« Vous avez là du papier sous la main » : publication et réception de la page blanche de Tristram Shandy, des exemplaires imprimés aux exemplaires numériques

Abstract

This article focuses on the modalities of print and digital publication of the famous “blank page” of Laurence Sterne's Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. This page, which appears in chapter XXXVIII of volume VI of the novel, stands for the portrait of a character, the widow Wadman, that the narrator refuses to describe: he then instructs a fictional Reader to take up the pen himself and draw on his copy. Although this episode results, in the majority of the novel’s printed editions, in the concrete insertion of a blank page, critics have given little consideration to the possibility of readers' intervention on their volume. This reticence is analysed as part of an allographic, linguistic conception of the literary text. In contrast, I suggest using the disparity of Tristram Shandy's copies to think of publication as a material diversification of reading. The article thus compares the concrete modalities of reception of a corpus of printed and digital blank pages. It then examines the way in which private material practices of reading can, through “non-bookish” modes of dissemination, extend the publishing process, creating a tension between public and private spaces of reading.

Keywords

• literary materiality
• Tristram Shandy
• intermediality
• reading