The introduction to Book 5 contains a witty joke about plagiarism: the author suggests that he is unable to resist the temptation to borrow from other people's work, but at the same time he pretends to speak harshly about such borrowings. Part of the joke lies in his declaiming against plagiarism, using borrowed language. Both Tristram and Laurence Sterne are jokers, and it often seems that a borrowed passage was inserted to see how many readers would raise a hue and cry about it. The fact of the matter is this: Sterne used everything. Whatever he borrowed took new shape, new direction, and new meaning from the molding power that he exerted on almost everything that came under his hand. Whether the change derived from rearrangement of the components or from mere setting them in his own context, it is always impressive for the insight it gives us into the mechanics of his creative genius. Writing for an urbane and widely read audience, he could not have expected to fool them; we can safely assume that he knew his readers would recognize what he had borrowed and that he gave them credit for seeing the point of the borrowings. No one cried plagiarism until twenty-five years after his death — another and a different generation. And during the Victorian era, all critics felt morally obligated to chastise Sterne for his unacknowledged borrowings, even though some of these critics commented at the same time on the skillful and creative use to which he put those few passages.
Like the sections on noses (end of Book 3 and beginning of Book 4), the Fragment on Whiskers is full of bawdy innuendo; and just as he pointed out that if the world wanted to consider the nose as an indecent symbol, it was the world's responsibility, so he says the same thing about whiskers. There is nothing that is exempt, nothing too farfetched to be considered in two senses, one of them sexual.
