Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel (review)

As Thomas Keymer observes, critics commonly read Laurence Sterne ahistorically. To some, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman uncannily prefigures formalism and even deconstruction. To others, it anachronistically hearkens back, through Scriblerian satire, to the Renaissance tradition of scholarly play that D.W. Jefferson called "learned wit." Brilliant, theoretically charged readings support the first view. The Florida Edition of Sterne's works, currently in progress, bolsters the second. Its hefty volume of notes to Tristram Shandy records a degree of learned quotation that would have startled even John Ferriar, the early critic who accused Sterne of plagiarism. By contrast, Keymer grounds Sterne's parodic, relentlessly intertextual masterpiece in the print (and political) culture of the 1750s and 1760s, reading the book that made Sterne famous as the deliberately trendy textual embodiment of its historical moment.

Keymer makes deft use of narrative theory, drawing especially on Gérard Genette's Palimpsests, but since he wants to historicize Tristram, he rejects "the poststructuralist armour … in which intertextuality is an infinite field of potential relations from which readers, unconfined by authorial intention or editorial fiat, select at will" (11). A meticulous scholar, he first considers the characteristic literary artifacts produced by the "new species of writing" dominated by Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding. A precise reader, he can compel a characteristic strategy in Smollett and the footnotes that Richardson added to the third edition of Clarissa to illuminate Sterne's text. Showing that reviewers created pressure to innovate by disparaging contemporary novels less innovative than Richardson's and Fielding's, he makes sense of eccentric minor precursors of Tristram, notably the Life and Memoirs of Mr. Ephraim Tristram Bates (1756)—first identified as a source in 1918—or John Kidgell's The Card (1755). He reproduces pages from both that clinch his point: the very appearance of Tristram Shandy shows how consciously Sterne engaged with his most innovative contemporaries.

However, George Eliot's letters about the experience of serializing Middlemarch in 1871–1872 provide my candidate for Keymer's most surprising (and surprisingly effective) intertext. Yet Sterne certainly knew the irregular, sometimes nearly interminable practice of serialization, which was solidly established as a way of distributing the costs and widening the readership of multi-volume works. Tristram Shandy appeared in irregular instalments between 1759 and 1767, eventually representing its own reception in a frantic bid to sustain its vogue. Read through Eliot's pained accounts of the demands of serial publication, Tristram's characteristic laments about the discrepancy between lived and narrative time reveal a distinctively modern subjectivity emerging from the circumstances of publication. Keymer challenges theorists of narrative time who take for granted a complete text, however open ended. Sterne's first readers, by contrast, could be surprised at any moment by a new instalment of this sporadic work in progress. A lament for Tristram's death, provoked by the apparent suspension of the novel, preceded the dying protagonist's last instalment.

In his insistent modernity, Sterne resembles "the freshest modern," the writer celebrated above all others by the Teller of Jonathan Swift's A Tale of a Tub (1704), a book more extravagantly postmodern in appearance even than Tristram. Keymer therefore situates him in the context of satirist Charles Churchill and the Nonsense Club, a gathering of relentlessly fashionable writers that also fascinated John Hall-Stevenson, the devoted friend Sterne celebrated as Eugenius. More fruitfully still, Keymer also considers the Ossian poems, another contemporary project whose nostalgia (and melancholy) established a hypermodern fashion. A product of Scotland's military conquest after the 1745 rebellion, the Ossian poems allow Keymer to address, especially in connection with Uncle Toby's "apologetical oration" (Tristram Shandy 6.32), Tristram's connection with the Seven Years War (1756–1763), the great imperial conflict with which it overlapped. Sterne dedicated the first and last instalments to no less a statesman than William Pitt. The wars of King William and Queen Anne—the wars that have scarred Uncle Toby—were in Sterne's day often compared to the...