ABSTRACT
Both Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy are rendered impotent by their avowed objectives: the authors know in advance that Don Quixote will not succeed in reinstating knight errantry as Spain's dominant moral discourse, and they quickly realize that Tristram will fail to deliver his life and opinions. These objectives are not the real source of impotence, but rather a 'hobbyhorsical', to borrow Sterne's term, response to a pervasive, almost transcendental real-world impotence. The relation of author to reader becomes one of the dominant concerns of the eighteenth-century novelist, and Sterne is no exception. Sterne has often been called a protomodernist precisely because he makes such demands on the reader. Provided that, for Cervantes, success in writing meant creating a new kind of experience for the reader, then for Sterne, success meant not only creating a unique experience, but also performing its construction.
