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The Self-Conscious Narrator in Comic Fiction Before Tristram Shandy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 August 2021

Wayne C. Booth
Wayne C. Booth*
Affiliation:
Haverford College Haverford, Pa.
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Extract

Historical statements about Tristram Shandy have in the past generally been hampered by critical misconceptions about the book. As long as it was taken to be a farrago, the value of which depended on a few lucky strokes on an otherwise haphazard and worthless canvas, efforts to see it in its historical context were doomed to failure. In effect, such a hodgepodge could have no important context. It was, as critics and historians repeated endlessly, a mad, inexplicable thing, unreasoned and unreasonable, having real kinship in literature only with other mad books, most of them long since wisely forgotten. As a whole it was really nothing, and consequently as a whole it could not be related to other wholes. Thus, with the exception of such matters as the peculiar sentence structure, the minute delineation of gesture, and the depiction of humor and sentiment, there were really no artistic devices to be placed in a historical context; all one could do was to place Sterne in the historical stream of those who were delightfully inartistic.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 67 , Issue 2 , March 1952 , pp. 163 - 185
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1952

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References

Notes

1 See James Aiken Work, Introd. to ed. of Tristram Shandy (New York, 1940); Rufus Putney, “Laurence Sterne, Apostle of Laughter,” The Age of Johnson, Essays presented to C. B. Tinker (New Haven, 1949); Wayne Booth, “Did Sterne Complete Tristram Shandy?” MP, xlviii (Feb. 1951), 172-183.

2 Discussion of these must be reserved for a later article, which will include Béroalde's Le moyen de parvenir, Burton's Anatomy, Bruscambille's Prologues, John Dunton's A Voyage Round the World, D'Urfey‘s An Essay Towards the Theory of the Intelligible World, “Pilgrim Plowden's” Farrago, Francis Kirkman's The Unlucky Citizen, La Fontaine's Fables, Montaigne's Essays, Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, Swift's A Tale of a Tub, Bouchet's Serees, and other relevant works.

3 The most interesting pre-Cervantian use of intrusion in fiction occurs in Thomas Nashe's Jack Wilton (1594); see esp. “The Induction to the dapper Mounsier Pages of the Court.” It is perhaps self-evident that this survey of the self-conscious narrator cannot be exhaustive. Nor is there any effort to show that Sterne knew individual works, though in fact it is certain that he knew most of them.

4 The Life and Atchievements of the Renown'd Don Quixote de la Mancha, trans. Peter Motteux, rev. John Ozell (London, 1719). Sterne owned the 1743 edition; my page references are to the Modern Library reprint of this revision (New York, 1930).

5 Part i, 1651; Part ii, 1657. First translated, 1676. Tr. by “Mr. Tho. Brown, Mr. Savage, and Others” as The Comical Romance (London, 1700). My references are to the 1712 edition of this translation.

6 For further outstanding intrusions see pp. 99-100, 160, 203, 208, 212, 242, 331.

7 This statement is certainly open to dispute, like all statements about influence, whether particular or general. But I think a careful reading of Marivaux' novels from the point of view of what Fielding could have learned only from them must confirm Fielding's own opinion when he lists Marivaux and Cervantes as the sole novelists among his major influences (Tom Jones xiii.i). The other writers listed are Aristophanes, Lucian, Rabelais, Molière, Shakespeare, and Swift.

8 Trans. J. Lockman, Pharsamond, or, The New Knight-Errant (London, 1750).

9 There is explicit parody of La Calprenède's Faramond, but the whole tradition of the romances is the true object of most of the ridicule.

10 The first 11 of 12 parts were translated as The Life of Marianne: or, The Adventures of the Countess of . . . (London, 1736-42). My references are to the Dublin reprint of the London translation, 1742.

11 Examples of this are to be found throughout Marianne (e.g., i, 15, 57, 83, 159, 272; ii, 58, 182). The following is typical: “It would perhaps be much better not to mention all these little particulars; but I write as well as I can. I must not think that I am making a book, for that would discompose my mind too much. I rather chuse to fancy my self conversing with you, because what passes in conversation is tolerable. Let us then proceed” (i, 30).

12 The History of the English Novely iv (London, 1930), 240. See also Sherburn's account in Albert C. Baugh et al., A Literary History of England (New York, 1948), p. 1024.

13 To class together as “nonsense” or “facetious” works the books of Rabelais, Béroalde, Bouchet, Marivaux and Swift is rather unfortunate, especially since it is clear from other references that marivaudage, even for Baker, has nothing to do with the one quality these writers do have in common: an elaborate use of the self-conscious narrator.

14 E.g., Mrs. Charlotte Lennox' The Female Quixote (1752) and Thomas Mozeen's Young Scarron (1752).

15 The History of Charlotte Summers, The Fortunate Parish Girl (London, 1749). CBEL says that this book has been attributed to Sarah Fielding. The “first edition” I have used is dated 1750.

16 It is perhaps obvious that an increase in the vividness of the intrusions has no necessary relationship to the quality of a whole work. Actually such a sequence is detrimental to the story itself. But it is this very excessive quality about the intrusions which carries the novel as a whole one step closer to the border-line beyond which lies the new kind of work written by Sterne.

17 As in Tom Jones, the most fully developed picture of the narrator is given in the prefatory chapters to each of the books. See especially Books i and ii, in the first chapters of which the author's indebtedness to Fielding is explicitly avowed (i.l-11; 215-228; esp. pp. 9 and 221).

18 For example: The Adventures of Mr. Loveill, Interspers'd with many Real Amours of The Modern Polite World (London, 1750), esp. pp. 1-2; John Kidgell, The Card (Dublin, 1755), esp. pp. 11-13; The Juvenile Adventures of David Ranger, Esq. . . . (London, 1757); Angola. An Indian History. A Work destitute of all Probability . . . (London, 1750); The Life and Memoirs of Mr. Ephraim Tristram Bates, commonly called Corporal Bates, A Brokenhearted Soldier (London, 1756). This last work is important to the study of Tristram Shandy more for other reasons than for its narrative intrusions; it is a possible source, though an indefinite one, for some of the materials—as distinct from the devices—of Sterne's book (see “A Precursor of Tristram Shandy,” by Helen Sard Hughes, JEGP, xvii [1918], 227-251). But it does show a good deal of fairly subtle narrative intrusion (e.g., pp. 10, 14, 15, 90). Perhaps the best stroke is the author's trick of having Bates begin his story in third-person, with a great show of objectivity, and then more or less unconsciously drift into first-person at crucial points in the story, thus throwing a delightful retrospective humor over all the pretenses of the preceding narrative.

19 The Adventures of Captain Greenland, Written in Imitation of all those Wise, Learned, Witty, and Humorous Authors, who either already have, or hereafter may Write in the same Stile and Manner (London, 1752).

20 See i, 108; ii, 149-50, 168, 186, 309; iii, 1, 2, 88, 149, 186, 233, 250, 297; iv, 14, 21, 30, 39, 50, 51, 59, 62, 64, 271, etc.