Biblical Sterne

Rhetoric and Religion in the Shandyverse

Ryan J. Stark

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781350202894
• eBook ISBN: 9781350177796
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Is Laurence Sterne one of the great Christian apologists? Ryan Stark recommends him as such, perhaps to the detriment of the parson's roguish reputation. The book's aim, however, is not to dispel roguishness but rather to discern the theological motives behind Sterne's comic rhetoric, from Tristram Shandy and the sermons to A Sentimental Journey. To this end, Stark reveals a veritable avalanche of biblical themes and allusions to be found in Sterne, often and seemingly awkwardly in the middle of sex jokes, and yet the effect is not to produce irreverence. On the contrary, we find an irreverently reverent apologetic, Stark argues, and a priest who knows how to play gracefully with religious ideas. Through Sterne, in fact, we might rethink humour's role in the service of religion.

1

The Shandean Apology

The problem with pornography is not that it shows too much of the person, Pope John Paul II observed, but that it shows far too little.¹ I have yet to find evidence that John Paul had Laurence Sterne on the desk when he made this insightful point, but I would like to imagine that he did. We discover in the Shandyverse the same idea. Sterne presents it differently, of course, and in a manner unsettling for those who cling too tightly to decorum, but he and the Pope arrive at equivalent sentimental conclusions: they know we have souls and that the pornographer’s single entendres bear false witness against the dignity of personhood. Here, then, is the first hallmark of the Shandean apology, and perhaps the most technical from a rhetorical standpoint: the double entendre, if marshalled correctly, protects human beings against lurid superficiality. Real smut welcomes simplicity, as does real religious fundamentalism, Enlightenment rationalism, logical positivism, or any other grave monomania expressed through the framework of a plain rhetoric. On the contrary, Sterne’s suggestive wordplay functions in exactly the opposite way, certainly connecting the verities of life to the sexual impulse, but also—and just as certainly—connecting the sexual impulse to the verities of life. They are mixed and for the great satirist held in precarious balance. The absence of that balance is what Sterne confronts on the rhetorical level with his Shandean banter.

From where Sterne developed this knack for sexual innuendo is a separate question. Typically, critics point first to Rabelais and Shakespeare, but mention also Cervantes, Erasmus, Burton, and Swift, among others. This is perfectly good company in which to place Sterne, but behind these figures lies a much older source from which he drew, that is, the Bible, wherein Sterne first discovered Shandean possibilities. Note, for example, that Old Testament Hebrew contains no word for “penis,” though euphemisms for the virile member abound, including “the virile member,” “foot,” “finger,” “thigh,” “hollow socket,” as in Jacob’s “hollow socket,” “key,” and “rib.” The last might interest those who have wondered about Adam’s rib in the Septuagint and, relatedly, why the human male conspicuously lacks a baculum.² As Yorick reminds us in the Journey, the shopkeeper’s wife is the bone of the shopkeeper’s bone.³ Nor do the authors of holy writ leave un-euphemized the feminine counterpart: “bowl,” “keyhole,” “form,” as in Isaiah 3:17’s exposed “form,” “shoe,” and “hand,” to name a few, and the “palms” of the hands in the case of Jezebel’s durable palms.⁴ They remained stubbornly intact even after the horses trampled her to death and the dogs ran away with most of her body.⁵ Rabelais—we might remember—reinvents the Jezebel scene in the form of Friar Tickletoby’s demise, the licentious priest who also suffers a death-by-horse-trampling scenario, with only his severed “foot” surviving as evidence of the ordeal.⁶ And from Rabelais to Sterne, where Tristram bouncily flirts with the curious female reader who, if tempted by a devilish thought, is told “to jump it, to rear it, to bound it,” and, if necessary, “to kick it”—just “like Tickletoby’s mare.”⁷ Sage advice, no doubt, or maybe an indecent proposal. Maybe both.

All of this is to say that Sterne comes honestly by his penchant for sexual innuendo, from noses and knee rubs to buttonholes and petticoats; from Elisha and the Shunammite woman recast as Yorick and Mrs. Shandy, for example, to the Pentateuch’s immodest lady wrestler reconfigured as Tom’s sausage-making-Jewish-widow girlfriend, who inspires one of the best of all Shandean adages: “There is nothing so awkward, as courting a woman, an’ please your honour, whilst she is making sausages.”⁸ Presumably, too, those inquisitive readers of Scripture will recall the lady wrestler’s punishment for grabbing a man by the genitals. It is commanded in Deuteronomy 25:12 that her hand be cut off, or that she endure a total bikini wax, depending on how one translates the passage.⁹ The latter—the bikini wax tribulation—is the more Christian of the two punishments, I believe, and certainly the more Shandean.

One gets the impression that the Reverend Joseph Cockfield understood these matters in some detail, when, after pouring over Sterne and pondering the Bible, he queried, “Who that indulges serious reflection can read [Sterne’s] obscenity and ill-applied passages of Holy Scripture without horror?”¹⁰ We arrive, then, at the second hallmark of the Shandean apology: an irreverently reverent use of Scripture in the service of satire, often risqué in nature. Not coincidentally, this second hallmark abruptly leads to a third, which is the upsetting of overly sensitive Christians, who are the primary target of Sterne’s wit, not counting the Devil. And the provocations worked. That is, Sterne upset a lot of Christians, the moral busybodies, in particular. The Goodman Browns. The Mrs. Grundys. He had a knack for it. John Wesley strongly urged against reading Sterne, for instance, unless one prefers “uncouthness,” in which case he is “without rival.”¹¹ The Presbyterian minister Samuel Miller described Tristram as “shamefully obscene,” while the Anglican priest Vicemus Knox—writing in the late eighteenth century—deemed Sterne “the grand promoter of adultery, and [of] every species of illicit commerce,” before pinning upon him England’s rising divorce rate.¹² Indeed, we could find an inordinate number of additional examples. Politicians, self-appointed cultural critics, the publisher Ralph Griffiths, who declared Sterne a “pimp to every lewd idea,” and the moralizer “D. Whyte,” who enquired, “Must a clergyman of the Church of England set himself up as a second Satan?”¹³ Famously, too, the abolitionist William Wilberforce disapproved, calling Sterne “indecent” and with “pernicious purposes,” a writer “eminently culpable” for “corrupting the national taste” and “lowering the standard of manners and morals” everywhere.¹⁴ He said this, it should be noted, while standing on Sterne’s shoulders, heavily indebted to the Shandyverse’s daring abolitionist rhetoric.¹⁵ One could say that without Sterne there would be no Wilberforce, which might not ring entirely true, but nor does it ring false. On how the genial Sterne managed to elicit so many expressions of outrage, theories will undoubtedly vary, but the psychological condition motivating the outrage might very well be the same across the board. As Arthur Cash discerned, “There is less excuse for those literary critics and conceited moralists whose only aim has been to suppress the frivolity they cannot share.”¹⁶

Not all is doom and gloom, however. Sterne also gathered admirers, and continues to do so, many of whom are far afield from the usual readers of Christian literature. This brings us to the fourth and—for our purposes—final hallmark of the Shandean apology, that is, to share mirth with the David Humes and Friedrich Nietzsches of the world. The latter—of “God is dead” fame—praised Sterne as the freest spirit to have ever lived, a sentiment largely shared by Goethe and Schopenhauer, neither of whom attended church regularly.¹⁷ Hume, the man who said that “supernatural beliefs” had been “everywhere rejected by men of sense,” thought Tristram Shandy the best English book of the mid-eighteenth century, and thought Sterne an orthodox Anglican priest.¹⁸ After cutting-and-pasting together his own version of the Bible, the deist Thomas Jefferson called Sterne’s writings “the best course on morality ever written,” while Abraham Lincoln, possibly America’s first bisexual president, comically quoted the Journey’s starling anecdote as he pondered his own circumstances in the presidency: “I can’t get out!”¹⁹ And then we discover Virginia Woolf, whose admiration for Sterne is well documented, as is her now-infamous response to the happy news of T.S. Eliot’s conversion: “I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with poor dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic, believes in God and immortality, and goes to church.”²⁰

In the history of Christian apologetics, one is hard-pressed to find another figure who elicits such a curious collection of replies. What kind of Christian apologist finds such obvious comradery with the twin pillars of modern atheism and such palpable friction with so many prominent religious luminaries, if not full-blown excommunication from them? The best kind, I think, to answer the question forthright, and certainly the Shandean kind, which brings me to my overarching theme: Sterne advances the Christian faith in a decidedly odd way and against the better judgment of gloomy religionists everywhere. Of course, such a thesis may sound like old news to Herbert Read, who—in 1937—pointed out that Sterne’s fictions and sermons put forward the same Christian arguments, in essence, one implicitly and the other explicitly.²¹ This is also what Sterne meant, most likely, when he described Tristram Shandy as “a moral work, more read than understood,” and is, too, the convincing line of criticism taken by Cash, Melvyn New, Stephen Prickett, and Elizabeth Kraft, among others, that is, a religious Sterne making religious claims.²² Allow me therefore a slight emendation to my theme, given that I run the risk of stating the obvious: Sterne defends the Christian faith in a manner even stranger and more mischievous than is currently understood, by a long way, I think, and for reasons that are a pleasure to explain. Gwendolyn—from Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest—prefaces one of her speeches as follows: “On an occasion of this kind, it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one’s mind. It becomes a pleasure.”²³ Such is my preface as well.

I divide this book into five chapters, not counting the introduction and conclusion, and organize them chronologically, with the caveat that The Sermons of Mr. Yorick were drafted before Tristram Shandy, or at least mostly drafted, but were not attributed to “Yorick” until after Sterne had invented the Shandyverse. Ergo, I think it best to imagine Sterne and Yorick as co-authors of the homilies, which causes me to place them after Tristram Shandy.

In Chapter 2, “Paranormal Tristram Shandy,” I argue that Sterne exorcises the real Devil from the bedeviled mind of writer and reader alike, not the fake Devil of the modern literary imagination. Sterne performs an “exorcism, most unecclesiastically,” and does it primarily through humor, taking very much to heart Thomas More’s observation that “the Devil … the proud spirit … cannot endure to be mocked.”²⁴ And if the real Satan is the Shandyverse’s arch villain, then other implications follow as well, not least of which is the thought that Ephesians 6:12 proves more important than John Locke to understanding Tristram’s psychology: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

In the third chapter, “Are the Sermons Funny?,” I reopen a seemingly closed debate, arguing against the modern critics that the sermons do—indeed—carry a Shandean tint. Not that they are impious or in any way unsuitable for the pulpit. Nevertheless, Sterne amuses, and some of the humor is risqué and requires more than a passing knowledge of Scripture to appreciate. This last point once more highlights a neglected but crucial source of inspiration for Sterne’s comic genius: the Bible, especially the Old Testament, that ancient repository of wisdom and proto-Shandean intrigue.

In Chapter 4, I revisit the Maria of Moulins scenes, one in Tristram and the other in the Journey. I argue that both allude to Genesis 38. Maria plays the role of Tamar, while Tristram and Yorick step into variations upon the role of Judah. The episodes are counterfactual insofar as Maria fails to get pregnant, but the overall moral of the Maria scenes is very much in line with the scriptural admonition against overconfidence, especially as it relates to how we imagine ourselves able to resist temptation. Cases in point: Tristram and Yorick set out with perfectly good intensions, I show, but when confronted by real temptation, that is, a convenient prostitute, their delicacy quickly turns to concupiscence.

In the final chapters, 5 and 6, I explain why Sterne conjures up Yorick’s ghost and sends him to France. Specifically, I argue that Sterne uses the fleshy ghost to critique Gnostic and atheistic attitudes toward life. A sentimental ghost story, probably the first of its kind, the Journey demonstrates God’s mercy beyond the grave, giving full literary credence to that mysterious passage in 1 Peter where we hear of Christ preaching to the dead: “For this cause was the gospel preached also to those who are dead, that they might be judged according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit.”²⁵ The Dogberrian philosopher Yogi Berra once observed, “It ain’t over till it’s over.”²⁶ Sterne’s implicit Shandean proverb in the Journey bears a family resemblance: it is not over even when it is over, as is evidenced by Yorick’s final theosis, which ends as all things end on this side of Heaven, not at the end but rather with a particularly dramatic aposiopesis.

And perhaps it goes without saying that laughter is the dominant side effect of the Shandean apology. True laughter. The sort of laughter about which the demon Screwtape complains because it disrupts “the realism, dignity, and austerity of Hell.”²⁷ A second side effect often follows, which is the development of tenderness, a disposition also mixed with nostalgia, romance, and love for the neighbor. If read correctly, Sterne provokes such feelings, regardless of one’s theological commitments—or lack thereof. Finally, on a concluding note, Sterne’s Christian rhetoric prompts something else unexpected in many of us, a third side effect, and this is a renewed curiosity about Scripture, insofar as few writer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Table of Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The Shandean Apology
• 2 Paranormal Tristram Shandy
• 3 Are the Sermons Funny?
• 4 Maria in the Biblical Sense
• 5 Otherworldly Yorick
• 6 Ghost Rhetoric
• 7 Why Sterne?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint