29

A Suitcase with a letter and a frame of film

The VFI believes Merck is connected to the Information Superhighway. Indeed, we believe he has a constructed a web page, although the VFI ISH Technician is unable to trace it. We would be grateful if Merck, or someone who knows Merck, would contact the VFI.

Sterne is fundamentally Pessimistic in that he sees order as begetting only greater disorder, but in his rejection of the façade of the Enlightenment categorization of knowledge, he uncovers a hitherto overlooked path towards the self in the very act of story telling itself, the instruction of another mind. Defining a semantics of language distracts from the ultimate reason for writing which is communication: specifically a communication which goes in two directions unlike the self centered conversation modeled throughout the text. By leaving work for the reader's imagination and implicating the reader in the story telling, Tristram forces the reader to recognize himself as an active, changing variable in the text. ......So how is Tristram to define himself in his LIFE and OPINIONS? Without definition what is left to remedy the sorrow of delusion? Rejection, gesture, the storyless storyteller, and discovering good natured amusement in the face of futility, become preeminent.

In this film I suggest we show how Sterne plays out this proposition of the paradox of definition and communication and how he attempts to situate the artist outside of the theology of the Deus in Machina. If the text can in fact be broken down into a simple progression it would seem to lend itself to three parts: first, the problem; second, the answers rejected and offered within the text; and third, the solution presented by the author through the structure of text.

Around him Tristram sees the feverish attempts of man to legislate through reason and structure, to respond to a personal crisis of stability by forcing the arbitrary back into a healthy, recognizable continuum. It is through the HOBBY-HORSE that Walter and Toby seize interpretive keys to the happenings of the world.

Tristram recognizes that the solace of definition, of faith in meaning and in the Deus in Machina is hollow and vacant, the very methods of appearance and transparent relations which Walter, Toby, Slop and the others chose to define their realities break down under the least imposition and leave their souls with nothing to hold in the face of the dark void of the world. Their spiritual decadence is exposed as the last refuge of the spiritually bankrupt, a splendidly arrogant and ostentatious architecture of the soul without meaning, without story.

Finally, the film should end by examining exactly what the ramifications of Tristram's futile task are. From the first chapter, there is a sense of foreboding in the work symbolized by the unwound clock, an image which dominates and serves as a reference for much of the action in the book. From the moment Tristram's mother cries out at his inception as well as the inception of the book -- Pray my dear! Have you not forgot to wind up the clock! the reader is presented with a constant series of consequences to this calamitous oversight on his father's part. Because the clock is not wound, Tristram's world eternally refuses to resolve itself into a neat, ordered universe. Tristram's life is a comedy of errors and his father's definition set, which he has in part in inherited, correctly interprets each factor as contributing to a life forever unregulated and out of control. Everything we know about Tristram points towards failure. Tristram cannot recover from the fatal disease of being born and the infirmaries which attend it, a plague which propagates itself from his broken nose through his misnaming to his education and into his very *****. The universe has arbitrarily arrayed itself against him -- if we take Walter's presumptuous definitions of the import of Tristram's geniture, name, nose, and circumcision as equitable commentary on the workings of the machine. One of the greatest implications of this is that without the movement of the machine, without the temporal system in place, not only will time be distorted, the temporal mutation will preclude beginnings and endings themselves. Without a clock to mark off an objective time schema, we can see how the structure of his novel rapidly disintegrates into something very similar to the whirling smoak-jack turning in his uncle Toby's head. But given his ambivalent perspective, recognizing that the project of exposing his own story through the optic of his own HOBBY-HORSE, i.e. his LIFE and OPINIONS, is futile, Tristram turns to Trim's text of gesture and true interaction for an escape.

Rather than struggling against the chaotic world, he yields himself to it and assimilates failure into the nature of his project. The structural failure of his text comes out of an attempt to explain his own dysfunctional definition set. Ultimately he reconciles the paradox of the artistic HOBBY-HORSE (that in order to communicate himself he must isolate himself) by leaving the story untold and moving instead in a performative, interactive realm. He engages himself in a confessional, ostensibly to display the progression of his LIFE and OPINIONS to the general public, but moves the meaning from the actual story of Tristram to the act of Tristram interacting with his reader (which is, in fact, the only narrative thread which follows us throughout the book), sharing with the reader the great joke of discovering that the story can only exist untold. He alters the meaning of the HOBBY-HORSE away from the false Optimism of the Enlightenment and frees himself from the doom of not being able to tell a story by becoming a storyless storyteller. This is his "secular" vision of the artistic project in a world without a comprehensible, regulating Deus in Machina. Ultimately Tristram becomes successful because he is an educator searching for meaning rather than a definer presupposing meaning; because he, unlike his family, is interactive with the world. He informs his reader's ability to reject the vanity of the world by pointing out his reader's own HOBBY-HORSEical interpretive schema.

.........

Peter Greenaway

.........