what it performs-or, better, creates the illusion of performing-is a personality.
There is no particular reason to assume that such a voice was, definitively, Laurence Sterne. We are all now suspicious in a healthy way about identifying anything as essential, especially in matters of the self. This voice, too, is a construction, more artful and self-conscious than most. But it was at least part of Sterne's genius that he recognized in the -160- new form of the novel the opportunity to perform or project a distinctive voice of personality. Fielding had done it already, in Tom Jones particularly, but he had kept the voice separate from Tom's story: Fielding's narrator controls the action openly but is not part of it. To a remarkable degree, however, Sterne's voice is the story, is the action of all of his fiction. But that does not really state the difference strongly enough, for Sterne takes another step beyond Fielding. Not only did he make his voice the center of his novels, he realized-at least after the publication of the first installment of Tristram Shandy-that such a voice (however invented) could be the source of this new brand of writerly fame, personal celebrity. The novel-either because of its formal freedom, or because of the kind of audience it attracted, or because the era was increasingly shaped by a mercantile cast of mind, or (most likely) because of the fortuitous combination of all these forces-allowed for what we might call the commodification of personality. The book, with its square shape and hard covers, could become almost literally a package, a package for a voice to be bought and sold. We may regard with some distaste the resulting loss of distinction between a person and a product, but whatever our response, we should not lose sight of the historical importance of what Sterne represents, for it is not a trivial moment in the making of the world that we live in. And perhaps our judgment may be tempered somewhat if we keep in mind that celebrity (however commodified) was something Sterne longed for, something he found, and by every account, something he loved.
But Sterne's celebrity, however determined by history and personality, and however significant as an image of the future world, is not the end of the story. Celebrity ends with death, and then the only form of fame left for the writer is the old-fashioned one, the immortality of reputation. As Tristram says, 'Death opens the gates of fame.' The fiction of Laurence Sterne has endured, at least until now. And having looked at the author and what his career represents in the history of the novel, it is time to examine more closely his work, for in the end it gained Sterne not only contemporary celebrity but also lasting reputation.
Boswell records this among other miscellaneous observations made by Samuel Johnson on a day in March 1776- about eight years after Sterne's death. Johnson must have taken some satisfaction in pro-161- nouncing this terse obituary. As noted above, the two men met only once, late in 1761, and the conversation went badly (Sterne may have shown Johnson a pornographic picture). Johnson was wrong, of course, but it is worth analyzing for a moment how he was wrong. Was he mistaken to assume that literary oddity and endurance are incompatible? Or was he in error when he said Tristram Shandy was odd? He was undeniably mistaken to imply that Sterne's novel would not last (to give Johnson credit, Sterne was somewhat neglected, as many writers are, in the years immediately following his death), but-as is so often the case with Johnson's critical blunders-the question he raises is central. What is the relationship between endurance and oddity in works of art? Can something genuinely bizarre last? One popular answer, at least in the case of Sterne, has been to deny that he is odd. With marvelous dexterity, this school of thought works to normalize Sterne's fiction. Such an approach, however, finally does confirm Johnson's point about the kind of art that will survive: nothing odd, it turns out, will do for long. In this section, I want to look at some of the most prominent attempts to grapple with Sterne's work, including especially the many discussions that have insisted in one way or another that Johnson was wrong about Sterne, that his work is not odd. If my own discussion is weighted more heavily toward Tristram Shandy, and leaves less room for A Sentimental Journey, that reflects both the balance of the criticism that now exists and the fact that most readers are likely to approach Sterne through his first novel.
Most any modern reader who casually picks up Tristram Shandy will think Johnson's opinion frankly obvious. It begins with the hero's intimate account of his own conception, and then proceeds, digressing at every single opportunity, to recount a very few events from his earliest childhood. While there are plenty of Tristram's opinions, delivered in that distinctive voice we glanced at above, there is in fact very little of his life; most of the events we do see occur not to him but to his father, Walter, and to his Uncle Toby; and many of these take place long before his birth. Along the way, there are interpolated stories, extracts in French and Latin, a missing chapter, chapters out of numerical order, and a host of typographical peculiarities: a blank page, a black page, marbled pages, straight lines, crooked lines, doodles, dashes, and asterisks. Whatever the other oddities of Tristram Shandy, it looks strange. Lest we fall into the error of thinking this sense of oddity is born of our own ignorance, we must remember that it was a contemporary, John-162- John, who called it odd, and he was hardly the first. Everyone thought it was peculiar when it appeared ('a succession of Surprise, surprise, surprise,' Hume said) and the argument was not about whether it was strange but whether you liked the strangeness. Horace Walpole, for one, hated it, calling it a 'very insipid and tedious performance… the great humour of which consists in the whole narrative going backwards.' But his friend and correspondent, Horace Mann, confessed, 'You will laugh at me, I suppose, when I say that I don't understand Tristram Shandy, because it was probably the intention of the author that nobody should… It diverted me, however, extremely.'
The oddity of Sterne bears much further scrutiny, but I think it can best be approached by looking in some detail at arguments on the other side. A great deal of modern criticism has aligned itself against Johnson, though in a bewildering variety of ways. Let us make a first distinction, however, between approaches that are historical and those that are nonhistorical. I will look at the latter first.
The nonhistorical approach is typified by one critic who, in the 1960s, called Sterne 'an inexplicable anachronism,' and who in support of his point approvingly quoted this remark from several decades before: 'To see what Sterne's achievement really was, is, I believe, only in these last few years possible, in a mind made aware by The Magic Mountain, Ulysses, and Remembrance of Things Past.' For this school of thought, Sterne was of course strange to a reader like Johnson, in the same way as any prophet who is ahead of his time is perceived as strange. Sterne understood, virtually at the beginning of its history, that the novel's destiny lay not with the kind of work being done around him, but with at least three hallmarks of the modern novel: difficulty, self-consciousness, and the attempt to render in all its subtlety the manifold subjectivity of the inner life.
Setting aside the question of whether Sterne's contemporaries or his predecessors were really uninterested in these possibilities for the novel, it is undeniably true that his own work manifests all these qualities: he is difficult, he does promote self-consciousness, and he is sensitive to the peculiarities of interior experience. The difficulty of Tristram Shandy is undeniable. It is hard to read a book whose story line, such as it is, is hopelessly fragmented and delayed. These frustrations, moreover, have as one of their consequences a kind of alienation effect: as readers, we become self-conscious of our complicity in what Richardson rather peevishly called readers' desire for 'Story, story, story'; such -163- a desire for an apparently seamless and progressive unfolding of linked events can falsify our experience of ourselves and the world. Once we have achieved that awareness, we can become more cognizant of the way our experience does unfold-disjointedly, digressively, above all, subjectively. Such is an abstract rendering, at least in part, of the world of Sterne from this modernist point of view, and such a description points up obvious congruences with the world of Joyce or Woolf.
This approach to Sterne, while it has not disappeared, has gradually diminished in importance over the last twenty years, especially in light of the broad return to history that has marked so much recent criticism. Critical trends aside, however, an understanding of Sterne as an 'inexplicable anachronism' seems to me to ignore the fact that reading Tristram Shandy is not very much like reading Ulysses or To the Lighthouse. And the difference is not simply a matter of costume, or setting, or language. These writers differ in fundamentals, for the difficulty or selfawareness or stream of consciousness narration of the high modernists is, finally, in the service of realistic presentation and authorial objectivity. Sterne's digressions and moments of self-consciousness may sometimes work to create a realistic effect (more on this below), but Sterne seems at least equally interested in exposing how all attempts at realistic representation are doomed. Before the first volume is half over, Tristram interrupts the action in a by-now familiar way to comment on his problems as a storyteller:
When a man sits down to write a history, — tho' it be but the history of Jack Hickathrift or Tom Thumb, he knows no more than his heels what lets and confounded hinderances he is to meet with in his way, — or what a dance he may be led by one excursion or another, before all is over. Could a historiographer drive on his history, as a muleteer drives on his mule, — straight forward;-… he might venture to foretell you to the hour when he should get to his journey's end;-but the thing is, morally speaking, impossible: For if he is a man of the least spirit, he will have fifty deviations from a straight line to make with this or that party as he goes along, which he can no ways avoid. He will have views and prospects to himself perpetually solliciting his eye, which he can no more help
