On Sterne's Page: Spatial Layout, Spatial Form, and Social Spaces in Tristram Shandy

On Sterne's Page: Spatial Layout, Spatial Form, and Social Spaces in Tristram Shandy Christopher Fanning Since the time of its first publication, readers of Tristram Shandy (1759-67) have struggled to account for its oddities of appearance and narrative method. Its lack of conventional novelistic form has caused critics to wonderwhether Tristram Shandy is a "novel" or rather some variety of philosophical commentary or anatomical satire. One answer to the problem of generic coherence has been to follow Tristram's own suggestion that he "must go along with you to the end of the work."1 Following Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction, one recurrent focus of criticism has been the sense of the narrator's presence as the unifying principle of the work. Part of what ultimately obviates the need for strict generic definitions is the way in which Tristram, as Booth phrases it, "has ceased here to be distinguishable from what he relates."2 Sterne's unique integration 1 Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions ofTristram Shandy, Gentleman: The Text, ed. Melvyn New and Joan New, 2 vols, Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1978), 6:20, 534. References are to the original volume and chapter numbers, followed by the page number in the Florida edition. 2 Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 223. According to Booth, the secret of Tristram Shandy's, "coherence, its form, seems to reside primarily in the role played by the teller, by Tristram, the dramatized narrator. He is himself in some way the central subject holding together materials which, were it not for his scatterbrained presence, would never have seemed to be separated in the first place" (p. 222). EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 10, Number 4, July 1998 430 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION of the sense of the narrator's presence into the formal structure of the narrative has had important implications for the history of narrative. Only recently, however, with renewed interest in the print culture of the era, has a further extension of this integration become apparent. A consideration of Sterne's attention to the physical material of the book in relation to questions of narrative presence in Tristram Shandy has become necessary. This essay will inquire into Sterne's use of three different ideas of "space" in Tristram Shandy: the space found in the fictional world, in fictional technique, and in printing. The first two ideas of space—the mimetic and the formal—are customary ways of considering "fiction and space." Both critical approaches employ space as a metaphor. One of the ways of interpreting a novel is to consider the mimetic spaces of fiction— the spaces of the fictional world that characters inhabit—as metaphors for its thematic concerns. In eighteenth-century fiction, obvious examples of this variety of space range from the enclosed, claustrophobic spaces of Clarissa to the freedom of the open road in Tom Jones, each having a metaphoric correlative in our ideas of the private and the public, the realms of thought and of action. A similar range is found in Tristram Shandy: the spatial separation of the men conversing in the parlour from Mrs Shandy and the midwife who are labouring over Tristram's birth in the bedroom above correlates with the separate spheres ofmale and female activity that are themselves figures for satiric distinctions between theory and practice; Tristram's journey through France in volume 7 is a spatially enacted metaphoric flight from death. At the same time that mimetic space has metaphoric meaning in a work of fiction, the form of that work is often discussed in terms of a metaphor of abstract discursive "space" that helps to articulate the manipulation of narrative sequence. This is a formal concern with the way in which the narrative is ordered. For example, when simultaneous events are placed into linear language, sequence is fragmented and narrative is said to have been "spatialized." Similarly, "spatial form" is at work when motifs or images demand interconnections that thwart the supposedly sequential flow of language (syntax or narrative).3 Tristram Shandy has long been recognized as a masterpiece of spatial form, especially...