ABSTRACT

Tristram Shandy places its bearer from the very beginning in a tradition that runs counter to the prevailing interest in the text's entertainment value. This chapter shows how, in the eighteenth century, it does break up; or, to be more precise: how the concept of melancholy is at the same time split into its components and begins to be transformed into a new synthesis. Tristram Shandy is in more than one sense an exploration of the ambiguities inherent in Benjamin's analysis of baroque mentality. The German Romantics claimed Tristram Shandy as forerunner in their enterprise of reconstructing a metaphysical totality that was to consist of transcendence firmly anchored in immanence, reconciling gloom and mania. In Robert Burton's Anatomy, neither imaginative excess or the amassing of countless examples, nor the empty loquacity trying to create the illusion of a dialogue with the reader, succeed in providing ways out of this immanence.