The discrete material nature of the book reinforces the idea of the
     author as the creator of their work and maintains a distance between
     the author and reader- this "pitiless divorce", is exemplified in
     the tradition of the realist novel, whose "clear and cogent rhythm
     of events" is well suited to the otherwise over-deterministic
     linear-temporal model of print, but does not reflect the immediacy
     and simultaneity of most common experience. Therefore, Jay Bolter
     asserts that "to attack the form of the (realist) novel was also to
     attack the technology of print." According to Brian McHale, the
     realist novel denies itself the opportunity to let the physical
     properties of the book "interact" with the content, but instead
     confined the text to solid blocks of print, and was thus
     "conventionalising space right out of existence". Postmodern writer
     Ronald Sukenick recognises that: "We badly need a new way of
     thinking about books that acknowledge their own technological
     reality....We have to learn to think about the novel as a concrete
     structure, rather than as an allegory, existing in the realms of
     experience rather than of discursive meaning." Lawrence Sterne's
     "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman", completed in
     1767, was amongst the first novels to make the materiality of the
     book explicit by experimenting with narrative style; as the critic
     Victor Shklovsky indicates, for Sterne "the awareness of the form
     through the violation of the novel constitutes the content of the
     novel." Unlike the narrator of the realist novel, whose objectivity
     usually manifested itself as anonymity, Tristram is constantly
     interrupting the flow of the twisting narrative- "dropping the
     curtain" over the scene - to remind us of his presence; he spends
     less time narrating the story, which in itself is uneventful, than
     he does in narrating his own narration, and in doing so, draws atte-
     ntion to the artifice of Sterne's writing. He is unable to drive on
     his history "as a muleteer drives on his mule,- straight forward"-
     "For, if he is a man of the least spirit, he will have fifty
     deviations from a straight line to make with this or that party as
     he goes along, which he can by no means avoid. He will have views
     and prospects to himself perpetually soliciting his eye, which he
     can no more help standing still to look at than he can fly; he will
     moreover have various
     Accounts to reconcile:
     Anecdotes to pick up:
     Inscriptions to make out: 
     Stories to weave:
     Traditions to shift:
     Personages to call upon:
     Panegyricks to paste up at this door;
     Pasquinades at that:- All which both the man and his mule are quite
     exempt from." Tristram's narration is interspersed with other
     texts- some reproduced, some read by other characters, most are
     unfinished. He is eager to share the responsibility of writing with
     the reader- "Writing when it is 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...would presume to think all: The truest
     respect you can pay to the reader's understanding, is to halve the
     matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn as
     well as yourself." He invites the reader to join with him in the
     writing of the text by making the processes involved in composition
     apparent, thereby drawing attention to the visual qualities of the
     text and to, what Peter Conrad in his introduction to `Tristram
     Shandy' called, "Sterne's quest for alternatives to language":
     Tristram concludes his grieving account of the death of the parson
     Yorick by inserting a tombstone in the form of a double-sided black
     page; he inserts squiggles which represent the meandering paths
     of his narrative; unable to describe the "concupiscible" Mrs
     Wadman in words, Tristram leaves a blank page and invites the
     reader to draw : "To conceive this right, -call for pen and ink-
     here's paper ready to your hand.- Sit down, Sir, paint her to your
     own mind..." Words and letters are often replaced with asteris ks:
     sometimes to avoid impropriety, in which case the reader is invited
     to replace the code, and sometimes out of ignorance of what was
     actually said- Tristram never presumes to be an omniscient or
     infallible narrator. His constructing of the text is made more
     tangible still: he leaves chapters XCVI and XCVII of the third
     volume as blank pages, only to return to work on them later in the
     book, while chapter XXIV of Volume ii is missing altogether with the
     pages misnumbered accordingly- in the next chapter Tristram
     explains that he tore the ten pages out: "[T]he book is more perfect
     and complete by wanting the chapter, than having it...I question
     first, by-the-bye, whether the same experiment might not be made as
     successfully upon sundry other chapters..." He then goes on to
     rewrite what was torn out in the pages, thereby making the doctoring
     of his own work unnecessary: "And so much for tearing out of
     chapters". This physical assault on the technology of writing and
     printing is, as Bolter has indicated, a recurring theme of
     Sterne's book: in chapter XXVII of the same volume, a physician
     recommends that a rather delicate burn- sustained after a freshly
     roasted chestnut rolled off a dining table and into the lap of the
     unfortunate Phutatorius, through the open aperture of his breeches-
     be wrapped in a "soft sheet of paper just come off the press", of
     which the fresh ink is the efficacious agent: "[I]f the type is a
     very small one (which it should be) the sanative particles...have
     the advantage of being spread so infinitely thin, and with such a
     mathematical equality (fresh paragraphs and large capitals excepted)
     as no art or management of the spatula can come up to. -It falls out
     very luckily, replied Phutatorius, that the second edition of my
     treatise de Concubinis retinendis is at this instant in the press.
     -You may take any leaf out of it, said Eugenius- no matter which."
     `Tristram Shandy' is trying to make us aware of that material quality 
     of the book which realist writers would spend the next century
     trying to deny. In his study of hypertext and the history of
     writing, `Writing Space', Jay Bolter argues that Sterne's book
     anticipates, and might benefit from being reconstructed in, electr-
     onic writing: for example, he suggests that the conversational
     interaction with the text that Tristram "can only pretend to offer",
     can be made obligatory in a hypertext version. I think though that
     Bolter underestimates, or at least doesn't stress the importance of,
     the extent to which `Tristram Shandy' depends on its own physical
     qualities as a book: although it is, in modern terms at least,
     "contravening the natural use of print", `Tristram Shandy'
     acknowledges, and takes full advantage of, its own "technological
     reality".