Facta Sunt Servanda: Facts, their Fetishes, and their Recollection in Tristram Shandy

This article considers the peculiar way in which facts and truth are understood and represented in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. A Scriblerian treatment of documents and sources, such as the footnote on the Renaissance scholar Fortunio Liceti who is presented almost as a freak, makes the reader doubt the veracity of the references presented in the text. On the other hand, Tristram Shandy is a book that is based on a complex and multi-layered system of referential materials, as witnessed, for instance, by its use of Paul de Rapin de Thoyras and Nicolas Tindal’s History of England, or Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia, among many others. Using the French sociologist Bruno Latour’s distinction between facts, fetishes, and ‘factishes’, this essay interprets Walter Shandy’s treatment of facts as their transformation into the fetishes of his own speculative desire, and Uncle Toby’s model scale replica of the War of the Spanish Succession as his personal fetishisation of military and historical events. Tristram’s interpretation of the facts of his own life, which derive from his father’s and his uncle’s experiences, as well as those of all the other protagonists belonging to his memories, tries to consider both the factual and the fetishistic sides of the facts and events he inherits and recollects, and to understand them as ‘factishes’ that are made of data, the given aspects of one’s story that one receives, and facta, the constructed versions of those facts. Tristram thus takes upon himself the duty of considering the facts he inherits as a knot of both negative data — as, for instance, his father’s and his uncle’s incapabilities — and positive truths: the humanity his ancestors contain deep down on their more hobby-horsical sides. Therefore Tristram, as the narrator of his memoirs, conceives truth as a task, rather than an object of his search.