Tristram
begins, as promised, with the Slawkenbergius tale, a story about a
traveler with an exceptionally long nose. He then returns to his
father, who is still lying across the bed, but begins to rouse himself
and expostulate about his afflictions. Walter decides that the
misfortune of the crushed nose must be counteracted with all the force
of an exceedingly propitious name: he settles on "Trismegistus."
Walter calls the day's events "a
chapter of
chances," and so prompts Tristram to review the list of chapters he has
promised the reader: on knots, whiskers, the right and wrong end of a
woman, wishes, noses, and modesty. He adds to the list a chapter on
chapters, which he delivers immediately as his father and Uncle Toby
walk downstairs. It takes several more chapters to get them all the way
down the stairs, during which time they contemplate the greatness of
the name "Trismegistus" and speculate on the difficulties of marriage
and childbirth.
Tristram
discusses with the reader the fact that he is in the fourth volume of
his life story and has only gotten to the first day of his life. Some
quick calculations reveal that at the current rate of one volume a
year, the length of his life is growing faster than he is telling it.
Rather than progressing, he is actually losing ground: "the more I
write, the more I shall have to write," he marvels, pointing out that
the same holds true for the reader.
Susannah
rushes in with the news that the child has gone black in the face. She
needs to know the name he is to be given so that he will not die
without being baptized. Walter hesitates for a moment, debating whether
to risk such a great name on a child who might not live to reap its
benefits. But since there is no time to be wasted, he sends Susannah
with the name while he dresses himself. But she proves, as Walter had
feared, to be a "leaky vessel"; she can only remember the first
syllable to tell the curate. He christens the baby "Tristram,"
impatient of Susannah's objections. When Walter learns of the mistake,
he walks calmly out to the fish-pond, surprising everyone with his
composure. Remaining behind, Toby and Trim find a hole in Walter's
theory about the importance of Christian names, reflecting on the fact
that names actually make very little difference in battle. When Walter
returns to the house, he delivers a speech on the systematic manner in
which he has been persecuted in the matter of this child.
They send for
Parson Yorick, in order to inquire whether a re-christening is
possible. He declares himself no "canonist" and suggests that they
consult Didius, the church lawyer. Tristram then omits a chapter
(skipping from 23 to 25) and staunchly defends his privilege of doing
so. He tells at great length what would have been in the chapter before
returning us to the dinner of scholars. The issue of the un-naming is
put off by a comic incident in which a roasted chestnut has fallen into
Phutatorius's pants and burned him. He blames Yorick for the incident,
demonstrating the parson's tendency to make enemies unwittingly. After
treating the burn by wrapping it in a page just off the printing press,
the learned men resume the question of the naming accident. After
lengthy debates they conclude, irrelevantly, that parents are unrelated
to their children.
Walter Shandy
actually enjoys these circular academic discussions greatly, and only
when he returns home does he recall his miserable afflictions. He is
immediately distracted from them again by the arrival of a letter
naming him as the recipient of a legacy of a thousand pounds, left to
him by Aunt Dinah. He muses for some time about how to spend the money,
feeling torn between sending Tristram's brother Bobby on a Grand Tour
of Europe, or making some capital improvements to the Shandy estate.
His indecision is relieved, however, when the news arrives that Bobby
had died. Tristram seems to exult in that fact as the volume closes,
stating that he dates the proper beginning of his "life and opinions"
from the moment he became the family heir. He teases the reader, once
again, with the promise of Uncle Toby's love affair, calling it "the
choicest morsel of the whole story."
Commentary
The sexually suggestive story from
Slawkenbergius reopens the question of whether a sexual innuendo is
implied in Tristram's damaged nose. Tristram plays with his audience
here: he wants the reader to feel the ridiculousness of the
conventional assumption that everything in a story must have a hidden
meaning. To create this effect, Tristram must simultaneously encourage
and disappoint that expectation. Tristram cultivates this ambiguity in
a variety of ways, including the sexual overtones in the description of
Uncle Toby's wound to the groin and the incident in which the hot
chestnut lands in Phutatorius's fly.
Time continues
to be an important theme. In analyzing the way his life outpaces his
narration of it, Tristram is stating in concrete terms an idea that has
been a premise of the book all along: the extreme difficulty for even
the most flexible and resourceful kind of writing to contain an
immeasurably rich, complex, and diverse reality. These reflections do
not fling Tristram into despair about his project, however. Rather, he
seems to approach it with a new vigor, taking the abundance of material
as a highly optimistic circumstance.
The accidental
mischristening of the baby forces Walter to revise the explanation he
gave earlier when he called this day "a chapter of chances." The
particular misfortunes that have befallen him touch with perfect
precision on each of Walter's most treasured obsessions, the points of
his greatest vulnerability. They began to look too coincidental to be
accidental, and he decides that he must be the victim of some heavenly
conspiracy. Tristram, like his father, is susceptible to far-fetched
ideas about the causation of events. They take the remotest precursor
to everything that happens as its fundamental cause, overlooking more
immediate factors. Such a view contributes to a fatalistic outlook:
when a servant's knot is the "real" explanation for medical
malpractice, human beings are seen as having very little control over
the outcomes of their actions.
© "Section 4"
Santos, Matilda.
SparkNote on Tristram Shandy.
1 Nov. 2008
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/tristram/section4.rhtml