The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne. 3. Impressions of Five through Nine.

CONCEPT

Laurence Sterne

This is a beautiful book. So read it!

I want to amend, slightly, my fourth impression; it has evolved. I should have figured it out in the last post, but I've got such an aversion at this point to any sentence that begins "This book is about language," that I earnestly strove to remove the expression for a book that had engendered in me the most penitent respect.

All that aside, "this is a book about language." Or better, this is a book about communicating. Not communicating. Striving to communicate. It isn't postmodern in that nothing is communicate. The precise meaning is almost always lost, but the significance is almost always conveyed. This keps Tristran Shandy clear of the sort of pessimism and solipsism that (I find) infects this subject almost all of the time.

That can be considered the "seventh impression."

The eighth impression:

Reconciling the fourth and sixth impressions (last time) is part of the reason the book is so wonderful and bright. It's funny. It's fun. It's filled with sex and raunchery, anecdotes and accidents. And misunderstanding. Here's I think, for me, the resolution of what has been a going concern for me: what do William Shakespeare, Jane Austin, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, William Beckford, Tennessee Williams, Anton Chekhov, Caryl Churchill, Antonin Artaud, and now Laurence Sterne all have in common, but not Don DeLillo? A lack of cynicism. Skepticism and cynicism are not the same thing. SKEPTICISM IS A NECESSARY LENS TO JUDGE AND CONTRAST OUR EXPERIENCES. Is cynicism a valid lens through which to view your experiences? Certainly. But it's all shit to me. Why this? Because, our daily routines are calculated and accidented to expose us to the most cynical aspects of our lives already. To wallow in this is a triple indulgence, opposes progress in the issues that skepticism/cynicism lays bare, ergo: CYNICISM IS ATAVISM. A least favorite thing to me.

Think about it. In Tristram Shandy, great romances collapse, lives are presumably ended in solitude and some degree of loneliness, wounds do not heal, wars are fought except when they are wanted, and we barely get to meet our pug-nosed ill-named narrator (born under an unlucky star clock). And yet it is irreducibly hopeful.

Toby, Toby, Toby, Toby, Toby...

END OF POST.