book’s improvised quality, the condition of its pages, or its vulnerability to public opinion have their own degree of candor. The possibility that pages will be missing or scenes incomplete is quite real in these faddish novels, which would much less often have been bound, and much more quickly have been recycled as paper, than the works of major literary figures. Gestures of authorial distress are not, in Goodall’s or Shebbeare’s case, quite the “false scent” that Dorothy Van Ghent shows them to be in the case of Sterne.25 In this perspective, Sterne capitalizes on the self-deprecating humor of the relationship professional novelists had established with their public. Expanding his cast of fictional readers to include distinct characters and their various interpretive hobbyhorses, blank pages, and jokes about sexual imagination, Sterne plays in a new realm of confidence with the dangerous alliance forged in these earlier novels, between an author genuinely uncertain about the objective shape of his output and his sceptical customer.
Artificially Intelligent Books
In this light, the novels of the mid-century provide important evidence that eighteenth-century readers were not simply, or even primarily attracted to novels as a credible, alternative realities. Even their moderate success attests to the presence of a reader different from the one imagined, for instance, by Julie Park in her account of eighteenth-century novels beloved as part of a culture devoted to making non-human characters as lifelike as possible.26 Readers of Shebbeare and Goodall and Coventry were keenly attuned to the quality and economy of entertainment as a human construction. And yet the mid-century fiction that reminded readers of the material constraints of novels did not necessarily encourage them to command or improve the production of fiction or to deploy the spirit of critique for their own purposes.
One sign that gestures of transparency and collaboration worked against a feeling of human empowerment in mid-century novels is the number of fictional narrators pursuing a combative relationship with their reader. Shebbeare, Goodall, and their contemporaries are artful at making the environment of the printed book a barrier to the human involvement in the technical production of a story. Tristram Shandy has been described as a narrator whose collaborative gestures frequently turn out to have no substance: although he relinquishes passages of his narrative, he frequently recants on these moments. At one point, after inciting readers to guess what is to come next, Tristram announces that “if I thought you was able to form the least judgement or probable conjecture to yourself, of what was to come in the next page,—I would tear it out of my book” (70). “It is in vain,” he exclaims at another point, “to leave this to the Reader’s imagination …. ’Tis my own affair: I’ll explain it myself” (340). In such moments, argues Keymer, Tristram becomes more of a “control freak” than a partner in conversation with his readers.27 But most self-conscious novels that appeared before Tristram Shandy flaunt an even cruder brand of authorial control than this.
The passage from Charlotte Summers in which the narrator has left his readers to imagine Charlotte for themselves concludes, for instance, with the narrator pointing out that although he has left his character to their imagination, he has also “cast a Spell upon her, that she cannot move one Step without my leave” (1:56). In the same spirit, the narrator announces gleefully that
I am determined my Readers shall learn something in every Chapter, and this, amongst other Things, they must learn and practice Patience, for let them be in never so great a Hurry to come at the Speech of Miss Summers, they cannot come near her, without my Permission, and as I have now got them into my Custody, they must travel my Pace, or get back to London, on Foot, without seeing the show. (1:24)
This attitude of authorial bravado makes narrators the tormenters and hostage takers of fictional readers, who are subject to digressions and deprived of narrative satisfaction. In The Sisters, the narrator turns to the implied reader after offering a brief glimpse of the “young, gay, sprightly and charming” Charlotte to advertise his power: “no wonder the heart burns to know more of her, and the bosom pants for a nearer acquaintance.”28 Eliza Haywood’s The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) tauntingly claims that “the reader, if he has the patience to go through the following pages, will see into the secret springs which set this machine in motion.”29 In this move, Haywood, like Sterne later, presumes knowledge of and superiority over the hungry consumer of novels.
In some novels, the narrator reins in the fictional reader on the charge of indecency. Dodd’s narrator hails “gentle readers” in the middle of a raunchy scene from The Sisters to “stop here a while with me [and] think not these pages … written solely to amuse or divert thee” (55). The narrator of Charlotte Summers claims that when he circulates among his female characters in their private rooms he wears his “conjuring invisible cap” and views them chastely from his position as a deity (2:155). Asserting that he chooses not to represent things more intimately, this narrator distinguishes himself from readers who lack such impunity by announcing that, while readers must be controlled against their will, he has access to the pornographic aspect of his narrative but restrains himself from using it. In The Brothers (1758), Susan Smythies coos: “I choose to leave to the imagination, rather than attempt the description of the tender, generous, grateful things, which were thought and said on this affecting occasion.”30 This playful willingness to withhold erotic and romantic detail gestures to the real reader’s ability to fill it in. But the same strategy often erupts into pure shows of authorial confidence: “if we had the least inclination,” Shebbeare’s narrator of Lydia boasts, “we might fill this journey with marvellous and surprising adventures” (2:18). Goodall’s narrator puts it most vociferously in Capt. Greenland, announcing at one point that “we are much better Judges than our judicious Readers, what is necessary to insert in this History and what should be omitted” (1:47).
Rather than enjoining the reader to participate in a conversation with a narrator, these dialogues underscore a situation in which the lone reader-of-print’s powers are few and desires are many. They draw attention to the way that narrators design a plot and its characters without consulting an audience and to the fact that, once this plot makes it into print, it becomes indelibly fixed as a course of events. Novel readers are positioned in these exchanges as particularly impatient and likely to be sexually frustrated by the non-interactive environment of the book. Their communication with the narrator, however tantalizing it might appear as a dialogue between creative minds, is thematized as a confrontation with the medium of the novel and an impasse to the imagination: the reminder of paper works against the illusion of collaboration.
But the dialogue between fictionalized readers and narrators can also be used to spell out the way narrators are subject in different ways from readers to the medium with which they work. One tendency that distinguishes Shebbeare, Goodall, Haywood, and the author of Charlotte Summers most clearly from Cervantes and Fielding is their suggestion that even aggressively original storytellers are answerable to the established rules of novel writing. Haywood, for instance, makes a point of obeying the putative unity of time and space by arguing that “it would be as absurd in a writer to rush all at once into the catastrophe of the adventures he would relate, as it would be impracticable in a traveller to reach the end of a long journey, without sometimes stopping at the inns in his way to it.”31 She differs in this respect from Fielding, who explains in Tom Jones that he will meet the reader’s need for interest by filling out extraordinary scenes and passing over periods of time when nothing happens.32 The narrator of Lydia makes a similar gesture to fixed narrative conventions when he turns a long digression into a description of himself running as a child to meet his father on the road, but discovering it is impossible to speed up the rate at which he travels: “In the like manner we conceive if we walked through the woods of America to meet this valiant chief, we could in no wise hasten his journey to New-York” (1:28). These intrusions demonstrate a writer bound to produce a sequential story, to write one sentence after another in continuation on the surface of the page. They pit this writer against the reader tempted by the possibilities of codex to leap ahead in the story. Digressive asides illustrate that even an author’s deviation from a narrative must
