Neither Humanist nor ModernistSterne, the Moderns, and the Novel by Thomas KeymerReview by: Ian Campbell RossThe Irish Review (1986-), No. 32, Thinking in Public (Autumn - Winter, 2004), pp. 119-121Published by: Cork University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29736255 .

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dh?anann s? air. Mholfainn go mbronnfa? c?ip den leabhar seo maraon leis an

chorn f?in ar bhuaiteoir? Chorn U? Riada feasta!

R??NA N? FHRIGHIL

Neither Humanist nor Modernist

Thomas Keymer, Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-19 924592-4. ?47.00 hbk.

In describing Work in Progress (later Finnegans Wake), James Joyce wrote that the

elements of his new book were 'exactly what every novelist might use: man and

woman, birth, childhood, sleep, marriage, prayer, death . . . Only I am trying to

bring many planes of narrative within a single aesthetic purpose. Did you ever read

Laurence Sterne?' So overt an endorsement of Sterne's perceived modernity -

and

there are many others by writers from Virginia Woolf to Milan Kundera - might

seem to justify the widespread tendency among contemporary readers and critics

to treat Sterne as an honorary modern and Tristram Shandy, in the words of one

recent writer, as a 'modernist or postmodernist text avant la lettre'. Alternatively,

students who come to Sterne's masterpiece via the established criticism of the

second half of the twentieth century may see it as emerging from the Renaissance

Humanist tradition, most influentially described by D. W. Jefferson in his essay 'Tristram Shandy and the Tradition of Learned Wit', and emphasize Sterne's

allegiances to the writings of Erasmus, Montaigne, Robert Burton and the

Scriblerian project embodied in the writings of Swift and Pope. However

approached, though, Sterne himself appears in these readings as an anachronism,

linked to the past or future but, in some sense, detached from his own time.

In this incisive new study, Thomas Keymer sets out to situate, or re-situate,

Sterne within the literary and cultural contexts of his own day. To this end, he

divides his book into three principal sections -

'Narrative Discourse and Print

Culture from Pamela to Tristram Shandy , 'The Serialization of Tristram Shandy and

'Sterne in the Literary Culture of the 1760s'? that permit him to develop his ideas

in a manner at once focused and wide-ranging. Arguing for the contemporary

awareness of Tristram Shandy as the 'defining work of its immediate day, tied

intimately into the writing of a culture it both reflects and influences', Keymer insists on how rarely such a view is registered by modern criticism. Intent on

redressing this perceived omission, Keymer foregrounds Sterne's

close engagement 'with the novel genre in the crucial period of its forma?

tion (which is to say in the two decades immediately prior to Tristram

Shandy s launch); an ongoing responsiveness, through the mechanisms of

serialization, to key texts, trends, and events as they developed in the

ensuing decade; the subtextual presence ... of specific contemporaneous

intertexts . . .[and] an element of topical, and indeed political, satirical

innuendo that is not incidental but systematic and central.

ROSS, 'Neither Humanist nor Modernisf, Irish Review 32 (2004) 119

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Having twice ?

and somewhat nervously? -

situated himself between the

principal prevailing tendencies of Sterne criticism, Keymer starts by engaging with

one of the most intriguing difficulties besetting any reader interested in the

contemporary literary forces that shaped Tristram Shandy: the scanty reference

Sterne makes, in his fiction or in correspondence, to the 'new species of writing'

that began with Samuel Richardson's publication of Pamela in 1740, a scantiness

made all the more apparent by Sterne's extensive allusion to, citing of, or copying

from the wide variety of classical and Renaissance authors whose works he had -

or, in some cases, had not -

read. With a few familiar though well-discussed

exceptions -

there is an excellent account of the many similarities between the Life

and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman and the anonymous Life and Memoirs of Mr. Ephraim Tristram Bates (1756)

? Keymer is little more successful than his

predecessors in identifying specific examples of contemporary prose fiction Sterne

can be shown to have read. An excellent close reader, alert to verbal echoes,

accordingly, Keymer argues instead that, with regard to contemporary prose

fiction, Sterne employs a 'fuzzier' kind of intertextuality than in relation to

Renaissance texts, since contemporary readers were so familiar with the fiction of

their own day as not to need precise allusions to the works with which Tristram

Shandy enters into dialogue. (It is doubtless frustration at the lack of demonstrable

allusion that leads Keymer into the occasional weak formulation about works

Sterne 'must surely have known', or into simply taking for granted, with no

evidence whatever, that Sterne had read Richardson's Clarissa and Sir Charles

Grandisona) This is not likely to worry the Sterneans who evidently form a

significant part of Keymer s intended audience, but it would be a pity if other

readers were to be deterred, for Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel has much to offer

anyone with a serious interest in eighteenth-century fiction or indeed the novel

genre more generally.

Particularly persuasive is Keymer's account of Tristram Shandy's imaginative

engagement with the formal elements of prose fictional representation employed

by both Richardson and Fielding, as well as with Fielding's metafictional games. Still more convincing is the author's situating of Tristram Shandy within the broad

range of contemporary prose fiction, especially that of the 1750s. Keymer's

authority here comes from the sense that he has actually read the minor fiction,

whose profusion and frequently formulaic nature he indicates so well, even if he

occasionally overstates the obscurity of some of these works (neither Thomas

Amory's John Bunde nor Charles Johnstone's Chrysal, for instance, is quite as

unknown as he suggests, at least to specialists). Among other strengths of the first

part of his study are compelling discussions of typographical play in contemporary fiction and the marbled page.

If Part One could - and should ? be read by all those with an interest in

eighteenth-century literature, then Part Two, on the practice and poetics of serial

fiction, draws on existing studies of nineteenth-century serialization in ways that

cast additional light on that subject by comparison with eighteenth-century

practice, as well as vice versa -

though no amount of critical discussion, however

120 ROSS, 'Neither Humanist nor Modernist', Irish Review 32 (2004)

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sharp, can ever recapture contemporaries' experience of reading Tristram Shandy as

it first appeared, in nine volumes published in five irregular instalments across an

eight-year span.

The third part of Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel is the most specialized.

Opening with a close discussion of Sterne's connections to the Nonsense Club of

the late 1750s and early 1760s, it continues with an illuminating chapter on the

Ossianic vogue, in which Keymer argues convincingly for a much closer

connection between the 'ardent primitivism' of Macpherson's Fingal and the

'playful modernity' of Tristram Shandy than is immediately apparent. The final

chapter links Tristram Shandy with Whig politics and contemporary readings of

Marvell's poetry (like some of the earlier material, Keymer here draws on and

develops work first published elsewhere).

By its title and organization, Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel may most easily

find readers among those with a particular interest in Sterne and Sterne

scholarship. It deserves a much wider readership.

IAN CAMPBELL ROSS

Shelley's Irish Links

Paul O'Brien, Shelley & Revolutionary Ireland. London and Dublin: Redwords, 2002. ISBN 1-872208-12-6. ?11.00 pbk.

John Keats came to Ireland in 1818, to see the Giant's Causeway, but turned back

at Belfast, lacking money, having underestimated the distances involved in his

journey, and repelled by what he saw. He writes to his brother of one encounter:

'On our return from Bellfast we met a Sadan ?

the Duchess of Dunghill ?

It is no

laughing matter tho ?

Imagine the worst dog kennel you ever saw placed upon

two poles from a mouldy fencing.

? In such a wretched thing sat a squalid old

Woman squat like an ape half starved from a scarcity of Buiscuit in its passage from

Madagascar to the cape, ?

with a pipe in her mouth and looking out with a round

eyed skinny lidded, inanity - with a sort of horizontal idiotic movement of her

head ?

squab and lean she sat and puff'd out the smoke while two ragged tattered

Girls carried her along. - What a thing would be a history of her Life and

sensations.' Byron never visited Ireland but drew on the experiences of his friend

Hobhouse in arguing for Catholic Emancipation in the House of Lords in 1812:

'Should it be objected that I never was in Ireland, I beg leave to observe, that it is

as easy to know something of Ireland, without having been there, as it appears

with some to have been born, bred, and cherished there, and yet remain ignorant

of its best interests.' More famously, Shelley came to Dublin to organize and

petition for reform, to distribute pamphlets and political fervour in equal measure.

The relationship between the writing and ideals of high Romanticism and the

politics of late-eighteenth-century Ireland has scarcely been mapped, and Paul

HASLETT, 'Shelley's Irish Links', Irish Review 32 (2004) 121

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