Italo Calvo was right, of course. Sterne is not simply a member of the Scriblerian approach of Learned Wit, but the “undoubted progenitor”and archetype of the avant-garde novel. By reputation, the avant-garde is seen as radical experimentation, or by its fiercest critics, a form of posturing self-indulgence. But at its root, there may be something more modest, a distillation of the very nature of humility, “to let people tell their stories their own way.”