H o w t o R e a d L i t e r a t u r e1 1 2version of reality. There is no ‘complete’ account possible of a tiny
stain on one’s fingernail, let alone of a human life. The realist novel
is meant to reflect existence as it is, in all its unruly detail; but it is
also supposed to mould this formless stuff into a shapely narrative.
And these two aims are really incompatible. Any story is bound to
select, revise and exclude, and so fail to give us the unvarnished
truth. If it tried to do that, it would have to go on for ever. One
thing would lead to another and that to another, in a series of
digressions upon digressions. Which is exactly what happens in
Tristram Shandy.
For Sterne (or so at least he pretends), selecting and excluding is
a way of cheating the reader. Design is really deceit. So Tristram,
the book’s narrator, sets out to tell us everything he possibly can
about his birth and upbringing. The result of this apparently
reader- friendly gesture is that the narrative rapidly stalls and
the reader is utterly bamboozled. We suspect that what may look
reader- friendly may be secretly mischief- making. By trying to tell
us everything about himself, all the way back to the moment of his
conception, Tristram ends up spinning such an unwieldy mass of
text that we risk being completely flummoxed. The whole enter-
prise is hilariously self- undoing. It is not long before we begin to
suspect that the hero is out of his mind, and feel ourselves being
dragged in much the same direction.
Realism appears to give us the world in all its delightful or
alarming dishevelledness, but it actually does no such thing. If a
telephone rings in a realist novel or a naturalistic drama, it is almost
certain to be a move in the plot rather than a wrong number.
Realist works choose the kind of characters, events and situations
which will help to build up their moral vision. In order to conceal
this selectivity, however, and thus to preserve their air of reality,