful, but it may well open his text, allowing us to revisit some of the most important twentieth-century critical statements on Tristram Shandy. Walter's all-toocomprehensive approach to learning points to some of the many textual traditions that jostle against one another in Tristram Shandy, and provides a means of making some generic sense of the often arcane learning that fills the novel. 1 Tristram Shandy, vols 1 and 2, The Text, ed. Melvyn New and Joan New; vol. 3, The Notes, ed. Melvyn New et al., the Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1978-84), 2:492. References are to page numbers in this edition (vols 1 and 2 are paginated continuously). EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 13, Number 1, October 2000 2 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION One early critic found Walter Shandy an odd character for an eighteenthcentury novel: he "thought it singular, that [Sterne] should produce the portrait of his Sophist, Mr. Shandy, with all the stains and mouldiness ofthe last century about him."2 Apart from his moments of exemplary sympathy towards his brother, Walter is indeed no typical eighteenth-century man; the entire book, though published from 1759 to 1767, has much of the previous century about it. This is not news: early modern influences have been observed in Tristram Shandy since its publication. Rabelais, Montaigne, Cervantes, and Shakespeare are well known as sources for Sterne, who throughout his text trumpets his debt to this Renaissance quadrumvirate.3 Other readers have turned up unadvertised (but still seminal) Renaissance influences such as Nashe, More, and Burton.4 This accounting by no means exhausts Sterne's debts, but Burton's appearance in this catalogue is especially suggestive. As lohn Ferriar was the first to notice in 1791, Sterne cuts large passages from the whole cloth of Burton and inserts them into his novel. Perhaps more important , though certainly less tangible, Tristram Shandy often echoes Burton's distinctive voice. Ferriar's observation on Burton applies equally well to Sterne: "The bulk of his materials generally overwhelms him. ... Thus from doctrines of religion to military discipline, from inland navigation to the morality of dancing-schools, every thing is discussed and determined" (p. 58). Much of the idiosyncrasy of Sterne's style can be traced back to a 2 John Ferriar, Illustrations of Sterne: With Other Essays and Verses (London, 1798), p. 57. References are to this edition. 3 Arthur H. Cash discusses some of these Renaissance sources in Laurence Sterne: The Early and Middle Years (London: Methuen, 1975), pp. 199-206. Among the more important treatments are W.G. Day, "Some Source Passages for Tristram Shandy," Notes and Queries 18 (1971), 5860 ; Jonathan Lamb, "Sterne's Use of Montaigne," Comparative Literature 32 (1980), 1—41 ; Alan B. Howes, "Laurence Sterne, Rabelais and Cervantes: The Two Kinds of Laughter in Tristram Shandy!' Laurence Sterne: Riddles and Mysteries, ed. Valerie Grosvenor Myer (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1984), pp. 39-56; Donald R. Wehrs, "Sterne, Cervantes, Montaigne: Fideistic Skepticism and the Rhetoric of Desire," Comparative Literature Studies 25 (1988), 127-51; H.W. Matalene, "Sexual Scripting in Montaigne and Sterne," Comparative Literature 41 (1989), 360-77; and Robert L. Chibka, "The Hobby-Horse's Epitaph: Tristram Shandy, Hamlet, and the Vehicles of Memory." Eighteenth-Century Fiction 3 (1991), 125-51, Jonathan Lamb takes up the larger question of imitation and influence in "Sterne's System of Imitation," MLR 76 (1981), 794-810. 4 For Nashe and More, see David McNeil, The Grotesque Depiction of War and the Military in Eighteenth-Century Prose Fiction (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990) and the unpublished dissertation ofCynthia Waugh Sulfridge, "Intimate Narrative: Narrator-Reader...