• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Seen this way, the whole notion of plot, which is ridiculed as an Aristotelian or Horatian structure, gives way to the dramatization of Tristram’s relationship to his reader. In Sterne’s stream of self-consciousness the narrator of Tristram Shandy attempts to communicate, however fragilely, a sense of who and what he is, “to convey,” as Tristram puts it, “but the same impressions to every other brain, which the occurrences themselves excite in my own” (IV, xxxii, 266). The reader and Tristram start out as “perfect strangers to each other,” but Tristram promises early in the novel that “[a]s you proceed further with me, the slight acquaintance which is now beginning betwixt us, will grow into familiarity; and that, unless one of us is in fault, will terminate in friendship” (I, vi, 6–7). This shift from acquaintance to familiarity to friendship may be taken as an extension of the process at work in Tom Jones, where the narrator makes his appearance metaphorically in the guise of an innkeeper who presents us with a bill of fare and who at the end of the novel takes his leave as though we have been companions on a stagecoach who have come to know each other in the course of our travels. Our relationship starts out commercially—we have, after all, bought the book—but it ends with the suggestion that chance acquaintance has become friendship. Sterne’s is an extreme version in eighteenth-century fiction of the attempt to turn an idiosyncratic self and a conventional society into a community. In Book IV of Gulliver’s Travels, Lemuel Gulliver finds himself between two worlds, whinnying ludicrously for one and unable even to break bread with his family in the other. To find more of a split between self and society in this period we would need to turn to the hero-villains of the Gothic novel, whose frequent claim on our attention is that neither their societies nor their readers can understand the consciousnesses from which their behavior proceeds.

At this point we are prepared to see more clearly some of the differences between Sterne and modern writers. Jean-Jacques Mayoux has a number of intelligent things to say about Tristram Shandy, yet his assertion that Sterne was aware of the “fantastic nullity of time” misses the point: “Sterne was aware before Beckett of the fantastic nullity of time, of its compressibility, so total that as Pozzo reminds us in Waiting for Godot, a life can be said to begin and to end on the same day, the same instant.”22 Sterne’s point rather is that time moves inexorably and quickly: his temporal strategy is to extend not nullify it. The Dedication of Tristram Shandy to Pitt accounts for the book as part of “a constant endeavour to fence against the infirmities of ill health, and other evils of life, by mirth; being firmly persuaded that every time a man smiles, – but much more so, when he laughs, that it adds something to this Fragment of Life.” Here is an important source for Sterne’s awareness of the fragmentary nature of life as well as fictions.23 In A Sentimental Journey he slows down the pace of his story by dwelling on minute particulars and paying great attention to the seemingly unimportant incidents of life. Samuel Richardson’s “writing to the moment” and Fielding’s emphasis on the world as “a vast machine, in which the great wheels are originally set in motion by those which are very minute, and almost imperceptible to any but the strongest eyes” have their parallel in Sterne’s gloves, purses, and snuff boxes, Tristram’s riddling and Yorick’s pulse-taking. Sterne’s use of minute particulars has more in common than theirs with Samuel Johnson’s observation that “[t]here is nothing too little for so little a creature as man.” Sterne accepts this proposition far more affectionately than it is offered.

To humanize time is to humanize place as well. It is not just the Romantics who see the importance of “spots of time.” Tristram describes his narrative as a journey while describing his actual journey to