THE BAD BEHAVIOUR OF LANGUAGE:

The Problem of Communication in the Eighteenth Century

Nicolette Bethel

March 1986

No --- said I; --- I am certain you have got it wrong.

--- 'Tis you who are wrong; replied Tristram: For those who --- like you --- have been rais'd on a diet rich in such delicacies as the writings of Mr T.S. Eliot; --- Mr James Joyce; --- Mrs Virginia Woolf; --- Herr Sigmund Freud; --- M. Jean-Paul Sartre; --- M. Albert Camus; --- Mr Samuel Beckett; --- Mr Harold Pinter; --- Mr Tom Stoppard; --- &c., &c., --- the Problem of Communication is believed to be the concern of the Twentieth Century alone. When in Fact, --- as is found in the words of the Preacher, son of David and king of Jerusalem: There is no New Thing under the Sun; --- that is, that every New Thing is old: --- the Problem of Communication is as old as Language itself.

--- In short, said Tristram: --- I was here before you.

*

Polonius: What do you read, my lord?

Hamlet: Words, words, words.

Polonius: What is the matter, my lord?

Hamlet: Between who?

Polonius: I mean the matter you read, my lord.

[Hamlet, II,ii, 193-7]

That was a way of putting it -- not very satisfactory:

A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,

Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle

With words and meanings.

[T.S. Eliot, "East Coker", II, 68-71]

I hate set dissertations --- and above all things in the world, 'tis one of the silliest things in one of them, to darken your hypothesis by placing a number of tall, opake words, one before another, in a right line, betwixt your own and your readers conception --- when in all likelihood, if you had looked about, you might have seen something standing, or hanging up, which would have cleared the point at once.

[Sterne, Tristram Shandy, III, xx]

For the twentieth-century reader, the problem of communication is a very modern concern. The writers of the twentieth century have, in general, been acutely aware of the limitations and ambiguities of language, and the theme of communication is one which has been addressed by every major author of the period. T.S. Eliot, for instance, wrote The Waste Land around the failure of modern man to communicate effectively; and indeed, if we leave aside the inability of the various personae in the poem to communicate among themselves, we are faced with the more immediate problem of understanding the poem as a whole. A look at the notes at the end of The Waste Land, moreover, only confuses us more; thus in form as well as content, the poem illustrates its theme. In James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the figure of Stephen becomes more and more remote from the reader until he slides into the cryptic, introspective scribble of his own diary. Stephen Dedalus never manages, indeed, to communicate effectively with anyone outside himself. Even when he is confronted with the outgoing character of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses, the most he can do is urinate with Bloom;[1] and we are led to suspect that communication for the artist, at least according to Joyce, may amount to little more than a communal pee. Finally, for the writers of the Theatre of the Absurd, language is empty, and the attempt to communicate simply futile: "Words, words," says Guildenstern, in dismissal. "They're all we have to go on." [2]

It is natural, therefore, for the reader of modern literature to associate the problem of communication with twentieth-century writing. As Glenn Hatfield writes, however, "the eighteenth century, like the twentieth, was a language-conscious age." [3] As beliefs in the existence of absolute knowledge gave way to more powerful theories of relativism and probability[4], so the vision of language as a reliable form of communication faded in the same light. Indeed, it was in the eighteenth century that Locke's vision of language as an inefficient conductor of meaning became widely accepted; and as Locke was able to write that

all the Art of Rhetorick, [and] all the artificial and figurative application of Words Eloquence hath invented, are nothing else, but to insinuate wrong Ideas, move the Passions, and therefore mislead the Judgment, [5]

so Daniel Defoe was able to carry the theory further and emphasize the gap between the word itself and the meaning behind it. "Reason," he wrote,

must be the Judge of Sense in Language, and Custom can never prevail over it. Words, indeed, like ceremonies in Religion, may be submitted to the Magistrate; but Sense, like the Essentials, is positive, unalterable, and cannot be submitted to any Jurisdiction; 'tis a law unto it Self, 'tis ever the same, even an Act of Parliament cannot alter it. [6]

Certainty was a thing of the past; relativity in everything a mark of the times.

It is no coincidence, then, that we find a preoccupation with communication (or the lack of it) in the work of almost every writer of the period. From Defoe, whose mistrust of language was so deep that Joyce could call his works "the literary documents in which the soul of the modern realistic novel is glimpsed",[7] to James Hogg, for whom words were so unstable that a witness in court would swear to nothing,[8] the problem of communication is ever-present. It is implicit in the works of Samuel Richardson and Tobias Smollett, who epistolary novels raise the question by their very form. It is discernable also in the writings of John Bunyan and Henry Fielding, authors who, at first glance, may not appear to be concerned with the problem of communication at all -- The Pilgrim's Progress is didactic, a book written directly to the reader,[9] while Fielding's narrators stand between the reader and their tales, constantly editing the stories they tell.[10] We may even watch the failure of language in action when we read Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto; for that novel, while aspiring to the Gothic, achieves only the heights of comedy. It is defeated by its own language. Walpole's subject matter is the stuff of horror and sensationalism, but his rhetoric is that of reason and order; ironically, therefore, the resulting tale is a parody of the very thing he is trying to create.

It is possible, indeed, to link the fascination with which eighteenth-century writers viewed Hamlet with this interest in language and communication. In many ways, Hamlet is a play about words; it is a play in which language is substituted for action to such an extent that when the action is finally taken, it is grossly out of proportion to the act which precipitates it. Hamlet himself, in many ways, is a type of eighteenth-century man. He stands between the worlds of simple action and complex debate, and is himself profoundly aware of the limitations, and, at the same time, the importance of words. He is, indeed, "a wit and a creature of the theatre compelled to renounce word games, plots and amateur theatricals for tragic action, and unable to make the sacrifice." [11] The very fact that Hamlet is alive to carry out his revenge in the end, moreover, depends upon the written word -- upon the contents of the letter carried by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to the English king.

If we examine several of the works of the period, therefore, we discover that the preoccupation with the uncertainty of language occurs more often, and in more depth, than we might suppose. The very convention of the epistolary novel, for example, demonstrates this concern. A story which is told through letters opens up many questions about the process of correspondence itself; more, perhaps, than the author of the story may realize. When Pamela begins to tell her tale, for instance, we are provoked to question the truth of it from the very start. To whom, first of all, is she sending her letters? How has she edited her experience as a result? What has she left out, and why? Do her letters change when she is taken to Lincolnshire and can no longer send them home? As we question, we become aware of the insecurity of the ground upon which the language of correspondence rests.[12] The process of communication is one which operates on two levels, one which is dependent on two participants: the first level is that which involves the writer and his work, the second that which involves the product and its readers. When Pamela is unable to send her letters home, the second level of communication -- the connection between the letter itself and its readers -- is broken. The question arises again: if Pamela herself realizes that her letters cannot go anywhere, then for whom is she writing? The answer, of course, is simple: Pamela is writing for herself. In the novel, indeed, Richardson clearly illustrates what Northrop Frye calls the "respect for literature as process" -- the profound interest with which one regard the writing of a story, rather than the finished product itself[13]. When Pamela goes to Lincolnshire, then, she continues to write because she has to write; for the communication which exists between the writer and the work, if incomplete, is nevertheless legitimate.

When Tobias Smollett chose to use the epistolary form for his book Humphry Clinker, he raised the question of communication through letters in a way which was both similar to that of Richardson, and very dissimilar. Like Richardson, Smollett is able to keep the action and the emotion of his tale "at a continuous present";[14] unlike him, however, Smollett does not use the letters in his novel to underscore the truth of the characters' experience. The purpose, for Smollett, of having the story told by the characters themselves is not to get it straight from the horse's mouth; for, as we notice immediately, the horses all say different things. Richardson, we suspect, would very much like us to take what Pamela says at face value.[15] Smollett, on the other hand, recognizes the subjective element which is active in correspondence, and exploits it. Each episode is presented from at least two perspectives, and it is only by sifting through the biases of each that we begin to see what may really have happened. It is significant, too, that Humphry Clinker himself is the one person who does not -- indeed, cannot -- write a letter; yet he is in fact the most important character in the novel. For Smollett, then, truth and integrity are qualities which lie beyond the shifting surface of words.

When correspondence fails for some reason -- when letters cannot be sent, for instance, or when there is no one around to whom one can write, the epistolary novel becomes a journal. The journal, the memoir, the travelogue and the confessional novel are all common forms in eighteenth-century literature; titles such as A Journal of the Plague Year, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, and The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner abound. With the journal form, indeed, we may claim that the problem of communication has been accepted. Letters are written to specific people, that is, with the certainty of readership in mind; journals, on the other hand, are written for no particular audience. The journal, indeed, is the product of the first level of communication, the result of a writer's need to express himself whether or not he has an audience. For this reason, the journal can become, in certain cases, a desperate form. If the writer's need to create stems not from an exuberant outpouring of ideas but from a desire to articulate and thus control or rationalize his experience, the journal can become a very bleak form indeed. The act of keeping a journal, in fact, may often be the act of a solitary person, of someone who has no community.[16] For if one has nobody in whom to confide or with whom to talk, one can at least create the illusion of community by writing a book.

"Words," writes Robert Merrett, "are inevitably necessary to the control of material circumstances." [17] Pamela writes because she wishes to make sense of the treatment given her by Mr B.; significantly, too, the more confused she becomes, the more compelled she is to write about it. Yet Pamela is not a true desperado. She is frightened and bewildered, and despairs once;[18] but we never feel that she is really all alone in the world. Her Lincolnshire letters, though unsent, remain letters, and she always retains the memory of a caring community of which she is a part, a community which, although perhaps beyond her reach, nevertheless exists. Such is not the case with James Hogg's Robert, the protagonist and author of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner; for Robert is a solitary figure, and his is a memoir which is written out of the desperation of total isolation.

"I was born," Robert writes, "a total outcast in the world." [19] He is, in fact, a being without an identity. He is of uncertain parentage, and is not recognized by his mother's husband as his son; he is excluded from the world of his brother, heir to Dalchastel; even his name is not uniquely his. If this is not enough, he is haunted by a figure who is ambiguous at best, evil at worst, and whose identity remains a mystery to Robert throughout the book -- a figure, incidentally, whose ability to take on different shapes is terrifying. When Robert first encounters him, indeed, it is as if he has come across his double; for the being -- Gilmartin -- resembles Robert like a brother. Robert Wringhim is a person, then, who is surrounded by doubles. His surrogate father, Robert Wringhim the elder, bears his name; Gilmartin has the ability to assume hie shape; and George, his brother, may be viewed as his alter-ego. One cannot, however, communicate with one's double. All one can do is look at it, and there see one's self mirrored. Robert's only sense of self stems from the fact that he believes himself to be one of the Elect, one of the few human beings to be saved from hell-fire; this fact, however, ironically enough, isolates him still more from the world around him. Robert's only means of connecting himself with reality, therefore, is through words -- through the lies which he tells to establish himself in the community, and through his skill at debating theological matters. Language becomes for Robert both a means of insulating himself from reality, and of giving himself a place in the world; the urgency he feels to write his Memoirs stems from his need to reassure himself of his place in the real world. We may see his story, then, as a desperate attempt to communicate with something real, even if that something is himself.

It would be save to say that Hogg was not only preoccupied with the function of language as a means of establishing one's true identity, but also with the ease with which language masks truth. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, indeed, is a book which combines the journal form with that of a historical document, and one which shows up the limitations of language in both. Robert's story is told twice; and it is told first not by Robert but by the Editor of the book. The Editor's Narrative, in fact, thanks to its position at the beginning of the work, serves to bias the reader against Robert's memoir, despite the writer's protestations to the contrary. Robert Wringhim, we are informed, was a fanatical, self-righteous Calvinist whose rigid beliefs led him into the clutches of the Devil himself. We are not, therefore, to take his word for anything. Consequently we approach Robert's tale with a preconception of how things really happened.

Hogg, however, refuses to allow us to rest in that notion. For him, indeed, the nature of truth is one which lies beyond words. For, as Mrs Logan's servant says when called in to testify in court: "I am very scrupulous about an oath. Like is an ill mark. Sae ill, indeed, that I wad hardly swear to ony thing." [20] Truth, she seems to be saying, is something which cannot be had even beyond reasonable doubt. We may apply the maxim to the book as a whole; is there any way that we can know the whole story behind it? Robert is, by his own admission, a liar. The Editor, moreover, is a man with an axe to grind. His narrative, despite its initial show of objectivity -- "It appears from tradition," he writes, "as well as some parish registers still extant ..." [21] -- dissolves into a story based upon conjecture. The objectivity fades, indeed, at the end of the opening paragraph, for the narrative which follows is as full of colourful detail as any fairy-tale; and we feel, consequently, as if we have fallen from the muddled world of historical facts and figures into a prettier, stabler world. As indeed we have. The world into which the Editor has toppled us is the world of fiction;[22] and the Editor himself, far from being a neutral compiler of facts, has been transformed into a spinner of tales. We may see the irony of the Editor's mask of objectivity in the concluding paragraph of his introduction to Robert's memoir. "I now have the pleasure," he writes,

of presenting my readers with an original document of a most singular nature ... I offer no remarks on it, and make as few additions to it, leaving everyone to judge for himself. [23]

This from a man who has taken up ninety-odd pages telling Robert's story from his own point of view. Despite his feigned neutrality, however, he does not fail to judge for us. "We have heard so much of the rage of fanaticism of former days," he concludes, "but nothing to this." [24]

For Hogg, then, words are disguises which cover the shifting shape of truth. Liars, false witnesses and people who manipulate language to their own ends abound in his work. It is as if he has agreed with Guildenstern's frustrated statement, "Words, words. That's all we have to go on",[25] and has taken it upon himself to show how precious little that really is.

It is to Daniel Defoe, however, that we must look for the embodiment of the eighteenth-century suspicion of language. It is he, in fact, who is perhaps the most modern of all the writers of his age in his treatment of language, and we may view his deep interest in the solitary figure as the logical extension of his mistrust of words. If one believes, as Defoe does, in the inadequacy of words to communicate the sense of a matter[26], then it takes no great stretch of the imagination to conclude that a person may never effectively communicate with other people. Indeed, on his essay on Defoe, James Joyce writes:

in his solitary and peculiar death ... there is something significant. He who immortalized the strange solitary, Crusoe, and so many other solitaries lost in the great sea of social misery ... felt perhaps, as the end drew near, nostalgic for solitude.[27]

Defoe's writings, like those of many twentieth-century authors, emphasize the loneliness of the human soul. Robinson Crusoe is in fact the physical embodiment of this solitude, for his isolation from society is absolute. Yet it is the characters who, although surrounded by people, nevertheless remain isolated, that the modern reader finds familiar.

Such a character is Defoe's Roxana. The world in which she lives, for all its glamour, is very similar to that of the Absurdist dramatists. "Consistency," says Stoppard's Rosencrantz, "is all I ask"; "Give us this day our daily mask," responds Guildenstern.[28] Roxana, we feel, were she around today, would echo "Amen"; her world, like that of Robert Wringhim, is a world of doubles, disguises and uncertain identities. Her own identity crumbles as a result[29]; and Roxana, like Robert, turns to words in an attempt to discover who she really is. The writing of her "history", therefore, is a means of anchoring herself in reality, of ridding herself of guilt, of reassuring herself of her own being. But Roxana's words fail her, like everything else. She sinks into a scattered narrative in which repetition and contradiction trap her in ever-decreasing circles; and in the end, her words become just another mask.

It is to A Journal of the Plague Year,[30] however, that we must look if we are to find Defoe's frustration with words most closely revealed in the language he employs. It is to words that the narrator of the Journal turns for stability during the Plague; and it is those words which fail him. As Sherri Freedman writes:

In A Journal of the Plague Year we see how speech and rumours have become closely connected with the plague itself ... language is a means of spreading disease, a malevolent tool.[31]

Like Robert Wringhim and Roxana, the narrator of the Journal is a solitary figure; like them, too, his solitude is to some degree self-imposed. He is a bachelor, and, although he mentions "a Family of Servants" (JPY, 8), the people themselves remain nameless, and, for the most part, faceless beings. He chooses, unlike many other Londoners, to remain in the city during the pestilence, despite his own warnings to the contrary (JPY, 197).[32] As a result, he becomes still more isolated, for the London of the Plague is a sad, sinister place.

The Face of London was now strangely alter'd ... Sorrow and Sadness sat upon every Face; ... all look'd deeply concern'd; and as we say it apparently coming on, so every one look's on himself, and his Family as in the utmost Danger: ... towards the latter End [of the Plague], Mens Hearts were hardned, and Death was so always before their Eyes, that they did not so much concern themselves for Loss of their Friends, expecting, that they themselves should be summoned the next Hour.

(JPY, 16)

There is no communication in the City; the only sound the human voice makes, or so it appears from the narrative, is that of mourning. The language of the book, moreover, reflects this lack of connection. The narrator contradicts himself at every turn; he says that he is a saddler (JPY, 8), but can get no horse to leave town (JPY, 9). He believes that god will spare his life if he stays (JPY, 13), but advises other people to flee (JPY, 108); he admits to the necessity of shutting up houses to prevent the spread of the disease (JPY, 161), but condemns the practice as the cause of much unnecessary suffering (JPY, 47-8). the Saddler, desperate for some kind of order, nevertheless is prevented from finding it by his language.

The purpose for the writing of the account, it appears, is to provide "a Direction" for anyone faces with the prospect of another epidemic. Yet the book itself lacks direction. We cannot say that it goes anywhere, for it does not; even the title of "journal" is misleading, for it is, rather, a sort of memoir[33]. Its only progress occurs along chronological lines, and even those, we feel, are touchstones to which the Saddler returns when he becomes especially confused. Numbers, like words, provide a sense of stability; and the Saddler takes refuge in statistics, bombarding us with lists and collections of figures taken from the Bills of Mortality and other official documents. The more he buries himself in language and numbers, however, the more confused his narrative becomes. His words, which he strings together in a frantic attempt to order his memories, turn bellyside up and muddle him still more.

At times, it appears, he appreciates the inaccuracy of statistics. "I must still be allowed to say, that if the Bills of Mortality said five Thousand," he writes,

I always believ'd it was near twice as much in reality; there being no room to believe that the Account they gave was right, or that indeed, they were, among such Confusions as I saw them in, in any Condition to keep an exact Account.

(JPY, 129)

Nevertheless, he continues to call upon the Bills to authenticate his account. He invokes numbers, moreover, where one can be sure of nothing. When he describes the "terrible Pit", for example, he is unsure of its size ("it was about 40 Foot in Length, and about 15 or 16 Foot broad; and ... about nine Foot deep, but it was said, they dug it near 20 Foot deep" (JPY, 59)); yet he is still able to say exactly how long it takes to fill it, and how many bodies are thrown into it (JPY, 59-60). How, we are tempted to ask, does he know all this? The answer is that he does not; indeed, he cannot. "The Bills show 1,159 deaths from the plague in the [time]. It is not credible that all but 45 would have been regulated to the plague pits," writes Louis Landa in his notes on the text[34]; the figure is the Saddler's invention.

The language of A Journal of the Plague Year, when faced with the supreme difficulty of describing the horror of the Plague, fails in the end. During a plague, indeed, one risks infection if one attempts to communicate with others' as a result, one can only talk with one's family and with oneself. The Saddler has no real family; he calls his servants his "Family", but has no real connection with them. As a result, he can only write for himself, turning his stories inward, and hoping that, through them, he will be able to understand what is happening. The fact that he has some conception what communication is possible only serves to make his efforts more desperate;[35] for it is when one has nothing to aim for that one gives up. Trapped by the inadequacy of language to describe what he has experienced, then[36], the Saddler is ultimately sucked into a vortex of repetition and amnesia, contradiction and imprecision.[37]

We may say, indeed, that the doggerel which rounds off the narrative represents the final collapse of language in the book. For, according to Northrop Frye,

The characteristics of babble[38] are present in doggerel, which is ... a creative process left unfinished through lack of skill or patience ... Doggerel is ... poetry that begins in the conscious mind and has never gone through the associative process[39], It has a prose initiative, but tries to make itself associative by an act of will, and it reveals the same difficulties that great poetry has overcome at a subconscious level.[40]

Like the doggerel, A Journal of the Plague Year is an attempt at creation which, because incomplete, has been reduced to babble. As with doggerel, words have been "dragged in"[41] in an attempt to make things stable. All they do, however, is scramble and distort the facts even more, and obscure any sense there might be in the narrative. The Plague, it seems, has created chaos everywhere, from the streets of London to the Saddler's thoughts. The Saddler, indeed, because isolated, can communicate with no one but himself; yet he is not even allowed to do that. Words, themselves unstable in Defoe's eyes, can regulate nothing. As a result, communication fails on both levels. We leave the book feeling that there is indeed nothing more to language besides "a sort of authentic disorder." [42]

It may indeed be said, therefore, that "The eighteenth century was suspicious of language." [43] As we have seen, in fact, several authors of the period, not least of all Defoe, would agree with Eliot that

Words strain,

Crack and sometimes break under the burden,

Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,

Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,

Will not stay still.[44]

It would be more accurate, however, to claim rather that the eighteenth century was fascinated with words. Not all of the writers of the age regarded language with mistrust. For, as Damien Grant writes,

there was another attitude to language [in the period] ... This was the attitude which looked on language positively as the prime agent of the human imagination and regarded the material of language as a maze of infinite possibilities ... which it was the writer's delight as well as his duty to explore.[45]

Grant goes on to make a distinction between "the very English and very Augustan Locke, Fielding and Johnson" who, like Defoe, distrusted words, and "the very un-English and (in their different ways) non-Augustan Swift, Smollett and Sterne".[46] We can see his point. Into the first category fall writers who, because of their suspicion of language, employ it carefully, keeping it at a distance, attempting (like Fielding, with his constant editorial comments) to keep it fixed in one place. The second group of writers, however, are those for whom words are alive with significance, and whose love of language is based upon precisely that quality which makes the "Augustans" uneasy: the refusal of words to "stay still", and the constant metamorphosis (or "matthewmurphying", as the case may be)[47] into other things.

It is difficult, however, to place Laurence Sterne in any category and leave him there. The Shandean world he has created is a world unto itself; so too is his attitude towards language. The very point about Tristram Shandy is that the book escapes classification; as Tristram himself says,

I write a careless kind of nonsensical, good humoured, Shandean book, which will do your hearts good ---

---And all your heads too, provided you understand it.

(TS, VI, xvii, 332) [48]

Perhaps more than any other eighteenth-century writer, Sterne was intrigued by the combustible nature of language. His use of words was different even from that of the other "non-Augustans" mentioned by Grant. Swift and Smollett, interested as they were in the endless possibilities of words, nevertheless viewed language as a means to an end -- Swift for his satire, and Smollett in Humphry Clinker for the demonstration of his (albeit gentle) moral. For Sterne, however, language was the end in itself.

Tristram Shandy is, in fact, "largely about the imperfections, the radical instability of words." [49] Sterne works with words the way an alchemist works with metals; his purpose, however, is not to discover merely how to make gold, but rather to see how many different metals he can make from one. For him, indeed, as Tristram solemnly tells Eugenius, "---to define--- is to distrust" (TS, III, xxxi, 162); and he spends much of his book undoing the definitions of words.

How, then, we may ask, is the problem of communication addressed in Tristram Shandy? For if Sterne constantly undermines the foundations of words -- and he succeeds, not only in playing upon words which already have certain connotations, but in giving other, more innocent words, naughty under-meanings of their own -- then surely his book, like Defoe's works, is about the failure of communication. The assumption is valid, to a point. It is possible, indeed, to draw several parallels between Laurence Sterne and daniel Defoe, despite Grant's distinction. Both men write, for example, about solitary figures. Like the Saddler, Tristram is, at the time of the book's writing, the only Shandy left alive; moreover, because he himself has fathered no children, he is the last Shady. Like the Saddler, too, his book assumes the form of an autobiography or memoir because, unlike Pamela and the Brambles, Tristram has no one to whom he can write. It is possible to view Tristram's impulse to write down his "Life and Opinions" as stemming from a need to revive the past and to chase away the loneliness of the present. "If 'tis wrote against anything," Tristram writes, "---'tis wrote, an'please your worships, against the spleen" (TS, IV, xxii, 225); against, in other words, depression. Moreover, Sterne, like Defoe, concerned himself with the unreliability of language. We must listen carefully to what Tristram says, and weigh it before we believe it completely; for like the Saddler, whenever Tristram is definite about anything (like the date of his conception), we may be sure that he is wrong. Yet there is one major difference between Sterne and Defoe. While Defoe's demonstration of the inaccuracy of language reflects his sombre view that without words we cannot communicate, Sterne's vision is different. His language, unlike Defoe's, expands as it dissolves. When words lose their meanings in Tristram Shandy they do not perish, nor do they "decay with imprecision". Rather, they take on new significance, metamorphosing before our eyes, stretching to acquire fresh meanings. Sterne revels in the very anarchy of words, twisting them around, and turning them, like Father William in Alice's Wonderland poem, on their heads; and when, pushed to their limits, they tumble exhaustedly to the ground, then he allows silence to speak for itself.

Perhaps the most significant thing about Tristram Shandy in a discussion of language lies in the fact that some of the most eloquent parts of the book occur when words fail -- when Uncle Toby begins to whistle Lillabullero, for example, or when Trim draws flourishes in the air with a stick.[50] The book itself is an extension of this pattern. When Tristram cannot describe something accurately, he does not, as the Saddler does, delve into his word-hoard, throwing together sentence after sentence only to conclude "that it was indeed very, very, very dreadful, and such as no tongue can express." (JPY, 60). Instead he lays down his pen; and his words are replaced by visual images. Indeed, as Ian Ross writes,

Sterne ... accepts ... that though language may itself falsify felt experience, the writer has no option but to use it or remain silent. the failure of language in its primary function as a means of communication is certainly a major theme of Tristram Shandy ... the panoply of black pages, blank pages, missing chapters, asterisks and dashes, as much as his own fondness for aposiopesis ... suggests Sterne's own belief that communication takes place more truly through gesture and sympathetic identification than through words.[51]

Sterne, therefore, having recognized the limitations of language, nevertheless does not allow himself to be confined by those limitations. When they are reached, he does the only sensible thing: he keeps quiet and lets his meaning transmit itself at will. when language fails for Sterne, therefore, the communication of essentials does not.

Tristram, we are told, hates "set dissertations" for their strings of "tall, opake words". Tristram's book, therefore, is anything but a set dissertation, and his language is surprisingly transparent. Words are his business. Linked as he is to both Hamlet and Lear's Fool, they must be;[52] but they are never his masters. When they misbehave, indeed, Tristram (and Sterne through him) sets them whirling madly into nonsense. And like the spokes of a wheel, which, when stationary, can interrupt an onlooker's view of what lies beyond them, Sterne's language, when set spinning, allows us a clear vision of the meaning which lies at its heart.

The question of communication in the eighteenth century is one which occupied many minds of the age. The breakdown of communication, whether that between the writer and his subject, or between the reader and his text, was a problem to be addressed. If we return to Grant's division of the attitudes towards language and adapt it for our own purposes, we may regard those attitudes as ranging from outright suspicion of language to a celebration of its instability; and we may place Daniel Defoe at one end and Laurence Sterne at the other. For Defoe, communication suffers a complete breakdown when its burden is placed upon words. Not only is the reader unable to make sense of the Saddler's text, but the Saddler himself is similarly unable to effectively arrange his thought on paper. As a result he becomes isolated from the world around him, and from his text and his readers as well. The opposite, however, is true of Sterne. Tristram is able to produce a work which, if not true to its title, nevertheless reflects the flow of his thoughts, jumbled though they may be.[53] More than that, he is able not only to speak directly to his readers, but also to provide them with room in the text to reply. In his hands the text becomes a dynamic entity, and the readers of his work are participants in it, even, to a degree, co-creators. Tristram is not like Fielding's narrators, who are so talkative that we can never get a word in edgewise. When we read Tristram Shandy we feel as if we are holding a conversation with Tristram, rather than reading his memoirs. And for an eighteenth-century writer, in whose age the fear of losing communication through the inaccuracy of words was great, the achievement of drawing that close to twentieth-century readers, who have been taught that there is no point in trying to make contact through words, is an achievement indeed.

NOTES

---

[1] See James Joyce, Ulysses, (London, 1968), p. 623.

[2] Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, (London, 1967), p. 30.

[3] Glenn W. Hatfield, Henry fielding and the Language of Irony, (Chicago, 1968), p. 1.

[4] See Valerie Grosvenor Myer, "Introduction", in Laurence Sterne: Riddles and Mysteries, (London, 1984), p. 9; also see Margaret J. Olser, "Certainty, Scepticism, and Scientific Optimism", in Probability, time and Space in Eighteenth Century Literature, (New York, 1979) pp. 3-28.