"Tristram Shandy" (1759)

It's tempting to congratulate (or scourge) ourselves as living in an era of ironic detachment from the text, where literal readings are quaintly old-fashioned, and where the strangely near-yet-far relation of writer and reader seems to break down the fourth wall without building anything new or trustworthy in its place.

But then there's Tristram Shandy.

Tristram Shandy is one of the key starting points in English prose for innovating and popularizing self-aware narrative and textual play. There is, famously, the endless inability to get on with the story. And there's the visual space and conventions of the text -- the scattershot typography, the incorporation of everything from music to legal documents to translations, the visual pauses, a marbled endpaper stuck in the middle of the book, and two all-black pages (a printer's nightmare) -- the list goes on and on.

As soon as movable type existed, authors and printers experimented with it. Once the press exists as a tool of art -- and the audience of that art expands beyond the individual, and moves out to masses -- the questions of how we can manipulate text with that tool, and what it means to be addressing multiple unknown readers, have lurked in the background of writing.

And sometimes, in the foreground.  Here's the Aldus Mantius 1499 edition of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (from an exhibit by the University of Glasgow) -- the text in this example is shaped into goblets:

Shaped text can found in medieval manuscripts, too, but here it makes the leap from calligraphy to typography -- from the individual hand-lettered artwork to the reproducible mechanical one.

Similarly, addressing an unknown reader is an old conceit, but it takes on a new dimension once you actually have hundreds or thousands of readers in that audience. The acknowledgement of both the audience and the fiction of a tale -- noting its artifice even while creating it, and mocking the conventions, ploys, and sleights of hand that authors resort to -- is a notable aspect of the preface of Don Quixote.   So these concerns aren't created by novels, but were born alongside them -- and, in a literal sense of pagination, preceded the first one.

We'll see a lot more of this experimentation with text as we discuss the volume (and the subject) The Art of McSweeney's in an upcoming class.  Contemporary prose can seem like it is only, or at least primarily, of the moment -- and not part of a much longer dialogue and dynamic inherent to the form itself.  "But this time is different" -- "But, new technology!" -- "But, people read less/more now" -- "But, books are cheaper / more expensive now!" -- "But there are new distractions from reading" -- but, but, but.  Well, yes, and to a point.

But maybe, ultimately -- no.

For a sense of how it first looked, here's the complete Google Books scan of the Bodleian's copy of the 1760 edition.  There's an even better-looking copy at fulltable.com of the 1783 edition:

Reading Tristram Shandy might be as freeing an experience for a writer today as it was then, if for different reasons: not by finding its innovations are new, but in the realization that they are very old and yet still entirely alive and vital. Each generation of writers winds up revisiting (and sometimes pushing against) the boundaries of the form. It is not quite so lonely a challenge as we might imagine.