The Motley Emblem follows one scholar’s efforts to recreate the 169th and 170th pages of the third volume of Laurence Sterne’s 1760 novel, Tristram Shandy . This is the famous “marbled leaf,” which Sterne describes as “the motley emblem of my work”: a double-sided leaf of marbled paper, each one unique. It the page most his own, in the sense that it stands as a figure or emblem for the rest of his idiosyncratic novel. But it is also the page that is least his own, for marbling was not a craft Sterne hims
WHY THIS MATTERS
The Motley Emblem puts Sterne’s marbled page in context. A context means a weaving; the motley emblem is a knot in a web. And that context starts, but does not end, with the text, Sterne’s 1760 novel Tristram Shandy . Writes that novel’s narrator: