ODD. HOW VERY ODD. I’m waking again; it’s another autumnal morning. But this time the room I’m in is rocking heavily. Beyond its large portholed windows I see the fast-moving white-caps of a frantic, angry Baltic sea. Noise grates from everywhere: those ceaseless bangings, creakings, groanings and grindings that form the unique soundtrack of a big ship under way. The massive silk-sheeted bed I’m in is empty: empty, that is, except for my own soft naked self. Empty too the whole grand stateroom – which is surely not the cabin I was assigned to when I boarded the vessel yesterday. In truth I can’t imagine how I happen to be lying here; though a large silk nightdress and three large empty champagne bottles in a flooded ice-bucket offer a very faint clue.
Excuse me while I rise in my naked splendour and take a quick look around. Ah. Over here, it seems, I’ve acquired a large and steamy bathroom. With your permission I’ll disappear for the next few minutes and take a hasty shower. There: that’s much better, isn’t it? Now let’s go and find me some clothes. The ones I came in have somehow disappeared: utter mystification. My suitcase lies tossed into the corner of the cabin, but that’s totally empty, I see. Why don’t we check these fitted wardrobes? My word, just look at that! Amazing sequinned dresses! All these flamboyant hats! These wigs, in every shade! Beautiful soft silk nightgowns! The bangles, the bras, the bustiers, the huge spare eyelashes and false fingernails! Oh, there, look, my shirts. And I notice we have our own big Russian TV set, there in the corner. Shall we switch on and find out what the world’s been up to in our absence?
And not only here on the Vladimir Ilich has the night been taken up with mysterious and confusing events. The commentary seems to have switched from Swedish to Finno-Ugrian, not a language I’ve mastered, but the gist stays clear. Following the principles Vladimir Ilich historically set down for the proper conduct of a revolutionary coup d’état (arrest the government in power, take the post and telegraph office, the national bank, and the railway station to stop the trains) the Moscow crowds have gone on the streets, heading for their modern equivalents: the mayor’s office, police headquarters, the TV building, the airport. Cut to: a tracked hi-jacked personnel carrier smashing through the doorway of the state TV station, reinforced by a large angry mob who are trying to battle their way inside, and a firefight begins. Cut to: machine-gun fire spraying across wide boulevards and fleeing crowds. Cut to: Tzar Yeltsin, descending at the Kremlin by helicopter. Now become Action Man incarnate, he’s striding round his office and asking his generals to react. Cut to: Disconsolate newscaster looks at camera, says, ‘The conflict in Russia has at last come to the brink’, and Wipe to black. The station’s gone off air . . .
Finland, not far away from here over the Baltic, takes over with its own live footage. A big squat newscaster in a decent suit talks to camera. There are agency pictures, a general sense of confusion. But it’s early morning outside the White House. Tanks are rolling across the river and ranging up in a row outside the building, their barrels raised. Deputies at the windows, shouting down to the soldiers below. Yeltsin in the Kremlin, talking furiously, dashing to the Defence Ministry where the nuclear codes are. It seems he has called out the army, no doubt a high-risk gamble, since he can hardly know now which side his own generals and troops are likely to support. Rifles are firing, a soldier goes down, a tank shell flies and hits the White House high up, windows blowing out and . . . Just a moment, what’s the time? Oh my god, it’s White Rabbit time: hurry hurry hurry. I’ve a paper to give, and the Diderot Project starts its business in the conference room in exactly ten minutes. My paper, where is it? I’m a sound and responsible academic type, so surely I must have written it. I always write it. When I say yes to something, I do it. Just a minute, I really ought to eat something, except I’ve left it far too late for breakfast . . .
Off we go then, breakfast-less, paper-less, through the clanging banging ship. Stewardesses hoover away in the wood-panelled passages. Below, in the bars and lounges, noisy shouting crowds of Russians are gathered, watching the next live newscast. In the conference section, things are quieter, more studious. I find the glass-walled chamber assigned to the Diderot Project, and stare through the glass walls. Yet even here things have changed overnight; Bo and Alma must have been busy. The room’s been rearranged into a large square of tables, covered in green baize. On the tables are places laid with neat new notepads, pencils, bottles of Russian fizz, large cardboard wallets stuffed with maps and restaurant tickets and marked ‘Diderot Project’. And round the tables, showered, changed and doubtless breakfasted, are the Diderot pilgrims, awaiting the first speaker of the morning. Bo sits in the chairman’s seat. He looks up, sees me, impatiently waves me inside. The other pilgrims look at me strangely. Only the red-haired diva, clad in black today, gives me a quick glance of complicity.
The event is in train. Bo is already speaking. Difficult events surround us, he’s announcing, waving his glasses. But when the world is in chaos, all the more reason for all the more reason. When things are in confusion, there must always be those who follow the bright torch of truth. When times darken, the world needs those who can deal in clarity and wisdom, can unify anarchy and order, real and ideal, arts and science. As Bo goes on speaking, in his reassuring fashion, as if it is perfectly normal for us to read theoretical papers to one another while sailing into a revolution, I try to draw thought and idea together from the darkness of stupor. Very well, it’s conference time in the Baltic; must do my best. Suddenly Bo stops, says my name by way of introduction, turns interrogatively to me. I get up and take the speaker’s place. I look round at the row of stony early-morning faces ranged all round the green-baized table. I begin to speak. And this – or more or less – is what I find I have to say:
A PAPER THAT IS NOT A PAPER
How very kind of you to invite me to give this first paper, even though I wasn’t even present at the time to say I was happy to give it. So I do have to tell you that this paper isn’t really a paper. (BO: Oh no, I don’t believe it . . .) It would probably take several chapters of a novel to explain why I’ve not been able to write one. Let’s just say it was due to circumstances beyond my control, and maybe my self-control. But I think the best thing I can do is to tell you a story. (AGNES: No, I thought so . . .) Except the story is not really a story either – because it’s perfectly true, and starts from a real experience I had in Stockholm just two days ago.
Bo, you’ll recall that I chose to arrive one day early, before we set off on this fine scholarly voyage. And I decided to spend my extra afternoon, usefully and philosophically, hunting the tomb of the great René Descartes. It seemed the ideal way to begin any kind of philosophical pilgrimage. After all, Descartes had asked us nearly all the questions that disturb the modern mind, and he did more than almost anyone to make sure we actually had one. He’s surely a figure who lies behind our own philosopher, Denis Diderot . . . (BO: I don’t think so, surely he rejected Descartes . . .) Perhaps. But he did understand Descartes showed us a world divided into mind and matter, and gave us the world as a living, perceiving, enquiring machine.
Unfortunately when, just about 350 years before I did, Descartes arrived in Stockholm, his own living, perceiving, enquiring machine suddenly began to fail. He soon caught a chill and died of it, at the age of fifty-six. He was buried somewhere or other in the city, at the Queen’s command. And what followed next, as you explained, Bo, was a remarkable history – an odd history of posthumousness, which I’ve been thinking about ever since. I suppose you know the story, so it goes to say his corpse and coffin travelled widely – from Sweden to Denmark, Denmark to France. In France they went from abbey to abbey, church to church, and site to site. His bones were buried, disinterred, re-buried. He was dug up in the French Revolution, he almost made it to the Pantheon. Resting in the gardens nearby, he saw the rise of Napoleon, the advent of the Citizen King, the dawn of the Second Republic, and so on. And each time the clock of history ticked on a bit further, they moved him from here to there.
In short the dead philosopher was unquestionably much busier, better travelled, more argued over, more problematical, more celebrated, more entertained, in every respect far more attended to than he ever had been during his rather reclusive quiet life. He became a great posthumous power. In fact both he and his famous dilemma – the Cartesian dilemma – have been buried, disinterred, scattered, venerated, execrated and generally fought over by every generation of philosophers and writers from then to this very day . . . (LARS: It’s quite true. Take Samuel Beckett for instance . . .) And all these strange posthumous adventures, these lineages and homages and defacements, these complicated heritages and anxieties of influence began to shift my thoughts from the topic I’d first thought of for a paper (‘Diderot and Postmodernism,’ I have to admit), from Denis to another writer, and Postmodernism to Postmortemism. Or necrology, as the French nicely call it, the study of the dead.
Perhaps you recall that in another revolutionary year in Paris, 1968, another great philosophe, Roland Barthes, published a famous necrological essay, ‘The Death of the Author’. Necrologically speaking, Barthes is himself now dead, following an odd street accident in the rue des Ecoles, quite close to the place where Descartes’ remains are now buried, assuming that any remain after his endless travels. But what exactly remains of Roland Barthes, the author of ‘The Death of the Author’? I suppose you could say that what he’s achieved is a postmodern Posterity. That’s to say, in the modern way we admire him, but we’ve learned to think of him as he seems to have perceived himself, as a writing, a text – a teasing text, a text that both celebrates and denies the writer who may or may not have written it. Because, as I understand it, the whole claim of Barthes’ work is that a writer can only be exactly that: a text.
In other words, there isn’t a she that writes it, there’s an it that writes him. (AGNES: Or mostly her . . .) Meaning books don’t have authors, they just have destinations. That’s why, Barthes famously tells us, in accepting the Death of the Author we’re announcing the Birth of the Reader. A book’s a game, a tease, a seduction that comes from the other side of a grave. Whatever authors might think of their own purposes and intentions, the text can never become final nor the game be concluded. There’ll always be more readers, and more readers mean more meanings. A text’s simply a language. And language is slippage; it doesn’t fix or make real anything at all. Books float off into the great utopia of language, somewhere between writing and reading. And yet what’s interesting about this idea, of books as an open play of floating signs between writer and reader, isn’t new at all. I can find it in the eighteenth century. (BO: In Diderot, of course . . .) In Diderot, yes, but also in my own favourite writer. ‘Writing, when properly managed, is but a different name for conversation . . .’ he writes in the glorious pages of Tristram Shandy. ‘The truest respect you can pay to the reader’s understanding is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him (AGNES: Or her . . .) something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself.’
All this set my mind going on a process this writer always used to call ‘transverse zig-zaggery’ . . . (BO: In other words, the Lockean association of ideas. ME: Yes, Bo, that’s quite right . . .) And I began to turn my mind to this whole complicated question of literary mortality. Sweden and its graveyards certainly had something to do with it. So did our quest for a dead philosopher. So did Roland Barthes. I began to reflect that while in modern theory we pretend we have no need of an Author to explain our interest in books, the truth is we like to grant lives to our authors, and even view them as real persons just like all the rest of us. (VERSO: That assumes you know what a person is . . .) Even the critics and scholars amongst us are deeply interested in literary biographies and autobiographies, or what’s now fashionably called ‘life-writing’. Even Barthes finally wrote a book about this, called Barthes on Barthes (I admit he claimed to see himself as a total fiction). But ask any publisher and they’ll tell you there are plenty of readers out there who much prefer the pleasure of reading an author’s biography to the pain of reading his or her work.
(VERSO: But biographies are fictions too . . .) Exactly. Biographies are fictions too, and in fact they all have just one common plot and culmination. They tell us the life of the author, and then they usually tell us of the death of the author. Only when we reach the final weeks, the ultimate hours, the famous last words – Browning saying, ‘More than satisfied’, Henry James saying, ‘So here it is at last, the distinguished thing’ (VERSO: He didn’t . . .), Gertrude Stein saying, ‘What is the answer? What is the question?’ and so on – can we feel the plot’s complete. Yet according to my new theory of Postmortemism, the end of the story isn’t the end of the story at all. It’s simply the opening shot in the next story: the necrological sequel, the story of the writer’s after-life, the tale of the graveyard things that follow. Wakes and processions, cemeteries and dripping yews. Obituaries, eulogies, epitaphs, inscriptions, tombs, catafalques. Statues, plinths, busts, poets’ corners, writers’ houses, pantheons. Libraries, collections, lost manuscripts, translations, collected edited editions, complete works (they almost never are). In other words, all the things Denis Diderot (BO: Oh good . . . something important at last . . .) called ‘Posterity’: that is, the pregnant scene for which everything in life is staged, the place where literature becomes literary, a show by a dead writer in front of an audience of live readers. In short, the shadowy theatre where we all bury, disinter, translate, interpret, study, revise, amend, re-edit, parody, quote, misquote, traduce and transcend, in a wild anxiety of criticism and influence.
Which takes us into the wonderful world of ‘burlesque necrology’ – where some great gothic tale of deaths, corpses, tombs, monuments, anniversaries, retrospectives takes on far more importance than the life as originally lived. Think of the great English poets. Shelley: drowned at sea, body burned to ashes on the beach at Lerici, heart returned to England. Byron: dead for Greek freedom at Missolonghi, body returned to England, offered to Westminster Abbey but refused, sent off to Newstead Abbey, statues almost everywhere except in Britain. Browning: died in his son’s palazzo in Venice, still mourning Elizabeth Barrett forty years after her death in Florence, taken to the island of San Giorgio, then shipped home and offered to Westminster Abbey, application approved. Hardy: entombed in Westminster Abbey, heart buried next to spiky wife in Stinsford churchyard. And so on.
In fact the fates of writer-corpses have constantly been strange. Voltaire’s corpse was smuggled out of Paris in a postchaise sitting up, so he wouldn’t suffer an atheist’s funeral in quicklime. In the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, the tombs of La Fontaine and Molière are mysteriously empty. In a makeshift chapel on a ranch near Taos, New Mexico, D. H. Lawrence’s body, moved from Vence in France, has been plugged into the ground with thick concrete to protect him from necrophilic female admirers. Perhaps the greatest artists’ graveyard of all is on the island of San Giorgio in the Venice lagoon, where, for instance, Ezra Pound lies close to Stravinsky. Another’s in Saint Petersburg, where Dostoyevsky lies with Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. Of course we’re all obsessed with the Death of the Author.
Which, by more transverse zig-zaggery, takes me back to 1968, the same year Barthes published his essay. Because that year I was present at an important literary funeral – in fact the funeral of the author I probably admire most in the world. (ALMA: But a moment ago you said he lived in the eighteenth century . . .) It took place in Yorkshire, Britain’s largest and most literary county (the county I come from myself). If you ever go there, as you must, you’ll find another significant phenomenon of Postmortemism. For just as there’s literary necrology, there’s literary geography. You can start your Yorkshire tour in Brontë Country, where the signs are in Japanese, go on to Bradford, which is Priestley Country (signs mostly in Urdu), then head for James Herriot Country (no people, just animals). On to Castle Howard (Brideshead Country) and to the coast at Whitby (Dracula Country). Then if you head northward you’ll soon find yourself among the aspiring maidservants of Catherine Cookson Country. Go south to the Humber and you’ll find an area which consists of milkbars, fishdocks, huge civic cemeteries. This can be instantly recognized as Philip Larkin Country.
My particular funeral took place in the beautiful stone estate village of Coxwold, in the Howardian Hills, midway between Herriot and Brideshead Country. The deceased had been the vicar of the parish and a Dean of York. His name was Laurence Sterne. (BO: Just like the author?) It was the author. (LARS: But he died a long time ago . . .) Precisely two hundred years before I attended his funeral. He wasn’t just a very famous writer but a very famous preacher (ANDERS: Parson Yorick . . .) Parson Yorick, the parson from York, whom so many people came to hear they enlarged Coxwold church to fit them in. But his fame soared when he began writing a novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy – so successful he was presented at court. He became famous in France, went there and to Italy. He came back and wrote a tale of his travels. (ANDERS: A Sentimental Journey . . .) The moment it was published he died, in March 1768, at his London lodgings in Bond Street, of the tuberculosis that always plagued him. His last words, incidentally, were, ‘Now it is done.’
Sterne died almost alone; at least, he was attended by one servant, and that was it. His wife, a ‘porcupine of a woman’, who’d turned out to be ten years older than she said, was heading off to France along with his fortune. His excellent mistress, Eliza Draper, had returned to her husband in India. He was out of favour with the church for his work. Which is probably why only three people attended his funeral: a sailor, his printer, and a lawyer. He was buried without a headstone at Archery Fields, an overflow graveyard of Saint George’s, Hanover Square. It sounds a good address; it wasn’t. The graveyard was guarded by a big mastiff dog because it was regularly robbed by grave snatchers. But the grave snatchers snatched the dog, and within two days they’d stolen Sterne’s body too. It was next seen at Cambridge University, on the dissecting table at a public anatomy lecture. A member of the audience recognized him, but didn’t say so until after the skull had been trepanned. (LARS: Alas, poor Yorick . . .) Of course the university didn’t wish to be embarrassed (BO: The university never does . . .) . . . so the remains were secretly returned to the grave snatchers, taken to London and secretly restored in the grave.
And there they stayed till the Swinging Sixties. In Britain this happened to be not only a time of Beatlemania, mind-enhancing drugs and body-enhancing sex, but a property boom. One of Britain’s biggest landowners, the Church of England, decided the best way it could serve its divine mission was to put the churchyard on the market for commercial development. Happily a good man I knew, Kenneth Monkman, remembered Sterne’s remains, went to the consistory court, and asked for an exhumation. When they dug the graveyard, they found bones and a trepanned skull. The problem was to be sure it was Sterne’s, so they called a forensic pathologist (Mr Harvey Ross of Harley Street, if you want to know). He came up with an ingenious forensic device. In Italy Sterne sat for his bust by the famous English sculptor Nollekens, who always measured his sitter’s heads with callipers. If they could match the skull with the bust, which Mr Monkman possessed, it would prove it was Sterne’s. The bust was brought to the graveyard. The head grinned at the skull, the skull at the bust. They matched exactly.
My friend Monkman now had skull and bones. All he needed was a grave to put them in. Fortunately the ideal answer presented itself: an academic conference. In the summer of 1968, the University of York decided (in between the student sit-ins so fashionable at the time) to hold a great International Sterne Conference two hundred years after his death. It was like our present gathering, except instead of being held on a ship heading for a revolution it was held on the campus in the middle of one, and instead of us nine something like two hundred international scholars came. (BO: But quantity is not always quality . . . MOI: Definitely not, but it was still a very splendid and memorable occasion. I was there myself. BO: I do hope you had papers . . . MOI: Yes, I gave one. BO: If you could do it then, you could . . .) I had time in those days. Besides, our conference now had more than papers. It also had Sterne’s bones and winged skull. (LARS: Which reminds me, where is Diderot?) So we arranged a funeral, and decided to bury him in the graveyard of the church he’d made famous, Coxwold.
So, a portion of the world’s thinking finest, we all met at Shandy Hall, Sterne’s crazy house in the village, his ‘philosophical hut’, as he called it. He’d spent the profits of Tristram Shandy remodelling it to fit his own fantastic imagination, and now Monkman had restored it to its former glory. It was quite a remarkable occasion. The Church of England decided to let bygones be bygones, so the current Chancellor of York – his name was Canon Cant – agreed to give the funeral oration. A firm of wine-shippers, Croft’s (Sterne had known the founder) agreed to ship over a case of his favourite bromide, port from Oporto. We walked in a row through the lovely estate village. We sat down among the Grinling Gibbon tombs, and awaited the oration. But – alas, again, poor Yorick. Just one important person was missing, and that was the deceased himself. By a fatal error the British will understand only too well, the remains had been assigned to travel from London to Coxwold by British Rail. Following an ancient rule, they had delivered them to a wrong destination, a village of vaguely similar name in darkest Wales. Worse still, the occasion, like Stockholm, was totally alkoholfri. British Rail had also been entrusted with the case of port.
The funeral took place even so. Canon Cant’s obsequy was quite excellent; a crying shame Sterne himself had missed it. The skull and bones did turn up several weeks later, after having toured most of Britain. By now the scholars had returned to their distant lecture-halls, so what remained of the remains had to be reburied by a tiny handful of dedicated Sterneans, who admit to little memory of the event, since the case of port turned up too. So now, if you care to visit Coxwold, as you should, you will find Sterne’s remains are now interred there. In fact you’ll find two tombstones in the churchyard, one put up long ago by some friendly Freemasons, the other a new one. Incidentally, as far as details of birth and death are concerned, both are incorrect. And, sad to say, at the foot of the graves lies that of Kenneth Monkman, the only one who really knew the full story, and the greatest Sternean of them all.
(BO: I’m sorry, but we are really here for Diderot . . .)
Ah, yes, Diderot . . .
As Dr Johnson famously complained, Tristram Shandy is the oddest of books. Sterne used his transverse zig-zaggery to break every rule of the new form so rightly called ‘the novel’. He left blank pages for the reader to paint in, put the preface in the middle, set the chapters in the wrong order. Consequences come before causes, and only after he’s published several volumes does he say he’s ready to start. Most novels then started with the birth of the hero, so he started with his conception. And it’s a botched conception – by a Lockean association of ideas, Tristram’s father-to-be winds the clock and makes love to his wife on the last night of the month, one thing reminding him of the other. Tristram’s mother-to-be finds it difficult to concentrate on the one, as she’s wondering if he remembered to do the other. So Tristram’s conception is a damp squib, as it were, and he’s born a botched child, an imperfect specimen. But then the whole book is a botched conception too. In fact it’s all a cock and bull story, Sterne says.
But if he designed a fantastic mystification for the book’s beginning, he devised an even cleverer one for the ending. He chose to conclude the book in the most striking way possible: the Death of the Author. He had congenital tuberculosis, and started the book as a comic stay against his misfortunes. He decided to keep writing a couple of volumes a year till he just dropped dead. Then the book would end, ‘Now it is done.’ Or that’s what he thought. In 1760, 1761, 1762, his writing was well up to schedule. Six volumes were out, he’d become an international celebrity. But his health was fading, so in 1762 he decided to make his will, leave Shandy Hall, and travel to France and Italy – partly to convalesce, partly because he was hoping to donate his porcupine wife to Europe in the interests of greater integration. Before he set off on his strange and irreverent Grand Tour, he decided to send the six volumes to the French writer he admired most. And he happened to be Denis Diderot. (BO: Ah . . . at last . . .)
Diderot fell in love with the book. He told all his friends Sterne was the ‘Rabelais of the English’ and this was ‘the craziest, wisest and greatest of all books’. Seventeen hundred and sixty-two was, as so often, not really a great year to be English in Paris. The Seven Years War was ending, and the French were just losing their two Indies – America and India – to the British. Their overseas empire was dying, the much-resented Peace of Paris about to be signed. None of this improved Franco-British relations (they were soured for generations). Still, nothing ever did. The French became deeply Anglophobe, and soon, through the playwright Beaumarchais, they were sending arms to American Revolutionaries and making national heroes of the electric Ben Franklin, the great George Washington, the splendid Thomas Jefferson. It proved a dangerous strategy, for in supporting the American revolutionaries the French court was encouraging the coming of its own. But that was ahead, this was still the Age of Reason. And, as you know, the French generally forgive writers and philosophers, people like us who rise above local difficulties and are citizens of the world . . . (ANDERS: Let’s hope this is true in Russia . . .) And in any case Sterne was Irish . . .
So, after all, 1762 turned into a good British year in Paris (a city which looked, said Sterne, a good deal better than it smelled). David Hume, like some fat Cistercian, was on the staff at the new British Embassy. Edward Gibbon, the man who was still scribbling the great book of empire that he had dreamt of on the steps of the Capitol in Rome, was there, charming his way all around town. So was the actor David Garrick, a very good friend to Sterne. Sterne’s fame had gone before him, and soon he too was ‘shandying around’ all the salons in his drab black suit: meeting the learned doctors of the Sorbonne, flirting with the ladies, becoming a friend of Diderot’s atheistical friend d’Holbach – that great protector of wits, he called him. Before long he’d converted Parisians to the new philosophy of ‘Shandyism’. He had Garrick read a play of Diderot’s to consider staging it in London, though Garrick found it far too French: ‘’Tis love love love throughout, without much separation in the character,’ he observed shrewdly. And in turn he encouraged Diderot to study Garrick’s acting performance, which led him to write a very important treatise on the matter. (LARS: Ah yes, I know, I know – The Paradox of the Comedian . . .)
But the great moment came at the end. Sterne was invited at the last minute to give a sermon of dedication for the new chapel in the British Embassy. It was of course a grand occasion, with princes, courtiers and ambassadors, bishops and priests present. And the philosophes were out in force as well. Hume, who worked in the Embassy, was there, and so were his friends d’Holbach and Diderot. Unfortunately Sterne seems to have decided to give a sermon that wasn’t a sermon. (BO: Ah, yes, now we know . . .) He chose to preach on a very odd text from Hezekiah – an ‘unlucky text’, as he admitted later. It concerns the rather remarkable miracle where Hezekiah put all his concubines on display, and this makes the sundial, affected as it were by Viagra, mysteriously move by ten degrees. The princes and priests were scandalized, and thought it no way to dedicate an official Parisian residence, however protestant. (ANDERS: I would think it was ideal . . .) The philosophes, of course, thought the sermon was admirable. Half of them were former Jesuits anyway, and it seemed to them that if only they could preach from the altar like this it might even be worth believing in God.
And Diderot, feeling he’d found a soulmate, promptly decided to write a novel in the manner of Tristram Shandy, using the same techniques . . . (BO: Transverse zig-zaggery?) The book, he said, worked as true creativity did: ‘By long observation, consummate experience, tact, taste, instinct, a sort of inspiration; by a long and awkward march, by painful fumbling, by a secret notion of analogy derived from an infinity of observations, whose memory gets wiped out but whose trace remains.’ He particularly liked one delicious touch, Uncle Toby’s famous groin wound, which makes his amours a problem. Because of the wound, Toby is forced to explain everything else he knows, like the events of the Siege of Namur, in encyclopedic detail – literally, for Sterne got his information from the great British encyclopedia of the day, Chamber’s, which Diderot tried to translate. (BO: It started the Encyclopedia . . .). The odd sexual joke seemed the source of a new way of storytelling, and that started Diderot off on his own book. For Sterne, this would create a remarkable paradox – one he could never know about. His aim was that Shandy would end with the death of the author, a totally fair surmise. ‘Now it is done,’ were his last words; and some people think he meant his book. But it wasn’t done. Diderot had begun to continue it, and would for years after Sterne’s death.
But Denis being Denis, the book that started out this way turned into something quite different. The wounded Uncle Toby turns into a fatalistic servant, bold enough to tell his master the one reason he’ll be remembered is because he had such a famous valet. (BIRGITTA: Ah, my darling, I know what it is. Jacques the Fatalist And His Master . . .) The servant became a significant figure of the day, in fact finally became— (BIRGITTA: Figaro, of course. I told you that). So we can say Sterne turns into Diderot; who turns into Beaumarchais; who turns into Mozart; who turns into Rossini. He also turns into Proust and Joyce, Beckett and Nabokov, and thus an essential part of our own literature. Instead of writing a book nobody would remember, because as Dr Johnson said nothing so odd can live long, he became the source of a whole tradition of stories, plays, operas – a classic case of Postmortemism.
But our Diderot really wouldn’t be Diderot if he didn’t make his book new. Sterne asked many of the great literary questions, and that’s why we love him. Diderot asked a great many more. He added fresh tricks, postmodern diversions, all sorts of new games to play between the writer and the reader. It’s always been said his book has four characters – Jacques, his master, the writer, the reader – and no one can tell which is in control. He adds lots of mystifications and operatic strategems, like the tale of the vengeful Mme. de la Pommeraye. But one thing clearly carries on from Sterne. Just like Shandy, Diderot’s Jacques doesn’t conclude. No one really gets anywhere, beds anyone, or discovers anything. After all, the only complete story is written in the Book of Destiny above, Jacques says, and who can possibly know how that will end?
So Diderot recommends we finish the tale ourselves. But then, when he checks the manuscript again, three endings have suddenly appeared. One has popped out of the pages of Tristram Shandy. Can it be plagiarism? Perhaps, he says – ‘Unless this dialogue between Jacques and his master actually pre-dates that book, so that our good master Sterne is the real plagiarist. But this I doubt, because of the high esteem in which I hold Mr Sterne, whom I distinguish from most of the writers of his nation, who steal from us first and then insult us.’ (A charge, incidentally, I’d like to refute here and now. I never steal. I simply inter-textualize.)
Diderot tells us a tale with no ending still has to end somewhere, like everything else in the world. That applies to Sterne’s book, his own, and me now. So that’s all I have to say in this paper that wasn’t really a paper. Except for one thing. While he was in Paris, Sterne sent to his London bookseller for some books by British authors (Chaucer, Pope, Cibber, Locke), to be put to his account but sent elsewhere, ‘for they are for a present’. The books were a gift for Diderot, and crossed the channel to join his library. But this was the library Diderot was in the process of selling to Catherine of Russia. So, when he in his turn suffered the fatal Death of the Author in 1784 (that’s the date claimed in all the encyclopedias), all his books, including those Sterne gave him, went to Russia and joined the library in the Hermitage, which I believe we will soon be privileged to see, so maybe we’ll be looking at them soon . . . (BO: Well, perhaps, nothing is certain . . .)
And then, as I understand it, many of Diderot’s manuscripts went to Russia as well, including the wonderful Rameau’s Nephew (BIRGITTA: If you say so . . .) and the still unfinished text of Jacques. Later on, through all sorts of strange channels, these works which weren’t published at all in Diderot’s lifetime began to reappear in Germany and France, and began to be published, but in very confused editions. People still wonder whether there are more manuscripts in Russia (BO: I don’t think so . . .) but maybe when we arrive in Petersburg we’ll find out more about how the story that never finished went on— (ANDERS: Except have you seen this morning’s news? . . .)
And that’s all . . . oh, except for one last thing. Sterne’s books went to Russia, but what about all the books Diderot gave to Sterne in return – his own writings on art and philosophy? Well, they found their way back to England, and so back to Shandy Hall, Sterne’s little philosophical hut up in Coxwold. But once Sterne had died the house ceased to be a rectory, and then it fell into total decay, until Kenneth Monkman found it and restored it. He also began to rebuild Sterne’s lost library, and that’s where I saw some of those books, though most are still missing. That was in 1968, of course. The year of the Death of the Author, and also the year I turned up at Shandy Hall to take part in a literary funeral where the corpse totally failed to be present . . .
So, Bo, I’m sorry. But that’s all I can do by way of an ending, and all I can do by way of a lecture. I’m so sorry your first paper wasn’t really a paper . . .