The Ampersand: November 2001


Avoiding Pathological Literature
Writer, Symbol and Audience in Sterne and Joyce
Michael R. Allen

Besides residing in works by Irish writers who famously experiment with form, the characters Stephen Dedalus and Tristram Shandy take similar creative stands as each revisits the events of youth in order to explore what has shaped him as human and as writer. In The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram is writing his memoirs, starting at the day he was conceived. Tristram goes on - ending before he would turn ten - to make a rambling, comic study of his psychology and his role as autobiographer. In James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a narrator takes us into the school days of Stephen Dedalus, exploring the mind of a young man who desires to be a poet. Stephen’s sensibility is shown as a prelude to a writer’s life not seen at the book’s end, while Tristram’s “life and opinions” are a remembrance of one who is writing. Given the different narrative structures of their books, Stephen and Tristram cannot be said to be in any predecessor/successor relationship, nor are they both the same sort of writer. Yet, examining their fictional lives side by side reveals comparisons and contrasts that richly illuminate the art of writing. Ultimately, Stephen and Tristram’s intersections and divergences question the solidity of the distinction made between the commonality of prose and the art of poetry. Instead, engagement of the world outside the writer--resistance to the pathological - and the response such participation invites become a more telling criteria of when literature is art.

The dichotomy between Tristram Shandy and Stephen Dedalus seems to illustrate the perceived larger tension between novels (a Victorian ideal) and poetry (a Modernist ideal). Poetry has been frequently seen as beautiful and capable of evoking something deeper in readers than they encounter in real life, while the novel began as something that aims to represent reality - like Tristram Shandy’s being presented as autobiography. This dichotomy has frequently been presented in the idea that poetry is high art and the novel is low art or not art at all. Clearly, Stephen shares this viewpoint, as does Tristram in his refusal to aspire to beauty. And yet Tristram’s autobiography (or novel) gets into the associations of his subconscious and plays with the real it describes as Stephen’s imaginary poetry flatly lays out the imaginary with unintentional surrealism (i.e., each line has an unclear relation to the others). The novel has been degraded for being “too real,” for forsaking beauty to truth, while poetry has been praised for its grace and its aspiration to the sublime. However, only the novel seems capable of nearly always inviting the response art needs, precisely because it is so human a genre. And poetry fails frequently when the poet, like Stephen, consigns humanity to the Other that he must avoid to remain a pure artist. Of course, poetry is frequently beautiful and truthful - but so are the novel and the essay. Joyce and Sterne twist the distinction between poetry and prose by raising the question of whether literary art occurs when a work adheres to an ideal Platonic form or when it is receptive to the reader’s participation in creating the work.

Although both Portrait and Tristram Shandy are fictions posed as biographies, the books are built on different narrative structures, which influence the creative stands of the protagonists. The narrative voice in Portrait, until the very end, is not Stephen’s but that of a narrator. The structure of narrative voice in one way fulfills the title of the book, building the many changes Stephen goes through as he tries to find his own voice as an artist. The structure allows Joyce to leave Stephen where he desires and fears to be: alone to create. Whether or not Stephen is a real artist, the reader can decide. What is important is that he poses as one, creating poetry that does not try to shadow reality - the hallmark of true art to Stephen. His villanelle contains lines of images that symbolize very little to the reader:
Your eyes have set man’s heart ablaze
And you have had your will of him
Are you not weary of ardent ways?. . . (223)
Who is “you”? The images are vague and scarcely-defined. Even the enflamed lover is “man” and no one specific; the reader is not even being entertained or enlightened even asthe writer thinks his verse is high art. On the other hand, Tristram Shandy is the autobiography of Tristram Shandy. It is the only book Tristram has ever written, and the only one he claims to have read. As such, it gives the reader the story of a life in a culture in which the reader implicitly also participates. Tristram does not claim to be an artist, although his work is certainly artful. Instead--and this is why he personally disqualifies himself as being an artist - he is trying to capture the reality of his life:
Writers of my stamp have one principle in common with painters. Where an exact copying makes our pictures less striking, we choose the less evil; deeming it even more pardonable to trespass against truth, than beauty. (69)
Tristram’s described role as writer could not differ more from that of Stephen’s. Stephen writes of a poem he has written: “Read what I wrote last night. Vague words for a vague emotion” (251). What Tristram calls “beauty” is the vagueness Stephen is trying to capture, and what he thinks makes him an artist. As writers, Stephen and Tristram agree on the distinction between “mere” prose writer and the poet, although the final creative output of each character demands that the reader question whether or not the writer is correct in making the distinction. Looking at which literary work - Stephen’s villanelle or Tristram’s autobiography--can reasonably be defined as art, one must forcefully disagree with the definitions of art both Stephen and Tristram offer.

Approaching these two texts with the question of “what is art?” in mind, however, only allows the reader to see one aspect of the gap between the words of Shandy and the words of Dedalus - and overlooks the role of the reader in creating literature. In order to see why these intertexts serve to contrast each other so markedly, one finds it useful to start with the question of philosopher Nelson Goodman: “When is art?”. Answers to this question offer more direction for discussing literature than the question “what is art?”, because literature involves direct participation of the reader in its being able to be perceived. The reader must find symbols and complete the meaning of the work before the work exists.

Reading therefore raises the question of “when” rather than “what” art is because different readers will find different meanings in the text. As Goodman writes, “the answer to the question ‘When is art?’ thus seems to me clearly to be in terms of symbolic function” (69). There is no symbolic function if the reader sees no symbols in the work, and the symbols do not function if the reader cannot attach meaning to them but the writer can. One would find it hard to call an inaccessible, cryptic yet beautiful villanelle art, for literature becomes art experientially. It becomes reasonable to say, in regard to literature, that if the reader and the writer cannot generally see the same symbols and meanings thereof in the text, that the text is not art in that instance. The writer must anticipate and welcome the reader’s participation in creating literature in order to create art. Thus the writer must create work that contains a world in which both writer and reader - and not just writer - can reside.

Related to the role of the writer is how much he chooses to identify himself as a member of society, and how much he sees himself as necessarily apart from other people. Not surprisingly, the self-described writer Tristram spends most of his autobiography writing about the family members and other people who influenced him as a young man. Tristram is very much his father’s son as he leaves the door hinge unfixed. On a larger scale, Tristram is very much a normal human being with a story to tell; he is not a remote artist exhibiting his cloistered creation to normal people. In fact, Tristram goes so far in asserting the common traits he shares with the society of mankind that he wishes his project would not be unique: “willing that all mankind should write as well as myself. --Which they certainly will, when they think as little” (501). This stance is diametrically opposed to that of Stephen Dedalus, and supports the definition of art each describes. Stephen’s life is the story of a boy different from as well as indifferent toward his fellow humans. Stephen nearly becomes a priest so that he might be closer to the purity of God than his fellow Catholics. As he is told, “Such a boy [as Stephen] is marked off from his companions by his piety...” (157). Later this plan crumbles as Stephen’s sensual nature demands satisfaction - so Stephen looks to be apart, or even alone, as an artist, who knows the purity of material art rather than the spirit. “I do not fear to be alone...” (247), Stephen tells Cranly near the book’s end. Stephen Dedalus sees himself as the artist - more specifically, the poet. What Stephen and Tristram do in constructing a writer/poet dichotomy is to suggest that the influence of the world outside of the writer is an obstacle to the beauty of art, and that the artist cannot afford participation in society.

Of course, the implication of the duality of participation/removal implies two radically different ways of existing in the world. As a writer, Tristram poses himself as the Everyman in the sense that he can nearly be every man; Tristram sees his writing as a way to express the psychology and connections with other people that everyone has. Again working on the other side of the oppositional duality, Stephen Dedalus sees participation in a community as a crude deterrent to art. When Stephen writes, it is to convey the beauty of sensation or imagination, not the reality of his psychology - his villanelle is almost completely at odds with the real feelings he wants to convey. The difference lies in where each writer sees his feelings best expressed: from Tristram, feelings are expressed directly to people, while Stephen expresses himself in the self-contained poem. Tristram Shandy’s autobiography captures a real life that intersects with others, because Tristram does not set out to find beauty but personal truth. Under the burden of finding beauty, Stephen sees it necessary to forsake the Shandean world of connections with humanity. Ultimately, Stephen has no life (in the social sense) in which to find meaning, while Tristram has so much life to sort out that he can never bring his autobiography past his youth.

Some of that abundant, seemingly careless Shandean life spills over into Portrait as Mr. Dedalus, father of Stephen, literally brings engagement of the life outside of his own to the table. At the dinner table gathering of the Dedalus family, Dante and Mr. Casey, Mr. Dedalus stirs up trouble and connects the conversation’s disparate parts not only by offering his opinions on Irish nationalism and the Church, but by trying to get the others involved in the discussion. Like Tristram Shandy, Mr. Dedalus takes the world around him and orders it in a way that is both lively and artful. Like Shandy the narrator, Mr. Dedalus’s artful skill lies more in how he engages and responds to what other people are doing than in any ideas or acts he originates. Consider how he balances his commentary on life with his drawing the younger Stephen into the feast and its discussion:
--Yes, yes, said Mr. Dedalus. I meant about the . . . I was thinking about the railway porter. Well now, that’s all right. Here, Stephen, show me your plate, old chap. Eat away now. Here. (32)
This passage is strikingly Shandean; out of its context it could be mistaken for part of Tristram’s narrative. Enjoying the shared food of life and creating more life in conversation seem to be intertwined goals of Mr. Dedalus. But Stephen remains silent in the midst of this scene, even as his father seeks to let down the boundary of age by inviting him into the world of the arguing, lively adults. Later, it is no wonder that Stephen rejects writing free-flowing prose that encompasses more than his own voice. Mr. Dedalus is much like Tristram Shandy - and Walter Shandy, whom Tristram accepts - in his ability to narrate his own life and include everyone else who shares his world in his narration. Stephen Dedalus cannot do the same, nor does he think he can ever follow his father’s path. Watching his father and some friends as they drink and reminisce about youth, Stephen thinks that “No life or youth stirred in him as it had stirred in them” (95) when they were his age. If Stephen is to narrate anything, it will not be Shandean prose, but poetry colder and as detached from the world around him as Keats’ urn.

Stephen’s refusal to participate in the world outside of himself directly opposes Tristram Shandy’s recollected embracing of the stuff of his life - intrusions, diversions and accidents included. Whether he is being accidentally circumcised by a closed window or he is recounting his uncle’s obsession with recreating old battle sites, Tristram is very much in contact with worlds physical and social. As he writes at the start of Book VI:
. . . let us just look back upon the country we have passed through.--- ---What a wilderness has it been! and what a mercy that we have not both of us been lost, or devoured by wild beasts in it! (329)
As much as it is an exaggerated metaphor, this use of wilderness by Shandy also is an earnest admission of his aim to include the influence of the world in which he and his readers live in his work. This engagement of a larger world than that of the individual person could not be more different than what the young Stephen Dedalus does as he turns his back on the world with only the “old artificer” as a companion. Sterne seems to anticipate the call of Scott Russell Sanders:
Such fiction treats some “little human morality play” as the whole of reality, and never turns outward to acknowledge the “wilderness raging around.” . . . What is missing from much recent fiction, I feel, is any sense of nature, any acknowledgment of a nonhuman context. (183)
Even though Tristram Shandy is a novel with the workings of human psychology at its core, its brilliance comes from how its narrator incorporates the many influences the world outside the individual exert upon the mind. If Stephen Dedalus could be moved to likewise incorporate rather than reject his influences, he could create the same art his creator Joyce does. In how the authors treat their stand-in writers, one see that Sterne openly identifies with Tristram while Joyce distances himself from Stephen. Both Sterne and Joyce engage those forces in the world which have influenced them, and both create novels of illuminating brilliance even as both of their characters do not share the ability to create art.

Ultimately, the definition of art both Tristram and Stephen pose cannot withstand a look at what creative work they produce. We see Tristram’s autobiography as a rich, unplanned ramble through his life. Tristram takes each scene in his life he describes and uses each point as a point in a narrative space that must be connected to others, in a way that both entertains and imparts meaning. What Tristram can do on paper is exactly what Stephen does in his mind as he sits in church listening to the sermon. The Shandean perspective would have it that Stephen’s associational thinking is the rule, not the exception - and that his error is in thinking otherwise. Tristram’s autobiography is a work that allows the reader to derive truths from its particulars, and is therefore accessible and enduring. Take Tristram’s analogy: “Writing, when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation” (82). A writing of conversation relies on the reader’s response - and therefore has the potential to be art to more than just its creator.

Art is art mainly because it is recognized by its beholders as such, not simply because its creator endows it with the “symbols of the element of mystery” (223) Stephen sees as artful. Those “symbols” are meaningless to the reader if they do not invite a larger response than a simple aesthetic appraisal. Without the human element Stephen sees as corrupting, he has no art - just a bad villanelle. Tristram Shandy has created art, whether he likes it or not - the Shandean perspective on writing betrays Tristram’s own injunction against its being called “art.” Stephen Dedalus errs in assuming that the invitation for human response disqualifies a work as art, when it instead is the essential qualifier of a true literary art. Tristram Shandy likewise assumes wrongly that his participatory banter with the reader is what makes his work not art. Again, the wrong question about art is being answered as neither recognize the reader’s role in creating art with them.

The reader who compares Stephen Dedalus and Tristram Shandy sees that writing without response is mere writing, not art. Though each writes from a perspective that mistakenly upholds removal from humanity as essential to true art, one of them produces art by inviting that response. The reader can actually read the richness of Tristram Shandy’s autobiographical ramble, while he might beg Stephen to please “tell no more of enchanted days” (223), as his villanelle implores. Stephen’s “symbols of mystery flowed forth over his brain” but they don’t flow forth over the reader’s, and that is where they do not become art - and where Tristram Shandy’s modest words do. Goodman writes about symbols in art that “their being representational involves no representation of anything outside them” (61), but he misses the way literature changes his terms. If both reader and writer create the art where these symbols are found (in the text), then those symbols represent nothing at all if they are not agreed upon by reader and writer. This means that those symbols must represent at least what the reader thinks they signify and at least what the writer thinks they signify; they are perhaps nonrepresentational outside of this relationship which has the text at its center. Without the writer’s facilitating the reader’s participation in the work by allowing those symbols to become representational, the reader cannot even consider those textual symbols.

It is clear that literature that is created to become art does not serve as art unless it invites the reader to participate in giving it meaning. Goodman’s aesthetics, though astute, would better accomodate literature by adding that art is only influenced by the world in which the artist lives. Whether or not the writer chooses to reduce that influence on his work to only the small part of the world that is creator or expand it to include society and nature determines whether or not that work is meaningful, and hence serves as art, to anyone except the writer. The more of the world is put into the literary work, the more of the world is invited to continue the work’s creation by reading it. A work that only represents the influence of one person, like Stephen’s villanelle, is art to no one but Stephen. As Scott Russell Sanders writes, “However accurately it reflects the surface of our times, fiction that never looks beyond the human realm is profoundly false, and therefore pathological” (194). (Sanders lists James Joyce as a writer of such fiction.) On the other hand, Tristram Shandy’s autobiography contains so much influence outside of Tristram that is put into the work that it has the potential to become art for the whole world. Tristram’s work avoids becoming antisocial in its author’s willingness to look outside of himself in creation and rejection of a “language incapable of describing and expressing life” (Rodgers 124). Determining what literary work is art, one then should replace the qualifying what’s of poetry or prose with the when’s of creating with or without the influence of the world outside of the writer.

The invitation for the reader to respond means creating symbols which the reader can imbibe with meaning so to find truth in created beauty. What Tristram Shandy and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man jointly show is that literary art invites the reader into its world of symbols, because it has a strong tendency to combine multiple voices, people, places, events and things and create a composite world that is a society in itself. The writer who is looking within to look out, like Tristram, will create a rich literature that invites another participant to complete the creation. Goodman’s insistence that “Whoever looks for art without symbols, then, will find none...” (66) is best coupled with the statement that whoever tries to create art without accessible symbols will make none. The writer who writes “symbols of mystery” does not invite the reader to complete the creation of a work of art, but instead announces that the reader is unnecessary to his work.

Perhaps Roland Barthes offers the best reader’s view of what literature needs to do to make art occur: ‘The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing” (6). Likewise, the reader must desire the text and prove it in reading; only then does literature fulfill its promise to become art. Literature that is art exists as a meeting ground between two worlds in communication - two worlds that are bound by general agreement upon one set of symbols in one work of art. Tristram Shandy and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man both remind us that there must be an engagement of a world outside of the solitary writer in order for one’s literature, verse or prose, to provide that meeting ground and not to remain an item of personal fetish.

Works Cited

  • Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 2000.
  • Goodman, Nelson. "When Is Art?" Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978.
  • Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. London: Penguin, 1979.
  • Rodgers, James. "Sensibility, Sympathy, Benevolence: Physiology and Moral Philosophy in Tristram Shandy." Languages of Nature. L.J. Jordanova, ed. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers UP, 1986. 117-158.
  • Sanders, Scott Russell. "Speaking a Word for Nature." The Ecocriticism Reader. Athens, Ga.: Georgia UP, 1996. 182-195.
  • Sterne, Laurence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. New York: Quality PB Book Club, 1992.


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Copyright 2001 Michael R. Allen.