Of Fanciful Noses and Other Jokes of the Kind: The Structure of the Strange Loop and the Defence of Curved Lines in Tristram Shandy’s "nose episode"
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24162/EI2024-12486Keywords:
Augustan Literature, Hogarthian Aesthetics, Laurence Sterne, Metalepsis, Strange loopAbstract
“The Tale of Slawkenbergius”, also known as the “Episode of the Nose”, is one of the most recognised and quoted passages from Tristram Shandy (Sterne 1759-1767). This short story from the fourth volume of Sterne’s novel has received a great deal of attention in the specialised bibliography. However, the studies so far published analyse the story as an isolated episode and concentrate mainly on the use of irony, double entendre and puns as a means of alluding to sexual issues (Gallagher 2018; Walsh 2009). The aim of this paper is to study “The Tale of Slawkenbergius” no longer as a humorous representation of the grotesque, but as a metaliterary manifestation of Sterne’s poetics, thus relating the tale to the structure of the novel. The way in which Sterne uses the device of the “strange loop” in this passage to express his subscription to Hogarth’s aesthetics and to Hogarth’s ideas about the “lines of beauty and grace” will be determined. It will also relate the apology for the beauty of a colossal-nosed, disproportionate hero that is established in this episode to the defence of “deformed” art forms, removed from neoclassical aesthetics, that Tristram establishes throughout his narrative.
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