John Wesley had a few words for Sterne: 'For oddity, uncouthness, and unlikeness to all the world beside, I suppose the writer is without a rival.' Well, something odd will do for ever if the sensation-seekers have their way; Tristram Shandy has outlasted Johnson's Dictionary, even in the classroom. Sterne was the first author to come up with fully explicatable - as distinct from explicable - texts, in English fiction anyway. His books are as necessary to the formalists as to the historians of feeling, and it is his apparent formlessness which guarantees him this place. Quite often he is rejected by students on first acquaintance, partly through a priggishness which will allow only the young to talk dirty. But he comes into his own in the graduate school and the Zapp-it-to-me international seminars, where priggishness takes more unnatural and exclusive forms.

LRB 8 January 1987 | PDF Download