Where the Stress Falls by Susan Sontag Read Free Book Online Page A

nineteenth century should not surprise us. While Sterne’s books, so celebrated in his lifetime and shortly afterward, were being reassessed in England as too peculiar, occasionally indecent, and finally boring, they continued to be enormously admired on the Continent. In the English-speaking world, where in this century he has again been thought very highly of, Sterne still figures as an ultra-eccentric, marginal genius (like Blake) who is most notable for being uncannily, and prematurely, “modern.” When looked at from the perspective of world literature, however, he may be the English-language writer who, after Shakespeare and Dickens, has had the greatest influence; for Nietzsche to have said that his favorite novel was Tristram Shandy is not quite as original a judgment as it may seem. Sterne has been an especially potent presence in the literatures of the Slavic languages, as is reflected in the centrality of the example of Tristram Shandy in the theories of Viktor Shklovsky and other Russian formalists from the 1920s forward. Perhaps the reason so much commanding prose literature has been issuing for decades from Central and Eastern Europe as well as from
Latin America is not that writers there have been suffering under monstrous tyrannies and therefore have had importance, seriousness, subjects, relevant irony bestowed on them (as many writers in Western Europe and the United States have half enviously concluded) but that these are the parts of the world where for over a century the author of Tristram Shandy has been the most admired.
    Machado de Assis’s novel belongs in that tradition of narrative buffoonery—the talkative first-person voice attempting to ingratiate itself with readers—which runs from Sterne through, in our own century, Natsume Sseki’s I Am a Cat , the short fiction of Robert Walser, Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno and As a Man Grows Older , Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude , much of Beckett. Again and again we meet in different guises the chatty, meandering, compulsively speculative, eccentric narrator: reclusive (by choice or by vocation); prone to futile obsessions and fanciful theories and comically designed efforts of the will; often an autodidact; not quite a crank; though sometimes driven by lust, and at least one time by love, unable to mate; usually elderly; invariably male. (No woman is likely to get even the conditional sympathy these ragingly self-absorbed narrators claim from us, because of expectations that women be more sympathetic, and sympathizing, than men; a woman with the same degree of mental acuity and emotional separateness would be regarded as simply a monster.) Machado de Assis’s valetudinarian Brás Cubas is considerably less exuberant than Sterne’s madcap, effusively garrulous Tristram Shandy. It is only a few steps from the incisiveness of Machado’s narrator, with his rueful superiority to the story of his own life, to the plot malaise that characterizes most recent fiction in the form of autobiography. But storylessness may be intrinsic to the genre—the novel as autobiographical monologue—as is the isolation of the narrating voice. In this respect the post-Sternean anti-hero like Brás Cubas parodies the protagonists of the great spiritual autobiographies, who are always profoundly, not just by circumstances, unmarried. It is almost a measure of an autobiographical narrative’s ambition: the narrator must be, or be recast as, alone, certainly without a spouse, even when there is one; the life must be unpeopled at the center. (Thus, such recent achievements of spiritual autobiography in the guise of a novel as Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless
Nights and V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival leave out the spouses who were actually there.) Just as Brás Cubas’s solitariness is a parody of a chosen or an emblematic solitude, his release through self-understanding is, for all its self-confidence and wit, a parody of that sort of triumph.
    The seductions of