4 - Narratives and readings

Summary

Sterne's illusion that he was inhabiting his own text, or that his life had become a quotation or a continuation of it to the point where he could read himself in what he had already written, shows him exploiting (perhaps beyond reasonable bounds) two related associationist positions. If there is no point of origin at which the efficacy of a cause can be declared, then not only are causes interchangeable with effects, origins with ends, but authors are interchangeable with their texts, and readers with authors. This joint-sharing in the common fruit of literary labour is not possible, however, without a degree of belief, which arises from the intensification of an idea (analogous to an effect) to the degree where it may become indistinguishable from an impression (analogous to a cause). This intensification is in turn not possible without a prior structure of ideas forming either the inducement for the believer to believe or the frame of that belief. Sterne seems to be grasping all of these implications when he writes to Dr John Eustace: ‘A true feeler always brings half the entertainment along with him. His own ideas are only call'd forth by what he reads, and the vibrations within, so entirely correspond with those excited, 'tis like reading himself and not the book’ (Letters, p. 411). An examination of the development of this narrative intimacy will show how neatly Sterne was plaiting ideas and images from Hogarth into his imitations of Cervantes in order to foster opportunities for hypallagic rearrangements of writer, reader and text. It will also become evident that intimacy of this order is not achieved or maintained without risk.