So as not to forget, pt 2

For a long time after reading Tristram Shandy, but not immediately after, I thought that there was a part in it in which Walter Shandy interrupts some speech of his at the point where he is about to refer to some object or other. The interruption consists of his instead producing the object itself, as if to insert it into his words, and then carrying on: not that he says "this" and ostends, but that he undertakes the more radical maneuver of holding it up wordlessly. It turns out that I got the matter somewhat wrong, as you can see here (this is in book III, and you want chapters thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen—they're short). I link rather than transcribe not only because, despite the chapters' shortness qua chapters, it would still be a lot to type out, but also because neither ASCII nor HTML can reproduce the variety of dash-lengths Sterne uses. First of all, it's not Walter at all, but rather Dr Slop. And second, while that is what happens (I mean Slop does just show an item instead of saying anything), you can't tell at first that that's what's going on, because precisely what was going on isn't explained until ch. 15, and the speech occurs in ch. 13, which consists almost entirely of speech, so that Slop's action, rather than being described in the text as you read it (there is no "and here he does such and such"), is just represented by a placeholder in his speech, a row of asterisks. This one, who very kindly found the passage for me, thereby sparing me the absolutely unbearable pain of rereading the book, maintains that the row of asterisks is there because, while Slop means to pull out simply the forceps, he also pulls out a squirt (whatever that is), and Toby therefore misunderstands him, and there is no way to represent this mistake and mis-taking while merely recapitulating his words/action (or anyway I think that's the interpretation). I'm not so sure; it seems to me that it could well simply be there as a place-holder, to be filled in later when the speech is over; no word can go there because nothing is said, and for whatever reason the content of ch. 14 is meant to come after that of ch. 13, though it could just as well, albeit with different rhetorical effect, precede it. (And even if ch. 14 preceded 13, replacing the asterisks in Slop's speech with an interposed description of what happened would have the effect of chopping his speech into two parts: as things are it is all one thing, and the long description of what happened, coming after the text of his speech, does not make it seem as if the action itself took a long time, which the description's interposition might risk.)