Abstract
This book examines the links between sentimentalism and narrative self-reflexivity in eighteenth-century novels about men of feeling. At the centre of things is a set of texts that were all published around the same time: Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67) and A Sentimental Journey (1768), Henry Brooke’s The Fool of Quality (1766–1770), Tobias Smollett’s Humphry Clinker (1771), and Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771). Each of these novels participates in the cultural turn to sensibility by populating their narratives with new models of virtuous and sympathetic masculinity. Equally significantly, these novels about sentimental men also share a tendency to employ a variety of self-referential literary techniques, including typographical play, textual fragmentation, anti-linear narrative structures, visual puns, manipulations of digression and inter-textuality, and self-conscious intrusions by narrators, authors, readers and editors. These techniques not only undercut any realist illusion that the reader is directly perceiving immediately beheld events, but they also, importantly, draw attention to the narratives in question as materially embedded in printed books. The novels of Sterne, Brooke, Smollett and Mackenzie thus consistently display a distinctly eighteenth-century concern for books as physical objects that reflects their participation in a rapidly expanding print culture, something that is also reflected in the many instances where these texts blur the boundaries between printed books and sentimental bodies.
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Notes
This trend is on display, for instance, in many of the excellent essays collected by John Traugott in Laurence Sterne: Twentieth Century Views (1968). Traugott himself notes in the introduction that we now “look back to Sterne as a kindred spirit” (18) while Benjamin Lehman explores how Tristram Shandy is “full of premonitions of the future of the novel” as realized by Proust, Joyce and Thomas Mann (21). Viktor Shklovsky implausibly denies the significance of sensibility in Tristram Shandy, stating sentimentality “is a rare phenomenon in Sterne” (200), in order to strengthen his claim that the novel is a pure distillation of the twentieth-century formalist ideal of structural self-consciousness. More recently, Tristram Shandy has taken on the reputation as a postmodern anti-novel avant la lettre. Definitions of the postmodern critical term “metafiction” invariably cite Tristram Shandy as a major precursor or an early practitioner. Particularly revealing of the current desire to take Sterne out of history is Larry McCaffery’s observation in Postmodern Fiction (1986) that “Tristram Shandy is a thoroughly postmodern work in every respect but the period in which it is written” (xv). While analyses of Sterne’s fiction from the perspective of contemporary literature and theory have yielded some of the most sophisticated and ambitious readings of Tristram Shandy, statements like McCaffery’s embody how, in these approaches, the text’s relationship to its own time can sometimes be treated with a problematically dismissive presentism. Approaching Sterne from the opposite historical direction, D. W. Jefferson has influentially described Sterne as “perhaps the last great writer in the tradition” of learned or scholastic wit, a tradition that includes Pope and Swift, but goes back through Rabelais and Erasmus (150). From this perspective, Tristram Shandy’s ability to seem like a precursor to modern or postmodern anti-realist novels stems from the fact that it is actually not a novel at all, but a particularly late example of pre-novelistic satire. Sterne’s apparent experimentalism that makes his work so congenial to “modernist, metafictional, existential, deconstructive, and Lacanian readings” (Wehrs 127) actually derives from his fairly conservative indebtedness to Renaissance literary traditions of fideistic scepticism that parody intellectual system-building, and not from any visionary anticipation of radical crises of knowledge, subjectivity and representation brought about by (post)modernity. This line of thinking has been supported by Donald Wehrs, but also by Melvyn New, whose exhaustively researched Florida edition of Tristram Shandy reclaims many of “Tristram Shandy’s most celebrated encounters with linguistic indeterminacy or representational impasse as features of a satirical tradition” (Keymer 6). The learned lumber of the Florida edition functions, Keymer notes, as a kind of unanswerable “trump card” for New and others who wish to reclaim Sterne as a traditionalist (6).
This more “practical self-consciousness” reveals an inventiveness to 1750s prose fiction whose significance to Sterne and eighteenth-century literature has been largely overlooked, even by classic critical essays like Wayne Booth’s “The Self-Conscious Narrator in Comic Fiction before Tristram Shandy” (1952). As Keymer notes, typographical manipulation and plays on the “bookness” of the novel “is a feature of Tristram Shandy’s reflexiveness neglected by Booth’s more strictly narratological focus on authorial intrusion and reader response” (63).
A notable and welcome recent exception to this pattern in criticism can be found in Simon Stern’s “Speech and Property in David Simple” (2012), an article which was published in ELH at the same moment as I was preparing submit this manuscript to the publisher. Stern’s essay meets the formal intricacies of Sarah Fielding’s sentimental tale head on, but takes a different interpretive path from mine here, though one that is clearly productive and worth thinking about more deeply. By considering how David Simple, as a narrative, self-consciously responds to its position within contemporary legal and proprietary debates around texts and words, “Speech and Copyright in David Simple” opens up another potentially productive perspective from which to approach literary self-awareness within novels about men of feeling.
While Price focuses specifically on literary critics, cognitive and psychological studies of readerly immersion have compiled empirical data about all kinds of readers, from serious scholars to less serious (but no less avid) “ludic” consumers of popular fiction, all of whom report a propensity to lose a conscious awareness of the material book in their hands. In Experiencing Narrative Worlds (1993), Richard Gerrig uses metaphors of mental travel or transportation to describe this phenomenon, while Victor Nell’s Lost in a Book (1990) compares the experience to trances and hallucinations. In either case, these consequences of textual absorption were not unknown in the eighteenth century, and, in fact, Lord Kames’s account of “ideal presence” in Elements of Criticism (a text I will return to in Chapter 2) could be considered a precedent to Gerrig’s and Nell’s investigations.
Other works complementing Kroll’s research into somaticism in the Restoration and eighteenth century include Murray Cohen’s Sensible Words (1977).
Jayne Lewis’ The English Fable (1996), as well as a few texts of more direct relevance to the novels at hand, such as Jonathan Lamb’s Sterne’s Fiction and the Double Principle (1989), which discusses Sterne’s sceptical worldview and its parallels with David Hartley’s materialist and associationist philosophy.
Carol Flynn’s “Running out of Matter” (1990), which addresses the embodied habits that underpin the narrative logic of many novels of sensibility.
Paul Goring’s The Rhetoric of Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Culture (2005), which examines the eloquence of sentimental bodies in the context of the “somatic protocols” (7) and performative rhetoric of modern politeness.
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© 2013 Alex Wetmore
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Wetmore, A. (2013). Introductory Matter: Structuring Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Fiction. In: Men of Feeling in Eighteenth-Century Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137346346_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137346346_1
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