I started reading Tristram Shandy yesterday in little bits and pieces and so far it’s been very funny. I like Shandy’s high-flying imagination and skewed common sense, and I find his inability to stay on-topic and make a straightforward point very relatable. I’m still near the beginning, at the part where he dedicates the book for the second time after various digressions (third if you count the book’s actual dedication in the front matter), this time to the Moon (“Bright Goddess,” with timely well-wishes to Candide and Cunègonde), just after his dedication to a generic “My Lord” which he clarifies is “for no one Prince, Prelate, Pope, or Potentate” but rather up for “public sale” (after which he talks up its strengths in terms of the “painter’s scale” of points-out-of-20, rating favorably its expression and coloring and so on). It’s fun for me to see this kind of riffing on dedications in 18th-century novels since I’ve thought a lot about their strange resemblance to the sort of writing you end up doing to make a living online as an artist these days (except that it’s more directed at the general public now than some Earl of Wessex or whatever, which I guess is some kind of progress?). Anyway it’s all very entertaining—I’m barely capturing the true ridiculousness of its atmosphere (the stuff with the dedications comes at the tail end of a long bit about “hobby horses” which starts as a frank discussion about personal hobbies, but the hobby horses gradually become more and more actual horses in the discussion, until one appears in “dark strokes” as a background character in the “painting” of his dedication-for-sale, giving “great force to the principal lights” of the prospective dedicatee). Here’s the actual dedication-for-sale, since I’m talking around it so much:
My Lord,
I MAINTAIN this to be a dedication, notwithstanding its singularity in the three great essentials of matter, form and place: I beg, therefore, you will accept it as such, and that you will permit me to lay it, with the most respectful humility, at your Lordship’s feet—when you are upon them,—which you can be when you please;—and that is, my Lord, whenever there is occasion for it, and I will add, to the best purposes too. I have the honour to be,
My Lord,
Your Lordship’s most obedient,
and most devoted,
and most humble servant,
TRISTRAM SHANDY
There’s something about Shandy’s basic cadence, not necessarily here but just in general, that reminds me of Castle Rackrent’s Thady Quirk, which is kind of endlessly amusing to me since they seem like they have almost opposite goals as novels (outrageous Pythonesque silliness vs. lightly political social naturalism). Maybe the resemblance is only skin-deep, since they’re both “dialogic” novels by Anglo-Irish authors written only forty years or so apart etc. etc., but I wonder what more could be made of it, even if it is just a question of style in the end.
When you’re ready I’m definitely happy to read what you have to say & respond etc. I first read The Dispossessed when I was 14 and then again a few years ago; it’s been one of my favorite books since I first read it, and in a way I feel like it has something of special substance to say as a work of anarchist literature that something more utopian wouldn’t quite be capable of. I don’t want to say too much though since you’re still reading it. Definitely curious to hear your thoughts (even if they have nothing to do with that angle).
I tried to read Left Hand of Darkness some years back but for some reason it didn’t quite “grab me”—I think I only got maybe 10–20 pages in and kind of lost steam. I can’t really say why and maybe I should give it another go. Thinking it over, all of the books I’ve read that I feel like have really done a lot for the way I view gender aren’t fiction but more feminist/gender theory (Gender Trouble, Am I That Name?, The Second Sex, and A Room of One’s Own are the ones I think of most readily in the moment, in various different ways). I don’t think fiction is incapable of addressing those kinds of themes deeply or anything, maybe more just that a lot of fiction writers either don’t think very hard about these kinds of topics or do feel kind of unpleasantly didactic to me when they do try to handle them. In the case of Left Hand of Darkness I don’t feel like I got far enough in it to even say anything like that, though—I think what I was stuck on was something more in the vein of the base texture of the writing, again in a way I’m not quite sure how to express and feel a little suspicious of in retrospect. Who knows from what place such sentiments arise.
