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5. A Chapter of Accidents: Disfiguration and the Marbled Page in Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
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5 A Chapter of Accidents Disfiguration and the Marbled Page in laurence sterne’s The life and opinions of Tristram shandy, Gentleman [O]thers on the contrary, tucked up to their very chins, with whips across their mouths, scouring and scampering it away like so many party-colouring devils astride a mortgage. —Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman ut magis legere libeat in marmoribus quam in codicibus —St. Bernard This chapter digresses from contemporary matters in order to delineate the odd trajectory of a single wordless leaf in Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman; I conduct this exploration according to Jarry’s ’pataphysical rule of the anomaly, which governs exceptions and is the subject of chapter 10.1 At the same time this chapter exemplifies the accidental felicities that obtain in that minor species of miscognition Dick Higgins and I named “creative misunderstanding.” The textual-scholarly battles as to precisely what constitutes a paratext (those various aspects within the cover of a book that frame the text proper) form the broad background for this odd configuration. Jerome McGann, a scholar adamantly committed to socializing the study of literary texts, stresses the need to focus on those material aspects previously disregarded as peripheral or irrelevant. Among these, he cites “typefaces, bindings, book prices, page format” (McGann 13). Unlike Genette’s investigations into the paratextual in his book Seuils, McGann addresses the non-linguistic elements enclosing or juxtaposing texts-as-such and, while acknowledging the usefulness of Genette’s itemized set of paratexts (prefaces, dedications, notebooks, advertisements , footnotes, etc.), additionally insists that by restricting itself to the linguistic aspects of a format Genette’s methodology problematically ignores 64 Chapter 5 those extra-linguistic phenomena McGann himself considers crucial to textual understanding. As McGann states, “[t]he text/paratext distinction as formulated in Seuils will not, by Genette’s own admission, explore such matters as ink, typeface, paper, and various other phenomena which are crucial to the understanding of textuality. They fall outside his concerns because such textual features are not linguistic” (13). Rather than extending the debate between two distinguished textual scholars , let me ask how and when does the non-linguistic periphery become linguistic and by that interrogation turn to Tristram Shandy. In the middle of volume III of the first edition, Sterne abruptly defamiliarizes the reading experience by simultaneously interrupting both the narrative flow and the book’s bibliographical conventions with a decorative marbled leaf. The leaf is marbled on both recto and verso but with two distinctly different patterns of marbling; it is hand-inserted into the normal collation as a sequential leaf that contains page 169 on the recto and 170 on the verso. How are we to interpret this? Karen Schiff offers a convincing figurative reading of the leaf’s significance. “In the context of the narrative,” she observes, “it is obvious that this image represents Walter Shandy’s ejaculation, a subject that also starts off the novel in volume I. The colors of the original marbled page can all be found in the body, and white and yellow pigments are splattered in the top layer. And Sterne would prefer a reading practice that mimics the unpredictability of sexual experience” (9).2 I will return to Schiff’s claim later; suffice it to say at this point that in an unprecedented gesture within the history of the novel, Sterne deterritorializes a decorative endpaper , endowing it with both metaphoric significance and mimic power. In this manner McGann’s non-linguistic periphery suddenly becomes a contraventionally repositioned paratextual element essential to the narrative of the most heterological and anomalous of eighteenth-century novels. It might be useful to look at the historical rise of marbling. Marbled paper’s characteristic polychrome random patterns are obtained through a process of floating different colored inks and dyes on a gelatinous substance that is then scattered into random chromatic patterns. (In more recent developments the ink and dyes are stroked with a comb.) After the liquid is marbled in a container, the blank sheet of paper is dipped into it. Imported into Europe from Turkey in the seventeenth century, the practice became widespread by the middle of the eighteenth century; its mass-production soon influenced the style of textiles , furnishings, and wallpapers as well as endpapers. It was soon applied to the leather covers of books to create a marbled effect upon the leather (known as “bark,” “marbled,” or “tree” calf). The fact that...