The Beautiful Oblique: Conceptions of Temporality in “Tristram Shandy” by Duncan Campbell (review)

59 only of the historical context of A Sentimental Journey and the framework withinwhich its verbal meanings were formulated, but also critical responses from Sterne’s time to the present. The result—no doubt inevitably, and properly—is that the notes have a marked variorum tendency, both citing and evaluating previous local commentary, and capable of comprehending Thomas Jefferson as well as Thomas Keymer. Thistendency the editors clearly acknowledge: ‘‘every new edition gathers the past into itself, and in so doing weighs traditional findings against its own, preserving much, but also criticizing and discarding some earlier notions . . . .’’ The text itself, as in previous Florida volumes, is an elegant clean page, large of font and generous of lead, carefully following the lively typography of its original, down to three distinct lengths of dash. Copy-text for Messrs. Day and New, as for Stout, is the first printed edition, published by Becket and de Hondt, February 27, 1768, rather than the manuscript sources. In this policy the Florida editors are consistent with the general modern trend toward acceptance of social factors in production, of the printed text as the site of a cooperative authority between author and those engaged in the production of the book. There are ten textual Appendices, nine concerned with textual notes, collations among the original texts, and bibliographical descriptions. The last Appendix provides a collation of substantive variants between the Florida edition of Bramine’s Journal and those of Wilbur L. Cross, Lewis Perry Curtis, and Ian Jack. As these are not authoritative editions, this may seem a work of supererogation, though there is a practical interest to the student of the modern text of Sterne. There is, too, an intriguing parallel, along with the clean reading text, with the practice of such an eighteenth-century textual editor as Edward Capell—no bad model of scholarship, style, or method. Marcus Walsh University of Liverpool DUNCAN CAMPBELL. The Beautiful Oblique: Conceptions of Temporality in ‘‘Tristram Shandy.’’ New York: Peter Lang, 2002. Pp. 228. $36.95 (paper). Moretheoreticalthanhistorical,Mr.Campbell’swell-written,clearlyorganizedstudy of temporality in Tristram Shandy does not overly burden the reader with a long history of the changing philosophical conceptions of time, nor does it leave Sterne and the reader lost in a labyrinth of theory. No reader of Tristram Shandy can overlook time. Focusing less on the concept of time itself than on its relation to narrative through the traditional notion that time and narrative are linear, Mr. Campbell persuasively argues that Sterne’s parody of novelistic realism may be bestunderstood asanefforttointerrupt both the experience of time as an indivisible point of presence, and linear narrative as an analogy of the linear sequence of ‘‘nows’’ in time. Mr. Campbell’s declared purpose is to show that Tristram Shandy’s notorious ‘‘oddness ’’ derives from ‘‘a conception of temporality as a radical alterity or difference.’’ Observing that the novel is unstable as a genre in the eighteenth century, Mr. Cambell nevertheless refers to Sterne’s text as a novel throughout. His condensed history of the novel and its ‘‘referential ambitions,’’ its realist tendencies, rightly includes allegory as a critique of realism and its representational illusions. The exemplary practitioner 60 of allegory, Sterne consciously introduces a gap between words and the reality that the novel is supposed to represent. The gap between the sign and the external world to which it refers forces us to recognize that what really matters is the internal connection between signs. Since allegory is the referral of one sign to a previous sign, a repetition of a previous sign with which it can never coincide, we must admit a ‘‘rhetoric of temporality,’’a temporal distance between the past and present signs. As Mr. Campbell convincingly argues then, Sterne illustrates that the novel, no matter how self-conscious it is, can never be structurally complete because of this rhetoric of temporality. Mr. Campbell attributes the deconstructive traits of Tristram Shandy to a ‘‘radical conception of temporality as alterity that disrupts both subjectivity and representation.’’ Nevertheless, most of these traits—the interruption of linear narrative, destabilization of the autobiographical subject and the emphasis on textual materiality—can be explained . Parody ofcontemporary philosophers(SternesatirizingLocke’stheoryoftime) is a...