Spleen

Spleen, in Tristram Shandy’s account of its own purpose, is both a condition of inward bitterness and the enemy the book sets out to combat. The narrator describes laughter as a bodily remedy: the convulsive movement of the diaphragm and abdominal muscles is meant to expel bitter juices and the hostile passions associated with them. Yet the book’s cure is also formal. Its marbled pages, blank leaves, missing chapter, and sudden chapter breaks make disorder part of the reading experience, turning comic freedom into a counterforce against the fixed rules and solemn systems that feed spleen.

The Book’s Declared Antagonist

Tristram disavows several possible political or doctrinal targets for his book. He says that his account of his father and Christian names is not an attack on Francis the First, that the nose episode is not aimed at Francis the Ninth, and that his portrayal of his uncle is not a representation of his country’s military spirit. Nor, he insists, is the book written against predestination, free will, or taxes. Its declared object is spleen. This clarification makes laughter more than a pleasant by-product of the narrative: it is the work’s stated purpose and a practical answer to the bitter passions it seeks to displace.

The remedy is explained in physiological terms. Tristram connects laughter to repeated rises and falls of the diaphragm and contractions of the intercostal and abdominal muscles; these motions, he says, drive gall and other bitter juices from the body. The account deliberately joins moral disposition to bodily process. Spleen is not treated only as an abstract attitude: the text imagines bitterness as something that can be moved through the body and expelled by laughter. Its comic method thus claims a material effect, even as its exaggerated medical language makes the claim itself part of the joke.

Form Against Solemnity

The book’s answer to spleen is visible in its refusal to proceed by a single, orderly rule. During a conversation between Walter Shandy and Toby Shandy, the narrator interrupts their descent down a staircase to announce a new chapter. He says that he cannot govern the affair by any other rule, and rejects the idea that a man must follow rules rather than rules follow him. The chapter break interrupts the apparent forward movement of the scene, converting an ordinary passage down the stairs into an occasion for declaring formal independence. Against the pressure of dogmatic order, the narrative makes its digressions and sudden changes part of its comic resistance.

The physical book carries this resistance onto the page. One chapter is absent, leaving a ten-page gap, but Tristram argues that the book is not thereby less perfect: it is more complete for lacking the chapter. The marbled page and the blank leaves likewise make visible the distance between a book as a material object and a story as continuous verbal account. These interruptions are not simply defects to be repaired. They unsettle the expectation that completeness must mean unbroken narration, and turn omission itself into a provocation to the reader.

A blank page also appears when the narrator invites the reader to imagine a woman for himself, as like his mistress and as unlike his wife as conscience permits. Rather than supplying a finished description, the text leaves the page empty and transfers the act of depiction to the reader’s imagination. The empty space makes participation possible, but also exposes how much a narrative can imply without stating. In this way, the book’s material absences join its comic method: they interrupt passive reading and frustrate the demand for a fully controlled, wholly explicit account.

Laughter, Reading, and Resistance

Tristram presents the book as a small work intended to stand in place of many larger books, though he admits that its fanciful manner makes a serious appeal for the reader’s lenity difficult. That tension suits its attack on spleen. The narrator asks to be taken seriously about the work’s purpose while making seriousness itself vulnerable to interruption, play, and physical comedy. Laughter is at once the book’s subject, its proposed medicine, and the movement its form tries to produce.

The narrative’s image of the missing chapter clarifies the method: absence need not amount to failure, just as a deviation from rule need not amount to incompleteness. Across its bodily account of laughter and its conspicuous manipulation of pages and chapters, the book opposes a rigid demand for seamlessness. Spleen becomes the condition to be expelled; comic motion, whether in the reader’s body or in the narrative’s broken progression, is the instrument of release.