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Sagal, Anna K. '''An hobby-horse well worth giving a description of': Disability, Trauma, and Language in Tristram Shandy," The Idea of Disability in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Chris Mounsey. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell, 2014. Pp. 105-133.
If one mind-numbingly accepts Uncle Toby as suffering from PTSD, this essay is coherent, even if it does not convince. Ms. Sagal's argument is hermetically sealed, closing down not only Sterne's text, but more generally literature's complexity. One can certainly read Moby Dick as a study of Ahab's PTSD-but at what cost to Melville's enormous canvas? Medical or psychological diagnoses cannot ''solve'' literature's problems.
That said, one result of battlefield trauma is the loss of language to express it; pain is ''unrelatable [sic], linguistically and empathetically.'' On the one hand, this mirrors Sterne's belief that language fails fully to comprehend the world; on the other, Toby's...