Chapter 6 - Engraved Lines

Summary

The final chapter considers Sterne’s use of engraved lines as illustrations of digression. Contextualising the print history of lines, the chapter examines the history of the dance manual, which, like that of Tristram Shandy, is one of innovation. Dance manuals were visual texts that had to be ever more experimental in their attempt to instruct by means of the printed page. Tristram Shandy shares with Beauchamp-Feuillet manuals diagrams which become demystified through labelling: the four plotlines closing volume 6 and Trim’s flourish in volume 9. Sterne defers annotating these lines to encourage the reader to encounter the digressive text in a looping and non-linear manner. Trim’s flourish is remarkably like the symbols which in the Beauchamp-Feuillet dance notation system represent arm movements or dance steps, and the serpentine, Hogarthian progress of a dance like the minuet, one of the most popular dances of the mid-eighteenth century. Like Sterne’s use of dance in Tristram Shandy, Trim’s flourish, when read alongside eighteenth-century dance notation, signifies both the one-off movement of his stick and the inability of anyone in Sterne’s novel to progress in a straight line.