Dialectic of Whimsy

Strategically generalizing from a close reading of the character-system and narrative style of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–1767), this article proposes that whimsicality is an aesthetic category of eighteenth-century culture attuned to the specifically agrarian dynamics of commercial capitalism. Situating Sterne’s novel at a major inflection point in British socio-economic history, the article shows how the whimsicality of Tristram Shandy more specifically expresses the custom-bound inertia of the gentry class toward the commercial development of agriculture through rationalization, enclosure, and improvement. As exemplified by Walter Shandy in particular, whimsicality is distinguished as an aesthetic category by its low affective intensity, temporary duration, unproductive disposition, and mimetic structure. The article concludes by tracing the stylistic and characterological shifts of the final three volumes of Tristram Shandy, which result in a tonal polarization between the downwardly mobile Tristram and the increasingly capitalistic Walter, reflecting capital’s tendency to fragment and overcome the traditional elite’s passive resistance to agrarian modernization.