Madeleine Descargues-Grant
Ever since Sterne’s gloss on laughter as an addition of “something to this Fragment of Life” in his dedication of the second edition of Tristram Shandy to William Pitt,1 the literary category of the fragmentary has won for itself a central, if elusive, place in Sternean criticism. It will be the purpose of this essay not so much to review this criticism, but to explore the seductiveness of the fragment as a form hatching within the text, in Sterne and in other writers. Fragments carry both paradigmatic and syntagmatic weight: they place the text in a series of other texts, vertically so to speak, but they also influence the narrative horizontally as they are incorporated into it. My exploration will first reflect on the fortunes of the fragment in the Augustan age, then examine the resonance of the notion and the term in a mostly Sternean corpus, elaborated with references to Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, Pope’s Dunciad, and Spectator 85 by Addison.
Sterne wrote one separate fragmentary piece, which has come to be known as the “Rabelaisian Fragment.” He also inserted real or so-called fragments into his two major works. Not surprisingly, his practice occasioned a profusion of imitators who thought their homage more aptly presented when entitled “Fragment(s).” In the wake of romantic and postromantic literary fashions, moreover, the word “fragment” became a catchword for such dissimilar performances as “Fragments in the Manner of Sterne”—paltry sentimental variations excusing themselves as based on the Maria theme of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey—or, nearly a century later, Paul Stapfer’s fantastical “Fragment inédit.”2 It was even Sterne’s fate to have his works artificially fragmented for the taste of the public, that is, anthologized and broken into more palatable pieces, as in the notorious example of The Beauties of Sterne.3 Because of its polysemy, “fragment” is a slippery word with which to crack the code of Sterne’s compositions.
Of course, the whole of Tristram Shandy, with its missing (or not) tenth volume, interpolated tales, displaced chapters, and typographical breakages, can be regarded as a compendious fragment of Tristram’s life; and the same applies to Yorick’s Sentimental Journey, with its unmistakably missing final period. Certainly the assiduous critic could identify dozens of “subfragments” scattered through Sterne’s volumes. What I wish to do here is to concentrate only on those instances in the Sternean corpus where the word “fragment” is actually used by the author as a primary identification. The word can be simply present in a sentence or serve as a title. It will be useful at the outset to provide a list of my nine examples, from the “Rabelaisian Fragment” (1) to the fragments that may be collected from Tristram Shandy: (2) “Brother Didius . . . upon his backside;” (3.34.263); (3) “The Fragment [upon Whiskers]” (5.1.409–15); (4) “Now my uncle Toby . . . pieces of antiquity.” (5.3.423); (5) “To those who call vexations . . . not to be able to see it.” (7.30.625); and from A Sentimental Journey: (6) “A Fragment” (containing an anecdote about the town of Abdera)4; (7) “The Marquis d’E**** . . . how I envied him his feelings!” (107–8); (8) “The Fragment. Paris” (containing the story of the French notary) (134–35), “The Fragment. Paris” (136–39), “The Fragment and the Bouquet. Paris.” (140); and (9) “The Case of Delicacy” (160–65).
One of these examples seems to me of particular significance, and this is (8) the episode of A Sentimental Journey situated in Paris, in which the word “fragment” is repeated in three consecutive titles, the fragment itself supplying at once a plot and a metanarrative, with Yorick playing the part of the reader. Nor is this the only feature that commands our attention. The remarkable proximity in the passage of a “sheet of waste paper” (134)—that is, the fragment itself—and of the butter that Yorick is eating for his breakfast establishes a thematic connection between Sterne’s writing in the second half of the eighteenth century and the treatment of the notion of the fragment in texts from the Augustan age or even earlier. The complex idea of corruption, in the shape of degraded matter, and the simpler one of food are indeed two underlying metaphors that seem inseparable from the motif of the fragment for Pope, and even for Shakespeare. The food metaphor comes down to us from what can be considered as the biblical master trope of the fragment as nourishment in the episode of Jesus feeding the multitude. This episode is diversely told by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; the loaves of barley may be five or seven, and the fish may be a few and little or just two, but each time the breaking of bread and the leftover broken fragments are associated with the ideas of plenty and satiety. This could in turn be related to the doctrine of plenitude governing the Great Chain of Being, warranting, through God’s own vigilance, that all species and all elements, down to the hairs on a man’s head, form part of a meaningful whole.5
The Classical Fragment
Because fragmentation in a modernist sense has been such a central issue in twentieth-century criticism, including critical reflection on Sterne himself, I believe it useful to start with what very clearly distinguishes Sterne from the modernist aesthetic credo, according to which the fragmented world—a euphemism for the world without God—can only be made whole through art, whose mission it is to restore completeness. Such a divine mission on Earth, one gathers, might have been implied by Mallarmé when he declared that “the world is designed to reach its perfection in a book,”6 a statement one can hardly imagine Laurence Sterne, an Anglican parson, would have endorsed. Mallarmé’s book is a secular book, authorized by aesthetic judgment—an object in the cultural sphere. As such, it is far removed from the Book of Nature invoked by Christians throughout the Middle Ages for the metaphorical “reading” of God’s creation. Sterne might play with the idea of a “work of redemption,”7 he could count on writing and laughing it away to keep up his spirits, but he would not have confused writing a profane book and achieving salvation. For all his investment in literature, Sterne never proposed it (says Christopher Ricks) as “the be-all and end-all of human existence”; he was too conscious of “[t]he potential arrogance of literature—in its relation to the other arts, to the sciences, to religion, to life.”8 With this intellectual proviso in mind, we should be wary of overinterpreting Sterne’s obsession with the fragmentary as secular epiphany, in the Joycean/Woolfian sense, and in the light of our own postmodern bewilderment in the diminished world we have inherited and that we continue to reduce to even smaller and more incomprehensible parts.
In order to do justice to the fragmentary in Sterne’s writing, one needs rather to turn back to the classical age. As Alain Montandon has argued, Pascal’s Thoughts are the turning point in matters concerning the literary status of the fragment: his confessedly uncompleted work is conditioned by his very vision of human life as “a mean between nothing and everything.”9 For Montandon, this amounts to a representation of life as “an incomprehensible fragment in the universe,”10 a formula quite akin to Sterne’s own “Fragment of Life.” This philosophical conception of the fragmentary, let us remember, issues from the works of a Jansenist French Catholic, therefore one closer to Protestant notions of the centrality of God’s grace, and hence tolerably compatible with the views of a Church of England cleric such as Sterne. It rests upon trust in a completeness that eludes the writer’s human efforts: these can provide rhetorical glimpses into the sublime, but they can only aspire to the unachievable divine model found in the sublimity of the Bible.11
The fragmentary for Sterne, in other words, is characteristically human—“all are from the dust, and all return to dust” (Eccles. 3:20)—as it is for the French classical or the English Augustan ages. This dissociates it from the fragmentary theorized as the ideal literary form by the romantic imagination, in particular by the German romantics and Jean-Paul Richter, and indeed from all later versions, including the modernist one. No transcendent function is assigned by Sterne to fragments themselves. The relation of the fragment with theology has to be sought, as Elizabeth W. Harries has cogently argued, in the biblical intertext. Sterne’s fragments and his way of using them “point to the necessary incompleteness of our attempts to make sense of life’s fragments and of life itself as a fragment, but also to the expanding and ultimately liberating power of those attempts.”12
The fragment as motif in the later eighteenth century is also “inextricably bound up with our notions about the ancients,” Harries observes in her study The Unfinished Manner: “Relatively few ancient texts have come down to us whole; we know many of them only as fragments or in fragments: isolated lines or episodes, sometimes too discrete to be brought together into any form that looks complete.”13 The interest in the fragmentary and the incomplete is therefore inherently modern—“Only in the early Renaissance did it somehow become possible to create fragments”14—and the preoccupation with the fragmentary comes with the “lateness” complex of the moderns. In the Augustans’ eyes, the value of fragments is in any case ambivalent: they may be seen either as precious (they are all that is left from the past) or as damaged (they are broken, degraded material). This ambivalence is reflected in the treatment given by at least one great Augustan, Alexander Pope, to the predominant metaphors of gestation and digestion that conflate fragment and food in the Dunciad. Besides the admiration for the ancients, the Christian intertext, as we have indicated above, also enriches the metaphoric potential of the fragment. Whereas this metaphor is essentially negative in Pope’s rhetoric, as it was previously in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, representing the degraded condition of modern culture and language, it gets a positive treatment at the hands not only of Sterne in his Sentimental Journey, but also of Pope’s contemporary Joseph Addison, in the Spectator. One is familiar with the idea that in Yorick’s journey, the broken and the interrupted are associated with good fortune, following the Shandean prejudice in favor of digressions. But one cannot help wondering also if the coincidence that makes Addison and Sterne consider fragments as choice morsels, in Spectator 85 and in “The Fragment. Paris,” respectively, might have to do with the engagement of each author, separated though they are by decades, with the transformations of print culture and of the market of literature. Both Addison and Sterne were committed diversely to the serial mode of publication, and both sought means to adapt to a new, broader readership in their manner of writing, recognizing the changes in readers’ expectations and in what they themselves as authors could expect from their readers. The fragments around which they develop their microstories question the readers’ motivation for reading and challenge their performance as readers. That might give a hint as to why both writers use the fragment as a pedagogical exercise in reading, and as an example of how to read, helping the relatively unpracticed to become more competent.
The Fragment in Sterne
None has more weight than Rabelais to confirm the reading of Tristram Shandy in the Renaissance tradition of learned wit. It is therefore of particular interest to gauge Sterne’s literary achievement when writing explicitly in the manner of the French writer, via a narrator called Longinus Rabelaicus. The “Rabelaisian Fragment” (1), possibly written just after A Political Romance and just before Tristram Shandy, is now read by critics as in some sense a germ for Tristram Shandy itself.15 Melvyn New elaborated this diagnosis in 1972, tracing the palimpsest of the original “Fragment,” under the bowdlerizations introduced by Sterne’s daughter, and also the rewritings induced by Sterne’s own “self-censorship [which] does suggest that [he] was aware of changing tastes and changing standards of decorum” (SRF, 1085). Tom Keymer contended more categorically that “the Fragment was unprintable from the start,”16 with its flagrant obscenity. All in all, nevertheless, the “Fragment” is a successful exercise, in which the ingredients that flavor the writing—the “debt to and love for the French satirist,” the “ear for the Rabelaisian vocabulary”—justly match their original (literary) purpose: “a satire on learning and sermon writing” (SRF, 1084, 1085, 1083).
But is it in fact more than a gifted pastiche, with its scatological comedy and its use of Rabelaisian idiom and onomatopoeia? Despite its vigorous and flavored style, the “Fragment” remains what it purports to be, “A Fragment in the Manner of Rabelais,” effectively Sterne’s “first attempt at what ultimately became Tristram Shandy,” “cull[ed] for ideas as he writes his masterpiece” (SRF, 1085, 1086). While A Political Romance offers itself as a pamphlet in its own right, the “Rabelaisian Fragment” seems to be more intertext than text, and this is owing not only to its remaining unfinished. Whatever phrase comes alive in it does so with the prior reference to Rabelais or, better, the posterior reference to Tristram Shandy itself. Longinus Rabelaicus makes “an Exclamation, but taking Care to moderate his Voice at the same Time” (SRF, 1088), as Walter will during the conception of Tristram; he lays down the principles of the Kerukopædia, echoed later in the Trista-pædia, while Homenas reflects on the exercise of pilfering and borrowing in the writing of sermons, adumbrating Yorick. But Tristram’s interiority provides the ignition for the greater work, which combines the same ingredients with significant differences.
The “Fragment” proves that Sterne could quite convincingly write in the mode of Rabelais, qua respected figure from the Renaissance, as the first chapter puts it: “Shewing . . . What a Rabelaic Fellow, Longinus Rabelaicus, is” (SRF, 1088), a feat that perhaps does not add much, after all, to the creative translations of Urquart and Motteux. It also proves how different this emanation of Rabelais was from the ethos of the author Sterne, his Shandean self. It seems as if Sterne had tried out his voice in different registers to construct his fully fledged, hybrid persona, in which the proponent of learned wit described by D. W. Jefferson and the satirist identified by New coexist with the explorer of the sympathetic affections. The “Rabelaisian Fragment” is memorable for its genealogical interest and for the critical paraphernalia it has occasioned, Tristram Shandy, of course, being its most developed critical reading.
In Tristram Shandy
Following the first, unforgettable use of the word in the phrase “this Fragment of Life” in the dedication of the second edition of the first two volumes to William Pitt, the reader meets the word “fragment” in volume 3, when Tristram launches into a discussion of the legitimacy of appropriating opinions as one does apples, simply picking them up, and calls Tribonius in support of Locke (2): “Brother Didius, Tribonius will say, it is a decreed case, as you may find it in the fragments of Gregorius and Hermogenes’s codes, and in all the codes from Justinian’s down to the codes of Louis and Des Eaux,—That the sweat of a man’s brows, and the exsudations of a man’s brains, are as much a man’s own property, as the breeches upon his backside” (3.34.263). To identify Tribonius (for Roman emperor Justinian’s chancellor Tribonianus), Gregorius, and company, New’s annotations point us to the information Sterne would have found in Chambers’ Cyclopædia, in the article “Civil Law,” and again in “Code.”17 The discussion of property mentioning John’s apple refers to Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (264). New cites James Work’s remark on Sterne’s slapdash use of the sources: “Des Eaux appears to be a confused reference to Louis XIV’s Ordonnance des eaux et forêts of 1669, a famous code designed to conserve and develop French forests, of which numerous erudite interpretations were written. This slip suggests that here, as in other known cases, Sterne derived his ‘erudition’ from marginalia rather than from the text” (265). New also traces in the passage an echo of the scattered rules of the Kerukopædia in the Rabelaisian fragment. The whole exercise suggests indeed a satire of pedantry and erudition maintained in the Rabelaisian spirit.
But what immediately follows bears on Walter’s practical solution to the fragmentary state of ancient knowledge on noses—indeed, Slawkenbergius’s tale is not far off: “he collected every book and treatise which had been systematically wrote upon noses, with as much care as my honest uncle Toby had done those upon military architecture” (3.34.265). This collecting hobbyhorse places the fragment in the realm of the compulsive and more generally of the affective, which the later part of this essay will explore in more depth. The whole context of chapters 34 to 38 is, in fact, contaminated metonymically by the fragment motif, bearing as it does on the collectioner’s urge displayed by the two brothers, as if they are compelled to try to turn fragments, odd bits and pieces, into wholes, and to fail. Chapter 35 introduces Bruscambille and Slawkenbergius, before the text literally fragments itself to offer two major exhibits: the marbled page at the end of volume 3 and Slawkenbergius’s tale at the beginning of volume 4. The opacity of the first, ironically suggestive of the very material on which classical fragments were often found, is matched by the inapplicability of the second to Walter’s desperation and helplessness at the news of the crushing of his son’s nose (4.2.327). In volume 3 of Tristram Shandy, far from enlightening their readers, fragments seem to obey a law of entropy and to make everything more scattered and disconnected, despite the futile efforts at reordering them.
Volume 5 provides good material for literary fragment seekers, opening as it does with the disquisition on the “relicks of learning” (5.1.408) spread as rubble in all modern texts, and continuing with the title “The Fragment” (3) to introduce the interpolated tale of the mishaps of the word “Whiskers” at the court of the queen of Navarre:
The Fragment.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * * * *
* * *——You are half asleep, my good lady, said the old gentleman, taking hold of the old lady’s hand and giving it a gentle squeeze, as he pronounced the word Whiskers—shall we change the subject? By no means, replied the old lady—. . . . I desire, continued she, you will go on. (5.1.409)
In this instance, the insertion of the fragment reads as an immediate visual commentary on the ancients-versus-moderns paradigm used with typical obliqueness by Sterne, first through his plagiarizing of Burton in an ironically performative discussion on plagiarism, then through his producing of a fragment of his own. This fragment, as shown above, is ostentatiously advertised as such by the generous portion of asterisks preceding the old gentleman narrator’s cue: as if to illustrate the instability of ancient manuscripts and their degradation—a typographical sign mimicking Swift’s hic desunt multa in The Tale of a Tub. Meanwhile, the so-called insertion provides the content of a chapter on whiskers and continues to tease the reader with a favorite theme, the gravity inherent in words, which inclines them to fall into the dirty rather than the clean path.
According to Richard A. Davies’s investigations of historical sources, no connection between whiskers and Margaret’s court life appears, though the court life was notoriously scandalous. Yet Sterne’s invented fragment stumbles on some sort of truth: “However, the association of ideas does have its basis in a quirk of the Queen’s that came to light during the nineteenth century: her fetish for hair which the French biographer of court-life of her age, Tallemant des Réaux, chose to hand down to posterity as one of Margaret de Valois’s more interesting idiosyncracies.”18 The fragment here is worth noting for its ring of truth, despite—or perhaps because of—its fabrication and its offhanded treatment of historical chronicles: “nor had I ever seen the underwritten fragment” (5.1.409) is Tristram’s cavalier introduction to his inserted piece, which may read as a warning to the naive. The ring of truth is in the narrative logic of Tristram Shandy, which makes its reader alert to the fact that whiskers, after the example of noses, are bound to be “dangerous” subjects.
Another sort of commentary on the productive use of textual fragments occurs in volume 5, when Toby misses the meaning of Walter’s speech on the occasion of Bobby’s death, owing to his inability to identify and locate his brother’s lengthy quotation (4): “Now my uncle Toby knew not that this last paragraph was an extract of Servius Sulpicius’s consolatory letter to Tully.—He had as little skill, honest man, in the fragments, as he had in the whole pieces of antiquity” (5.3.423). Here, Toby is unable to place this broken piece in the puzzle of quotations issuing from his brother’s mind. We can intuit a version of the continuous communication between writer and reader in this exchange between the two brothers. Walter we can cast in the role of the writer, his head charged with material and primed with ancient rhetorical models; Toby is the reader, doing his best to understand what is going on, despite his own “little skill” in the matter. The balance for the self-respecting writer or reader, it appears, must be found somewhere between Walter’s excessive familiarity with ancient rhetorical models—indeed, his inability to extract himself from them and to make them yield meaning—and Toby’s ignorant imperviousness to quotation, his inability to bridge (rhetorically, that is) the past and the present.
To complete this handful of examples from Tristram Shandy, the word “fragment” is, unsurprisingly, associated with antiquity and its monuments in volume 7 (5): the narrator’s journey fatally exposes him to sights for “the curious and inquisitive” (1.4.5) tourist. And although Tristram “think[s] it very much amiss—that a man cannot go quietly through a town, and let it alone” (7.4.579–80), a warning that descriptions of monuments will be few and far between in his travel narrative, even he may occasionally wish to visit some renowned places. Unfortunately, all his attempts at sightseeing are frustrated, beginning with the permission refused “to take an exact survey of the fortifications” in Calais, a disappointment he soon makes good by acknowledging, “after all that is said and done . . . Calais was never upon any account so considerable from itself, as from its situation” (7.5.583). Predictably, a similar fate befalls him a little later, this time on his visit to Lyons: “there could not be a greater [vexation] than to be the best part of a day in Lyons, the most opulent and flourishing city in France, enriched with the most fragments of antiquity—and not be able to see it” (7.30.625). There is an unmistakable intimation of the vanity of the contemplation of architectural or sculptural fragments in the parodic treatment of the monument devoted to Amandus and Amanda that follows. Tristram’s lucubrations on the “shrine” of the two lovers, which determine him to “go [on] a pilgrimage (though [he] had no other business at Lyons) on purpose to pay it a visit” (7.31.629), are brought to an abrupt ending: “When I came—there was no tomb to drop [this tear] upon. What would I have given for my uncle Toby to have whistled, Lillo bullero!” (7.4.643).
So much, one can half hear Sterne saying, for that precious fragment of antiquity. Even though he could (and would, especially in 1767, before the composition of A Sentimental Journey) be prey to fits of melancholy meditation inspired by Eliza Draper’s miniature or by pictures “of the Sculptures upon poor Ovid’s Tomb, who died in Exile, tho’ he wrote so well upon the Art of Love,”19 Sterne’s Gothic inclinations were always blended with a healthy taste for the living rather than the dead. One remembers that Janatone’s beautiful body, because she is alive, deserves more attention at the very beginning of the same volume 7 than “the great parish church” or the “fascade of the abbey of Saint Austreberte” (7.9.589).
In this series of examples, fragments, whether textual or architectural, serve mostly to confirm the narrator’s authority. They lead him on a wild-goose chase when he (or any other character) seeks them out, and he is better off when he produces or forges them himself. Nowhere are they truly redolent of past literary grandeur and standards; never does Sterne intimidate us with past models. Nevertheless, the ability to identify the fragment is a cultural test (one that Toby fails), warranting the reader’s wary participation in an intertextual game. Turning now to A Sentimental Journey—a work often said to be about reading as much as Tristram Shandy is about writing—should enable us to pursue this readerly game.
A Sentimental Journey
The stone that obstructs Yorick’s passage at the end of A Sentimental Journey (9) is a notable (and very material) example of the fragment. This is no inheritance from antiquity but a direct work of nature, produced by one of the many hazards that confront the traveler on his way: “mountains impracticable—and cataracts, which roll down great stones from their summits, and block his road up.—The peasants had been all day at work in removing a fragment of this kind between St. Michael and Madane” (160), which leads to Yorick’s stopping at an inn. There is only one bedchamber, and when a lady and her maidservant arrive at the same inn, the English gentleman, being an English gentleman, can but share his room. Harries stresses the fact that, even though the obstacle represented by the massive stone is “but a pebble” (162) compared with “the mutual embarrassment of Yorick and a lady traveler when they discover that they must share the same small bedroom,” the episode “leads to a connection, perhaps random and accidental, yet unmistakably there.”20 Indeed, A Sentimental Journey finishes with “The Case of Delicacy” and its well-known suspended ending, brought about by the fortunate fragment:
So that when I stretch’d out my hand, I caught hold of the Fille de Chambre’s
END OF VOL. II. (165)
As in the third volume of Tristram Shandy, but this time with effects that reverberate in the narrative, the text is receptive to the interruptive and creative energy of the fragment as sign, and made richer (as is many a journey) by the digression. One can even suggest that the stone fragment functions literally as a “Fragment of Life,” insisting as it does, in all its adventitiousness and unintelligibility, on a course of action that the narrative could not otherwise have supplied.
The episode of the old marquis in “The Sword. Rennes” (7) also associates the word “fragment” with an unpredictably positive outcome. “The Marquis d’E**** had fought up against his condition [decay, distress, and poverty] with great firmness; wishing to preserve, and still shew to the world some little fragments of what his ancestors had been—their indiscretions had put it out of his power” (107). Forced by poverty to go into commerce and to relinquish his sword, he is able, “in about nineteen or twenty years of successful application to business . . . to reclaim his nobility and to support it” (108). What is fascinating here, surely, is that it is the hazards of modern commerce (for which, read contingent narrative) rather than the symbolic sword (for which, read idealism) that restore the family fortunes, including the sword. That protocapitalist victim of contingency, Robinson Crusoe, could not have organized things better.
A Sentimental Journey also contains two self-declared fragments. The first one, “A Fragment” (45), set in the town of Abdera (6), supports Yorick’s motivation for hiring La Fleur—“He is always in love” (44)—with the authority of an anecdote that seems both classical and classic of its kind. This involves an endorsement of the passion of love, in which Eros and Agape are (con)joined: Yorick himself famously declares that “having been in love with one princess or another almost all my life . . . I hope I shall go on so, till I die, being firmly persuaded, that if ever I do a mean action, it must be in some interval betwixt one passion and another” (44). “A Fragment” then recycles the story of a representation of Euripides’ Andromeda, found in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, to conjure up a striking picture: “The fire caught—and the whole city, like the heart of one man, open’d itself to Love” (45). Typically, John Ferriar, who first noted that Burton himself had borrowed from Lucian, remarked, “Burton has spoiled this passage by an unfaithful translation. Sterne has worked it up to a beautiful picture, but very different from the original in Lucian, with which, I am persuaded, he was unacquainted.”21 It seems an apposite fate for the fragment, which, of all the examples so far examined, can boast the most authenticity, that it should turn out to be a mere reflection of an original ignored by Sterne. This textual episode might well be seen as a fable on the inevitable loss of originals in the age, which compensated by inventing “originality.”
But the most significant use of the fragment motif is certainly in the triple chapter “The Fragment. Paris” (134, 136) / “The Fragment and the Bouquet. Paris” (140) 8). This is when “the simple irreparability of the fragment” (140) is at its most tantalizing for Yorick and for the reader, since it is also an episode in which the narrator joins the reader in poring over a page. Yorick’s “deep attention” (135) is exercised by the few lines printed on a piece of wastepaper (protecting his breakfast butter), which he treats as a gripping enigma.
With this fragment we seem to return to Rabelais, the hallmark of old wholesome, pithy writing—now lost: “It was in the old French of Rabelais’s time, and for ought I know might have been wrote by him” (134). But the tone and the subject of the story bear no resemblance with the “Rabelaisian Fragment”; they rather remind one of the promise by Trim in Tristram Shandy of “The Story of the king of Bohemia and his seven castles” (8.19.683–91), which remains a kind of protonarrative gesture and never gets actually told: a “poor notary,” sent to the devil by his wife, embarks on a nocturnal ramble in Paris, only to lose his hat in the windy night and to lament his fate (“to be born to have the storm of ill language levell’d against me and my profession wherever I go—to be forced into marriage by the thunder of the church to a tempest of a woman”), until a voice calls out for “the next notary” (138), a quality that he happens inevitably to be invested with. He offers his services and is presently begged by an old gentleman to record his “uncommon” story: “I have nothing to bequeath which will pay the expence of bequeathing, except the history of myself . . . ; the profits arising out of it, I bequeath to you for the pains of taking it from me—it is a story so uncommon, it must be read by all mankind” (137–39). Needless to say, this story is itself on the rest of the wastepaper, two other sheets of which have been wrapped around a bouquet presented by La Fleur, Yorick’s servant, to a demoiselle. At Yorick’s request, La Fleur runs to the Count de B****’s house, where she works, to get the sheets back:
In a very little time the poor fellow came back quite out of breath, with deeper marks of disappointment in his looks than could arise from the simple irreparability of the fragment—Juste ciel! in less than two minutes that the poor fellow had taken his last tender farewel of her—his faithless mistress had given his gage d’amour to one of the Count’s footmen—the footman to a young sempstress—and the sempstress to a fiddler, with my fragment at the end of it—Our misfortunes were involved together—I gave a sigh—and La Fleur echo’d it back again to my ear—
—How perfidious! cried La Fleur—How unlucky! said I. (140)
If before we had been struck by the loss of originals (see above), here we are struck by the risk of a seepage of meaning, along with the fragment’s adventures: redirected or misdirected, it seems caught in a maddened version of “the ring of pleasure” (65). Sterne’s fragment leads us on its debased trajectory, from the wrapping of Yorick’s butter to that of La Fleur’s bouquet. But Sterne’s comic perspective requires a happy middle (if not a happy ending), and it is the rescue of the salvaged piece of wastepaper that now attracts our attention: “When I had finish’d the butter, I threw the currant leaf out of the window, and was going to do the same by the waste paper—but stopping to read a line first, and that drawing me on to a second and a third—I thought it better worth; so I shut the window, and drawing a chair up to it, I sat down to read it” (134). What he reads and translates is the aforementioned story of the notary, narrated in “The Fragment. Paris” (136–39), itself supposed to introduce the “uncommon” story of the old gentleman, which will never get told.
Yet as he is toiling at his table, Yorick is delighted by an accidental addition to his breakfast: “La Fleur had left me something to amuse myself with for the day more than I had bargain’d for.” The association of fragment and food is fresh and delicious here, by virtue of the contiguity of fragment and butter: “[La Fleur] had brought the little print of butter upon a currant leaf; and as the morning was warm, and he had a good step to bring it, he had begg’d a sheet of waste paper to put betwixt the currant leaf and his hand—” (134). The fragment seems endowed metonymically with nourishing qualities, like the print of butter itself, and with the fragrant subtlety of the currant leaf. This joyful synesthesia combines the pleasures of smell and touch, taste and gaze as well as the more intellectual promises of text in a sensual encounter with the world, an encounter that fulfills every sense and is therefore in every sense fulfilling—a miracle of completeness—one of those moments when Yorick is “positive [he has] a soul” (151).
The Fragment and Food
In itself, the connection between fragment and food is not new. As I touched on earlier, it goes back to Christ’s breaking of bread at the Last Supper and to the quantity of fragments left after the miracle of the loaves and the fishes to feed the multitude. But the availability of the Christian reading of the notion tends to be obscured, from the Renaissance onward, in a typically modern sense of the inadequacy of language, which is associated with the Fall and the curse of Babel. Therefore the connection is often established negatively; the fragment endures a fall of its own. As such, it belongs to a rhetorical series that can be found in Shakespeare, one case in point being Troilus and Cressida. In a famous scene toward the end of the play, after witnessing Cressida’s dallying with Diomedes, who has taken her in exchange to the Greek camp, Troilus memorably despairs of the coherence required for the established meaning that must lie at the heart of a faithful relationship:
The bonds of heaven are slipp’d, dissolv’d, and loos’d;
And with another knot, five-finger-tied,
The fractions of her faith, orts of her love,
The fragments, scraps, the bits, and greasy relics
Of her o’er-eaten faith are given to Diomed. 22
These degraded fragments conceded to a new lover, comparable to the bits of food left by greedy eaters, are the sign of the loss of wholeness and indicate the corruption of faith and meaning. In the richness of its negative precision, this description emphasizes an important characteristic of the fallen fragment: it is always used to recuperate what would otherwise have been thrown away, even to salvage what has already been disposed of. What profit can one make of this, and of what worth is such secondhand material? For Troilus, Cressida’s recycled love, by losing its undivided quality, is not love anymore. In the sexual context, pleasure is denied if it is impinged upon by someone else; the consummation is broken, satisfaction is impossible. The fragment evokes here, by means of the food metaphor, the loss of wholeness without which the world itself is meaningless. In a similar situation Othello exclaims, “Chaos is come again.”23 But this very meaninglessness, engendered by the division and the corruption of meaning, is a fertile topic for the eighteenth century: it is the main source of inspiration of the goddess Dulness in Pope’s Dunciad.
Corrupted meaning is precisely what Augustan satirists accuse hack-writers of trading in when they write potboilers. Dunces gnaw at old bones for want of new inspiration. They show unrelenting zest in scavenging only to feed themselves. At a time when, “[d]irectly and indirectly, the livelihoods of journalists, artists, poets, architects, designers and tutors all lay in the palms of the Great,” in the words of Roy Porter,24 this was the common lot. Consequently, self-respecting writers wanted to make it clear that they owed their success to their competence and talent, and not to their servility and promptitude to oblige. The notion of writing with strictly utilitarian motivations was detestable to them as it represented a threat to their literary identity. Later in the century, in 1767, one year before his death, Sterne wrote to a correspondent, “I was once such a puppy myself, as to pare, and burn, and had my labour for my pains, and two hundred pounds out of pocket.—Curse on farming (said I) I will try if the pen will not succeed better than the spade.” But this frank admission has to be weighed against his prouder declaration, albeit tongue-in-cheek, in a 1760 letter, at the beginning of his literary career: “I wrote not to be fed, but to be famous.”25
The major sin of hacks was that in doing just the reverse, they plagiarized their betters. By offering the same recycled stuff to an undiscriminating public, they also put writing on a level with eating, or rather with voracity. As Pope says, they were condemned to compete for “solid pudding against empty praise.”26 The fault, of course, is not in eating itself but in eating indiscriminately, ravenously, or to excess: in being governed by one’s appetite. In Sterne’s sermon, “Our conversation in Heaven,” the “voluptuous epicure, who knows of no other happiness in this world, but what arises from good eating and drinking,” is punished by his lack of proportion. He cannot have access to spiritual forms of pleasure: “represent to him that saints and angels eat not . . . —why, the only effect would be, that the fat glutton would stare a while upon the preacher, and in a few minutes fall fast asleep.”27
In Pope’s Dunciad we find another description of gluttony, in this case as a metaphor for Cibber’s plagiarism:
Next, o’er his Books his eyes began to roll,
In pleasing memory of all he stole,
How here he sipp’d, how there he plunder’d snug
And suck’d all o’er, like an industrious Bug.
Here lay poor Fletcher’s half-eat scenes, and here
The Frippery of crucify’d Molière.
(726)
Such feats of stealing, sipping, sucking, and plundering are performed for the benefit of “nameless Somethings” and “Nonsense,” “Where things destroy’d are swept to things unborn” (723, 731) in the words of Dulness herself (as mediated by Pope). The result of debased writing is that words lose the substance and the nutritive value that is found in old classic texts. So speaks Dulness again:
In ancient Sense if any needs will deal,
Be sure I give them Fragments, not a Meal;
What Gellius or Stobæus hash’d before,
Or chew’d by blind old Scholiasts o’er and o’er.
The critic Eye, that microscope of Wit,
Sees hairs and pores, examines bit by bit:
How parts relate to parts, or they to whole,
The body’s harmony, the beaming soul,
Are things which Kuster, Burman, Wasse shall see,
When Man’s whole frame is obvious to a Flea.
(779)
The perverse goddess ensures that this is how fragmentary texts, seen as fragments of food, return to literal waste. This demented assembling and disassembling of the same incomplete bits of meaning takes place in Grub Street, the street of dirt, where Smithfield, the meat market, is held. Therefore the modern English word “grub,” a low colloquial term for food, even fast food, is very faithful to its original meaning in Pope.
But strikingly, it is through the celebration of meaninglessness and fragmentation that the invocations of Dulness in The Dunciad are paradoxically most effective in conjuring up meaning and wholeness—just as the “universal Darkness” that descends in the last line of the poem is actually the evidence of a new dawn: the Dunciad itself. Integrity of sense is invoked in the negative, so to speak, which reminds us that in the end, the distribution of meaning is governed by rhetorical credibility. In other words, the fragment, a broken, incomplete piece of something, can, when handled by Pope’s synthetic imagination, help the reader regain what has been lost: the ideal whole, the great mythical, primitive unity of words and things. This has been effected, for the fragment, by a kind of cultural re-insertion.
It is in the spirit of this cultural shift that I now wish to explore the association of fragment and food, material and spiritual, in a Spectator essay by Addison, offering common points with Yorick’s experience: “I once met with a Page of Mr. Baxter under a Christmas Pye. Whether or no the Pastry-Cook had made use of it through Chance, or Waggery, for the defence of that Superstitious Viande, I know not; but, upon the Perusal of it, I conceived so good an idea of the Author’s Piety, that I bought the whole Book. I have often profited by these accidental Readings, and have sometimes found very Curious Pieces that are either out of Print, or not to be met with in the Shops of our London Book-sellers.”28 This statement by Addison in Spectator 85 does not make it absolutely clear whether the Christmas pie, “that Superstitious Viande,” has to be defended by or against Baxter. Metonymy permitting, is Baxter defending the pie from the heat of the oven, or is a mischievous pastry cook defending his tempting pie from the Puritan divine’s austere remonstrations against the pleasures of the flesh, especially at Christmas? What it does make clear is the other function of the metonymy: the fragment as medium, bearing a degraded message, speaks nevertheless for the message, for reading and for literature. Indeed, in its perverted condition, the page of a book (turned into wrapping paper) can still forcefully reveal the book it was. To the eye of a hungry reader, it is even potentially a most captivating text.
Such an avid reader is Yorick, in A Sentimental Journey, discovering his fragment of text under the butter-bearing leaf. But Addison in 1711 had already provided a comparable insight into the potential of the fragment as food, in its material and spiritual acceptations. Mr. Spectator in the aforementioned paper is thrilled to examine “the several printed Papers which are usually pasted upon [walls]. The last Piece that I met with upon this Occasion, gave me a most exquisite Pleasure.” In fact all pleasures are blended, sensual and intellectual, including that of quiet playful impertinence: “I have lighted my Pipe more than once with the Writings of a Prelate.” Fragmentation is not synonymous with loss of meaning here. It suggests the process of the systematic recycling of meaning through the intelligent reader’s interpretation: “I remember, in particular, after having read over a Poem of an Eminent Author on a Victory, I met with several Fragments of it upon the next Rejoycing-day, which had been employed in Squibs and Crackers, and by that means celebrated its Subject in a double Capacity”—revealing at the same time a spectacular performative “Capacity” (361–62).
Addison, as essayist, has some reason to prioritize the part before the whole; so has Sterne, on whose finished or unfinished Tristram Shandy no critic can pretend to have the last word. This might help us understand why these two reader/writers are especially fascinated by fragments, why they are able to treat an incomplete part of a writing as the choicest morsel. But how is it that these may be privileged revelations of a fuller substance, when conversely they signify the loss of an ideal whole? By what miracle can they seem to multiply their worth and provide their tasters with a special gratification?
In order to suggest answers to these questions, I will first turn to Addison to review the fortunes of the fragment. “It is the Custom of the Mahometans, if they see any printed or written Paper upon the Ground, to take it up and lay it aside carefully, as not knowing but it may contain some Piece of their Alcoran. I must confess I have so much of the Mussulman in me, that I cannot forbear looking into every Printed Paper which comes in my way, under whatsoever despicable Circumstances it may appear” (360–61). His attention to fragments makes him stumble on something worthwhile, quite the contrary of Pope’s “nameless Somethings,” as he yields to his particular hobby of “examin[ing] the several printed Papers which are usually pasted upon [the walls of some houses].” This is the ballad “Two Children in the Wood,” “a plain simple Copy of Nature, destitute of all the Helps and Ornaments of Art,” an example of the highest sort of poetry (that is, the sublime) through its very poverty of expression. This quality allows the reader’s feelings to develop fully: “because the Sentiments appear genuine and unaffected, they are able to move the Mind of the most polite Reader with inward Meltings of Humanity and Compassion” (361–62). In the modest piece he studies on the wallpaper, Addison sees a treasure that nobody else (no critic at least) had discovered before him—or so he says—though it was available to all, and he grounds in it a new Lockean conception of aesthetics based on sensations and feelings as well as on the response of the reader.
Addison’s readiness to perceive a whole vision of the world through a detail goes with his compulsive disposition: he “cannot forbear looking” and acknowledges an “inquisitive Temper, or rather impertinent Humour of prying into all sorts of Writing.” He reveals the collector in himself; over the years he has gathered a number of miscellaneous items made of printed paper: “when my Friends take a Survey of my Library, they are very much surprised to find, upon the Shelf of Folio’s, two long Band-boxes standing upright among my Books, till I let them see that they are both of them lined with deep Erudition and abstruse Literature. I might likewise mention a Paper Kite, from which I have received great Improvement; and a Hat-Case, which I would not exchange for all the Beavers in Great Britain” (361). In like manner, in A Sentimental Journey, Yorick is obsessed with his buttered fragment, whose opacity increases his reader’s interest: “it was moreover in a Gothic letter, and that so faded and gone off by damps and length of time, it cost me infinite trouble to make any thing of it—I threw it down; and then wrote a letter to Eugenius—then I took it up again, and embroiled my patience with it afresh—and then to cure that, I wrote a letter to Eliza.—Still it kept hold of me; and the difficulty of understanding it increased but the desire” (134). “Cure” and “desire” are the master words of this charmingly neurotic ritual.29 An artist in procrastination such as Sterne can be trusted to know what he is speaking about. The mode of gratification he describes in the study of the fragment is analogous with that provided by fetishism, not taken here as pathological but as a pattern enacted in the fulfillment of desire in general. Satisfaction is achieved, as it were, metonymically, by overestimating a detail. The piece, the part is given the power to evoke what cannot be present otherwise, namely, wholeness. The pleasure taken in the fragment is the grasping of the part for the whole, or the fixation on the veil, which is and is not what it hides; for the briefest of instants, it is a triumphant denial of the absence of the missing object of our wishes. It is also a successful resolution of the grieving for the completeness that cannot be possessed.
Mr. Spectator and Yorick are not repelled by the incomplete quality of fragments or by the various usages these have been subjected to by other readers before them: like Lazarus in another biblical context, they are happy enough to take what is left. More important, they demonstrate what a serious game can be played with discarded fragments. Because of the diversity of their origins, these can suggest unexpected compositions and liberate new meanings, just as a meal cooked with leftover pieces from other meals can be the occasion for the most delicious picnic. In both cases one has to respect the distinctive flavor of each piece and identify it carefully to make the most of it: preserving what is left and enhancing what is found, with a gourmet’s passion and expectation. The pleasure of the fragment is not untroubled though, as is testified to by the definitive interruption suffered by the old gentleman’s story, despite the willingness of the notary, “inflamed with a desire to begin” (139); just as Yorick is desirous to know what follows, like readers “reading for the plot,” in Peter Brooks’s expressive title.
The use of the fragment motif by Addison and even more conspicuously by Sterne lays bare the crude motivation of reading: the desire to know what happens next. The notary’s misfortunes command all the more attention from Yorick’s viewpoint, as they allow him to meet the possessor of a story—which both he and we will not be told. One can assume that, like in the Thousand and One Nights, it is the telling that makes sense and keeps life going. Plot here has to be taken in its starkest definition as investigated by Paul Ricoeur (not in the restricted sense it acquired through the development of the realist novel in the nineteenth century), that of a simple formal principle of configuration, establishing a basic coherence, which is necessary to the human mind. As such, it becomes, as Ricoeur says, “the intelligible whole that governs a succession of events in any story,” or, as Brooks puts it, “the dynamic shaping force of the narrative discourse.”30
Lovers of fragments such as Addison and Sterne will not complain that their pleasure is too little or too suspended in medias res, just as the texts that yield it, which have no definitive origin or ending. They—the lovers and the texts—do not obey the law of linear development found in the bildungsroman. This law has mortal implications since it is only when you reach the end—of the text, of reading, of life—that the whole structure makes sense. This may by contrast enhance the seduction of the fragment as form—more properly, as formal subversion, as a continuous questioning of formal conventions, especially assumptions regarding regularity and completeness. Compared with fully developed narratives, fragments are aleatory expressions. They are chance pieces, rescued by their readers from oblivion and from the destructiveness of time; they just would not be without the warm reading that brings them back to life again, miraculously.
Thus, broken pieces can be ennobled, in an echo of Christ’s miracle as related by Matthew: “And He took the seven loaves and the fish and gave thanks, broke them and gave them to His disciples; and the disciples gave to the multitude. So they all ate and were filled, and they took up seven large baskets full of the fragments that were left” (Matt. 15:36–37; italics added). Fragments become sufficient (as communion itself is given in small pieces of bread); the material is transformed. This has implications for the creative use of the fragment motif by Sterne and Addison. In their perspective, a fragment may be used not only to reconstitute a previously written text—and fragments need not belong to a distant past to be precious. The conjuring up of what was once written may even be a mere pretext, since the deciphering of fragments serves in fact to activate the very mechanism of storytelling, rather than to reconstitute a preexisting story.
Sterne’s use of the formal possibilities of the fragment never depends upon authorizing his writing with the invocation of an established truth. It is likewise free from the temptation to endow the fragment with aphoristic meaning. Yet the fragment chez Sterne has an uncanny appeal, and the practice of reading and discrimination may confer on certain passages a special, almost talismanic value, as they find themselves at the very core of the motivation of reading, where the desire for someone else’s untold story impels the reader forward.
The genetic code of DNA offers itself as a tempting further metaphor here, and one that respects the etymology of the fragment: a broken piece—as such useful or useless, depending on the capacity for imaginative response in the reader. A fragment of DNA can be used, precisely, to identify the whole, often for forensic, but also for more creative purposes—including the science-fiction possibility of regerminating a species from a fragment rescued from fossilization. We would do well not to recycle the story of Yorick’s skull in this connection, but the materials provided by this unique receptacle continue to motivate the curious reader, so often invoked by writers of the age.
Who is this curious reader, one may ask, if not the one who follows the thoroughfares and byways of a text, in an endless search for provisional truth? No one has applied himself to the task better than the dedicatee of this volume, whose scrupulous example has made Sterne’s works quite undissociable from his own (in)formative and indefatigable enterprise. We hope that this fragment may be added, with no derogation from such an example, to the ongoing criticism of Sterne and to the steady accumulation of Sterneana.31
Notes
1. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman: The Text, ed. Melvyn New and Joan New, vols. 1 and 2 of the Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1978), preface; all subsequent references to Tristram Shandy cite Sterne’s original volume and book numbers followed by the Florida edition page number and will appear in the text.
2. Isaac Brandon, “Fragments in the Manner of Sterne 1797,” Sterneiana, vol. 21 (New York: Garland, 1974); Paul Stapfer, “Fragment inédit,” in Laurence Sterne: Sa personne et ses ouvrages: Etude précédée d’un fragment inédit de Sterne (Paris:
G. Fischbacher, 1882), 16–52.
3. “I intended to have arranged [the most distinguished passages] alphabetically,” the editor explains in the third edition, “till I found the stories of Le Fever, the Monk, and Maria, would be too closely connected for the feeling reader, and would wound the bosom of sensibility too deeply: I therefore placed them at a proper distance from each other.” The Beauties of Sterne, 3rd ed. (1782), v–vi, quoted in Alan B. Howes, ed., Sterne: The Critical Heritage (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), 257.
4. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy and Continuation of the Bramine’s Journal: The Text and Notes, ed. Melvyn New and W. G. Day, vol. 6 of the Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002), 45; hereafter cited in the text by page number.
5. See Matt. 15:36–37, Mark 8:6–8, Luke 9:16–17, and John 6:11–13. Elizabeth Harries uses John’s version persuasively and invokes the metaphorical meaning of Jesus’s injunction to his disciples to “gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost,” which she applies dynamically to Sterne’s novels as the disciples’ baskets in which he “‘gathered up the fragments’ of learning and of the quotidian that came his way.” Elizabeth Wanning Harries, The Unfinished Manner: Essays on the Fragment in the Later Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 51. My own purpose is to reflect on the notion of literal as well as spiritual food, associated to fragments in each Gospel, and to address the metonymic connection of fragment and food in literature, and account for its lasting power.
6. Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 872.
7. “He has communicated a Manuscript to us, that he means soon to publish. It is stiled a Sentimental Journey through Europe, by Yoric [sic]. It has all the Humour and Address of the best Parts of Tristram, and is quite free from the Grossness of the worst. There is but Half a Volume wrote of it yet. He promises to spin the Idea through several Volumes, in the same chaste Way, and calls it his Work of Redemption.” Richard Griffith, A Series of Genuine Letters between Henry and Frances, vol. 5 (London, 1770), quoted in Sterne: The Critical Heritage, 185.
8. Christopher Ricks, “Introductory Essay,” in Tristram Shandy, ed. Melvyn New and Joan New (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), xv, xiv.
9. Blaise Pascal, Thoughts, ed. Charles W. LL. D. Eliot, trans. W. F. Trotter (New York: Collier and Son, 1909), 28. Accessed online at http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/PasThou.html.
10. Alain Montandon, “Le Fragment,” in Les Formes brèves (Paris: Hachette, 1992), 81.
11. “The inexpressibility or inaccessibility of the divine so often encountered in the sermons manifests itself in the sublime silences which suggest an origin they cannot convey.” Christopher Fanning, “‘The Things Themselves’: Origins and Originality in Sterne’s Sermons,” Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 40 (1999): 41.
12. Harries, The Unfinished Manner, 52.
13. Ibid., 12.
14. Ibid.
15. Melvyn New, “Sterne’s Rabelaisian Fragment: A Text from the Holograph Manuscript,” PMLA 87 (1972): 1083–92; hereafter cited in the text as SRF.
16. Introduction to A Sentimental Journey, ed. Thomas Keymer (London: J. M. Dent, 1994), xvi.
17. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman: The Notes, ed. Melvyn New with Richard A. Davies and W. G. Day, vol. 3 of the Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1984), 226, 264–65; hereafter cited in the text by page number.
18. Richard A. Davies, “‘The Fragment’ in Tristram Shandy V, 1,” English Studies 57 (1976): 523.
19. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy and Continuation of the Bramine’s Journal, 201.
20. Harries, The Unfinished Manner, 54.
21. Quoted from A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy and Continuation of the Bramine’s Journal, 282.
22. Troilus and Cressida, 5.2.157–59.
23. Othello, 3.3.93.
24. Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (1982; London: Penguin, 1990), 71.
25. Laurence Sterne: The Letters, ed. Melvyn New and Peter de Voogd, vols. 7 and 8 of the Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009), 8:619; 7:116.
26. Alexander Pope, The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (1963; London: Methuen, 1984), 723; hereafter cited in the text.
27. The Sermons of Laurence Sterne: The Text, ed. Melvyn New, vol. 4 of the Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 279.
28. The Spectator, 1711–1714, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 1:361; hereafter cited in the text. Richard Baxter (1615–1691), Nonconformist clergyman, acted as army chaplain with the Puritans under Cromwell, was appointed a royal chaplain at the Restoration, then driven out of the Church of England by the Act of Uniformity in 1662. The Act of Indulgence in 1672 permitted him to return to London, where he divided his time between preaching and writing. Other mentions of Baxter by Addison in the Spectator include no. 598: “I could not but smile upon reading a Passage in the Account which Mr. Baxter gives of his own Life, wherein he represents it as a great Blessing, that in his Youth he very narrowly escaped getting a Place at Court” (5:44); also no. 445, about “The last Words of Mr. Baxter” (4:63).
29. There is a remarkable example of what I am describing as “neurotic” or “fetishistic” reading in a novel by William Golding worth citing here. A young man on board ship receives a long-awaited letter from a young woman he has met and fallen peremptorily in love with. The letter itself is conventional enough; but the man’s interest is caught, and his desire quickened, by the fact that there are lines from another unblotted sheet on the reverse of the letter (the lines turn out to be a quotation from Pope); and he is further tantalized by a fragmentary phrase, ambiguous, “pressed through a previous page by a lead or silver point” (Close Quarters [London: Faber and Faber, 1987], 216).
30. See Paul Ricoeur, Temps et récit, vol. 2, La Configuration du temps dans le récit de fiction (Paris: Seuil, 1984), and Peter Brooks, who refers to Ricoeur as he develops his own theory in Reading for the Plot (New York: Knopf, 1984), 13.
31. The modest testimony offered by J. C. T. Oates is worth remembering. His collection of Sterneana, he tells us, was achieved by chance. He had first been hunting for a seventeenth-century minor author whose works were “almost impossibly rare and, for me, quite impossibly expensive; . . . it was soon borne in upon me that this was not the right tree up which to bark. Nor indeed . . . did I appear to be in the right century. I moved on to the eighteenth.” And here fortune smiled on his endeavor: “It was while I was making myself familiar with the contents of my library that I discovered a cache of Sterne and Sterneana bequeathed by an early addict.” Oates disclaimed the role of critic—“I hold it to be no part of the book-collector’s province to be a critic as well”—but his hobbyhorsical industry forms part of our research, and when he says,“I accept with gratitude such crumbs as fall my way from the tables of the philosophers of book-collecting,” we recognize in him a true devotee and disciple of the fragment. See “On Collecting Sterne,” The Book Collector 1, no. 4, 1, 6, 11.