{"id":612,"date":"2024-08-05T17:20:58","date_gmt":"2024-08-05T14:20:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fractiousfiction.com\/?p=612"},"modified":"2024-08-05T17:21:09","modified_gmt":"2024-08-05T14:21:09","slug":"the-first-postmodern-novel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fractiousfiction.com\/tristram_shandy.html","title":{"rendered":"The First Postmodern Novel?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Despite what you may have read elsewhere, most of the
experimental techniques of modernist and postmodernist
fiction were developed long before the 20th century. \u00a0We
encounter arch meta-narratives in Cervantes and a self-
consciously absurdist fragmentation of texts in\u00a0Rabelais. \u00a0
The main ingredient of the magical realism novel can be
found in Apuleius’s\u00a0The Golden Ass<\/em>, from the late 2nd
century A.D. \u00a0A host of other transgressive styles, from
stream-of-consciousness to surrealism, all appeared on
the scene long before they became avant-garde literary
movements. \u00a0

But the granddaddy of experimental novelists, the most
daring of the early innovators, was an Anglican clergyman
born in 1713. \u00a0\u00a0

Laurence Sterne was an unlikely
advocate for experimental fiction.
He didn’t discover his talent for
storytelling until his mid-40s, and
his first novel received the
ultimate thumbs down from
critics. \u00a0This satire, entitled\u00a0A
Political Romance<\/em>, was
suppressed and burned\u2014only
six copies of the original printing
have survived. \u00a0Sterne’s career
prospects in the church hierarchy
suffered as a result, and his attempt to earn a living as a
gentleman farmer also failed to generate much income. \u00a0

But his forbidden book had achieved a modest degree of
fame. “Ten times more was said about this piece than it
deserved, because it was burnt,” the\u00a0London Chronicle<\/em>\u00a0later
asserted. Sterne decided to seize the opportunity presented
by this passing moment of notoriety. \u00a0He turned his attention
to writing, and began work on an audacious comic novel which
he named\u00a0Tristram Shandy<\/em>\u00a0(or, in its full title:\u00a0The Life and
Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman<\/em>). \u00a0

The book was written quickly, and in almost tragic circum-
stances. Sterne suffered from tuberculosis, and around this
same time his mother and uncle died, Adding to his domestic
woes, Sterne\u2019s wife was so distraught when she found her
husband in bed with the maid that she threatened suicide
and was placed under the care of a physician. \u00a0According
to one source, Elizabeth Sterne\u2019s mental state was so
unbalanced that she thought she was the Queen of Bohemia.

Such travails are hardly
conducive to writing any
literary work, but least of
all a large-scale comic
novel. An early version of
the novel was rejected
because of the darkness
of its satire, but laboring
(in Sterne’s words) “under the greatest heaviness of heart,”
he undertook to lighten the heavier passage, and accentuate
the more amusing qualities of his eccentric protagonist. \u00a0

Perhaps I should say that you will be amused by Sterne’s
protagonist\u00a0if\u00a0<\/em>you stay around long enough for him to arrive
on the scene. \u00a0Mr. Shandy is the narrator of the novel and
he apparently abides by the view that a life, or at least ‘The
Life<\/em>‘ (and Opinions<\/em>, etc. etc.) begins at conception. “I wish
either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they
were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they
were about when they begot me,” he begins on page one. \u00a0
But this will be a long gestation, not to mention labor and
delivery. \u00a0In Volume Four, he is still on the first day of his life.

Digressions and tangents existed in literature long before
Tristram Shandy<\/em>, but Sterne was the first to understand that
the digression could serve as the main course. \u00a0Instead of
deferred gratification, the deferment\u00a0is<\/em>\u00a0the gratification in
these pages. \u00a0Even the smallest actions in this novel can take
be a long time coming in this novel. \u00a0\u00a0Other writers can bring
their cast of characters to Mars and back with less effort
than Sterne expends in getting them downstairs. \u00a0

Tristram Shandy<\/em>\u00a0secured lasting fame for its author and
found unexpected admirers. \u00a0Schopenhauer and Goethe
praised it lavishly, and Karl Marx even tried imitating
Sterne’s style in an unpublished comic novel he wrote as a
teenager. \u00a0But many others dismissed it out of hand or
offered lukewarm compliments. Samuel Johnson predicted
that the novel would not have lasting appeal, because “nothing
odd will do long.” \u00a0Literary scholar Ian Watt denied that
Tristram Shandy<\/em>\u00a0was a novel, merely acknowledging the
book as “a parody of a novel.” \u00a0The work has “an indefinite
theme, worked out by a verve that has not the slightest
concern for order, unity or logic,” announced the authors of
a 1933 textbook on English literature. Around this same time,
Ezra Pound admitted that Sterne\u2019s book was required reading,
but was quick to add: \u201cI don\u2019t recommend anyone ELSE to try
to do another\u00a0Tristram Shandy<\/em>.”

Pound’s advice was roundly rejected by experimental authors
of the 20th century. \u00a0Almost immediately after the publication
of James Joyce\u2019s\u00a0Ulysses<\/em>, critics compared it to Sterne’s
iconoclastic book\u2014indeed, even Pound made the comparison. \u00a0
\u201cUlysses is, presumably, as unrepeatable as\u00a0Tristram Shandy<\/em>,\u201d
he explained; \u00a0\u201cI mean you cannot duplicate it, you can\u2019t take it
as a ‘model’.”

And then the postmodernist writers of the last half of the
20th century did precisely that.\u00a0Tristram Shandy\u00a0<\/em>was the
perfect<\/em>\u00a0role model for their purposes. \u00a0In its pages they
found a wealth of material to imitate: short, choppy chapters
of Barthesian pithiness; self-conscious reflections on the
role of narrative; deliberate violation of readers’ expectations
and literary conventions; a preference for cranky and eccentric
characters; \u00a0a willingness to subvert plot at every turn; and,
above all, the rejection of any attempt at ‘realism’ in favor of a
celebration of the most fickle subjective attitudes. Or put
another way, form battled with content and lost in a first
round knockout. \u00a0On almost every page, Sterne offered
a playbook that perfectly suited the literary temperament of
the age of Derrida and Lacan,\u00a0Vonnegut\u00a0and\u00a0Calvino. As
hard as it was to believe, a quirky book older than the United
States was suddenly up-to-date to a frightening degree. As
one quipster put it:\u00a0Tristram Shandy\u00a0<\/em>“was a post-modern
classic before there was a modernism to be post about.”

But though Sterne took liberties, not all of them accrued to
his credit. \u00a0Long before modern novelists started experi-
menting with cut-and-paste techniques, Sterne was doing
the same in\u00a0Tristram Shandy<\/em>. \u00a0Alas, his particular way of
practicing the art of cut-and-paste usually goes by the name
of plagiarism. \u00a0Fortunately for the celebrated novelist, Google
wasn’t around in 1767, and these repeated borrowings went
unreported until after his death. \u00a0But Sterne did little to hide
his fingerprints. \u00a0Even an attack on plagiarism in the pages
of\u00a0Tristram Shandy<\/em>\u00a0was itself plagiarized\u2014from Robert
Burton’s\u00a0Anatomy of Melancholy<\/em>! \u00a0\u00a0

Perhaps this was an inside joke? \u00a0Pynchon would do something
just like this, no? \u00a0Yet scholars have found that Sterne’s
sermons from his days as a clergyman were also filled with
plagiarized passages. \u00a0All the signs suggest that he was a
literary kleptomaniac, a writer who couldn’t resist the temptation
to lift especially enticing phrases from unsuspecting owners. \u00a0

Yet what he did with these borrowed ingredients was highly
original. \u00a0There was nothing quite like\u00a0Tristram Shandy<\/em>\u00a0in
the preceding literature, or among the works of Sterne’s
contemporaries. \u00a0Indeed, the first several generations of
readers who praised or condemned the book could hardly
even imagine the reasons why this novel would later have
such a fearsome reputation. \u00a0They took it as one big joke, a
leg pull of epic proportions. \u00a0How could an 18th century reader
possibly conceive that this odd, frustrating novel would serve
as a blueprint for serious writers of a later day or a harbinger
of trends some 200 years in the future?

Then again, perhaps the first readers were right, and we
are the ones who stumble. \u00a0Do we err by viewing through
the eyes of theory what Sterne wrought with the intention of
wicked humor? \u00a0In the current moment,\u00a0Tristram Shandy<\/em>\u00a0is
an important book, a prescient novel, lauded for anticipating
the later evolution of literary form (or lack thereof). \u00a0If Sterne
were alive today, I’m sure he would accept the praise (and
any royalty checks in escrow) with a pleasant smile, but
probably also chuckle at our expense. Those postmodernists,
he would be right to surmise, just don\u2019t know how to take a joke.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Despite what you may have read elsewhere, most of theexperimental techniques of modernist and postmodernistfiction were developed long before the 20th century. \u00a0Weencounter arch meta-narratives in Cervantes and a self-consciously absurdist fragmentation of texts in\u00a0Rabelais. \u00a0The main ingredient of the magical realism novel can befound in Apuleius’s\u00a0The Golden Ass, from the late 2ndcentury A.D. \u00a0A<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t Continue Reading <\/span><\/i><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"Despite what you may have read elsewhere, most of the\r\nexperimental techniques of modernist and postmodernist\r\nfiction were developed long before the 20th century. \u00a0We\r\nencounter arch meta-narratives in Cervantes and a self-\r\nconsciously absurdist fragmentation of texts in\u00a0Rabelais. \u00a0\r\nThe main ingredient of the magical realism novel can be\r\nfound in Apuleius's\u00a0The Golden Ass, from the late 2nd\r\ncentury A.D. \u00a0A host of other transgressive styles, from\r\nstream-of-consciousness to surrealism, all appeared on\r\nthe scene long before they became avant-garde literary\r\nmovements. \u00a0","_seopress_robots_index":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-612","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-1"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fractiousfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fractiousfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fractiousfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fractiousfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fractiousfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=612"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/fractiousfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":615,"href":"https:\/\/fractiousfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612\/revisions\/615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fractiousfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fractiousfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fractiousfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}