freak” than a partner in conversation with his readers.27 But most self-conscious novels that appeared before Tristram Shandy flaunt an even cruder brand of authorial control than this.
The passage from Charlotte Summers in which the narrator has left his readers to imagine Charlotte for themselves concludes, for instance, with the narrator pointing out that although he has left his character to their imagination, he has also “cast a Spell upon her, that she cannot move one Step without my leave” (1:56). In the same spirit, the narrator announces gleefully that
I am determined my Readers shall learn something in every Chapter, and this, amongst other Things, they must learn and practice Patience, for let them be in never so great a Hurry to come at the Speech of Miss Summers, they cannot come near her, without my Permission, and as I have now got them into my Custody, they must travel my Pace, or get back to London, on Foot, without seeing the show. (1:24)
This attitude of authorial bravado makes narrators the tormenters and hostage takers of fictional readers, who are subject to digressions and deprived of narrative satisfaction. In The Sisters, the narrator turns to the implied reader after offering a brief glimpse of the “young, gay, sprightly and charming” Charlotte to advertise his power: “no wonder the heart burns to know more of her, and the bosom pants for a nearer acquaintance.”28 Eliza Haywood’s The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) tauntingly claims that “the reader, if he has the patience to go through the following pages, will see into the secret springs which set this machine in motion.”29 In this move, Haywood, like Sterne later, presumes knowledge of and superiority over the hungry consumer of novels.
In some novels, the narrator reins in the fictional reader on the charge of indecency. Dodd’s narrator hails “gentle readers” in the middle of a raunchy scene from The Sisters to “stop here a while with me [and] think not these pages … written solely to amuse or divert thee” (55). The narrator of Charlotte Summers claims that when he circulates among his female characters in their private rooms he wears his “conjuring invisible cap” and views them chastely from his position as a deity (2:155). Asserting that he chooses not to represent things more intimately, this narrator distinguishes himself from readers who lack such impunity by announcing that, while readers must be controlled against their will, he has access to the pornographic aspect of his narrative but restrains himself from using it. In The Brothers (1758), Susan Smythies coos: “I choose to leave to the imagination, rather than attempt the description of the tender, generous, grateful things, which were thought and said on this affecting occasion.”30 This playful willingness to withhold erotic and romantic detail gestures to the real reader’s ability to fill it in. But the same strategy often erupts into pure shows of authorial confidence: “if we had the least inclination,” Shebbeare’s narrator of Lydia boasts, “we might fill this journey with marvellous and surprising adventures” (2:18). Goodall’s narrator puts it most vociferously in Capt. Greenland, announcing at one point that “we are much better Judges than our judicious Readers, what is necessary to insert in this History and what should be omitted” (1:47).
Rather than enjoining the reader to participate in a conversation with a narrator, these dialogues underscore a situation in which the lone reader-of-print’s powers are few and desires are many. They draw attention to the way that narrators design a plot and its characters without consulting an audience and to the fact that, once this plot makes it into print, it becomes indelibly fixed as a course of events. Novel readers are positioned in these exchanges as particularly impatient and likely to be sexually frustrated by the non-interactive environment of the book. Their communication with the narrator, however tantalizing it might appear as a dialogue between creative minds, is thematized as a confrontation with the medium of the novel and an impasse to the imagination: the reminder of paper works against the illusion of collaboration.
But the dialogue between fictionalized readers and narrators can also be used to spell out the way narrators are subject in different ways from readers to the medium with which they work. One tendency that distinguishes Shebbeare, Goodall, Haywood, and the author of Charlotte Summers most clearly from Cervantes and Fielding is their suggestion that even aggressively original storytellers are answerable to the established rules of novel writing. Haywood, for instance, makes a point of obeying the putative unity of time and space by arguing that “it would be as absurd in a writer to rush all at once into the catastrophe of the adventures he would relate, as it would be impracticable in a traveller to reach the end of a long journey, without sometimes stopping at the inns in his way to it.”31 She differs in this respect from Fielding, who explains in Tom Jones that he will meet the reader’s need for interest by filling out extraordinary scenes and passing over periods of time when nothing happens.32 The narrator of Lydia makes a similar gesture to fixed narrative conventions when he turns a long digression into a description of himself running as a child to meet his father on the road, but discovering it is impossible to speed up the rate at which he travels: “In the like manner we conceive if we walked through the woods of America to meet this valiant chief, we could in no wise hasten his journey to New-York” (1:28). These intrusions demonstrate a writer bound to produce a sequential story, to write one sentence after another in continuation on the surface of the page. They pit this writer against the reader tempted by the possibilities of codex to leap ahead in the story. Digressive asides illustrate that even an author’s deviation from a narrative must occur in obedience to the linear logic of the scroll, while a reader has the power to skip or access at random the pages of a book.
Such gestures of creative limitation on the part of the narrator function as reminders of the novel as a medium rather than a forum for open conversation. As authors work with print’s constraints, their humor suggests, they become answerable to way that pages contain and convey their narrative, and the way that novelists are expected to write. In Lydia, Shebbare’s narrator presents himself obliged to include the salacious diary of his character, Rachel Stiffrump. However, he postures, “we desire those readers, who trifle with their salvation, to skip the leaves which contain this diary” (42). This scenario presents reader and narrator wrangling in their own way with the physical and generic conventions of the novel. Odysseus-like, the narrator who is bound to the mast of his own profession has no choice but to transcribe the sirens’ song while the reader, unable to stop rowing, can only block her ears by skipping pages. In Horkheimer and Adorno’s reading of this scene the vital question, the one that modernity has prevented us from asking, is why the whole ship might not be steered differently.33 Mid-century novels seem to raise the same question in presenting the logic of book production as the one invariable in their contest for power. Some of the most creative endeavors of the time present narrators and reader locked in a struggle which ultimately works to the disadvantage of both kinds of human agent. When Charlotte Summers entertains the reader with the idea of a paper object mysteriously programmed to include her, or Kidgell, rather than defending his novel as literature, deploys its disposability by securing his pages the special status of being precociously alert to their lowly material fate as waste paper, books appear as the only victors in a visibly mediated world. This fiction becomes the elaborate and ambiguous selling point of self-conscious, mid-century novels.
As I suggested in the Introduction, one of the basic tricks of authors working in this mode is to suggest that a text already knows what will happen to it in print. David Hume captures this spirit of resignation to the transcendence of books when he delivers his own “funeral oration” by speaking in the past tense of his existence, concluding “I am, or rather was (for that is the style I must now use in speaking of myself, which emboldens me the more to speak my sentiments); I was, I say, a man of mild disposition, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humor.” His perspective suggests that he has committed consciousness itself to paper, a conceit in keeping with his claim that his life story will be “little more than the History of my Writings.”34 Jonas Hanway produces a more basic version of this effect when he prompts his reader to look at the “gilded leaves” of his book’s material form as corresponding with his treatment of “celestial matters,” and at the green binding, which “will naturally remind [them] of the livery of nature.”35 This description appears in a first-person travel narrative. And yet, when Hanway boasts knowledge