FEW FICTIONAL BIRTHS HAVE BEEN SO OVERWRITTEN, so meticulously historicized as Tristram Shandy's. The event is overprepared, that much is certain, and the digressions and dislocations through which Sterne presents Tristram's conception and delivery could stand as exemplary of all the other narratives which comprise the novel. If, as Shklovsky argued, Tristram Shandy is the most typical novel in world literature, such narratives as Sterne's representation of the midwife, which seems both incidental and crucial, which can never finally be told but which must be told, may provide the most typical narrative in novelistic literature.' As an effect of discourse, the figure of the midwife in Tristram Shandy represents, among other things, a nexus of crucial positions in the early-modern debates about obstetric authority in general and licencing in particular, debates which clearly indicate a strong and persistent male fear of what these women might get up to if left to manage childbirth on their own. If Sterne's literary project in the novel can be seen as in some sense a materialist critique of novelistic conventions with respect to the anxious narratives of male history, then the re-situating of characters in relation to their sociocultural circumstances is likely to involve some demystification of ideal origins in favor of an historical analysis of writing and of birth that will problematize the novelistic construction of character. It is thus not surprising that contemporary discourses on midwifery and obstetrics should prove one of the crucial discursive matrices from which this new, demystificatory novel has been written. Amidst its radical subversions of textual conventions, we shall suggest, Tristram Shandy not only satirizes Locke's influential theory of knowledge,2 but does