'Leave Him Something to Imagine'

“I am now beginning to get fairly into my work; and by the help of a vegetable diet, with a few of the cold seeds, I make no doubt but I shall be able to go on with my uncle Toby’s story, and my own, in a tolerable strait line.” 

By the time a persevering reader has reached Book VI, Chapter 40 of Tristram Shandy, he has shed whatever faith he once had in his feckless (but very amusing) narrator, who next shares these visual representations of the preceding volumes’ plot lines:

  

No reader is indifferent to Laurence Sterne’s novel. Some soon give up, finding his digressions and refusal to tell a “strait” story monstrously tedious. For some of us, Tristram Shandy is an endless party of a novel, a celebration of every feat fiction can perform. At the same time it’s the story of a writer who will remain alive for as long as he continues writing (like Sterne himself). He possesses an expansive, elastic, limits-defying sense of what prose can do. More than a century ago, Viktor Shklovsky declared it “the most typical novel of world literature,” and he meant it. One needn’t be a joyless postmodernist to fall in love with Tristram Shandy.

 

Sterne adds another squiggled line, in effect mocking the academic fashion for turning “narratology” into a branch of mathematics. Next, a straight horizontal line across the page – “a line drawn as straight as I could draw it, by a writing-master’s ruler (borrowed for that purpose), turning neither to the right hand or to the left.” The English professor who introduced me to Tristram Shandy (and A Sentimental Journey) half a century ago warned that no aspiring writer should attempt to ape Sterne’s style. The chapter concludes:

 

“This right line,—the path-way for Christians to walk in! say divines——

 

“——The emblem of moral rectitude! says Cicero——

 

“——The best line! say cabbage planters——is the shortest line, says Archimedes, which can be drawn from one given point to another.——

 

“I wish your ladyships would lay this matter to heart, in your next birth-day suits!

 

“——What a journey!

 

“Pray can you tell me,—that is, without anger, before I write my chapter upon straight lines——by what mistake——who told them so——or how it has come to pass, that your men of wit and genius have all along confounded this line, with the line of gravitation?”

 

With that passage under your belt, consider Sterne’s suggestion at the start of Chapter XI in the second volume of Tristram Shandy:

 

“Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation. As no one, who knows what he is about in good company, would venture to talk all; -- so no author, who understands the just boundaries of decorum and good breeding, would presume to think all: The truest respect which you can pay to the reader's understanding, is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself.”

 

Sterne was born on this date, November 24, in 1713 and died in 1768 at age fifty-four.