Ong claims that the print culture is comfortable with finality. He says, “Once a letterpress forme is closed, locked up, or a photolithographic plate is made, and the sheet printed, the text does not accommodate changes (erasures, insertions) so readily as do written texts…Print is curiously intolerant of physical incompleteness (Ong, 130).” This is a perfect example of Tristram’s unwillingness to conform to the constructs of typography. Sterne insists again on defying the rules of print by inserting pages that are blank, marbled, or drawn-in. Fanning says about the pages:
In addition to perplexing readers about its meaning within Tristram Shandy, the marbled page is the locus classicus for the problem of identicality and originality with regard to the nature of the print medium, for eighteenth-century marbling never produced the same result twice. Diana Patterson describes this phenomenon: “highly individual results create truly unique ‘copies’ of Volume 3 of Sterne’s novel. No two readers could have precisely the same experience of reading Volume 3 because of that leaf, and no reader without a leaf could have had a proper experience of the novel (Fanning, 391).
Sterne recognized that, though he was attempting to write an original novel, the experience of the audience could not be unique without ambiguity.
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