pages of a book.
Such gestures of creative limitation on the part of the narrator function as reminders of the novel as a medium rather than a forum for open conversation. As authors work with print’s constraints, their humor suggests, they become answerable to way that pages contain and convey their narrative, and the way that novelists are expected to write. In Lydia, Shebbare’s narrator presents himself obliged to include the salacious diary of his character, Rachel Stiffrump. However, he postures, “we desire those readers, who trifle with their salvation, to skip the leaves which contain this diary” (42). This scenario presents reader and narrator wrangling in their own way with the physical and generic conventions of the novel. Odysseus-like, the narrator who is bound to the mast of his own profession has no choice but to transcribe the sirens’ song while the reader, unable to stop rowing, can only block her ears by skipping pages. In Horkheimer and Adorno’s reading of this scene the vital question, the one that modernity has prevented us from asking, is why the whole ship might not be steered differently.33 Mid-century novels seem to raise the same question in presenting the logic of book production as the one invariable in their contest for power. Some of the most creative endeavors of the time present narrators and reader locked in a struggle which ultimately works to the disadvantage of both kinds of human agent. When Charlotte Summers entertains the reader with the idea of a paper object mysteriously programmed to include her, or Kidgell, rather than defending his novel as literature, deploys its disposability by securing his pages the special status of being precociously alert to their lowly material fate as waste paper, books appear as the only victors in a visibly mediated world. This fiction becomes the elaborate and ambiguous selling point of self-conscious, mid-century novels.
As I suggested in the Introduction, one of the basic tricks of authors working in this mode is to suggest that a text already knows what will happen to it in print. David Hume captures this spirit of resignation to the transcendence of books when he delivers his own “funeral oration” by speaking in the past tense of his existence, concluding “I am, or rather was (for that is the style I must now use in speaking of myself, which emboldens me the more to speak my sentiments); I was, I say, a man of mild disposition, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humor.” His perspective suggests that he has committed consciousness itself to paper, a conceit in keeping with his claim that his life story will be “little more than the History of my Writings.”34 Jonas Hanway produces a more basic version of this effect when he prompts his reader to look at the “gilded leaves” of his book’s material form as corresponding with his treatment of “celestial matters,” and at the green binding, which “will naturally remind [them] of the livery of nature.”35 This description appears in a first-person travel narrative. And yet, when Hanway boasts knowledge of his book’s binding, the center of conscious seems to tip from being his, as the author of a manuscript of uncertain future, to being that of a book already bound and in circulation.
Books, Hume and Hanway imply, have not only the ability to describe their own physical presence, but also the gadget-like ability to register and stay ahead of their readers. Charlotte Summers anticipates its real reader in this way by having Miss Arabella Dimple, lying naked in bed, call her maid to fetch “the first volume of the Parish Girl I was reading in the afternoon.” When Polly returns and sits down with the copy of Charlotte Summers, the sixth chapter of the novel procedes with a description of Arabella searching for the place she left off, which turns out—of course—to be the sixth chapter (1:67). In one sense, this scene simply carries on with a vein of humor introduced in Don Quixote, where the fictional world of the novel’s second part includes the presence of the first part, but it also pushes the joke to the surface of the page. As Arabella chastises her maid for imagining that she might have turned down a corner of the page as a marker, the copy of Charlotte Summers in the reader’s hand seems to become alert, not only to its own existence, but also to its physical condition.
The culture in which such a possibility seemed entertaining is one in which Tristram Shandy was affably at home, native to a context where authors were playing with the idea that paper could be conscious of what was written on it, and of how that writing was to be received in the imagined future of its material life. Tristram Shandy is well known as a book about a man trying to tell the story of his own genesis. But it can just as well be described from the perspective of the 1750s and ’60s as the story of a book—a book that makes its physical extension an integral part of the world of which the narrator claims to be conscious, recalling its genesis and circulation and announcing its cognitive superiority over the reader who is hostage to its technology. This is a good description of many of the jokes that have made Tristram Shandy seem so modern. Like the narrator of Charlotte Summers, Tristram illogically claims experience of his book as a material entity: he knows when the marble page is coming up and he deploys previous pages and volumes as a presence to which readers can be referred. At one point, excusing the bookbinder from charges of carelessness, Tristram mentions that he has torn out a chapter of his narrative (282). As we saw in the Introduction, he inserts a chapter offering his dedication for sale to the highest bidder, pledging to remove this advertisement in his next edition and to update the dedication according to the wishes of the winning bidder. At another point, he introduces Dr. Slop just as Trim is about to start speaking: ’Tis not two-pence matter—the corporal shall go on in the next chapter, let who will come in” (360). In each of these cases, Tristram draws attention to the materiality of his occupation and the process of communication that will follow from his publication. The effect of his doing so is that he inflates the knowledge an author can plausibly claim to have of the writing process at hand by extending it to take account of the book as an object already in print.
At times Tristram is also physically identified, like Hume, with the pages he is writing. For instance, he accuses his reviewers of having “cut and slash[ed] my jerkin,” offering a gloss on the image that suggests a literally bookish body, with his leather bound surface connected to his “rumpled” interior—“A Man’s body and his mind, with the utmost reverence to both I speak it, are exactly like a jerkin, and a jerkin’s lining;—rumple the one—you rumple the other” (144). Within the logic of his own life story it makes sense that Tristram should strive for the limited kind of transcendence associated with the inanimate consciousness of a book. His father, Walter Shandy, has tried to breathe life into books with little success, scratching meaning out of the pages of Slawkenbergius and pouring meaning fruitlessly into his Tristrapedia rather than into his son’s body. He handles Euclid with reverence, turning over the leaves of its initial chapter while displaying his knowledge of its contents, correcting its translation, and shutting it “slowly; his thumb resting, when he had done it, upon the upper-side of the cover, as his three fingers supported the lower-side of it, without the least compressive violence” (355). By transforming himself into a book cognizant of its own handling and reception, Tristram becomes the object that Walter fantasizes about keeping company with, a superior version of his own textual siblings, able to respond to the reader’s avid attentions in ways that Walter’s books so pointedly cannot.
Tristram’s figurative father, Yorick, is also honored in the possibility of Tristram Shandy as a book that stays awake to its own circulation. Yorick is, of course, dead at the time Tristram Shandy is supposedly being written, but his presence is palpable through the documents he has left behind. The fate of these documents, which include the sermon that has been lost, sold, misused, and finally made its way—as commodity, rather than legacy—into Tristram’s and now the reader’s hands, suggests that the promiscuous life Yorick leads as a literary character circulating on the market keeps him uncannily alive and present. In Yorick, Tristram has a model for the metemphychosis of papers as objects to whom superficial consumers as well as readers supply volition. The afterlife of Yorick’s writings provides evidence that the posterity of character is facilitated by the market. But in creating an equivalent life form for himself, Tristram also trumps Yorick, whose papers circulate with a logic alien to their original, whimsical sprit of composition. The intimacy Tristram claims with his reader at the moments where he “tugs” her through a chapter, promising that “the book shall not be opened again this twelve-month” or referring him to the
