Tristram
elaborates again upon the necessity of moving backward and forward in
time to tell his story. While he still intends to press on toward the
story of Toby's love affair, he prepares us for the possibility that he
may yet make some digressions along the way. He returns to his earlier
suggestion that Toby was the last to know that he was in love,
observing that if Susannah had not informed him of the matter, he might
never have pursued the affair at all. Tristram launches into the story
once, gets bogged down in rambling speculations, and decides to abandon
the chapter and begin again.
When Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim
first come
down to the country to begin work on the fortifications, they find that
the house is unfurnished. They are obliged to stay with Widow Wadman
for three days, and by the third day she has fallen in love with Toby.
Toby is so occupied with his battlements that it takes until the end of
the war--eleven years, in fact--before he has leisure to attend to the
situation with his smitten neighbor.
Tristram
describes the Widow's advances toward Toby as a military maneuver.
Separated from the site of Toby's battle replica only by a hedgerow,
Mrs. Wadman is in a most strategic position to launch her attack. By
feigning interest in his maps and plans she works her way into his
sentry-box, engineering seductive bumps and caresses whenever possible.
When the end
of the war forces a lull in their activities, Trim offers to provide
some amusement for Toby by telling the story of the King of Bohemia and
his seven castles. This tale never really gets off the ground, and Trim
digresses instead into the story of how he fell in love during the war.
After receiving a wound to the knee, Trim finds himself under the care
of a Beguine nun. After a great deal of knee massaging, he suddenly
realizes he is in love with her. Toby hijacks the end of the story,
which is clearly approaching a sexual climax, by saying, "and then
thou...madest a speech."
Widow Wadman,
who has been eavesdropping, seizes the passionate pitch of the moment
to make a move. She enters the sentry-box and announces that she has a
speck of something in her eye, asking Uncle Toby to take a look. Toby
at first finds nothing, but as he continues to inspect her beautiful
eye, his heart begins to warm to the Widow Wadman. This is the decisive
turning point in her campaign.
When Toby
informs Trim that he has fallen in love, the two set to work mapping
out a strategy. They ready their uniforms and weapons, and Trim decides
to attempt a peripheral conquest of Bridget, Mrs. Wadman's servant. The
night before the campaign is to take place, Walter writes a letter to
Toby full of his brotherly advice about women. The "action" is to begin
at eleven o'clock the next morning, and Walter and Mrs. Shandy walk out
to watch the drama unfold.
Commentary
This
volume is comprised of a series of delays
and restarts, as if Tristram is reluctant to get to the events that
will terminate the story because, in doing so, he will force himself
off the stage. He is running to keep ahead of the end of his own novel
in much the same way that he flew from Death in the last volume: not
desperately or fearfully, but enjoying the sights along the way. "One
would think I took a pleasure in running into difficulties of this
kind," Tristram remarks when he gets hung up in the sixth chapter. He
then goes on to demonstrate that he does
take pleasure in them, turning the pressing concerns that push him to
finish the novel (poverty and illness) into jokes. He got sick while
frolicking in Flanders, and prefers to think of the happy cause rather
than its unfortunate consequence. He then turns the serious condition
of his lungs into a satire of medical professionals, whose diagnoses
amount to nothing more than elementary math.
In one of
these digressions, Tristram makes the provocative statement, "I am
resolved never to read any book but my own, as long as I live." How
could he read any other? By this point in the novel we are to
understand that Tristram's book, in its broadest sense, amounts to the
very workings of his own mind. Everything he encounters (or reads)
passes through that same filter, which is itself the substance of the
book. Everything Tristram has read is a part of his narrative, almost
by definition; indeed much of it is there in a quite literal sense, and
he defines the scope of his book so that more can always be included.
Tristram's book, in this regard, is his very being--his life and
opinions are precisely what he cannot avoid or escape.
When the war
ends, Toby really does not know what to do with himself. The affair
with Widow Wadman helps him to transition out of a mindset obsessed
with the past (which has become translated by means of his hobby into
an imaginary and even delusory present). The experience of love and the
prospect of marriage require him to think about the present reality and
to look forward to the future in ways to which he has become
unaccustomed. "It is not easy," he tells Trim, "for one, bred up as
thou and I have been to arm, who seldom looks further forward than to
the end of his musket, or backwards beyond his knapsack, to know much
about this matter [of chronology]." Toby is trying to encourage Trim in
his storytelling, but he could just as easily be speaking about himself.
© "Section 8"
Santos, Matilda.
SparkNote on Tristram Shandy.
1 Nov. 2008
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/tristram/section8.rhtml