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Time to Draw a Line: Sterne’s Legacy to The Novel By Ken Simpson -R EPP ½GXMSR XLIVI EVI RS QSVI VMSXSYW HIZMERXW than Laurence Sterne and his narrator, Tristram, as transgressive as he is digressive. Sterne’s novel is a handbook of 18th-century thought; and it is a progenitor of Modernist and Postmodernist experimentation. In ‘The Novel and Europe’ Milan Kundera wistfully conceived of ‘a whole other history of the European novel’, had the examples of Sterne and Diderot been followed. The 18th, that most exciting of centuries, witnessed increasing challenge to the rationalist certainties of its predecessor. Eighteenth-century thought is characterised by a shift from certainties to possibilities (anticipating 20th-century judgements such as Conrad’s ‘True wisdom is certain of nothing in this world of contradictions’ and Kundera’s concept of ‘the wisdom of uncertainty’). Here is the mobilisation of the forces that would culminate in the 20thcentury supremacy of Relativism over Absolutism across a wide range of disciplines and activities: Darwinian evolutionary theory; Einstein and Relativity; Heisenberg’s Principle of Tolerance/Uncertainty; Nietzsche and the death of God; and, in literature, the development of techniques which render relativity and subjectivity (pre-eminently James Joyce; William Faulkner in As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury; and Virginia Woolf challenging the traditional association of ‘author’ and ‘authority’: ‘The Modern Writer cannot make a world because [they] have ceased to believe’). Modern literature foregrounds the subject-world, recognises it as worthy of interest, celebrates its subjectivity, relishes its relativity of perspective. Two statements – one 17th-century, the other 18th – indicate the change that was then underway: Descartes: Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) Sterne: Dubito, ergo sum (I doubt/am uncertain, therefore I am) (Works,VI, ‘The Koran’: Memorabilia (Dublin, 1779), 175.) In his Discourse on Method (1637) Descartes anticipates empiricism in that he sets everything to the test of experience, thereby pointing forward to Locke and the belief that laws/principles are not given but are established out of experience; but the aim of Descartes’ endeavours was the attainment of philosophical certainty. For Sterne, well versed
MR 0SGOI XLI QMRH GPSWIW XS XLI VMGLRIWW ERH žY\ of experience if such certainty is achieved. Hence Sterne’s mocking of systems and learned authorities, ranging through the literary, philosophical, religious, legal, and medical. There were precedents in Samuel Butler’s Hudibras and the satires of Swift. In Swift’s The Battle of the Books (1704) it is the Bee (Temple, VITVIWIRXMRK 8LI %RGMIRXW XLEX MW XLI žI\MFPI ERH dynamic chameleon, in contrast with the Modern (the Spider/Bentley) that asserts the Modern certainties. -J EVX MW QMQIXMG QMQIXMG SJ [LEX# -RGVIEWMRKP] MR XLI course of the 18th-century the answer is the mind of the artist or the mental processes in which he engages or which he conjures up by means of the imagination. Martin Price comments, ‘A century earlier ... Wren has no doubt that natural or geometric beauty is to be preferred; but Reynolds (Discourses, 1769) has come to wonder. Reality is becoming what the mind of man creates.’ With the Empiricist momentum the individual comes to hold centre stage, his sensations, emotions, XLI ZIV] žY\ SJ LMW QMRH HIIQIH [SVXL] SJ EXXIRXMSR The degree of reader-involvement generated by prose WEXMVI WYGL EW 7[MJX´W MW LIMKLXIRIH YRHIV XLI MRžYIRGI of Empiricism: the reader experiences the text itself; the reader is actively involved in it. Sterne, who has been waiting impatiently in the wings, takes reader-involvement to a new plane. ‘The plan,’ he wrote to Dodsley, his publisher, ‘is a most extensive one, taking in not only the weak part of the Sciences, in which the true point of Ridicule lies, but everything IPWI [LMGL - ½RH PEYKL EX EFPI MR Q] [E]´ Letters, IH 'YVXMW ,I ½RHW QYGL ÂłPEYKL EX EFPI´ LYQER nature and human behaviour; many of the intellectual fashions and activities of his day (including rationalism and associationism); the notion of someone writing his PMJI ERH STMRMSRW ERH XLI TVEGXMGI SJ ½GXMSR MRGPYHMRK the situation of the reader (Where would readerVIWTSRWI XLISV] FI [MXLSYX 7XIVRI# ERH MR TEVXMGYPEV he reacts against the tendency of the infant novel towards stabilisation. 8LEX [SRHIVJYP ½VWX TEKI SJ Tristram Shandy is Sterne’s response to the conventions of the autobiographical novel. ‘My name is Robinson Crusoe. I was born ... My parents ...’: the premise is that the reader will believe if they are given the facts. Why not take this to its absurd extreme: not from birth but ab ovo# 7XIVRI TEZIW XLI [E] JSV 7EPMRKIV´W ,SPHIR 'EYP½IPH Âł-J ]SY VIEPP] [ERX XS LIEV EFSYX MX XLI ½VWX XLMRK ]SY´PP probably want to know is where I was born, and what
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my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David 'STTIV½IPH OMRH SJ GVET´ The Catcher in the Rye); and Flann O’Brien at the start of At Swim-Two-Birds has an even more radical proposal: ‘One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as QER] IRHMRKW ´ ,S[ WLSYPH E RSZIP FIKMR# *VII JVSQ the constraints of convention; for which, thank you, Mr. Sterne. And he is equally radical in his revision of the concept of closure: his novel ‘ends’ years before it begins. Sterne has some other targets in XLEX VIQEVOEFPI ½VWX GLETXIV 8VMWXVEQ GPEMQW LMW PMJI would have been different had his parents ‘minded what they were about when they begot [him]’. Here Sterne is representing comically the growing belief in the physical origins of human understanding. There were many adherents to psychological materialism and particularly the view of man as mechanism. David Hume proposed that human behaviour be studied as a branch of physical science. In 1746 Condillac claimed a statue could be brought to life by endowing it with XLI ½ZI WIRWIW %GGSVHMRK XS :SPXEMVI [IEXLIV GER condition our mental state ‘insofar as we are machines and insofar as our souls are governed by the actions of the body’. That dogged amateur philosopher, Walter Shandy, is convinced that the mechanism of conception determines where the soul is lodged in the body of the embryo and, thus, the fortune – good or bad – of the unborn child. The sudden intervention of dialogue between the parents gives way to totally unexpected dialogue involving the VITVIWIRXEXMZI VIEHIV XLI ½VWX SJ QER] ETTIEVERGIW within the text). By the end of chapter 4 the reader MW EFPI XS ½PP MR XLI FPEROW % WPEZI XS VIKYPEVMX] ;EPXIV [MRHW XLI GPSGO ERH QEOIW PSZI SR XLI ½VWX 7YRHE] of every month ‘in order, as he would often say to my uncle Toby, to get them [little family concernments] all
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out of the way at one time, and be no more plagued and pestered with them the rest of the month’. Mrs. Shandy comes to associate the two activities; hence her question to her husband, with unfortunate effects for her son, then in the process of being conceived. Associationism dominated mid-18th-century thought. John Locke had distinguished between a ‘natural’ correspondence in ideas and a connection formed F] ³GLERGI´ SV ³GYWXSQ´ 1VW 7LERH] I\IQTPM½IW XLI latter). In his Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) Hume was more sceptical about our capacity to employ reason to determine experience. For Hume there are three principles of connection between present impressions and remembered impressions (which we call ideas): (1) Resemblance (2) Contiguity (3) Cause OR effect. According to Hume, experience leads us to see cause OR effect as cause AND effect. From causes that appear similar we expect similar effects; UYMXI [MXLSYX NYWXM½GEXMSR WE]W ,YQI ³%VKYQIRXW from experience cannot prove the resemblance of the past to the future, since all these arguments are founded on the supposition of that resemblance’; so that ‘all inferences from experience ... are the effects of custom, not of reasoning’. On the basis of past experience, Mrs. Shandy infers that sexual intercourse will always follow clock-winding (the human being as machine!). There is no reason why it should but that of habit; her inference is a result of ‘custom’ not ‘reasoning’. This is a comic demonstration of one of the facets of empiricism: that in stressing the importance of proof by experience it must accommodate the irrational. Sterne’s text teems with examples of effects deriving from the most unexpected causes, generally to the detriment of ‘small HERO’, Tristram, who attributes his misfortunes habitually to his being pelted by the ungracious Duchess, Providence. The nursery window that falls upon him while he is relieving himself, causing a circumcision at the very least, is sashless and
weightless because Corporal Trim, with the best will in the world, has removed these to provide Toby with QEXIVMEPW JSV JYVXLIV QSHIP JSVXM½GEXMSRW : 8LMW MW one of several incidents where the incident is recalled in dramatic form, and then subsequently explained, thereby heightening the ironic effect. Another is the mis-naming. Tristram is given the name for which his father (who believes names affect one’s fortune) has ÂłXLI QSWX YRGSRUYIVEFPI EZIVWMSR´ ;L]# ,MW JEXLIV´W asking Susannah, the maid, if she can carry the desired name, Trismegistus (‘thrice greatest’), the length of the passageway sends her off in the huff. He knows WLI GER´X FYX LI GER´X ½RH LMW FVIIGLIW 7YWERREL KIXW XLIVI ½VWX 8LI GYVEXI ORS[W RS WYGL REQI FYX he does know ‘Tristram’.Yet another of Tristram’s QMWJSVXYRIW MW XS LEZI LMW RSWI GVYWLIH žEX EKEMRWX LMW face at birth (and that may not be the full extent of the damage; perhaps his irregularities as narrator may be likewise explained!) but ’twould tax the patience of my reader to trace the labyrinthine sequence of contributory causes. As John Mullan recently observed, ‘Tristram Shandy is a true embodiment of Enlightenment empiricism, exploring the ludicrous ways in which character is formed out of accident ... 7XIVRI QEHI LMW ½GXMSR HS NYWXMGI XS E [SVPH MR [LMGL we really cannot know what is going to happen.’ Now, the neatly ordered plot of the conventional novel depends on the very principle of cause and effect which Hume regarded so sceptically. The conventional novel is the product of custom; there is no reason why it should take the form of a consecutive, chronological narrative which explains everything.Virginia Woolf admits she cannot make up plots because there are no plots in life; equally Susan Sontag asserts, ‘A life is not a plot’ in her foreword to Machado De Assis, Epitaph of a Small Winner (1880), a novel rich in Sternean legacy. Not for Sterne the perfectly ordered plot of Fielding’s Tom Jones – one of the three most perfect plots ever planned, according to Coleridge (the others being Oedipus Tyrannis and The Alchemist). In Ian Watt’s rejoinder – ‘perfect JSV [LEX#´ RSX XLI MRZIWXMKEXMSR SJ GLEVEGXIVW EW individuals – we see why such regularity is not for 7XIVRI 2SX SRP] MW XLI SVHIV SJ GSRZIRXMSREP ½GXMSR EX SHHW [MXL XLI žY\ SJ I\TIVMIRGI ERH XLI EREVGL] of life: it misrepresents what it is to be a human being (and to underscore the point Sterne presents some highly idiosyncratic individuals, not least his variously damaged narrator). So, exit plot to be replaced by the narrative consciousness. Tristram Shandy accords with its author’s description of Locke – ‘a history book ‌ of what passes in a man’s own mind’. But it is vital to Sterne’s purpose that he create the eccentric narrative persona of Tristram, rather than offering his own personal history, thereby allowing the play of authorial irony.
and direct: he asks us to be his friends, but not immediately. As in life, out of ‘a slight acquaintance ... will grow familiarity; and that, unless one of us is in fault, will terminate in friendship – O diem praeclarum!’ (I, 6). Within 10 lines we progress from being strangers to become his ‘dear friend and companion’! Tristram wants us to be his friends since he reckons that friends will be more likely to make allowances for his unorthodox manner of storytelling: ‘In short, do anything, only keep your temper.’ Sterne involves the reader by inviting him to help his struggling narrator in his task: ‘Writing, when properly managed ... is but a different name for conversation’ (II, 11). With his benign nature appealed to, the reader, thinking that half the book is his, revels in this unaccustomed freedom, failing to see that it is illusory: it merely seems freedom in relation to the constraints under which we are placed by conventional texts. Space is left for the reader to swear in (VII, 37); and we are invited to draw the Widow Wadman and, since this is our Widow Wadman, we will understandably be delighted with her: ‘was ever anything in nature so W[IIX#´ :- 8VMWXVEQ GSRWSPMHEXIW LMW LSPH SZIV XLI VIEHIV [MXL WYGL žEXXIV] Tristram is forever reminding his readers of the WMXYEXMSR MR [LMGL XLI] ½RH XLIQWIPZIW ERH XLIMV relationship with him: an acutely self-conscious REVVEXSV IZIV EPIVX XS XLI EVXM½GMEPMX] SJ XLI QIHMYQ
FPEGO TEKI TSMRXMRK ½RKIVW EWXIVMWOW WTEGIW XLIVIF] creates self-conscious readers, themselves equally alerted to the medium. And Sterne himself is sublimely HMWXERGIH ÂłPMOI E +SH TEVMRK LMW ½RKIV REMPW´ XS borrow a phrase from Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus). As Ian Watt observed, ‘Sterne, like Fielding ... was anxious to have full freedom to comment on the action of his novel. Fielding achieves this only by intervening ... Sterne achieves exactly the same ends by locating LMW VIžIGXMSRW MR XLI QMRH SJ LMW LIVS ?8LYW LI GERA manipulate until we are giddy without any breach of narrative authenticity since every transition is part of the hero’s mental life, which ... is very little concerned with chronological order.’ Sterne had absorbed Locke. In his Essay concerning Human Understanding (1689) Locke explained identity: ... since consciousness always accompanies thinking, and it is that that makes everyone to be what he calls ‘self’, and thereby distinguishes himself from all other thinking things; in this alone consists personal identity, ie. the sameness of a rational being: and as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person (II, 27).
Tristram’s attitude towards the reader is personal
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Engaging with the view that it is the free movement of the consciousness that constitutes individual identity, Sterne sets out to establish a narrating consciousness, and does so in such a way as to proclaim his doubts about the role of reason. The representation of consciousness enables him to bring personal/interior time into the novel. Walter quotes Locke to the effect that ‘the idea of duration and its simple modes is got merely from the train and succession of our ideas’ (II, 18). He tries to explain this to Toby, but is thwarted by Toby’s reading of ‘train’ in a military context: ‘just like a train ... “A train of artillery” said Toby’, thereby unwittingly validating Locke’s suspicions about the limited capacity of language as means of communication (Locke wanted to banish metaphor from the language). Sterne introduces a new dimension of psychological realism to the novel: chronology is there, but it loses its authority over narrative since the primary time-scheme is that of Tristram’s consciousness. Experience of duration; narrative time; reading time: these, rather, are foregrounded. The telling of the tale of ‘great-aunt Dinah, who was married and got with child by the coachman’ delights Walter but embarrasses Toby: to the one it is over all too quickly; the other wishes it were over sooner. Sterne experiments radically by playing with the concepts of clock-time, narrative time and reading time; most obviously when Tristram recognises that his experience far outruns his capacity to record it, so that, after taking a year to record the events of a HE] LI ½RHW XLEX LI MW PMZMRK XMQIW JEWXIV XLER LI writes. Consequently ‘the more I write, the more I shall have to write – and, consequently, the more your worships read, the more your worships will have to VIEH ;MPP XLMW FI KSSH JSV ]SYV [SVWLMTW I]IW# -: 13). Sontag’s comment on Epitaph of a Small Winner WLS[W XLI I\XIRX SJ 7XIVRI´W MR¾YIRGI SR XLEX XI\X ‘The seductions of such a narrative are complex. The narrator professes to be worrying about the reader – whether the reader gets it. Meanwhile the reader can be wondering about the narrator – whether the narrator understands all the implications of what is being told’ – exactly the situation in Tristram Shandy.
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Extreme Naturalist demands for correspondence between the time of the experience and the time of its representation are anticipated and taken ad absurdum (and one thinks of Sartre; also Warhol’s movie, Sleep; and, set in real time, Michael Winterbottom’s Code 49). On occasion Sterne has Tristram feign adherence to the Naturalist premise only to demonstrate its absurdity. In the brilliantly managed account of the threatened collision between Dr. Slop and Obadiah, Tristram begins by equating the pace of the narrative with the pace of the events it describes (II, 9), only to bring his account to a series of shuddering halts while he addresses the reader. The subtlest aspect of the technique here is that Sterne effectively presents simultaneously two levels of debate: that between Tristram and the representative reader, the subject of which is the conduct of Slop and Obadiah (overt debate); and that between Sterne and the reader (oblique debate), the subject of which is the relationship between material and medium. Time and again Sterne raises the question of how adequately XLI [SVH FSYRH QIHMYQ SJ ½GXMSR GER VIRHIV XLI realities of human behaviour and – above all – the human mind; and, anticipating Beckett, he asks whether it need be so wordbound. Hence the emphasis on the communication which Toby and Walter sometimes achieve intuitively, generally when their attempts at verbal communication have spectacularly failed; hence, too, the graphic peppering of the text itself. The Shandean HEWL PMXXIVW 7XIVRI´W [VMXMRK PIXXIVW EW [IPP EW ½GXMSR It is tempting to relate the nature of Sterne’s syntax and the fracturing of his narrative to a comment in a letter describing a day in a childhood dominated by the movements of his soldier father: he gives the date, followed by the words ‘All unhinged again’. With Sterne, time has lost its stranglehold over narrative. Instead, subjectivity, relativity and the spatial dimension: these are foregrounded. By playing further with the inter-relationships among the various timesenses, Sterne has Tristram anticipate the simultaneity of outer and inner, and past and present, experience that Proust and Joyce would so exploit. There are three locations, both physical and temporal, in the following – where Tristram is, literally; where he is in
his narrative; and where that leads him to by way of association: Now this is the most puzzled skein of all – for in this last chapter, as far at least as it has help’d me through Auxerre, I have been getting forwards in two different journies together, and with the same dash of the pen – for I have got entirely out of Auxerre in this journey which I am writing now, and I am got half way out of Auxerre in that which I shall write hereafter – There is but a certain degree of perfection in every thing; and by pushing at something beyond that, I have brought myself into such a situation, as no traveller ever stood before me; for I am this moment walking across the market-place of Auxerre with my father and my uncle Toby, in our way back to dinner – and I am this morning also entering Lyons with my post-chaise broke into a thousand pieces – and I am moreover this moment in a handsome pavilion built by Pringello, upon the banks of the Garonne, which Mons. Sligniac has lent me, and where I now sit rhapsodizing all these affairs (VII, 28). ‘Let me collect myself, and pursue my journey,’ says Tristram (ie. collect his various selves). Little wonder XLEX ½ZI GLETXIVW SR XLMW I\GLERKI MW VITSVXIH ³1] good friend, quoth I – as sure as I am I – and you are ]SY ¯´ ³%RH [LS EVI ]SY#´ WEMH LI ¯´(SR´X TY^^PI QI WEMH -´ :-- -VSRMGEPP] 8VMWXVEQ HSIW ½RH ER MHIRXMX] through his function as narrator, but it is something F] [LMGL LI JIIPW XVETTIH E HIRMEP SJ ¾Y\ E GSRWXVEMRX on the chameleon: ‘Leave we my mother … Leave we Slop likewise … Leave we poor Le Fever … let us leave, if possible, myself: – But ’tis impossible, – I must go along with you to the end of the work’ (VI, 20). By using Tristram’s consciousness as locus of narration Sterne liberates the novel from temporal constraints, thereby introducing a heightened dimension of WTEXMEPMX] MRXS ½GXMSR LIVI EKEMR 7XIVRI MW E LEVFMRKIV of Modernist experimentation: Joyce, Pound, Eliot engage with the spatial). Sterne’s is a space inhabited not just by the characters but by the recurrent motifs which their hobby-horses generate: Toby whistling Lillabulero or exclaiming ‘What prodigious armies we had in Flanders’; Tristram’s passing references to ‘dear Jenny’ (whom we never meet, though she is implicitly present when addressed) or the cough he got skating into the wind in Flanders. (Interestingly, motifs in this novel derive from the characters themselves, rather than from the classics or Western literature, as in Joyce or Lowry). There is a sense in which, just as Tristram is trapped, caught within his function as narrator, and turns inward upon that ‘self’, so the text – despite the rambling of the narrative – stabilizes itself spatially around these motifs. Paradoxically, Tristram’s problems with time (and mortality – Death comes knocking at his door and pursues him around Europe in vol. 7) are one of the means whereby Sterne
achieves spatiality. Joyce was right to suggest that Swift and Sterne should swap names. Arguably Sterne’s most remarkable EGLMIZIQIRX MW XS LEZI VIRHIVIH ¾Y\ HITMGXIH MX The space hosts constant motion, frantic activity – that of the mind and the responses prompted by stimuli. Martin Price comments, ‘With the rise of the novel the studied detachment of satire gives way to an exploration of the confusions and inconsistencies seen within the self.’ Sterne is in the vanguard. Tristram exclaims, ‘Now I love you for this – and ’tis this delicious mixture within you which makes you dear creatures what you are’ (V, 9); and for Yorick in A Sentimental Journey, ‘There is nothing unmixt in this world.’ One forgets this at one’s peril. For Sterne, to I\XVEGX ER IQSXMSR JVSQ XLI ¾Y\ SJ XLI GSRWGMSYWRIWW and indulge oneself by prolonging it is to run the risk of absurdity: stop to wallow or delight and all the while life is plotting behind your back to catch you out. Tristram’s poignant meditation on his mortality gives way to ‘Now, for what the world thinks of that ejaculation – I would not give a groat’ (IX, 9); in his encounter with poor Maria (IX, 24) acute sensibility disintegrates into the absurd when Tristram asks the HIVERKIH QEMHIR [LEX VIWIQFPERGI WLI ½RHW FIX[IIR him and her goat. Rightly, A. Alvarez commented, ‘It is Sterne’s particular strength as a comic writer that no matter how wholeheartedly he pursues high feeling, unredeemed reality keeps breaking in.’ The legacy to Joyce is obvious; and one is reminded of Lily Briscoe in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse: the vision had forever to be remade ... always something broke in, a newspaperboy shouting ‘Standard’ or ‘News’; the ‘match struck in the dark’ inevitably burns out. Tellingly, Alvarez takes as epigraph to his edition of A Sentimental Journey these words of Jean-Luc Godard: ‘Le moral, c’est le travelling.’ If Tristram Shandy is a satire on neo-classical authority
[MXRIWW 8VMWXVEQ´W HI½ERX VYPI FVIEOMRK [LMGL MR itself becomes a rule; Walter’s dogged pursuit of Truth through learned authority (Woolf’s Mr. Ramsay MR IQFV]S# MX MW EPWS XLI QIERW [LIVIF] 7XIVRI – remarkably – foresees the paradox at the heart of Romantic individualism: assert self and you deny otherness (cf. Keats: it is by ‘negative capability’ that one becomes otherness and achieves transcendence of the actual). For Sterne, we ride our own hobbyLSVWIW XLIVIF] HI½RMRK ERH PMQMXMRK SYVWIPZIW ;I have free will; exercise it and we rule out all other options. For Tristram, ‘It is a great inconvenience to a man in a haste, that there are three distinct roads between Calais and Paris, in behalf of which there is so much to be said by the several deputies from the towns which lie along them, that half a day is easily lost in settling which you’ll take’ (VII, 3). Sterne celebrates subjectivity (witness the range of responses to the news of the death of brother Bobby – all equally valid
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because each is that individual’s alone (V, 7)). But its MR½RMXI TSWWMFMPMXMIW EVI TEVEHS\MGEPP] PMQMXMRK E TSMRX made graphically in Tristram’s attempts to chart his progress. Here Sterne is plainly evoking Hogarth’s ‘line of beauty’, irremediably serpentine, in his Analysis of Beauty,Written with a View of Fixing the Fluctuating Ideas of Taste (1753), to which Tristram has earlier directed the reader. With ‘a writing-master’s ruler (borrowed for that purpose)’ Tristram succeeds in drawing a straight line, only to acknowledge that each of us will make of it what they will: it is ‘the pathway for Christians to walk in’ for divines; ‘the emblem of moral rectitude’ according to Cicero; and ‘the best line! Say cabbage-planters – is the shortest line, says Archimedes, which can be drawn from one given point to another’ (VI, 40). *M\MRK ¾Y\ GER MX FI HSRI# 4EVEHS\MGEPP] MR Tristram Shandy Sterne comes as close as is humanly possible. But his attitude is anything but Olympian; rather, the overarching irony of his text is essentially benign and humane, encompassing all exemplars of hobbyhorsicality (Toby, Walter, Tristram – his hobby-horse is writing his life and opinions – and the reader – ours is reading the text). By reasoning about oiling the squeaking parlour-door hinge, Walter ensures that he fails to oil it. The compassionate response from Tristram also speaks for Sterne, I would suggest: Inconsistent soul that man is! – languishing under wounds, which he has the power to heal! – his whole life a contradiction to his knowledge! – his reason, that precious gift of God to him – (instead of pouring in oyl) serving but to sharpen his sensibilities, – to
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multiply his pains and render him more melancholy and uneasy under them! – poor unhappy creature, that he should do so! – are not the necessary causes of misery in this life enow, but he must add voluntary ones to his stock of sorrow; – struggle against evils which cannot be avoided, and submit to others, which a tenth part of the trouble they create him, would VIQSZI JVSQ LMW LIEVX JSV IZIV# --- So, if with his fractured text, bleeding pages, spaces, ERH VI¾I\MZMX] 7XIVRI ERXMGMTEXIW 4SWXQSHIVRMWQ LI certainly does not replicate the meaninglessness which informs some Postmodernist texts: Sterne’s spaces are not voids. As for his legacy to Modernism, it is immense: the radical break with convention (and – remarkably – while the novel, as we now know, was still in its infancy); the questioning of certainties; the challenging of ‘traditional ways of conceiving the human self’ (M.H. Abrams’ phrase in relation to Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and Frazer); narrative fragmentation; dislocation of syntax (eg. Gertrude Stein). ‘Make it new,’ said Pound, and so created a manifesto for Modernism. Yes, Sterne made it new.