Free How to Write a Sentence by Stanley Fish

rehearsed in a list that could have gone on forever. One thought leads to another and then to another, each provisional and not quite followed through, until, in an act of will—there is no natural stopping place—the speaker puts a (temporary) period to his musings by revealing the wish behind his wish: I might have been a different person than the one you now see.
    But we don’t see him at all; what we see is an always receding “figure” whom we proceed to chase through the many pages that follow. Early and famous reviewers (Edmund Burke, William Hazlitt, Sir Walter Scott) called Sterne’s style careless, haphazard, shifting, rambling, and conversational, “a book without plan or order” (Walter Bagehot). There were complaints that nothing quite got finished. The author, Burke observed, “perpetually digresses; or rather having no determined end in view, he runs from object to object, as they happen to strike a very lively and irregular imagination.” In the end—there is no end—“the book is a perpetual series of disappointments.” A twentieth-century commentator (Lodwick Hartley) gets the style and its effect exactly right when he asks, “Who can tolerate the person who in ordinary conversation is forever backing and filling, embroidering and elaborating, detailing and digressing in a such a way as never to get his story told?” ( Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: A Norton Critical Edition ). Of course this is not ordinary conversation, but planned conversation designed to appear ordinary in an extraordinary way. The expectations Sterne’s prose repeatedly disappoints are the expectations that come along with a belief in a rationally ordered universe, a belief that is conveyed, even breathed, by the subordinating linear style we have seen in writers like Austen, James, Milton, Melville, and Martin Luther King Jr. In place of the unity and coherence attempted and achieved by these authors, Sterne puts “a seemingly new pattern of unity; not new but as old as humanity: the organic pattern of life” (Toby A. Olshin, in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: A Norton Critical Edition ).
    The organic pattern of life does not develop; it just grows, and representations of it often frustrate those who want to travel a straight line from the beginning to the middle to the end of a sentence, or of anything else. Sterne’s Tristram is well aware of his readers’ desires, and he comments on them even as he refuses to satisfy them. “I know there are readers in the world . . . who are no readers at all—who find themselves ill at ease, unless they are let into the whole secret from first to last, of every thing which concerns you.” They are not readers at all because they are not trying to put things together or figure them out (two meanings of the verb “to read”); rather, they want it all to be given to them nicely tied up in a neat package. It is those (non)readers he aims to tease when he tells them what he won’t tell them: “Sir, as you and I are in a manner perfect strangers to each other, it would not have been proper to have let you into too many circumstances relating to myself all at once—you must have a little patience.” That is a straightforward sentence, but the Shandean style returns immediately, imitating what it urges:
    Therefore my dear friend and companion, if you should think me somewhat sparing of my narrative on my first setting out—bear with me—and let me go on, and tell my story my own way—or if I should seem now and then to trifle upon the road—or should sometime put on a fool’s cap with a bell to it, for a moment or two as we pass along—don’t fly off—but rather courteously give me credit for a little more wisdom than appears upon my outside—and as we jog along, either laugh with me, or at me, or in short, do any thing—only keep your temper.
    Let me go on, he says, as he goes on, and drags us with him. The work of the sentence is done by those loose