tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26428110.post6075456066472546754..comments2023-07-08T09:00:54.916-07:00Comments on A Common Reader: Tristram Shandy discussion: Volumes I and IIDwighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688525659034403580noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26428110.post-2249288379447201672008-09-20T10:39:00.000-07:002008-09-20T10:39:00.000-07:00Interesting. I’m not familiar with A Sentimental J...Interesting. I’m not familiar with <I>A Sentimental Journey</I>, but it seems the second quote can be read as even higher praise than the first. I know I wouldn’t mind having something I wrote characterized that way.William Michaelianhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05945815778010124287noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26428110.post-16976980869238043182008-09-20T09:26:00.000-07:002008-09-20T09:26:00.000-07:00Both Ulysses and Tristam Shandy seem to be testing...Both <I>Ulysses</I> and <I>Tristam Shandy</I> seem to be testing the limits of a novel...seeing what it can do or what it can be. I just found a cheap copy of the 1935 Heritage Press version that you mention in your poem and it's a delight to see something similar to what was originally released.<BR/><BR/>I have not looked at Wollf's diaries or letters so that entry is interesting. The Modern Library copy I've seen had "The greatest of all novels" attributed to her, so at some point she obviously changed her mind. I did a quick search in both Common Readers, and found this in her entry on Sterne's "Sentimental Journey":<BR/><BR/>"Tristram Shandy, though it is Sterne's first novel, was written at a time when many have written their twentieth, that is, when he was forty-five years old. But it bears every sign of maturity. No young writer could have dared to take such liberties with grammar and syntax and sense and propriety and the longstanding tradition of how a novel should be written. It needed a strong dose of the assurance of middle age and its indifference to censure to run such risks of shocking the lettered by the unconventionality of one's style, and the respectable by the irregularity of one's morals. But the risk was run and the success was prodigious."<BR/><BR/>and<BR/><BR/>"The jerky, disconnected sentences are as rapid and it would seem as little under control as the phrases that fall from the lips of a brilliant talker. The very punctuation is that of speech, not writing, and brings the sound and associations of the speaking voice in with it. The order of the ideas, their suddenness and irrelevancy, is more true to life than to literature. There is a privacy in this intercourse which allows things to slip out unreproved that would have been in doubtful taste had they been spoken in public. Under the influence of this extraordinary style the book becomes semi-transparent. The usual<BR/>ceremonies and conventions which keep reader and writer at arm's length disappear. We are as close to life as we can be."<BR/><BR/>So either she changed her mind or she's totally b s-ing us.Dwighthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13688525659034403580noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26428110.post-53679085220555328862008-09-19T16:28:00.000-07:002008-09-19T16:28:00.000-07:00What a great adventure!For me, reading Ulysses is ...What a great adventure!<BR/><BR/>For me, reading <I>Ulysses</I> is like listening to music; reading <I>Tristram Shandy</I> is like listening to intelligent laughter.<BR/><BR/>Meanwhile, I always get a kick out of this excerpt from one of Woolf’s diary entries: <BR/><BR/><B>Wednesday, 16 August, 1922</B><BR/><BR/>I should be reading Ulysses, & fabricating my case for & against. I have read 200 pages so far — not a third; & have been amused, stimulated, charmed interested by the first 2 or 3 chapters — to the end of the Cemetery scene; & then puzzled, bored, irritated, & disillusioned as by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples. And Tom, great Tom, thinks this on a par with War & Peace! An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me: the book of a self taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, & ultimately nauseating. When one can have cooked flesh, why have the raw? But I think if you are anaemic, as Tom is, there is a glory in blood. Being fairly normal myself I am soon ready for the classics again. I may revise this later. I do not compromise my critical sagacity. I plant a stick in the ground to mark page 200.William Michaelianhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05945815778010124287noreply@blogger.com