The Role of the Reader: Tristram Shandy

Abstract

There can be few other novels that so comprehensively evoke and explore the central importance of the reader’s response than Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67). A novel which makes use of every conceivable kind of vacancy (including missing pages, blank pages, misplaced chapters, empty chapters) and, in place of words, gives rows of asterisks, squiggles, and black and marbled pages, offers an abundance of easy material for those who wish to stress the crucial productive involvement of the reader’s imagination in the generation of meaning. Equally helpful are Tristram’s and Sterne’s explicit statements concerning the creative and active participation of the reader. Here is Tristram’s colloquial analogy, which gives the idea of a ‘mediated’ response in its etymological sense (from the Latin mediāre, meaning to halve or be in the middle):

WRiting, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation: As no one, who knows what he is about in good company, would venture to talk all; — so no author, who understands the just boundaries of decorum and good breeding, would presume to think all: The truest respect which you can pay to the reader’s understanding, is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself. (p. 88) In that such a comment explicitly acknowledges the importance of an ‘interaction’ between novel (or fictional autobiography) and reader, it is hardly surprising that Wolfgang Iser, whose theory of response is based on such an idea, should want to quote this passage in his volume on Tristram Shandy.¹ Tristram’s sentence even anticipates the terms of Iser’s debate.