#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
"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."
@johncarlosbaez@bookstodon he's pretty explicit about his influences in the text - Cervantes and Rabelais get mentioned again and again - but I suspect it was still a pretty strange book in its era, as it would be in any era
@bookstodon This page is a highlight, with the most glorious selection of 18th century insults - "blockheads, numsculs, doddypoles, dunderheads, ninny-hammers, goosecaps, joltheads, nincompoops, and sh--t-a-beds" - then going on to claim it was necessary to write the 25th chapter before the 18th. The moral is drawn, "let people tell their stories in their own way"
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