Homunculus Economicus : Laurence Sterne's Labour Theory of Literary Value

Abstract

Homunculus Economicus:Laurence Sterne’s Labour Theory of Literary Value Scott R. MacKenzie (bio) In this essay I do not propose to analyze Laurence Sterne's novel; I intend to use it merely as an illustration of the general laws of novelistic form.—Viktor Shklovsky1 Adam Smith may be the person most responsible for the belatedness of investigations into the commercial features of the eighteenth-century novel. Certainly such investigations now abound, but they multiply in spaces created by long inhibition. Until the publication of The Wealth of Nations in 1776, English men and women of letters understood their sphere of activity, at least in part, as a marketplace,2 but Smith's assertion that the work of "men of letters of all kinds" is unproductive labour seems to prepare the way for Romanticism and its vehement segregation of literary from commercial value. Unproductive labour, according to Smith, "produces nothing which could afterwards purchase or procure an equal quantity of labour"; it "perishes in the very instant of its production."3 Productive labour [End Page 49] "adds to the value of the subject upon which it is bestowed"; unproductive labour adds nothing, and indeed destroys value: "A man grows rich by employing a multitude of manufacturers: he grows poor, by maintaining a multitude of menial servants."4 Walter Scott decried Smith's thesis fifty years later, asserting that "a successful author is a productive labourer, and that his works constitute as effectual a part of the public wealth, as that which is created by any other manufacture,"5 but only recently has literary studies found its way back to the marketplace of early and mid-eighteenth-century letters. What is more, most studies of the relationship between fiction and commerce in the period have worked by means of homology; they find commerce in altered forms, as ethical, characterological, erotic, and evaluative problems.6 Commerce has, in other words, remained a largely figural presence, history as textual unconscious. I hope here to sketch a more instrumental account of the commercial impulse in fiction. In Laurence Sterne's knotty masterwork, Tristram Shandy, I will identify a direct yoking of narrative technique to the creation of commodity value. I will argue that part of Tristram Shandy's prodigy is its often ambivalent attention to commodification, its experimental and satirical stab at turning the author's labour into commercial value and signifying that value within the text itself. Given Sterne's entrepreneurial spirit, Tristram Shandy's famed reflexivity ought to include substantial reflection upon the circumstances of the literary marketplace.7 Thomas Keymer argues persuasively that it does. His analysis details the initial serial publication of Tristram Shandy over the course of seven years and highlights interpretive issues raised or settled by its mode of publication. Sterne's novel, Keymer writes, "not only anticipates the innovative cost-effectiveness of Victorian serial fiction (its capacity to recirculate a publisher's cashflow, so that sale of each succeeding part would finance production of the next); even the imaginative content of the text arises from the [End Page 50] income from earlier parts."8 A particularly important example of the conversion of income to narrative, for Keymer, is Sterne's visit to France in 1763, which resulted in volume 7, wherein Tristram gallops all over France until he has "left Death, the lord knows—and He only—how far behind."9 Keymer rightly identifies the tour in volume 7 as an example of the thoroughly novelistic art of converting financial capital into cultural capital and back again.10 In this article, I will extend that kind of analysis beyond what we might call the historical necessities of the narrative—the plain fact that Tristram Shandy sold well—to the traces of commodity logic in the narrative. Sterne explains his creative process not simply in terms of reinvestment of his profits, but in terms of labour congealed in an object. I will not suggest here that the commercial success of Tristram Shandy was a necessary result of its form or structure, nor will I suggest that Sterne perfected the literary version of fully capitalized labour. No enterprise is guaranteed success simply because of its formal attributes, and...