From Typology to Type

[Dave Monroe]

>From J. Paul Hunter, "From Typology to Type: Agents of
Change in Eighteenth-Century English Texts," Cultural
Artifacts and the Production of Meaning: The Page, the
Image, and the Body, ed. Margaret J.M. Ezell and
Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan
P, 1994), pp. 41-67 ...

"Even a casual reader of Tristram Shandy--or, for that
matter, even a casual thumber--can quickly see how
dependent Sterne is for his effects on certain
features of print technology and modern bookmaking. 
Sterne is often credited with extraordinary invention
for his employment of these devices, and he is, of
course, original and clever, but (strictly speaking)
most of his print features are not new ....  The
features of print that Sterne exploits had, in fact,
been available to authors for some time, and many of
them had been liberally used in some form ....  In the
late 1750s and early 1760s, when Sterne was thinking
up his typographical jokes, novels had been around and
showing thir novelty for close to half a century.  In
Tristram Shandy print devices elbow their way into
prominence so that readers are almost forced to notice
that the text has come to depend on technology for
particular effects." (p. 44)

   "The first typographical oddity to strike the eye
in Tristam Shandy is, because of its ubiquity, the
dash....  It is the dominant--sometimes it seems the
only--mark of punctuation.  The dash here is not your
usual punctuational dash, setting off--as in this
sentence--some parenthetical, syntactically
interruptive word or phrase from the rest of the
sentence ....  Rather than the usual one-em dash,
Sterne's is more often two or three ems in length,
sometimes even longer.  Sometimes, as in chapter 4 of
volume 1, it takes up most of a line, in this case
centering the phrase 'Shut the door' and appearing to
seal off the text above from the text
below--presumably separating words that follow from
the readers who, on the previous page, have been
ordered to leave the room....  Sometimes it is even
longer, in one case more than two full lines in
length, when (in chap. 27 of vol. 4) the word Zounds!
opens the chapter as is followed by the very long dash
of silence ....  The text here, aided by the much
elongated dash that self-consciously pays homage to
what print technology can do for the process of
reading, replicates silence, hesitation, and
inarticulateness in the plot action, something shorter
dashes do repeatedly to enforce pauses of varying
length in the reading of the text.  Here what happens
in confronting the text as reader is analogized to
what happens in the text as narrative; representation
is made to seem as parallel as possible to
re-presentation in the present, and the physical text
is made to do what, on a temporal level, Tristram has
repeatedly been claiming he wants to do in replicating
his life as text.
   "More often the dash in Tristram Shandy is the eye
equivalent of silence--it is a reader's guide to 
pause--and the varying lengths of the dashes help us
pace our reading.   But ... he most often uses it with
other punctuation alongside--a comma or semicolon or
question mark or exclamation point, as if to say that
standard printing conventions were not enough...." (p.
45)

   "The dash in Sterne has two primary effects that
correspond to two Sternean perceptions about how print
technology affects verbal possibility.  The first
involves timing--the rhythm of the voice as a guide to
meaning, in effect a translation of print to the art
of saying and hearing--and the second involves an
apparent refusal to say, which actually involves
saying the unsayable.  Let me deal with the second
first ....  In the Phutatorius passage the long dash
after Zounds! is followed by another dash, this one
inside a word, or rather between two letters and
standing for a word.... 'Z---ds' .... Here, though, it
is a crux for a print text, a misrepresentation any
way you look at it.... he cannot have said
'z-blank-ds.'  A print text, however, can say
z-blank-ds ...." (pp. 45-7)

   "Here the dash stands, in print, for something
unspeakable and yet compellingly actual ...." (p. 47)

"Words here are not made flesh ....  The body may
fail, either to utter or repress, but print resurrects
what the flesh had desired." (p. 49)

   "And the dash, when it is punctuation, does the
same for the author, embodying and orchestrating
intention.... provide[s] for readers a score that the
voice can perform by giving the eye a visual diagram
of structural transitions.  The ubiquity of the dash
insistently calls attention to the manipulating hand
of the author behind the printer; for all the freedom
Sterne pretends to give individual readers, the firm,
set-in-print authority of the text remains inflexible
and controls readers, getting them up to speed or
slowing them down as he wants." (p. 49)

   "Long before Sterne silent and solitary readers had
been recreating, in mind and unvoiced voice, events as
the developing conventions of print in texts had led
them.... had constructed readers and conditioned them
into habits of narration that might have seemed
individual but, in fact, depended on the textual
authority and conventions of print.  No longer
dependent, as audiences of oral tales had been, on a
communal voice, readers had themselves to 'voice'
(silently) the story and give it pace and division,
guided by the type signs beside the letters.  As those
who have edited early-eighteenth-century novelistic
texts know well, 'conventions' of punctuation in these
texts are approximate at best; most writers and
printers use punctuation not for purposes of
grammatical clarity but just to indicate pauses.... 
What Sterne does is to add a qualifying dimension,
give himself a kind of second keyboard of possibility
....  If he is making fun of the control exerted by
predecessors who pretended to leave all the power in
the hands of judicious readers but who, in fact, tried
to drown out every single reader's own private and
silent voice, he is showing how it is done and doing
it in a way just a little more technologically
advanced ....  He is, instead of modifying,
articulating a standard feature of such texts, showing
how dependent on conventions of type the new narrative
medium is from the start.  Then he extends the
conventions one more step, showing it to be, all at
once, mechanical and absurd, necessary to the species,
and effective in its reigning in of individualistic,
unpredictable, willfully erratic readers." (pp. 49-50)

"Chapters in Tristram Shandy work similarly...." (p.
50)

Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram
Shandy, Gent. (1759-67) ...

http://www.gifu-u.ac.jp/~masaru/TS/contents.html

http://www.gifu-u.ac.jp/~masaru/TS/i.1-19.html#ch.4

http://www.gifu-u.ac.jp/~masaru/TS/iv.160-179.html#newt


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