ABSTRACT
Sterne's fiction is notoriously self-conscious about the modes of a novel's coherence - about the powers of a narrator to convince, to beguile and to satisfy. It is attentive to its 'sociality'. Sterne may have made new capital, and a new kind of instant literary fame, out of this selfconsciousness, but he was exploiting conventional expectations. In an age in which narrative fiction was suspected by many, even of its more enthusiastic consumers, of being suggestive, improper, promiscuous, novels were thick with descriptions of how narratives should be attended to and interpreted. They constantly concerned themselves, technically and moralistically, with the effects of telling stories. As we have seen, novels of sentiment keenly rehearsed the art of comprehending the pathos of narratives; the capacity to respond with tremulous sensibility to a tale of misfortune was represented as a sufficient sign of virtue. The use of 'the story of Le Fever' in Volume VI of Tristram Shandy is a clear enough indication of Sterne's awareness of this genre of the internalized tale, included to demonstrate the sympathies of its auditors. It is a story that comes to us freighted with the responsiveness of Toby and Trim to another's misfortunes; its point is the sympathy of which they are capable. But then sympathy is most graphic when it is not spoken, Toby and Trim not being the most competent handlers of words. It takes Tristram's narrative to describe 'the several turns of looks and limbs' that accom pany the telling and reception of Le Fever's story: 'fool that I was! nor can I recollect, (nor perhaps you) without turning back to the place, what it was that hindered me from letting the corporal tell it in his own words; - but the occasion is lost, - I must tell it now in my own' VI. v: 415-16). Narrative has to translate, has to make 'plain words' mediate the natural articulacy of feeling. And translation (a metaphor invoked throughout Tristram Shandy) is a matter of inference and induction - a freedom that comes with the acceptance of error. There is the under standing of which the likes of Toby and Trim are capable, signified in
their gestures, their sighs, their looks, and there is the sociality of the text - the relationship between narrator and reader - through which that understanding is represented. Richardson attempted to produce the poign ancy of sentiment in 'writing to the moment', which became writing which threatened to evade moralistic control. Sterne concedes that sentiment can only be glimpsed across the distance between a translator and an 'original'; that while feeling is supposed to transcend words, it takes words (at once judicious and inaccurate) to translate sentiment. Tristram Shandy is writing away from the moment.
