“Things have crowded in so thick”: Laurence Sterne, Antiquarian Quixotism, and the Printed Book
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This paper is drawn from the monograph project that I'm currently completing, Tangible Pasts: The Novel, Material Culture, and the Making of Historical Knowledge, 1700-1830. My book offers an alternative genealogy of the historical novel and explores the foundational role that the media experiments and material practices of antiquaries played in the evolution of the novel’s genre-defining engagement with the historicity of the past and present. Ever since Georg Lukács insisted, in his influential theorization of the historical novel, that ‘faithfulness to the past’ lies not in an antiquarian ‘chronicle-like, naturalistic reproduction’ (The Historical Novel, 61), critics have been particularly interested in the formal means by which novelists were able to transcend the positivistic genres that they ransacked for period detail.
By contrast, my book spotlights authors who did not seek to exorcise, but rather took inspiration from the disordered, additive, conjectural, and centrifugal impulses of antiquarian subject matter. My paper offers a reading of Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67) as a case study. Tristram Shandy takes a keen interest in the medial circulation of artefacts that lacked singularity, prestige, and obvious aesthetic value, and that were often serially organized and made modular and detachable in the process of print (re)mediation. In Sterne’s novel, these (re)mediated remains of the past inspire a range of eccentric knowledge projects: Tristram’s attempt to research, collate, and publish his family history; Walter’s work on his antiquarian catalogues and on the Tristrapœdia; and, finally, Toby and Trim’s miniature reenactments of military sieges on the bowling-green. I explore how these projects allow Sterne’s characters to give provisional material form to events and experiences that were not housed securely in official, documented history. Connected to this, I also trace parallels between antiquarian conceptions of fictional writing as a mode of speculative, unfinished composition and Tristram’s approach to writing as an open-ended process of construction.