By Wolfgang Iser
With out a starting and with no an finish, Tristram Shandy strikes in lots of various instructions, defying the traditional expectancies of its readers. Wolfgang Iser exhibits how Sterne exploits the philosophy of his day and its cognitive deficiencies, utilizing digression, humour and play to exhibit adventure of subjectivity, and implicitly to show the normal proposal of the self.
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Extra info for Sterne: Tristram Shandy
Example text
In order to do justice to the mind's inherent gift for combination, Locke has to have recourse to metaphors as explanations for the resultant links. Perhaps the most important of these is the 'train of ideas', through which he seeks to pin down the concept of succession as a condition for the complex idea of time. This has the advantage of an almost non-existent content while at the same time being backed by and thus coinciding with experience. In this context, as in others, Sterne radicalises the Lockean concept, extracting the figurative element from the metaphor and then offering an idea of what could motivate the succession: In swims CURIOSITY, beckoning to her damsels to follow - they dive into the centre of the current - FANCY sits musing upon the bank, and with her eyes following the stream, turns straws and bulrushes into masts and bowsprits.
Whatever forms of selfrepresentation Tristram sets up as a historian he undermines with his own subjectivity, so that the writing always exhibits the dual pattern of serious exposition followed by ridiculous exposure. Offering one's own life story as an object of fun both for oneself and others indicates a relationship of the self to the self whose cognitive impenetrability is deliberately exposed to laughter, which is the medicine Tristram would like to give his readers, and he delivers it by way of example.
3 Locke's philosophy as a pattern of communication In this respect Lockean philosophy is transformed into a pattern of communication, which serves to highlight the subjectivity of human nature as the deformation of the association of ideas. Sterne based his approach on a dominant thought system of his time because he could take its familiarity for granted, and thus turn it into a suitable medium through which to translate subjectivity for his reading public. To this end he uncovers the weaknesses of Locke's philosophy wherever cognitive theory and anthropology shore each other up: either the self is the pivot for the association of ideas, in which case basic premisses of epistemology fall by the wayside, or the association follows given premisses of cognition, in which case the system requires no anthropological patches.