Reading Body-Books: Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife reconsiders Tristram Shandy

Karen L. Schiff

Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife—what an outrageous book! Such was my initial reaction, based on first impressions: the cover’s close-up of a naked woman’s torso, the pages’ bold colors, the text’s brazen bawdiness. By the time I put the book down, I had arrived again at the same conclusion, but for a totally different reason: William Gass makes some wild challenges to readers, through both the content and the form of his narrative, to become conscious of how we interact with books. What starts out sounding like a pornographic narrative from an unabashedly patriarchal point of view ends up as an intricately crafted demand to consider the ideological undertones of reading books.

Though the topic of the reading process might not sound risky, Gass makes it risque. He suggests that reading is like whoring: the interaction between a reader and a book is like an encounter between a desperate man and a prostitute. In the narrative, these figures are represented by a nondescript sort of character, here named Phil Gelvin, and the title character, called Babs. [1] The outcome of such an encounter, Gass’s book implies, is mutual usury, whether it takes place between these characters or between a reader and a book. Outrageous!

The real subject of this novella is the process of reading, and not the narrative plot that serves as a vehicle for exploring that theme. As critic Philip Stevick writes, “Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife . . . is not about Willie Masters, or his wife, or about schoolbuses, or the United States in the fifties. It is, indisputably, ‘about’ signs and symbols, language, point of view, printed marks on a page, coherence and congruence, fiction, art” (75). This theme is coming back into focus in this decade, when electronic texts demand an inquiry into the significance of the “printed marks on a page.” The Dalkey Archive Press’s decision to create a collection of criticism about this book is a timely endeavor, given the challenge to the reading process that digital media are posing in our historical moment. I find it ironic that the collection will exist in electronic form, because this book is so concerned with the physical and material processes of reading. In any case, the occasionally exaggerated and inflammatory tone of the contemporary debate about electronic vs. paper texts is aptly engaged by Gass’s equally heated novella-cum-manifesto.

The Dalkey Archive Press reissue of Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, however, is not quite the book that Gass first published in 1968, as a supplement to Northwestern University’s TriQuarterly. Like the book’s first reprinter, Alfred A. Knopf (1971), Dalkey uses all one colored paper for the text of the book, where the pages of the original version were in four different colors: they were grouped into sequential sections of blue, olive green, red, and then white. Also, the photograph of a nude woman’s torso, seen from the front, occupies the entire front cover of the original version, with the words of the title and author splayed across her chest and belly. Dalkey reduces that image to take up a few square inches of the cover, and the title appears to one side of it. [2] The photograph of the back of a nude woman’s torso, which completely filled the back cover of the TriQuarterly supplement, appears similarly reduced, with blurbs and purchasing information that further distract from the buttocks. [3]

The altering of visual information is not a new phenomenon in republications, even when that visual information is integral to communicating the author’s thematic intentions. The same phenomenon plagues all modern editions of Tristram Shandy (1760-67), whose original composition was closely overseen by its author, Laurence Sterne. Many critics make parallels between Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife and Tristram Shandy to establish a precedent for Gass’s use of typographical twists, unusual images, language games, and other techniques for playing with the reader’s attention. Arthur Saltzman even asserts that “Gass out-Shandy’s Sterne in testing the possibilities of narrative play (or foreplay, in this instance)” (Fiction 113). [4] But after this type of brief and pithy allusion to Sterne, the connection generally stops.

Here I will delve more deeply into connections between Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife and Tristram Shandy. Gass quotes directly from the eighteenth-century novel in his text when he mentions “Uncle Toby” and his “fortifications” (olive). Gass also refers to Tristram Shandy‘s bibliographic quirks. In particular, both authors make asterisks into distracting visual markers; their methods for doing so depend partly on the technologies available to each and partly on their motivations for creating this visual variation in the first place. Like Sterne, Gass uses a variety of typographical styles, absurdly extensive footnotes, direct addresses to the reader, and bold colors, and the latter are available only in the original editions of both books.

The shared details in these novels support a common thematic concern with the process of reading and how people interact with physical books. It could be argued that Gass’s entire sexual-textual metaphor draws upon Sterne’s example. Both Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife and Tristram Shandy focus on the penis as a motif, though in Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife it is mentioned overtly and in Tristram Shandy it remains euphemistic (as a nose). Both texts ask or force readers to become conscious of acts of reading as bodily processes and to engage with their books in a less predictable way than in a beginning-to-end sequence.

But I do not wish solely to elaborate on surface similarities between Gass and Sterne; I will explore the ways that both of these texts ask us to reconsider how we read. While Gass echoes Sterne’s tactics for poking fun at reading habits, he also revises them. Sterne explodes the conventions of book production to suggest that the act of reading can be a sexual pleasure—engaging with a book can produce the riotous and joyful unpredictability of sensual experience and can result in a generative exchange. For Gass, however, that engagement with the book/body has a profoundly nihilistic mood. Instead of a potentially joyful excess, the reader finds delusion, so that by the end of Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, the book proclaims in large, diagonally aligned type, “You’ve been had…from start to finish.” Gass’s games do not seem as playful as Sterne’s, though perhaps Gass prods us to revive our playful relationship with books by demonstrating how thoroughly we have lost it.

Seen in this light, the title character becomes the wife of Willie Masters everywhere; the placement of the apostrophe after the “s” in Willie’s last name implies that there could be more than one willie master. [5] Perhaps we could call the “willie masters” the people who have learned how to lord over their libidos or to command their willies into quiescence. [6] When many critics abbreviate the title of this book as Willie Masters, however, the emphasis shifts away from the lonesome wife who is the absolute center of this book: she is its narrative subject, its narrator, and its physical manifestation. She is, literally and figuratively, the “flesh and bones” of this book.

So let us begin with Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife from the first impression—that is, by considering the original paperback covers. The two photographs, taken as a pair, invite us to see the entire book as a woman’s body. Since the covers show her outer skin, her bodily organs, thoughts, and inner life exist in the text between the covers. The placement of the words on the cover further cement the blending of book and body: they stretch and curve across the woman’s flesh instead of being typeset along strictly horizontal baselines. The title of the book, and the author’s name, are inextricably connected to the woman’s body in an imagistic manifestation of Babs’s later assertion, “These words are all I am” (white section). [7] The copy of the book the reader is holding, the narrative contained within, the physical book as a generic object and the body of a woman all become inseparably intertwined. The original paperback edition, in which the photographs fill both covers, aids the reader in perceiving this fundamental connection between book and body. Also in the original paperback edition, the photograph of the lower half of a woman’s body, shown from the back, has no external contours: the edges of her legs blend seamlessly into the blue paper as if her flesh were coextensive with the page. The same effect is achieved elsewhere in the volume: the pages are a woman’s body parts.

In Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne also calls attention to visible and material characteristics of the book structure to emphasize the physicality of the book. References to the volumetric organization of the book appear in every volume of the first edition. [8] This edition was published in nine volumes over seven years (two volumes every two years from 1760 to 1766, and one additional volume in 1767), though today the novel most often appears as a single book. From the outset, Sterne highlights the volumetric structure of his novel: the etching that appears opposite the book’s title page illustrates a scene from volume two, and its caption indicates the exact page on which the scene appears. To turn to this page requires putting down the first volume and picking up the next one. This strategy could also be a clever marketing tool, in that readers might be more likely to buy the second volume along with the first (they were published concurrently) for the gratification of finding the scene that the image depicts.

In the Norton Critical Edition, the editors place a reproduction of this etching close to the words that describe the scene in the image, so that the etching functions as an illustration. The image no longer refers the reader to another place in the novel altogether; modern editors remove this physical aspect of reading Tristram Shandy. Another example of a reference to physicality that gets removed occurs in the third volume, when Uncle Toby looks at a crevice in the wall, and the text refers the reader to “the word Crevice, in the fifty-second page of the second volume of this book of books” (III, xxxi, 147/158). [9] Critics have often interpreted the phrase “book of books” to mean that Tristram Shandy continually quotes other books, or that this work is about the process of reading a book, but the narrative context shows that it also alludes to the volumetric structure of the book: it is a novel made up of many volumes or “books.” In order to follow the reference, the reader must put down the third volume and pick up the second, just as when the frontispiece for volume one refers to a scene in volume two.

Indeed, the books take up literal space when Sterne invites the reader to sit upon a stack of the five volumes already read. At the beginning of the sixth volume, he associates book and body through their common physicality: “We have got thro’ these five volumes, (do, Sir, sit down upon a set—they are better than nothing)” (VI, i, 1/287). A collection of volumes becomes a sitting stool, which though small (the stack measures approximately 5 x 8 x 7 inches) serves the purpose of providing a seat for the reader. By saying that it is “better” to sit on the books than nowhere, Sterne implies that it is “better” to acknowledge the physical relationship between the books and the reader’s body than to go on believing that there is “nothing” material about the reading experience. [10]

In both Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife and Tristram Shandy, the book is not just a body, but a highly sexualized body. The cover photographs in Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife focus on anonymous erogenous zones, to make a generic or theoretical statement that the book can be considered as a sexual object. The woman on the cover has no face: the decision to exclude this most vivid marker of individuality implies that her sexuality is generically physical, cut off from an emotional life. [11]

Opening such a book becomes an act of sexual penetration, marked by a titillating pleasure but not a human relation. As Babs reminds us, “how close, in the end is a cunt to a concept—we enter both with joy” (white). The language of female anatomy in this sentence, like the image of female anatomy on the cover, indicates a sexuality that is almost mechanical in its anonymity. No wonder Babs is a “lonesome” wife. She knows that her partners find “joy” in her by neglecting her humanity in preference for her purely sexual characteristics. She acknowledges her whorelike role: “Oh, I’m the girl upon this couch, all right, you needn’t fear; the one who’s waltzed you through these pages…Could you love me? Love me then…then love me…Yes. I know. I can’t command it…you, the world; and I, the language” (white). Her discourse ends by conflating a sexual relationship with a textual one. Babs talks about keeping the reader/lover “down here where it’s dark and oily like an alley”—this could refer either to stereotypical locations where prostitutes solicit business or to the vaginal canal itself—or to an abundance of oily printing ink.

In Tristram Shandy, the book is also considered a sexual object, but Sterne retains a distinction between the female sexual characteristics of the bound volume and an actual female sexual being. When Uncle Toby tells his corporal Trim of his fears of wooing the beautiful Widow Wadman, he equates female anatomy with a military trench, and Sterne places this conversation around the “trench” created between the verso and recto of the open book. Toby declares, “I had rather march up to the very edge of a trench—” than attempt to woo the Widow Wadman. The word “trench” appears the end of the verso of a page spread; the reader’s eyes must then cross the seam in the book, or the “trench,” which divides the verso from the facing recto. [12] At the top of that page (VIII, xxx, 129/412), the “trench” becomes associated with female anatomy:

����������� ——A woman is quite a different thing

——said the corporal.

����������� ——I suppose so, quoth my uncle Toby.

As Uncle Toby mulls over the conundrum of whether the “trench” of a woman’s genital area can be distinguished from the military trench, the reader sees the similarity between both of these indentations and the gutter of the open book. As Buzz Spector notes in The Bookmaker’s Desire, “The topography of an open book is explicit in its erotic association: sumptuous twin paper curves that meet in a recessed seam” (16). [13] The pages of standard trade books in Spector’s twentieth-century frame of reference tend to be larger than the duodecimo-sized leaves of Tristram Shandy, so Spector’s allusion to buttocks emphasizes the roundness of the larger pages that spring from the gutter. Sterne, meanwhile, focuses more attention on what lies within this “trench” itself, and his discussion of its symbolism has an endearingly tentative quality whose humor is lacking in Gass.

The sexual nature of these book-bodies is reinforced by the use of color in both Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife and Tristram Shandy. Critics of Gass’s book are fond of assessing the colored paper of the original edition as signifying the stages of the body at rest (blue), sexual arousal (olive), intense excitement and climax (red), and post-orgasmic mental meanderings (white with glossy texture). Indeed, the blue section does focus on setting the stage in a largely descriptive way; the olive pages contain more conceptual complexity and are composed in a more complicated visual arrangement; the red section contains the most capital letters and the wildest page compositions; the white glossy section contains the key extended passages that help the reader reflect upon the antics that have taken place. The lack of page numbers on these pages heightens the parallel between colors and states of human existence. When the pages are not tied to a narrative sequence, they can seem to appear outside of time altogether, just as the experience of time when lived through the body is not bound by chronology.

In Tristram Shandy, color appears in the original edition of the marbled page, an outstandingly surprising feature of the novel. It is the only instance of color in the entire nine volumes, made in an era when “coloured illustrations were extremely rare” (Patterson 83). Even modern editions of Tristram Shandy do not try to replicate it: most have black and white reproductions of marbling inserted somewhere close to the original position of this page. After two hundred years, the pigments in the original marbling retain their riotous intensity, and no other work of literature has attempted such a grand-scale craft project. Each of the pages was hand-marbled, with pigments layered in the colors of the body’s liquids: pink, olive, yellow and white.

In the context of Sterne’s narrative, the marbled page is a corporeal intervention: it represents Walter Shandy’s ejaculation. [14] The sexualized symbolism has another layer of meaning, however, just as the pigments on the page are layered. Sterne wishes for us to “read” the marbling, and to consider it as an “emblem for my work!” (III, xxxvi, 168/xx). To “read” this page is to try to “penetrate” (pun intended, by me and by Sterne) a thoroughly asequential text that changes with each iteration. Sterne wants us to apply this approach to his entire novel, and to our reading practice in general. Early in the novel, he gives a noble rationale for his digressive games, of which the marbling is one.

‘Tis to rebuke a vicious taste which has crept into thousands besides herself; —of reading straight forwards, more in quest of the adventure, than of the deep erudition and knowledge which a book of this cast, if read over as it should be, would infallibly impart with them.—The mind should be accustomed to make wise reflections, and draw curious conclusions as it goes along; . . . I wish . . . that all good people, both male and female, from her example, may be taught to think as well as read. (I, xx, 130-33/41-42)

Sterne’s concluding sentiment could be considered the inspiration behind Gass’s novella.

In Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, Babs talks about herself as a marbled page: “I shall be quite singular enough to suit sly John the Scot himself, that canny philosopher who taught that Truth, though One, was irridescent [sic] as a plash of oil, and varied endlessly from spot to spot” (white). Babs describes the marbling process, in which oil-based pigments are splattered onto a thick substance (called “size”) held in a tub, and then are lifted off by placing a piece of paper carefully down and pulling the ink off as a unique print. Each paper is “varied endlessly”—Babs could also be describing her own ontology, both as language and as a book. Her “Truth” shifts with her words; she cannot be read “straight forwards” any more than Sterne’s marbling can be.

Typography, as well as color, expresses the states of mind and the physical shifts that the characters experience. In Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, no page completely lacks typographic variation; even the relatively sedate blue and white sections are interrupted with unusual uses of italics, changes in typestyle and/or size, and; on one blue verso, an entire block of backward type that mirrors the recto printed opposite. The range of typographic variation is prodigious, and was originally imagined as being even more encyclopedic.

One of Gass’s original intentions for Willie Masters was to reproduce the first-edition typefaces of any lines taken from other works, something which would have visually emphasized the highly diverse natures of those voices who have “used Babs” in the past. This intention proved to be impractical, but type styles can be found here from nearly every period since Gutenberg, ranging from pre-printing press calligraphy to old German gothic, Victorian typefaces, and modern advertising boldface. (McCaffery, Metafictional 175)

From this account, it would seem that Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife actually extends from before Gutenberg to the late 1960s, but no “pre-printing press calligraphy” actually appears. Some of the typestyles do look “calligraphic” in the sense that they imitate handwritten text, and some actual handwriting does appear in the text, but neither of these techniques point to a pre-printing-press era.

One olive page spread in the novella contains both handwritten styles and typographical quotations. Babs’s musings about writing “a string of beauties”—meaning including words on the page that look beautiful, regardless of their sense—gets expressed not only in terms of repeating the word “catafalque” in roman type, but also in printing this word (and some other random “beauties,” in English, French, Yiddish and gibberish) in a sloping cursive font. On the page opposite, the biggest handwritten passage of the book appears in a cartoon-style, using all capital letters (some with a heavier pen stroke than others) and surrounded by the contours of a talking bubble; these scribal conventions spring from an era long after Gutenberg’s. And though Gass was not able to include all the typographical styles he imagined, Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife does include some typographic quotations, such as a font that nearly mimics the masthead of the Christian Science Monitor to indicate that publication. [15] The inclusion of typestyles ranging from early printing to the late 1960s supports my contention that the book asks us to consider how language becomes visible, and how readers interact with manufactured books in the age of print. [16]

Tristram Shandy‘s games with typography also prompt general questions about the nature of the textual encounter. Scholar William Holtz is not alone in asserting that “Sterne’s typographical devices . . . [reveal] the essential inadequacy of printed language” (“Typography” 252). [17] But Sterne’s imagistic typography reveals the richness that is possible to convey on the printed page if the composer does not adhere to conventional textual appearance. Sterne is not just showing what language cannot offer; he is demonstrating what the book can offer. Sterne enlarges the activity of reading words by integrating them with non verbal information and thereby communicating a richer narrative and a more complex composition.

The typographical games in Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife are not as artful as in Tristram Shandy. In an interview, Gass says he wastes the opportunity to use typography in a radically challenging way. He says, “I was trying out some things. Didn’t work. Most of them didn’t work…the visual business was only occasionally successful, and most of that was due to the excellent design work of [graphic designer] Larry Levy, not me” (quoted in LeClair 69). The pages do often read as collections of typographic trivia as much as narrative experiments. On the other hand, Sterne’s humor is sometimes so subtle that his quirks do not register with readers, at least in the early twenty-first century, when many book production conventions have changed and readers are not accustomed to noticing the anomalies that may have distracted an eighteenth-century reader’s attention. [18]

In Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, the various typestyles indicate different mental tones that readers can experience. Many critics cite the ways that the different typestyles, especially in the first (blue) section of the book, correspond to Babs’s states of mind: “the roman sections deal with her memories about the past and her concern with words; the italic sections indicate her memories of her first sexual encounter; and the boldface sections present her views about the nature of bodily processes…and their relation to her aspirations for ‘saintly love'” (McCaffery, Metafictional 174). Another psychoanalytic valence to the variety of typestyles, however, lies in Gass’s shift in his own handwriting: he writes, “I think it very obvious now, though it wasn’t obvious to me [in college], that I should pick the way I formed words to be the point where I should try to transform everything” (quoted in LeClair 63). The form of the writing becomes a way to express all levels of experience: “‘That change of script,’ says Gass, ‘was a response to my family situation and in particular to my parents. I fled an emotional problem and hid myself behind a wall of arbitrary formality'” (LeClair 63).

If to change the appearance of one’s writing is to create a radical change in oneself, then the variety of typestyles in Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife serves to keep the text from taking on a stable tone. Since reading words creates a subtle silent/speaking voice in the reader’s head, the reader cannot maintain a consistent receptive stance; the act of reading becomes a constant reinvention of oneself as a reading subject. This process contrasts sharply with the habitual consistency of our reading practice. It becomes painfully evident that we generally assume a stable textual tone, manifested through a consistent typography. This habit soon looks like a blissful refuge compared with the complexity of Gass’s forced restlessness.

Specific typefaces can also associatively indicate mental tones or sociopolitical contexts. A newspaper title, Morning Telegraph and Times, appears printed in an Old English typeface. Because this is a generic convention for newspaper mastheads, it points to the type of reading material and even to the entire domestic scene indicated in a passage about “a man who can’t recognize his own wife behind her Morning Telegraph and Times” (olive).

In Tristram Shandy, Sterne uses an Old English typeface to give isolated phrases a preposterously regal air. For example, part of a sermon on conscience that Corporal Trim reads to Uncle Toby, Walter Shandy, and Dr. Slop is printed thus: “Conscience has got safely entrenched behind the Letter of the Law; sits there invulnerable, fortified with Cases and Reports so strongly on all sides;” (II, xvii, 121/93). In this example, the words “Letter of the Law” do not just signify the exact rules of jurisprudence; they also literally refer to the letters printed in the typeface for legal documents. The bold architectural lines of the Old English style appear invulnerable compared to the usual text type; it therefore seems to fortify any assertion printed in that style.

Willie Masters’ Loneseome Wife

Tristram Shandy

Old English also signifies the “Letter of the Law” when Shandy includes portions of his mother’s marriage settlement in the text. Sterne prints key legal phrases in Old English, such as “And this Indenture further witnesseth” (I, xv, 87/28). This typographical choice indicates a high-falutin tone, but it also punctuates the long text with a visual reminder of its legal status. Some of the words Sterne prints in Old English simply indicate the beginning of a new section of the document, and bear no substantive relation to legal discourse. While legal documents often have larger words at the beginnings of sections (cf. “We the People. . .”), such empty phrases as “That is to say,” (I, xv, 85/28) or “And also” (I, xv, 89/29) also parody the language of legal documents. There would be no need for a further explanation (“That is to say”) if the document were clear from the outset; legalese often contains unnecessary repetition of ideas and words (“And also”). Through this mimicry, Sterne asserts his own “legalistic” dominion over the composition of the novel as well as over its readers. He retains control by keeping the reader alert: he uses alternative typographical styles in inconsistent and therefore surprising ways.

Sterne’s use of Old English is more playful than Gass’s, echoing his general unpredictable approach to using textual production to underscore life’s mercurial nature. In the final volume of Tristram Shandy, Sterne uses Old English to help the reader “turn back to the two blank chapters” that appear after chapter XXV. His chapter headings generally use standard type for an informal abbreviation “CHAP.” followed by the chapter number in roman numerals. Headings for chapters eighteen and nineteen first appear with these headings printed like the others, but with no text beneath them; Shandy later returns to write them again but must distinguish them from the “earlier” versions of these chapters so that the game with sequence is clear. Their new headings—”The Eighteenth Chapter” and “Chapter the Nineteenth”—are written out completely, in an Old English typestyle which deviates from the typographical pattern of the other chapter headings. Again, Sterne is displaying his legalistic power: he commands the laws of order that govern his novel. This typeface signifies his ability to alter the standard sequence of the novel’s chapters.

Considering all of these examples together, the novel becomes a place to find a collection of diverse typefaces: this is the compositional equivalent of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism in his book The Dialogic Imagination. According to Bakhtin’s essay “Discourse in the Novel,” juxtaposed rhetorics of diverse socioeconomic or sociocultural groups typify novelistic style. Sterne and Gass create “dialogism” by juxtaposing distinct class-identified discourses not just in the grammar of their rhetoric, but in the typeface of their rhetoric. In Tristram Shandy, Old English signifies a higher class of printed discourse that stands out against the unified print of the text page. In Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, the typefaces indicate several tones and classes of discourse, from the screeches of a comic book character to the stately intoning of a newspaper.

Of all the typographical quirks in these two books, the most daring and significant is the authors’ use of asterisks. In Tristram Shandy, the asterisks often replace sections of text: “Usually…the omissions are suggestive—sexually suggestive” (Hutcheon 106). Generally, Sterne uses asterisks to represent female sexual anatomy, and occasionally male genitalia. Many times asterisks replace words or entire paragraphs that hint at women’s sexual parts (II, 47/71; II, 49/72; II, 65/77, et al.), and during a digression about a minor character, an accident occurs in which hot chestnut rolls off a table and “into Phutatorius’s ***�****” (IV, xxvii, 182/227). Sterne most notably uses asterisks to represent Uncle Toby’s genitalia, which were wounded at war. Uncle Toby received his wound to the groin as a result of an explosion on the battlefield, and asterisks resemble small battlefield explosions. Then, in volume IX (xxii, 80/442), asterisks replace a paragraph of text in which Toby supposedly tells Widow Wadman about the state of his groin; the marks punctuate the space in which Toby talks about his wound. It could be said, therefore, that the asterisks reinscribe Toby’s “puncture” wound by “punctuating” his discussion of the event that caused his injury.

Sterne’s quirky arrangement of asterisks on the pages of Tristram Shandy signals the irregularity of life. Type generally is designed to facilitate the regular spacing of elements. Letterpress type, like that used in Sterne’s day, included lead spacers in standard “em” and “en” widths to help compositors arrange type systematically. His printers would therefore be quite capable of creating reasonably regularly spaced lines of punctuation. Sterne’s lines, however, must have included odd-sized slugs, because the spaces among the asterisks are irregular. The marks vibrate on the page; the spaces between them take on a vitality and a sense of aesthetic play that disappears in more recent editions’ mechanically regularized arrangements of the same sections (see illus.).

The way that Sterne’s asterisks dance across the page performs the fluttering sense that accompanies titillating discourse about sexual matters. Like any innuendo, in which information is both hinted at and concealed, the asterisks both indicate and obscure the sexual reference. Sterne indicates the sexual energy, however, by playing with the spacing between the asterisks instead of merely incorporating them into the narrative. Using asterisks as replacements for words was not altogether uncommon to eighteenth-century literature, [19] but Sterne arranges the rows of asterisks idiosyncratically instead of mechanistically, expressing the playful mood (see illus. above). When Sterne creates sentences and paragraphs from asterisks whose alignment looks jumpy, this irregular composition interrupts the smoothness of the reading process.

When Sterne “plants” rows of asterisks on the page, the effect goes beyond small individual “explosions”—these marks, seen as a group, look like a field of cabbages. Sterne explains the significance of this idea at the beginning of volume VIII, when the narrator is continuing a discussion of digressions and plot lines which he began at the end of volume VI.

I defy, not withstanding all that has been said upon straight lines* in sundry pages of my book—I defy the best cabbage planter that ever existed, whether he plants backwards or forwards, it makes little difference in the account (except that he will have more to answer for in the one case than in the other)—I defy him to go on coolly, critically, and canonically, planting his cabbages one by one, in straight lines, and stoical distances, especially if slits in petticoats are unsew’d up—without ever and anon straddling out, or sidling into some bastardly digression—�”

* Vid. Vol. VI, p. 152.��������������� ��������������� ��������������� ��������������� ��������������� (VIII, i, 1-2/380)

It is impossible for the cabbage planter to planting a row of cabbage crops in a mechanically straight line, Tristram suggests, simply by virtue of being human and therefore unmechanized. It is especially difficult to regularize the body’s actions when a woman’s sexual parts are visible (through “slits in petticoats”). We humans are irregular and unpredictable—our physical actions will inevitably be unmechanical and our libidos will distract us at whim.

This passage also demonstrates that reading cannot proceed without digression. First, digression in the reading process is itself inevitable, because human bodies and minds are not strictly mechanistic. But also, Sterne’s footnote in the text—indicated with another asterisk—interrupts readers with a reference to the exact page of an earlier, related discussion. The passage implies that readers cannot keep their eyes moving “stoically” along the rows of words in the presence of a live body, or during an ongoing conversation between reader and text. Sterne dramatizes this point when he writes in his “Author’s Preface,” “I hate set dissertations—and above all things in the world, ’tis one of the silliest things in one of them, to darken your hypothesis by placing a number of tall, opake words, one before another, in a right line, betwixt your own and your reader’s conception…” (III, xx, ?/145).

Words themselves can be considered as cabbages, planted in rows along the page. In the passage just discussed, the words cannot articulate even a single thought without digressing: the phrase “I defy” is repeated three times as the narrator tries to return to his declaration-in-progress. A similar phenomenon occurs in volume VIII, when Corporal Trim tries to tell a story to uncle Toby. After each of four digressions (mostly in the form of Toby interrupting the story), Trim resumes the tale after a heading which appears centered on the page identically each time:

The story of the king of Bohemia and

his seven castles, continued.

In this case, the repetition functions like clearing the throat: it refocuses the reader’s attention on the section of the story to come. The words “I defy,” in contrast, need to be repeated in order to preserve the grammatical sense of the passage. In both cases, the words are like rows of plants on the page, and Sterne becomes the cabbage farmer who is composing the novel in a manner that is anything but “stoical.”

In Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, Gass does not use asterisks as censorship marks, perhaps because he is writing in an era when it is possible to use the language of sex more openly. Nor does he use them to play tricks on the reader, in the same spirit as Sterne’s. Still, Gass’s asterisks play with the reader’s attention and disrupt sequential “progress,” and perhaps they do so more thoroughly than Sterne’s because Gass had more innovative design options available to him through the technology of the late 1960s.

Gass uses lines of asterisks where one would suffice—a line of dialogue in a play appears at the top of a page with asterisks after some words; they appear to refer to footnotes below, but it soon becomes clear that the number of asterisks following a line does not often correspond to the number of asterisks preceding the text at the bottom of the page. The footnotes may or may not discuss the passage from the play, and there are fewer footnotes than there are asterisks indicating them; some of the footnotes even appear on pages where there are no asterisks in the text of the dialogue. Sterne’s asterisks for footnotes consistently appear one at a time and in a reasonably traditional relationship between text and note. Gass uses asterisks for footnotes to point beyond a disruption of “stoical” sequence toward a nihilistic nonsense. They tease the reader to anticipate how these marks will be used next, and also to feel frustrated and helpless because a system cannot be divined. Still, there is a gleeful freedom in his abundance of asterisks: going against accepted systems carries a thrill. Altogether, Gass’s deliberately contrary use of asterisks suits the allegory of prostitution, which is itself contrary to established law and societal codes. Sterne’s asterisks are teasing; Gass’s are taunting.

Both authors use the unusual positioning of the book’s asterisks to poke fun at—or prod us to see—the folly of proceeding regularly through a text from one word to the next. In Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, one line of asterisks arcs downward through the second half of a line of type and starts up again on the next line, slightly outside the print margin, suddenly in alignment again. Gass writes, “******************In addition, the stars interfere with the reading, pester the eye. (Why don’t you go to a movie?)” (olive). In this passage, the “movie” stands for a smoothly sequenced “reading” experience—one image or frame follows another and the reader must only sit back and be taken for a ride. This is precisely the kind of reading that both books aim to disrupt—asterisks challenge the reader to do something different from just reading “from beginning to end.”

Gass goes on to reflect on the effects of asterisks on readers. He laments that “one loses count—which goes with what, what goes with which” (olive). This phrase could easily refer to Gass’s own games with asterisks in the preceding pages. But Gass asks the reader to consider whether this distracted method of reading is so difficult after all. He challenges the reader to refrain from complaining about the quantity of “stars” or the lack of correspondence between text and note: “All this is true, but don’t come crabbing to me about it—do you live in the modern world, or not?. . . Furthermore, you have no trouble, do you? with charts and tables, graphs or logs. (Go to a movie.)” (olive). Plenty of non linguistic elements are accepted as part of a pleasant reading experience, even if they interrupt the flow of print. In the culture of the late 1960s, Gass implies, the multimedia barrage of information should make any reader feel equipped to handle subtle and contradictory signals. If you still object to the idea of these “interruptions,” Gass reiterates his command to stop using this medium and switch to one that allows more passive reception of data. [20]

Gass transforms asterisks from textual punctuations into visual images, and thereby asks readers to redefine their perceptual expectations of these marks. On one recto of the heavily starred olive section, the type size increases steadily toward the bottom of the page, and the last line of the printed text ends with three asterisks. Each is larger than the next. The first two have five arms and the third has six, and they expand into the right margin of the page (see illus). They function as a catchword (or catch-image?) for the following verso, in which the text area is full of twenty-two five- and six-pointed asterisk shapes, from 1/2″ to 1″ in diameter. Like the three on the previous page, they are hand-drawn instead of mechanically printed, and they are arranged without regard for the horizontal lines that usually constrain typography. They look more organic than conventional asterisks, yet less animate than starfish; the shapes resemble the stars that were stuck to the backdrops of the Mike Douglas show, a famous television talk show of the time (see illus). In contrast to the line of twenty-five typographical asterisks that lead into a footnote at the bottom of this same page, these asterisks no longer function as punctuation: they create a field of visual impact. The reader’s attention is drawn to their aesthetic properties instead of their signifying power. As Gass writes five pages earlier, “Anyway, these asterisks are the prettiest things in print” (olive).

Gass gives the asterisks’ beauty a transcendent, heavenly inflection when he writes, “It’s easy enough to think of them as star*s” (olive). While Sterne associates asterisks with farming fields and battlefields, Gass looks to the field of the firmament. [21] I believe that Sterne wishes us to see that our reading process transpires in the physical realm, while Gass wants us to remember that reading can be divine. Reading can be as unpredictable as life’s vicissitudes; it can also be a heavenly escape from that reality.

Whatever the symbolic meaning of the asterisks, they achieve a similar end: they bring the reader out of a narrative reverie and into the present moment’s experience of looking at the page as a visual object. Gass’s quotation from Tristram Shandy, which appears on the page in the olive section that contains the large five- and six-armed stars, reinforces the idea of reading in the present tense because its syntax is logically impossible. Gass quotes from volume III, chapter xxxviii (185/170) of Sterne’s novel: [22]

A cow broke in

tomorrow morning

to my Uncle Toby’s

fortifications.

When the past and future tenses collide in this ostensibly realistic sentence, a reader necessarily concludes that “This is fiction” or “This is not happening; it is something I am reading.” The latter part of the second statement is the most apt: the reader becomes conscious of the act of reading in the present moment. In this context, the “fortifications” can be seen as the four margins of the page that delineate the print area. These boundaries are being broken on many pages of Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife. The arms of the large “stars” that appear on this page could even represent the boundary-breaking cow’s udders: these “asterisks” have rounded points.

The time of reading is always in the present tense, and narrative time in both Tristram Shandy and Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife moves in anything but a linear or predictable fashion. The malleability of time and the intense vividness of the present moment are characteristics not just of reading, but also of lovemaking—and so we return to the ways that these books function as eroticized bodies. Arthur Saltzman writes that “in Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife [Gass] demonstrates how the same qualities are shared by good lovers and good readers” (“Where Words” 12). Actually, Gass gives more attention to bad lovers and bad readers and to the possibilities for improvement we generally neglect; we leave the book feeling cowed and sheepish, outraged and exposed. At the end of the novella, our reading habits have come under scrutiny: “But, honestly, you skipped a lot…Is that any way to make love to a lady a lonely one at that” (white). The book is lonely all the time, waiting for someone to read it. But it/she does not want to be read/loved according to an unoriginal, mechanical method—a creative and “nonscripted” approach is preferable. The narrator challenges the reader, “and would you complain at having to caress a breast first, then a knee, to sink so suddenly from soft to bony, or to kiss an ear if followed by the belly, even slowly? Only a literalist at loving would expect to plug ahead like the highway people’s line machine” (white). [23] If you really love the person you are interacting with, you will not be able to maintain a formulaic way of treating that person. By extension, if you love reading, you will not treat a book like a whore.

How do we treat books as if they are whores? We enter their worlds for a brief respite from our own, and for a temporary sense of reassurance and pleasure. When we have finished, when we have sucked them dry, we toss them aside; the book has been a vehicle whose physical presence we disregard. The book is a means instead of an end in itself. We read for intimate contact with the content of a book, or with our own feelings that the book evokes, yet we then toss the book aside when we are done with it as if it has not been at all connected to this emotional transaction. Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife tells us that this is what we are doing. Babs observes that her readers/lovers exit hastily “to dinner or to some appointment, and their eyes fly noisily against the windows. they fumble up their buttons, zip their zips…and if they’d paid me something, say a five spot, they could smile upon my smiles or say goodby perhaps; but no, it’s free, they’re done, the holy office over, and they turn their back on me…” Reading itself is free, regardless of whether one has paid anything to hold the book in one’s hands. But the “holy office” of reading rarely has a closing ritual: “i’m what they’ve left, their turds in the toilet”(white). After reading, the book remains as the material waste matter of the reading process; sometimes books are given or thrown away.

Babs also provides us with an alternative: we can get more out of our books if we give more attention to them. She advises the reader, “Though you’ll not be back, your brother will. Tell him he is responsible for me, and that I give as good as I receive. If he will be attentive, thoughtful, warm and kind, I shall be passionate and beautiful” (white). The next reader, having learned from the experience of this one, can be advised to cultivate the reading experience more carefully. Or we can bring Babs’s advice and the lessons from this book into the future, to make more creative reading experiences for ourselves.

While Gass accuses the reader of having followed a boring line through the text “like the highway people’s line machine” (white), Sterne treats the reader more gently. He admits that the “highway” is an easier road to travel though he suggests that it is much less fun. Compare Gass’s judgmental tone to Sterne’s humor in this passage:

Upon looking back from the end of the last chapter and surveying the texture of what has been wrote, it is necessary, that upon this page and the five following, a good quantity of heterogeneous matter be inserted, to keep up that just balance betwixt wisdom and folly, without which a book would not hold together a single year: nor is it a poor creeping digression (which but for the name of, a man might continue as well going on in the king’s highway) which will do the business—no; if it is to be a digression, it must be a good frisky one…(IX, xii, 48/433)

The “king’s highway” is a well-worn and ancient road from biblical times; it was the most traveled route in the Middle East. Here Sterne alludes to it to indicate the most familiar, beginning-to-end habit of reading, which is a common approach to the book but not an inevitable one. Sterne “look[s] back…and survey[s] the texture” of the text, and neither this shift in the direction of reading nor this engagement of the sense of touch is part of the “king’s highway” method of reading. Still, Sterne insists that the departures from the standard way of reading are essential—the insertion of “heterogeneous matter” help to hold the book together.

How can a reader rise to this opportunity, and become as “frisky” as a creative lover? Both Sterne and Gass imply that readers could expand their sensuality. Clearly both authors make their books full of “heterogeneous matter” as visual extravaganzas, For Sterne the text can also have physical texture, and for Gass it can have sound. When Gass reflects on his collaboration with Lawrence Levy, the graphic designer with whom he created this special issue of TriQuarterly, he is most interested in finding a way to represent musicality in a visual text. He says,

I was trying to find a spatial coordinate to go with the music, but my ability to manipulate the spatial and visual side of the medium was so hopelessly amateurish (I was skating on one galosh), and the work also had to go through so many hands…I’m still fooling around with visual business, but I am thinking of a way to make them sound. One problem, for instance, is trying to get the sense (in print) of different lines of language being sounded at the same time, or alternately, or at different speeds or pitch, as in music. (quoted in LeClair 69)

The “music” of the text is that which exists beyond words—that which cannot be expressed with just words. Though Gass, in this interview, ends by discussing sound in words with reference to subsequent texts, Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife does register an attempt to enrich the literary text by stretching the words until they verge on becoming another medium.

Of course fiction itself already constitutes a shift in medium—from life to text. Both Gass and Sterne attempt to achieve a shift in the opposite direction—from text to life—by making their texts speak to more than one perceptual sense. On the last page of Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, Gass calls for a new kind of language that embodies sensuality well. Though it ends up just being poetry, after all, this language has a signifying power beyond words.

Experimental and expansive—…it will give new glasses to new eyes, and put those plots and patterns down we find our modern lot in…It’s not the languid passing prose we’ve got, we need; but poetry, the human muse, full up, erect and on the charge, impetuous and hot and loud and wild like Messalina going to the stews, or those damn rockets streaming headstrong into stars. (white)

Gass’s ideal language makes new visions possible, and ignites physical energy—the image of “rockets streaming headstrong into stars” recalls the asterisks that did expand “full up” in the olive section.

The language Gass wants to create will expand into the spiritual as well as visual and physical realms. Still, in an embellishment to the written text on the last page, Gass nods to a distinction which, after all, exists between the two realms of words and worlds, literature and life. Though he has tried to create a physical world in his body-book, he advises readers to return to the actual physical world. In the middle of one brown coffee ring on the last page spread, the words appear:

HERE

BE

DRAGONS

as if to say that fiction contains only mythical creatures and other creations whose physical reality is dubious (or syntactically impossible). The words in another ring read:

YOU HAVE

FALLEN

INTO ART

—RETURN TO

LIFE

Now that the book is finished, the reader should return to the physical realm in which the coffee rings were made: the world of coffee and cups and paper pages and errant drips. This world exists as a trace in the coffee rings printed in the book, but it cannot be fully penetrated.

As if to taunt the reader’s wish to return—to life, to physicality, to the text, to the womb—a final coffee ring encircles a belly button. Shall we enter it as if it is “a cunt” to enter “with joy”? Should we long to return to the source of life (a connection that is indexed by the navel—our souvenir of the umbilical cord)? Or is the return to the physical body, pictured in the book, enough? Further, is Gass inviting us into a hall of mirrors, given that the image that represents physicality is, after all, a textual image, since it is printed in the confines of the book? Is this final image an enticement or a scolding?

This last question sums up the ultimate outrageousness of Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife. Gass invites us to read this body-book in a creatively “experimental, expansive” way, yet he also sets us up to fall into the reading habits he finds objectionable, and for which he then berates us for being disrespectful. The relationship between reader and author, or between reader and book, is a pleasure disfigured by mutual usury. In Tristram Shandy, by contrast, the relationship between the reader and the book-body is alchemical—Sterne cannot put together all the parts on his own. He invites collaboration with the reader:

But in this clear climate of fantasy and perspiration, where every idea, sensible and insensible, gets vent——in this land…where I now sit…in full view of my study window——if thou comest not and takest me by the hand——

����������� What a work it is likely to turn out!

����������� Let us begin it. (VIII, i, 1-2/380)

Sterne juxtaposes the mental and physical realms (indicated by “fantasy and perspiration”), but the reader must engage with the author’s text to make connections that Sterne only suggests. The dialectic of the verbal narrative and the physical book only becomes activated in the presence of a dialectic between the author and the reader. And as with alchemy, the results defy prediction. Though Gass’s surprising revelations at the end of Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife could not have been predicted at the beginning of the book, his results have all been predetermined. There is little alchemy in his project, or openendedness. He has masterminded the textual combinations until it feels desiccated by comparison with Sterne’s giddy play. The source of outrageousness in Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife is the bald and challenging ambiguities of the book as body, the narrator as author, the reader as lover. And the unpredictability of this dark mood, after all, rivals Sterne’s darting and swerving journey through the body-book.

[1] The name “Babs” brings to mind both the generically—and demeaningly—familiar “Babe” as well as the “boobs” for which a prostitute is perhaps known. Both of these possibilities indicate that the female character in this book is not a specific person, either; like Phil (whose name could signify a placeholder that needs to be “filled in”) she is a type rather than an individual.

[2] It is curious that Dalkey made the decision to downsize this image, while an advertisement for the book (in a special issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction devoted to William Gass) shows the full original cover as an advertisement for the reissue. The only additional texts are the phrase “Back in print after 15 years” at the top, and the publisher and pricing information at the bottom. Otherwise, the arresting cover image/text speaks for itself. I wonder why it was not allowed to speak at full volume in reprinting as well.

[3] The publishing history of Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife consists of a hardcover and paperback version of the TriQuarterly journal supplement, both of which had colored papers inside. The covers of the two were markedly different, however: the black cloth hardcover reduced the images on both sides, and it also has Italian endpapers inside the covers. The Knopf reprint (1971) has a reduced image on the front only; the pages inside are gray except for those in the white section, which are printed on a glossy white stock. The Dalkey reprint is printed all on glossy white stock; some editions have full cover photos and some reduced.

[4] See also McCaffery, Metafictional 174-75, Holloway 84 (refers to McCaffery “Art” 26-27).

[5] Either Willie’s last name is “Masters,” or the title refers to more than one person named “Willie Master.” Though the latter possibility suggests that the Willie Masters might have lonesome wives (thus making the title syntactically more sensible), Gass wishes us all to consider this particular “wife” we have in common (and which could also be considered our common-law wife): language, or the book.

[6] In this sentence, I am taking this word to mean either the male organs emblematic of sexuality, or the energy that gives one a jolt, as in the colloquialism “That gives me the willies.”

[7] The context of this quotation reveals several layers of dis/connection between language and the body. Gass writes, “When a letter comes, if you will follow me, there is no author fastened to it like the stamp; the words which speak, they are the body of the speaker. It’s just the same with me. These words are all I am.” A communication through language is uttered, as Roland Barthes would have it, in the nonnegotiable present tense: it is connected to the body of the reader (or the speaker projected by the reader) rather than to some distant and past author figure. The “letter” in this passage could be considered in two ways: as a written missive, and as each written character that compose the words in any document. In either case, the “letter” is identified with the voice of the reader who is interacting with the body of the book.

[8] In volume one of the original edition, Sterne is already making plans to add a map “with many other pieces and developments . . . to the end of the twentieth volume” (I, xiii, 77/25). In volume two, the narrator wonders if the second half of a sentence will be written eventually “in the third volume or not” (II, vii, 55/73); the dedication of volume five refers to “the story of Le Fever in the sixth volume.” The many references to other volumes make the reader constantly aware of the physical embodiment of the text.

[9] In citations from Tristram Shandy, I note the volume number, chapter number, and two sets of page numbers: from the original edition and from the Norton Critical Edition (separated by a slash).

[10] The reader’s hands are also part of the relationship between book and body: Sterne/Shandy mentions “these little books, which I put here in thy hands” (IV, xxii, 142/218).

[11] Critic Tony Tanner suggests that the cover photographs highlight the orifices of “nourishment and excrement” (Salamagundi 118, qtd. in McCaffery, Metafictional 277, n32) with which the book is primarily concerned, though I believe that a far more urgent concern of this book is the parallel between textuality and sexuality. If Tanner’s interpretation were accurate, the image on the front cover would show the woman’s mouth. When a woman’s mouth does appear later, on the opening page spread, it is opening in an erotic posture (sensually consuming the letter “S”—stands for “sensuality” or for “sex”?) rather than in a gesture indicating alimentation for nutrition only.

[12] This visible trench is called the “gutter” in printing terminology. (Get your mind out of the gutter, Toby!)

[13] Stephane Mallarme also sexualizes the book structure, but he addresses the uncut edges of a freshly bound book, not the gutters. He writes, “The unopened virginal book. . .ready for a sacrifice from which the red edges of ancient books bleed; the introduction of a weapon, or page cutter, to establish the taking of possession” (19). This metaphor of sexual penetration applies to an earlier era of book production: pages had to cut apart with a knife after they had been printed on large sheets and folded into smaller volumes.

[14] For a full discussion of the marbled page as Walter Shandy’s ejaculation, see my article in the Journal of Artists’ Books.

[15] In the masthead for the Christian Science Monitor in the late 1960s, the first capital in each word is a bit larger than the capitals in the rest of the word, and the tail of the “R” in “CHRISTIAN” drops below the baseline.

[16] Similarly, Philip Stevick notes that Gass’s contributions to a writers’ forum [“A Symposium on Fiction” with Paley, Percy & Barthelme, in Shenandoah] end up “universalizing: it is not simply his own fiction he describes but fiction qua fiction, all fiction” (72).

[17] Ronald Primeau also shortchanges Sterne’s visual digressions by considering them merely a demonstration of the limitations of language.

[18] Sterne played with page numbering and the order of chapters, and oversaw the printing of “wrong” catchwords. “In old books, [a catchword is] a word placed at the bottom of each page, under the last word in the last line, anticipating the first word of the following page. It was supposed to assist the reader as he turned the page” but it also helped the printer to retain proper page sequence (Holden 29). Sterne occasionally left out catchwords altogether, according to his visual arrangements or humor.

[19] “Readers of the works of Samuel Richardson were used to the convention of using asterisks instead of names, presumably in order to preserve anonymity” (Hutcheon 105).

[20] Gass ignores the possibility that film techniques such as quick cuts or surprising shots can jolt the viewer out of somnolence. Still, however, the film acts upon the viewer more than the book does, because its motion attracts attention and thereby makes the viewer seem more like a passive recipient. The precise nature of a viewer’s engagement with a film, compared to a reader’s with a book, deserves its own essay.

[21] Sterne also refers to the asterisks as stars that he “hangs up” to serve as “a couple of lights” in the “darkest passages” of the novel—specifically of his descriptions of sexual exploits (VI, xxxiii, 131-32/325-26).

[22] Sterne’s original is slightly different: he places parentheses around the words “to-morrow morning” and italicizes “Toby’s.”

[23] See text below for a discussion of the connection of the “highway” idea in this novella with Sterne’s use of the highway as a metaphor for a habitual reading process.

 
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