Sterne and the Narrative of Determinateness
Melvyn New, University of Florida
Volume 4, no. 4, July 1992
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
I will begin with a seemingly non-controversial observation by a recent critic of Tristram Shandy, anonymous simply because it is the sort of comment any one of a hundred might write today: “Sterne’s point,” he asserts, “is clear enough: life is a confused muddle of intent and accident.” It is the sort of generalization many have accepted at least since E.M. Forster in 1927 declared “muddle” to be the God ruling over the work. However, a closer examination of this particular formulation, not a jot different from that of countless others, might suggest an interesting problem … Using Tristram Shandy as my model, I specifically want to explore a key means by which its narrative, while pretending to suspend judgment about itself (to remain muddle), simultaneously reminds us of the impossibility of reading without judgment; we are unable to refrain from seeking the definitive statement of what is clear about the work. Since the narrative of Tristram Shandy is nowadays taken as a prime illustration of disruptive, fragmented, open, disjunctive narrative, it helps us at times to keep our attention not on any particular interpretation, but more broadly on the contrasting “stories” people tell about the work, the narratives they initiate in order to organize or possess or subdue Sterne’s mysterious text. In brief, while these modernist readers insist that Tristram Shandy is an open narrative, they all impose strategies of closure and clarity in their own writing upon it.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Sterne” include:
Consuming Indians: Tsonnonthouan, Colonialism, and the Commodification of Culture
by ROBBIE RICHARDSON (ECF 22.4, Spring 2010)
The Literary History of the Sash Window
by RACHEL RAMSEY (ECF 22.2, Winter 2009-10)
Talking Coins and Thinking Smoke-Jacks: Satirizing Materialism in Gildon and Sterne
by SCOTT NOWKA (ECF 22.2, Winter 2009-10)
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