ABSTRACT
There is a stock comic situation in which two people go through the motions of communicating but finally fail because each assumes that an idiosyncratic perspective is shared by the other when in fact it is not. A classic instance is the abortive conversation between Walter Shandy and Uncle Toby running through Sterne’s marvelously madcap Tristram Shandy. Toby is preoccupied with his hobby-horse: he constructs models of famous battles as a means of making order out of the experiences that matter to him (the tentacles of modern rhetoric have a long reach). He employs a language, rich in military allusions and similes, that reflects his priorities, and he hears the remarks of others largely in terms of his own military interests. Walter, meanwhile, has a hobby-horse of his own, a fascination with the austere intellectual world of ancient logic, where presumably dispassionate rational analysis can get at the truth of things and inject coherence into human affairs. Since neither of these peculiar characters is prepared to take into account the viewpoint of the other, talk between them is hilariously oblique and unproductive. Walter’s reference to a “train of ideas,” for example, suggests to Uncle Toby a “train of artillery”: on another occasion, mention of the “bridge” of Tristram’s nose is misunderstood as a reference to the Marquis d’Hôpital’s drawbridge; and elsewhere, Walter’s elegant dissertation on the logical value of auxiliary verbs suggests nothing more to Toby and Corporal Trim than the auxiliary troops at the siege of Limerick. Each time these individuals attempt to converse, their hobby-horses interfere, extinguishing the hope that any constructive meeting of minds can result from acts of language.
