My English Legacy

I recently got back my last paper as an undergrad English Major. I got a 97. This is also my best grade in an English class. And it is now I realize what must have convinced everyone else that English is an easy major: it is.

You just have to find your Hobby Horse. Some people preach "semiotics", others "epistemology", and me? My phrase is "What's at stake for the author?" The one thing these three intellectual bents have in common? I have no idea what they mean.

But they make professors swoon. At the top of the page was, scrawled in his handwriting, such raves as "one of the highlights of my quarter thus far" and "it leaves me rather speechless." And then, further down the page, he had highlighted a section. The sentence when I whip out the big gun, "constantly reevaluate what is at stake for the author."

The paper follows,
-D"almost enough to make me go back to grad school"an

P.S. It's about Tristram Shandy, a good novel about Tristram Shandy.

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I wrote this at 5:16, May 4th, 2005.
So far we've seen at least two instances of Sterne discussing the actual time of his writing: I.vxiii (page 24) "this very day, in which I am now writing this book [] -- which is March 9, 1759" and IV.xvii (page 230) "It is not half an hour ago, when [..] I threw a fair sheet [...] slap into the fire[.]" Now what I wonder is, are these statements true?

Our editor believes him (in the notes to Vol. I on page 540 he writes "dates that seem to correspond to the dates Sterne writes"). And why not? What is there at stake? Why would an author have any reason to lie about when they wrote something? It's a nice gimmick to connect with readers, and surely nothing should get in the way of that honest and direct bond that Sterne is creati--

But this is not the kind of writer Sterne is. He has already created the chronology of the telling, the chronology the characters live in, and the chronology of the reading. What would keep him from playing with the chronology of the writing?

Absolutely nothing. That's why I view all references to the act of writing as being as fictional as Dr. Slop's caricature or Trim's babbling. Instead, the dates are puzzles. What dates would I pick to insert into my own writing? March 20th. September 3rd. June 28th. Why? Well, that's for Bentley Biographers of the future to figure out. But if most of writing is a conversation with the reader, than this seems like a place where Sterne could be embedding a conversation with a specific reader.

The astute reader will point out that of course the narrative of writing is a fictional one: the narrator is not Sterne but Tristram. Maybe the converse is true, then, that Sterne is turning the seemingly fictional to the real. But even this would be a measured dose of reality. It is not opening a door, it is setting outside empty milk bottles to be picked up.

The key of all these theories is that Sterne remains in control. This book was written. We can be reasonably certain that he wrote later volumes after earlier ones (especially as Volume III opens with epigraphs in response to criticisms of the first two). More than that we can not necessarily say. And that's great. It makes us conscious of what we would assume in any other book. It's like Andy Warhol or Andy Kaufman. We have to constantly reevaluate what is at stake for the author. And is anything truly at stake if they tell an unknowable lie?

Sterne is probably safe from any attacks on him or his writing. Or, wherever he is, he won't be any the worse for whatever we or biographers prove about him or his writing. Even were he alive, the worst that could really result from someone ascertaining the truth or falsity would be more press, which could only result in more sales and royalties.

Sterne often plays with the physicality of the object of the writing. Here is one manner in which he plays with the physicality of the process. And this is what is so rich about this novel. Sterne just had to look over at the calendar or remember what he just did, jot it down, and he'll set me off for an hour thinking about nothing. But maybe, just maybe, he stole the idea of writing on March 9th from someone else, and I am thinking about something. Something real.

I'd just never be able to know.

Technology's Unkept Promise (one of them)

There was a simpler time. A time when you could say as much as you had to say to the person you have to say things to. Well, at least until the dinosaur ate you.

But as hunting/gathering became all the rage, more time was spent apart. No longer was she by your side as you felled and butchered the mastodon. She was back searching for rutebagas and tending to the young'uns.

Enter the alphabet. You can leave a note for your love on the wall of your cave. You go out to slay the migratory beasts, and when she wakes up she gets to read your your note of love, written in the blood of a sabertooth tiger. As long as you can fit your declaration of love in the first twenty feet of your stone abode where the light can reach.

A long time passed. And then, paper. You could leave reams of correspondence to your beloved. Except for that damn candle that would burn out before you had written out all you meant to tell her.

Ah, oil lamps. Refillable (as long as there are sperm whales). But now the rage is the telegraph. Send your message by post and it will not arrive until your debutante is a fiancee. But those telegraphs are so expensive--

Now the Telephone! Then the Singing telegram! Marvel before the Dancing bear-a-gram! Every mode of communication that has supplanted another has this same limitation: you can't write as long as you find yourself wanting to. Just when long-distance telephone companies priced themselves into oblivion, it was all the rage to have the mobility of a cell phone. Which one of us has not found themselves revealing the deepest darkest secrets of their soul to a "battery empty" message flashing on the screen? At least wired phones have the decency to respond to your most tightly-held thoughts ("I killed a man" or "I bought a Spice Girls album", the stuff you could only admit to a lover with a heart not fitted to later blackmail) with the reaffirming constancy of a dial tone.

Why can't inventors focus on turning an old technology reliable, instead of making new ones that make our art and our expressions end before--