johncarlosbaez

RanaldClouston , 6 months ago to bookstodon

#FinishedReading my first foray into 18th century literature, although I doubt much of the rest of it reads like this, with its twisted structure, absurd digressions, and typographical jokes. Some of it is incredibly quotable, fresh, and fun; other parts border on incomprehensible as the centuries render the jokes obscure. #Bookstodon @bookstodon #TristramShandy #LaurenceSterne

A page from Tristram Shandy, in which the author describes the progress of the story in various chapters diagrammatically, with meandering looping lines

johncarlosbaez , 6 months ago

@RanaldClouston @bookstodon

"With its typographical tricks, maddening digressions, and insistence on exposing its own artifice, Tristram Shandy seems closer to the fourth-wall–shattering metafictions of Borges or Nabokov, or to the stream-of-consciousness wanderings of Proust or Woolf herself, than to the more conventionally realist fictions of Sterne’s closest contemporaries.

But that raises a question: Just how did something so odd, so out of step with the norms of 18th-century fiction, appear in the first place? It’s easy to imagine Sterne as a lone weirdo tearing apart the rules of narrative art at the very moment his contemporaries were first perfecting them. But the truth is more complicated. Tristram Shandy wasn’t a unique avant-garde masterpiece awaiting the arrival of the 20th century to be appreciated. On the contrary, Sterne’s novel belonged to an already well-established tradition of “experimental” literature—a body of work every bit as formally adventurous as that of Sterne’s “modern” inheritors."

https://slate.com/culture/2016/01/laurence-sternes-tristram-shandy-isnt-as-modern-as-some-critics-believe.html