I. Introduction

Die Nibelungen stands out within the German film director Fritz Lang's oeuvre for a number of reasons. In addition to being the director's first great success, it is one of his most powerful films, and in all likelihood his most misunderstood. From the eminent film theorist Siegfried Kracauer onwards, this work has often been associated with Nazi and Wagnerian myths of Germanic origins, when in fact it is opposed to Wagner and all that he stood for, at least on the ideological level. It is clear to anyone who watches the film closely that it is open to many read-ings other than the blood and soil one imposed upon it by Hitler's fol-lowers. And once we move beyond the problematic approach of Kracauer, which tends to reduce this and other Weimar films to teleological fore-bodings of authoritarianism, the actual qualities of this film stand out with greater clarity. Die Nibelungen's bold, highly effective cinematog-raphy, revolutionary approach to Germanic myth, and subtle use of what I shall call “figured” or implied sound put Lang on the map of Europe's emerging directors when it first appeared in 1924. Lang's first foray into epic cinema, this film had an unmistakable impact on others working in an analogous direction, such as Sergei Eisenstein, in Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible.

In what follows I explore hitherto overlooked aspects of Lang's misconstrued epic by examining its artistic response to, and trenchant critique of, the ideological underpinnings of Wagner's music-drama. Both the response and the critique are the result of an implicit transformation of evolutionary schemes of the origin, development, and decline of peoples elaborated by the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ ethnological discourse and related speculation on the roots of “civilized” Europe. By focusing on these facets of the film, my aim is not to reset the balance between the aesthetic and the ideological dimensions of Die Nibelungen. My objective is more modest: to seek to show how Lang's strategies of sonic figuration rework Wagnerian ideas of the Gesamtkunstwerk and the leitmotiv in accordance with the novel technical conditions and aesthetic possibilities of film.

Moving from these considerations, this essay seeks to clarify the implications of the sonic as a specific perceptual attribute and narrative marker in Die Nibelungen.

I: Introduction

Vague Sounds, Insecure; Tentative. I can hear some squeaking, then cracking; sometimes I hear rumbling noises. It sounds as if I were carefully listening to a person who has not yet really decided what she or he or they wish to do now.

How this person acts sounds clueless, sometimes fuzzy. Sometimes, this person I can hear is moving much too quickly. But is it even a person? A bit later this person strange to me moves way too slowly. They are audibly breathing and idling, moving back and fro. Doubtful. Waiting. Biding their time.

I continue listening. The sounds are tender, brief, close to inaudible. Is this some thin stream of water running down? I need to listen. Is the performer just peeing now? Is it audiovoyeurism, is it my sheer surprise, or a strange, possibly perverted fascination with a clear streak of repulsion and being freaked out? The alien performer begins now to breathe in, continuously and very loud. They are breathing much harder, then more deeply, creating strange and uncomfortable noises made of mucus and air. Maybe it is cleaning his or her or their throat? Or is she or he starting to spit out or even vomit any second now? The sounds I hear are now clearly and intentionally disgusting; as if I were listening to some scaremongering, maybe alien performer who wishes to create the Foley sounds for some cheap but effective splatter horror movie. The monster is panting now, scarily—then it prepares to spit out in direction of its prey. Are we its prey, we, the listeners?

Then the repulsive performer of throat sounds turns silent, quite abruptly. One can hear them moaning and hissing; a faint hint of humming and vocalizing, briefly grunting and gargling. Again, I hear the continuous sound of some watery liquid. Even this liquid now sounds deeply uncomfortable to me: what body liquids are now leaking out, streaming out of this person?

The person moves about in its room. Further sounds can be heard, mostly of someone inconclusively moving around. A motorcycle drives by. Coughing. Then I hear more breathing, and even more guttural noises. I can actually even hear the tongue, the flesh inside this monster's mouth, the uvula palatina, moving and being moved by the harsh and panting stream of air. Is this stranger now trampling aggressively on the wooden floor of this room?

I. Introduction

Max Neuhaus Was Born on August 9, 1939, and died on February 3, 2009. He was an American musician, composer, and artist who was a noted interpreter of contemporary and experimental percussion music in the 1960s. The grandson of an immigrant from Hamburg, Neuhaus attended the Manhattan School of Music, very quickly becoming one of the best percussionists of his time. His musicianship introduced him to the magical circle of the musical avant-garde of the sixties. Meeting avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen during the inaugural performance of the composer's Zyklus in New York, as well as contacts with other composers of the time—Edgard Varèse, John Cage, and Morton Feldman—offered him friendship and access to musical culture. Very significant is also a commission by the Donaueschingen Music Festival for a collective radio sound work at the end of his life. But, more significantly, at a certain point, Neuhaus invented what he named “sound sculptures.” Soon these installations were divided into categories such as Place Pieces, Moment Pieces, etc. Their common denominator, the fact they all were tied to a precise locality and time, meant that the sound could not be reproduced authentically. Retraining at the Bell Laboratories in making electronic music gave Neuhaus an incomparable palette of sound samples from which he composed his work. He went on to create numerous permanent and short-term sound installations. He performed as a percussion soloist on concerts tours throughout the United States with Pierre Boulez (1952–63) and Karlheinz Stockhausen (1963–64). In 1964 and 1965, he presented solo recitals at Carnegie Hall in New York City and in fifteen major European cities. In 1966, he published on Mass Art Inc. four live realizations of John Cage's Fontana Mix (1958).

An indeterminate graphic score originally intended for a tape piece, with or without additional instruments, the Fontana Mix-feed, in Neuhaus's realizations, employed controlled feedback generated by placing contact microphones on percussive instruments and hooking the microphones up to loudspeakers positioned directly opposite the instruments. Neuhaus's work as a percussionist culminated in an album of contemporary solo percussion work, Electronics & Percussion—Five Realizations, which he recorded for Columbia Masterworks in 1968. From then on he pursued a career as a contemporary artist by developing sound installations, using electronic or electroacoustic sounds, which would emanate from a source within a particular space or location.

1. Introduction

In 1955 Heinrich Böll Composed one of the most biting satires about postwar German radio; a short story entitled “Dr. Murkes gesammeltes Schweigen” (Dr. Murke's Collected Silences). The story takes place at a radio station, where Murke spends his days recording and editing, all the while partaking in a secret hobby—at the end of each day he collects the snippets of “dead air” cut from the programs, pastes them together, and brings them home to listen to the silence. For Murke, silence is an antidote to the superficial and morally empty productions of German radio in the age of the Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle); yet implicit in Murke's desire for silence is a critique of the silencing of the memories of the Second World War and the Holocaust. German radio's complicity in this history is addressed directly in the story by Murke's technician, Humkoke, who reveals his own entanglement with the radio propaganda machine of National Socialism. Speaking of an occasion when he was once asked to cut a four-hour-long speech by Hitler by three minutes, Humkoke quips: “Als ich anfing, das Band zum erstenmal zu hören, war ich noch ein Nazi, aber als ich die Rede zum drittenmal durch hatte, war ich kein Nazi mehr” (As I began to listen to the tape, I was still a Nazi, but after I had heard the tape three times through, I was no longer a Nazi).

Murke's hobby and Humkoke's confession bring to the foreground a disturbing ambivalence rooted in Nazi radio's “assault on the ears”; for these men, silence is a refuge and the act of “tuning out” a necessary defense mechanism. Böll's story, which was read on the radio in a pro-duction by Radio Bremen in 1958 and eventually dramatized as a radio play (SR 1965, SWR/SF 1986), thus grounds the tensions surrounding Vergangenheitsbewältigung in the deep-seated anxieties evoked by the sounds of radio and the act of radio listening that persisted in German-speaking culture well into the 1950s.

Böll was not alone in his desire to use the radio drama genre as a means of critically reflecting on and satirizing both the radio as an institu-tion and postwar society in the Federal Republic more broadly.

I. Introduction

Martin Heidegger Remains a notorious thinker, notorious for his Nazism and for the alleged opacity of his writings and lectures. Yet it is difficult to think of many others who have exerted so much influence on the trajectories of twentieth-century thought. One particularly interesting element of his corpus is the way he frequently foregrounds listening. Others in the phenomenological tradition generally focused on the εἶδoς (eidos—the visual aspect of experience) or treated questions of listening in a way that subordinates the experience to what is being heard, especially in the context of music. Maurice Merleau-Ponty dedicated two small notes to music that he sadly never much expanded upon, and most of his other examples are either centered around bodily experience (that is, phantom limb syndrome) or seeing, as in the case of his famous reading of Cézanne. Roman Ingarden, the Polish student of Husserl, certainly wrote much on the subject of music, including perhaps one of the most sustained phenomenological engagements with questions of music's ontology, yet listening itself was left mostly fallow. Another student of Husserl (and later of Heidegger), Günther Anders, centered his early work around the phenomenology of music; a collection of this work was recently published. Edmund Husserl, Heidegger's major teacher, was overtly engaged with questions of music and sound, although references to these subjects remain spare throughout his work; at the beginning of perhaps the inaugural text of modern phenomenology, Ideas, he evokes the question of Ton (tone), which, in German, at least in a more explicit sense than in English, contains valences of both music and sound simultaneously (and therefore serves as an ideal piece of deconstructive vocabulary for those interested in critiquing the boundary between music and sound), and his analysis of inner time-consciousness is dependent on the metaphor of a melody.

Heidegger's corpus positively abounds with central terms that are clearly sonic in their frame of reference yet are only very rarely explicitly linked with music. A few examples: Stimmung (often translated as mood, but can also be used to refer to the tuning of an instrument), Gewissensruf (call of conscience), horchen (hearkening), and, of course, hören (listening) itself. Elsewhere, there are intriguing references to the Lied der Erde (Earth's song).

In this chapter, Heidegger's relationship to sonic phenomena will be explored in a broad and general fashion.

I. Auditory Subjects, Sonic Material

How do cultures sound? How do sounds affect the human subject's immersion in the world? How do we critically interrogate the many ways in which sounds contribute to a culture's self-fashioning and self-articulation? How are sounds past and present produced, recorded, and received through historically changing performances, media technologies, sound archives, artistic projects, political scenarios, and everyday practices? How does the materiality of sounds attain meaning through its resonance with the human imagination, analytical reason, and interpretive fantasies? How do sounds intersect with verbal language and visual perception? The present Companion seeks to address such questions by focusing on sound in German-speaking cultures, encompassing the Middle Ages, the classical-romantic period and nineteenth-century nationalism, high-capitalist industrial modernity and its cultural avant-garde, the National Socialist regime and the Holocaust, postwar East and West Germany, and the digital culture of the present. The Companion's title highlights that practices of sound production and listening, although fundamental to human existence, necessarily emerge in such specific historical periods and geographies. Sonic practices are affiliated with, or subversive of, aesthetic values, political ideologies, and media technologies, for which German-speaking cultures offer particularly fertile, if often contested, even traumatic grounds.

The present volume reflects the wide compass of this field as well as the diversity of intellectual positions among its practitioners. Although influenced by pioneering North American scholarship, the investigation of sonic events and auditory experiences by scholars working in, or affiliated with, German cultural studies has by now developed its own academic identity, methodologies, and interests. Nonetheless, it would be difficult, and not very useful, to try to differentiate specifically German (or Austrian, or Swiss) types of sound studies methodologies and practices from what has by now become a truly transnational discipline. Hence the Companion is not primarily an introduction to the discipline of sound studies practiced in German-speaking cultural institutions and public spheres. Rather, it offers a critical, albeit necessarily selective, survey of the diverse ways in which sound is represented, interrogated, and analyzed within German-speaking cultures. From these contexts, urgent questions of theory, methodological procedures, and cognitive interests arise to provide insights into what sound studies can offer today.

I. Introduction: The Sound in the Picture

Each literary epoch sounds differently, and that holds true not just in a metaphorical sense. A comparison between two texts, one from Realism, the other from Modernism, is suitable to elucidate this thesis. In the beginning of his novel Stine, first published in 1889/90, Theodor Fontane maps out an (almost) everyday street scenario, located in the middle of Berlin:

Although the narrator states that Invalidenstraße “looked” as usual, and accordingly describes mostly visual phenomena, what he first mentions is, conspicuously enough, the bell ringing of the horsecars and hence a sound. As incidental and irrelevant as it might appear at first glance, or, rather, at first listen, the bell ringing is a specific as well as significant sound. For Fontane's contemporaries, it was a clear hint to the time in which the story takes place: the present or recent past, the terminus post quem being the introduction of the horsecar in Berlin in 1865. The bell ringing of the horsecars thus functions as a marker of time: from it alone, attentive contemporary readers were able to deduce that they were about to read a novel about Berlin in the Gründerzeit (in fact, the story takes place in August 1877 or 1878). Space, and with it social status, is also marked by the bell-ringing, for at that time the horsecars followed selected routes through the city only, thereby favoring the infrastructure of certain districts.

We have discovered in Chapters 1 through 5 that in drawing his Shandean characters, Sterne's revision of dullness fuses benevolent intentions with self-defeating actions. We have found, too, that this paradoxical blend of self-sacrifice and self-inflation draws us within the Shandean world to admire their generosity and to laugh at their ineptness. Within the ambiguity of that world, we have also learned that while the benevolence of Yorick seems nearly unachievable, the life of utter dullness seems nearly unforgivable. Not surprisingly, as Mary-Celine Newbauld has thoroughly documented, such keen Sternean insights to the ambiguity of the human condition profoundly influenced other creative works in eighteenth-century Britain, including sentimental travel narratives, theater, and graphic arts.

The International Inf luence of Tristram Shandy and Sterne's International Inf luencers

In reading responses to Sterne's Tristram Shandy beyond England, we learn that Sterne's revision of dullness has been the primary cause of his work's popularity and influence. Lodwick Hartley writes, for instance, that Tristram Shandy enjoyed popularity with eighteenth-century American statesmen. While Thomas Jefferson admired Sterne's moral “emphasis on inward motive and intention,” Aaron Burr, thinking of forgivable, well-intended Shandean dullness, admitted that “if I had read Sterne more and Voltaire less, I should have known that the world was wide enough for Hamilton and me.” After outlining the many inept, eighteenth-century American imitations of Sterne's sentiment Hartley explains that twentieth-century Americans have appreciated Sterne for his Joycean treatment of “human isolation in a world where everybody is victimized by the limitations of language and by his own peculiar ‘association of ideas’ “ (Hartley 1971, 167). Yet American readers still value Sterne, says Hartley, as a “prophet of men of good will” (Hartley 1971, 168).

Sterne's revision of dullness has also strongly influenced non-English-speaking writers and readers. As A. O. Aldridge explains, Brazil's Machado de Assis reveals a “peevish pessimism” over worldly dullness that makes his tone more sardonic than Sterne’s. But Aldridge also notes that Machado de Assis revealed Sterne's influence by using the digressive technique to involve readers in the creative process of exposing hobbyhorsical dullness (Aldridge 1971, 170–75).

Those who enjoy humor ranging from the sentimental to the ridiculous have long embraced Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, for such readers attest, as do Anne Bandry-Scubbi and Peter de Voogd (2013), that Sterne keeps his promise to arouse laughter that will help them to “fence against” ineluctable pain. As Madeleine Descargues- Grant and many other scholars attest, among the most memorable sources of laughter in Sterne's work stands Tristram's father Walter, the bungling philosopher of systems who stumbles in unbuttoned trousers to his son's christening, hoping to secure the infant's future with “Trismegistus,” a name, Walter asserts, that will guarantee the boy's greatness (4: 384; 1: 57). Equally entertaining, Tristram's Uncle Toby, the gentle ex-captain of artillery, plays boldly at war games but trembles in innocence before seductive Widow Wadman and tenderly refrains from hurting a bothersome fly (6: 556; 8: 715; 3:191). Most readers will also admit to chuckling heartily over Tristram's bawdy at the expense of an oversexed abbess (7: 606), and over Parson Yorick's hot-chestnut prank at the expense of the pompous old fornicator Phutatorius (4: 378); and such readers may laugh all the more freely with license granted by both Tristram and Sterne (1: Dedication to Pitt, 9; 8: 716).

Yet, as Richard A. Lanham explains, critics have long debated the meaning of Sterne's humor. In the ludicrous but short-lived clashes between the Shandys, all described in the following chapters, many mid-twentieth-century scholars see moral instruction, a reflection of the need for reasonable heads to join generous hearts in Christian living, an expression of faith in humanity's capacity for goodness in response to pain. Some critics from the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries have echoed these moral themes. For instance, J. T. Parnell finds in Sterne's humor a commitment to Anglican values and an expression of “fideistic skepticism” in response to philosophical systems woven from pride, and Ryan Stark speaks of Sterne advancing “the Christian faith” in a “decidedly odd way” by exposing “gloomy religionists everywhere.”

Death, says Alvin Kernan, always emerges as the great symbol of tragedy. Isolation, therefore, as Northrop Frye explains, becomes the primary theme of the “tragic mode” in which the hero's exclusion from humanity often ends in exclusion from life. Though it seems at first strange to speak of tragedy in a satiric work devoted to laughter, the “underlying tonality” of Tristram Shandy modulates with tragic action, for the benevolent dullness of Sterne's comic heroes ends in either isolation or death.

Before progressing with his own life and opinions, Tristram relates the story of Yorick's death, which ends with the symbolic black page. I will therefore begin this chapter with a brief return to the tragic “fatality” that “attends the actions” of Yorick in his campaign against grave dullness (1: 24), focusing this time on Eugenius, who functions, to use Frye's terminology, as the “outspoken critic of the tragic action” and the witness of Yorick's cathartic death (Frye 1957, 218). Agreeing with Eugenius rather than with Helene Moglen, who finds Yorick an innocent victim of a dull community, I will show that Yorick, like most tragic protagonists in Frye's “high mimetic” mode, makes choices that cause his fate.

Eugenius’ Tragic Friend

We have already seen the type of Tristram's isolation in the penalty Yorick pays for his jesting campaign against dullness. We have also heard the warning of Yorick's friend Eugenius that the “fools” and “knaves” rebuked by Yorick's “sport” will challenge the parson with “war” (1: 32). As the “faithful friend,” whom Frye describes as “refusing, or at any rate resisting” that tragic hero's “movement toward catastrophe” (Frye 1957, 218), generous Eugenius spells out for the incorrigible parson-jester the “consequences” of such warfare with worldly dullness (1: 29). First, Yorick will suffer his “faith questioned,” his “works belied,” his “wit forgotten,” and his “learning trampled on” by the “malice” of “hired ruffians” (1: 32). Finally, in the “last scene” of his “tragedy,” the “helpless” parson will be “sacrificed” on the “fire” fueled by his jests in order to appease those who have felt the sting of his corrective wit (1:32).

I have argued in Chapters 1 through 5 that Sterne has consciously revised the traditional action of dullness in Tristram Shandy, that he has created benevolent Shandean characters who frustrate their good intentions with prideful, selfdefeating actions. Forwarding this same argument, Ronald Paulson asserts that Sterne also “modified the satiric process” in writing A Sentimental Journey. Though Yorick functions as a satirist in Tristram Shandy, writes Paulson, in A Sentimental Journey, the traveling parson becomes “both satiric object and observer” (264). To put Paulson's comment in the terminology used above, in A Sentimental Journey, Yorick displays, just like his friends in Tristram Shandy, benevolent dullness. Not surprisingly, in a close reading of Sterne's Continuation of Bramine's Journal, we find this same display of Shandean dullness found in A Sentimental Journey in Sterne's nonfiction account of Yorick-Sterne's passion for Eliza Draper and his anguish in England as she makes her own sentimental journey to India.

A Sentimental Journey

Yorick begins his journey basking in the warmth of his benevolent urge to share his prosperity, but his prejudice toward mendicants quickly exposes his self-righteous dullness. Sounding more like Tristram, who blames all his problems on fortune (1: 8), Yorick claims that he was “predetermined” to put his purse away when the “mild, pale” monk approaches, as the hard-working clergyman, now idle, cannot abide those who get through life in “sloth and ignorance, for the love of God.” Though Yorick later grants charity, in the form of a snuff box, to the monk (1: 26), his sudden, generous reversal, as John Stedmond points out, results from his desire to impress the melancholy beauty he has met. Yet the legitimate warmth of Yorick's heart radiates first from the guilt he suffers for his cruelty to the monk, guilt he feels before he meets the woman (1: 11); later, Yorick will cry over the monk's grave with only the reader there to note his feelings (1: 27).

Yorick's Sentimentality

Yorick's tears, however, do not always flow from deep feeling, as Stedmond argues in discussing the famous caged-starling scenes. Though Yorick sighs apostrophes to the abstraction “Liberty” and laments the “miseries of confinement” suffered in the bird cage and in the Bastille (2: 96, 97), the dull parson, observes Stedmond, forgets to release the bird in his anxiety over his own need for a passport to preserve his freedom (Stedmond 1967, 155; 2: 92).

In a letter written in 1767, one year before his death, Laurence Sterne describes himself as a “sentimental being” but assures his anonymous aristocratic friend that he counts himself as no ineffectual, scatter-brained Shandy. “The world has imagined,” Sterne explains to the earl, that “because I wrote Tristram Shandy I was myself more Shandean than I really was.”

We must acknowledge Sterne's disclaimer here when we contrast his sales to those of Tristram, who laments the “ten cart loads” of unsold volumes (8: 663) and receives no recognition in Paris (7: 599). In contrast to such failure and anonymity, in a 1762 letter to the famous actor David Garrick, Sterne writes of the “unexpected honours” he received in France, boasting that he has, unlike Tristram, converted many French readers “unto Shandeism” (Letter 81: 224; Letter 84: 242). Indeed, in his 1765 letter to Robert Foley, Sterne admits receiving, unlike Tristram, a “considerable sum” from sales of Tristram Shandy (Letter 147: 409), and Sterne's letter to Thomas Becket in the same year describes gratifying sales (Letter 89: 261).

Yet despite this contrast between the author's success and the surrogate's failure as well as Sterne's denial of Shandean kinship, Sterne shares Tristram's authorial experiences and motives. We have already seen in Tristram Shandy itself that Sterne and Tristram have accepted the inevitable persecution that comes to wit and the inevitable death that comes to humanity, and that, their tragic resignation notwithstanding, both authors have committed themselves to writing for friendship and against dullness. Sterne's letters reflect this same Shandean resignation and commitment.

Sterne's Epistolary Rebukes of Moralistic Dullness

Even though Tristram Shandy became immediately fashionable, Sterne, like Tristram, received numerous rebukes from the “grave” moralists. In a 1760 letter to Garrick, Sterne speaks of the “wound” he received from the rumor that he intended to lampoon William Warburton as Tristram's tutor. Such a report, says Sterne, mirrors the kind of “malice” that “brought poor Yorick to his grave” (Letter 46: 123). In that same year, Sterne confesses in a post-script to a letter addressed to Warburton that “the scribblers’ use me ill” (Letter 59: 152); Sterne was also accused of slandering Dr. Mead in his portrait of the pompous Dr. Kunastrokius (Letter 45: 125). Reiterating

In analyzing the plot of satire in Tristram Shandy, I will first join Melvyn New and others in affirming that Sterne has set up good-natured Parson Yorick as his model of the humble but active life of benevolence, his Christian satiric standard, which exposes by contrast the self-defeating folly of dullness. But I will depart from New and John Stedmond by demonstrating the paradoxical blend of dullness and benevolence in the Shandean world. Focusing primarily on Tristram's father, Walter, I will show that Shandean self-deceptions flow from generosity as well as from self-importance. I will argue, too, that Sterne created this ambiguous but laughter-provoking fictional world not to make dullness seem harmless but to draw readers into “friendship” with those—the Shandys—who lack the brutal brand of dullness that buried Yorick, thereby luring readers toward the standard of humble benevolence that most will never fully attain. To emphasize the elusive challenge of Yorick's life, I will finally illustrate how Sterne uses Tristram to mock the dullness in readers that he fails to see in himself.

Dullness and Distortion of Reality

The plot of satire, says Alvin Kernan, relates events in no causal, linear sequence. Rather, the ironic, apparently disjunctive plot relates the actions of the self-deceived in conflict with the actions of the real world. Motivated by pride, by the conviction that they may exceed limitations that define mortals, the dull ignore “what is and is not possible for man” and, therefore, secure perpetual self-defeat and “build,” ultimately, a world without form, a wasteland swarmed by a mindless mob (Kernan 1965, 102, 14). Such a plot, notes Kernan, illustrates Northrop Frye's description of the “mythos of winter,” one of the four “mythoi or generic plots,” the mythos that portrays the energetic “creation” of chaos, of a “world that desire rejects” (Kernan 1965, 183, 14).

This triumph of chaos results, Kernan writes, from a “multitude of smaller movements” of dullness, which he categorizes as confusing reality, magnifying reality, and diminishing reality. When dull people use language, explains Kernan, they produce confusion rather than clarity because they intend to display their verbal wit, not to share their observations on reality (Kernan 1965, 30).

Reflecting the turn toward cultural studies, the rich site for exploring issues of race, gender, and social injustices, the twenty-first century has seen many university presses publishing books focusing on multiple works and disparate authors. Most scholars have celebrated the value and timeliness of such publications, but I would argue that the time has come for a fresh reading of Sterne's greatest novel. In perusing the criticism on Sterne's work, we find Tristram Shandy frequently cited as a “novel on novel-writing,” a novel well “grounded” in “eighteenth-century fiction” yet a precursor to Joycean streamof- consciousness narration and to “postmodern” thought (Keymer 20, 27); we also find descriptions of Sterne's novel as equally grounded in satire on “Enlightenment system-building,” satire reminiscent of Burton's reflections on the sources of melancholy, Swift's allegories on madness, Cervantes’ anti-romances, and the “learned wit” of Rabelais and Monteyne (Keymer 20, 21, 24). Reflecting these diverse descriptions of Sterne's most famous novel, book-length studies of Sterne's Tristram Shandy appeared frequently in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s; since then, Sterne studies have multiplied and prospered, primarily in academic journals, but also in specialized books.

I offer this book, then, to demonstrate that, beyond the traditional objects of satire found in Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Sterne has revised the satiric plot in developing what I call the “benevolent dullness” of Walter, Toby, and Tristram; I borrow this term “dullness,” of course, from Alexander Pope's great satire “The Dunciad,” published in 1743, two decades before Sterne began publishing the first volumes of his novel.

The Shandys’ self-defeats derive, as this book will show, from generous instincts and from deliberate “moral characters” as well as from arrogant selfdeceptions that typify traditional objects of satire, such as leaders in government, the military, the sciences, the arts, and literature—the intelligent but sinisterly self-absorbed dunces that populate Pope's nightmarish poem and threaten collectively to “bury all” in a culture of “darkness.”

Additionally, the book will show that this paradoxical blend of dullness and benevolence in Sterne's characters generates an ambiguous moral condition that evokes both praise and blame in Sterne's readers.

The action of Shandean dullness, as we have seen, unfolds as radically satiric: arrogant self-deceptions produce social conflict and self-defeat. Witness once again the family “harmony” disrupted by Walter's self-indulgent research on Slawkenbergius, which secures neither the nose nor the future of Tristram (3: 277). We have also seen, however, that Shandean self-deceptions derive as well from self-preserving yet generous instincts fused with conscious benevolence in efforts for social union. Note once more Tristram's efforts on behalf of “friends,” partially described in the previous chapter. All comic characters, says Alvin Kernan, possess this vitality to preserve and give the self, and these efforts to reconstruct dull society on a benevolent foundation, explains Northrop Frye, define the goal of comic action. Because comic characters seek survival and freedom renewed in social union, they have the will to triumph over the “blocking forces” of dullness and the absurd mischances that together challenge their efforts to order human existence.

Writing his life and opinions for the sake of friendship defines Tristram's comic will to preserve himself and to unite others, a will, says William V. Holtz, that Tristram shares with his creator. The degree to which Sterne's art depicts the “comic triumph of life” over dullness will be the primary concern of this chapter (Kernan 1965, 187). To define the comic view of human limitations, I will first return to Tristram's story of Yorick, the parson whom Tristram endorses, before and beyond the black pages, for what Kernan calls his comic spirit, his warmth, and his wit. I will then follow John Stedmond in using Yorick to measure the dullness of Tristram's world; departing from Stedmond, however, I will show that Tristram purposely resurrects Yorick the jester not only to help him win friends through laughter but also to sharpen the contrast between Walter's educational follies and the learning abused by the worldly dull.

I will turn then to Tristram's self-assertive comic struggle against what Kernan calls the “ludicrous minutiae” that fill his family's past and prevent the telling of all. In Kernan's view, Tristram deprives his autobiography of the “dignity” he would give it when he insists on recounting past “trivialities” such as the ridiculousness of his naming and circumcision ceremonies (Kernan 1965, 96).