'For the Edification of the World'

“He showed how the novel could present, in refreshed form, the fatrasie, the pillar-to- post miscellany, of which Rabelais had perhaps given the greatest example possible . . .” 

George Saintsbury in The English Novel (1913) has taught me a new word: fatrasie. I’m without French but it seems originally to have meant a form of medieval French nonsense verse. The word evolved to mean “medley,” “hodgepodge” or, eventually, “rubbish.” English near-synonyms: gallimaufry, grab bag. Food analogies seem inevitable: a stew or good soup, an inspired blend of ingredients in which almost anything goes.

 

Saintsbury is writing about Laurence Sterne, one of the eighteenth-century writers he calls the “Four Wheels of the Novel,” along with Richardson, Fielding and Smollett. He continues: “[Sterne] showed how [the novel] could be made, not merely to present humorous situations, but to exhibit a special kind of humour itself—to make the writer as it were the hero without his ever appearing as character in Tristram, or to humorise autobiography as in the Sentimental Journey.”

 

I bring this up because Tristram Shandy is the book readers have most often told me they are unable to finish. I’ve come to expect the complaint whenever I mention the title. Reasons cited: boredom, confusion, pointlessness. I think I get it. Still, after 263 years and a million modernist and postmodernist mutations of the novel, Tristram Shandy can still be an expectation-defying experience. Forget linear narrative and conventional notions of character. What saves it from mere eccentricity or academic perversity is its humor (often filthy) and human interest. Yes, you come to care about Uncle Toby and the Widow Wadman just as you care about Kitty and Kostya, Natasha and Pierre.

 

Along with that, Tristram Shandy is heir to the Menippean tradition, as are Moby-Dick and Ulysses,  Montaigne’s Essays and The Anatomy of Melancholy. Such books are packed with learning, sometimes comically and often satirically so. Sterne turns the language of science into pure farce. This sort of thing will not bewitch every reader. I was fortunate. A professor who taught a class called “The Eighteenth-century English Novel,” in which we read the Four Wheels and more, talked up Tristram Shandy as her favorite novel. She had what we diplomatically call a “bawdy” (filthy) sense of humor, and she walked me through the novel on that first of many readings half a century ago.

I can’t condemn readers for being defeated by Tristram Shandy. I only encourage them to give it another try. I also bring this up today because Sterne immortalizes this date in Book I, Chap. XVIII of his novel:

 

“Now this I like;—when we cannot get at the very thing we wish——never to take up with the next best in degree to it:—no; that’s pitiful beyond description;—it is no more than a week from this very day, in which I am now writing this book for the edification of the world;—which is March 9, 1759 . . .”