Schoolhouse Follies: Tristram Shandy and the Male Reader's Tutelage

Who, apart from the dull-witted pedant or the tiresome moralist, could possibly prove immune to Tristram Shandy's seductive levity? Laurence Sterne's text has mesmerized, provoked, and perplexed readers for nearly three centuries, and it owes its near-mythic status—in large part, at least—to the author's stunningly inventive poetics. This narrative remains implicit in most modern scholarship on the text, and rightly so: eighteenth-century printers churned out dozens of reviews and pamphlets that enthusiastically parroted Sterne's distinctive style, and dissections of Shandean form continue to stream forth from contemporary presses.

However, it would be false to imagine that all of Sterne's readers hewed to this celebratory consensus. In fact, a significant contingent of the writer's contemporaries found themselves alienated by Tristram Shandy's redundancy and apparent pointlessness. Monthly Review critic Owen Ruffhead accused Sterne of "continually chiming on one set of ideas" after exhausting his wit in the text's first two volumes. "Your characters," he admonished the writer, "are no longer striking and singular."¹ Though Edmund Burke praised the book, he believed that even the first two volumes sagged with monotony. "[D]igressions so frequently repeated, instead of relieving the reader, become at length tiresome," he commented.² Other authors and critics called the text a "riddle, without an object," and suspected that Sterne wrote it merely to mock those readers who would toil in search of its (nonexistent) meaning.³

Sophisticated readers all, these men cannot be dismissed as rubes who simply didn't get Tristram Shandy. In fact, I want to argue that their responses have something valuable to teach us about the text's poetics, and possibly even its genre. Below I will attempt to demonstrate that Tristram Shandy contains a mélange of formal and thematic features that project an impression of textual redundancy and pointlessness. I do not view this impression as the incidental byproduct of Sterne's experimentalism, but rather as a strategy designed to facilitate certain modes of reading while discouraging others. Specifically, I believe that the text solicits a desultory and leisurely—perhaps even lazy—form of reading, and that it inhibits those modes of reading that upper- and middle-class men would have learned in eighteenth-century public schools and universities.⁴ My contention is supported both by the text's explicit advocacy for nonlinear, inattentive forms of reading, and by its equally overt condemnation of scholarly reading practices. As I discuss these modes of textual advocacy, I will also uncover various other formal features that assist in structuring the reader's engagement with Sterne's work.

It is neither radical nor especially revelatory to claim that a text's formal and thematic properties possess some capacity to influence readers' responses. However, certain advantages derive from speculating upon the range of reading strategies that a text may have invited during a particular historical moment. For one, this method motivates us to attend to those textual features that we tend to overlook due to an investment in particular generic labels. Additionally, it prompts us to treat fictional texts as archives that we can mine for data on attitudes toward reading. This is especially useful for data that, with regard to certain classes of readers (in the present case, upper- and middle-class male readers of imaginative literature), has been persistently absent from more conventional archives.

Let me move to a more specific discussion of the assumptions and methods that govern this paper. I view genre as performative, and therefore contingent. Thus I hold that each text functions as a field of generic potentialities, which are unlocked in permutations that vary from one reader to the next. From here I make two key assumptions. First, similar response patterns may develop among a single class of readers. Second, some texts embed generic potentialities in such a manner that certain types of readers will be particularly susceptible to respond to them. Throughout the discussion below I will endeavor to prove that Tristram Shandy is one of these texts. Specifically, I will show that Tristram Shandy contains a thread of...