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<i>Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel</i> (review)

2004; University of Toronto Press; Volume: 16; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ecf.2004.0031

1911-0243

John Richetti,

Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

REVIEWS337 Thomas Keymer. Sterne, the Modems, and the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. 236pp. £45. ISBN 0-19-924592-4. Without question, Sterne studies have stagnated lately. As far as I know, Jonathan Lamb's Sterne's Fiction and the Double Principle (1989) is the only recent major study. How many times, after all, can critics rehearse the subversive, parodie originality of Tristram Shandy or track the interweaving of sentimentality and sexuality in A SentimentalJourney} But more than any odier eighteenth-century novelist, Sterne continues to attract modern critical attention outside ofspecialist circles, and in die twentiedi century his work has tended to provoke ahistorical appreciation. The philosophically inflected playfulness built into both his books has made diem fit modernist and even postmodernist perspectives. Thomas Keymer begins by outlining this embrace of Tristram Shandy, dating back to the Russian Formalist, Victor Shklovsky, making Laurence Sterne our contemporary, a modernist avant la lettre. But Keymer also shrewdly opposes to that approach the stricdy historicist and specialized understanding exemplified in D.W. Jefferson's classic 1951 essay, "Tristram Shandy and the Tradition of Learned Wit," and, especially, in Melvyn New's books about Sterne (and in his monumental Florida Edition of Tristram Shandy with its encyclopedic notes) . As Keymer wittily remarks, New's Sterne is nobody's contemporary, neither ours nor the eighteenth century's, but rather "a wilful Renaissance throwback," recapitulating Rabelais and Cervantes. Keymer does not quite reject these approaches. He acknowledges their usefulness and even dieir inevitability, as he tries (at times he seems to be having it all ways at once) to steer a path between them, hoping to define Sterne as something distinct from either proto-modernist or satiric reactionary. Overall and nearly all the way through, his study is a sharply original revisionary interpretation, a recontexualization of Sterne's work in die particular modernity ofhis time, the new "novelism" ofthe mideighteenth century. The crucial lesson Keymer has to teach is that TristramShandyis, specifically and insistentiy, a response to Sterne's literary-historical moment, "above all a satire on the novel" (p. 7) and (more suggestively) a fulfillment of Swift's A Tale ofa Tub, extending and deepening thatwork's assault on a modernity that by the 1750s had outstripped Swift's projection ofit as a zany and even dangerous deviation from common sense and rationality. But there is much more to Keymer's thoughtful and thorough rehistoricizing of Tristram Shandy. For one thing, he reminds us of forgotten predecessor eighteenthcentury "experimental" fiction such as Thomas Amory's Life ofJohn Buncleor Edward lumber's TheJuvenile Adventures ofDavid Ranger, Esq. For another, Keymer in his first chapter, "Sterne and die 'New Species ofWriting,'" makes as strong a case as I have ever seen for Sterne's particular engagement with 338 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION16:2 his three great predecessors, Smollett, Fielding, and Richardson. But he makes a more original foray in his succeeding chapter, "Novels, Print, and Meaning," when he surveys the critical and novelistic climate of the decade and a halfofthe 1750s and early 1760s and pursues a number ofinteresting facts that, in the end, add up to a newly realized contemporary immediacy ofpurpose for Tristram Shandy. One, thanks in part to die unsparing critiques of the Monthly and Critical Reviews, which compared all new fiction to the work of Richardson and Fielding and found it seriously wanting, and also dianks to the emergence oforiginality itselfas a key critical desideratum for narrative, Keymer suggests that novelists were under considerable pressure to assert their distinctiveness and places Sterne's work within that set of demands. Two, he proposes convincingly that Sterne was reading widely in the fiction of the 1750s and that "Tristram Shandy may turn out to be as thoroughly grounded in diis kind ofmaterial as the Dunciadand PeriBathous are in hack verse of the 1720s" (p. 52). Three, he traces various precedents in forgotten novels such asJohn Kidgell's The Card (1755) for playing with the material format of the text, and he also reminds us of typographical devices in canonical fiction such as the rendering of Clarissa's distracted scraps and fragments ofwriting after her rape. None ofthese facts is new, but they are, Keymer...