Dr. Samuel Johnson once claimed that “nothing odd can last.” As an example, he cited Laurence Sterne’s novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, which had temporarily fallen from favor. Over two centuries later, that same novel may well be one of the best examples of something odd lasting amazingly well.
While even contemporary readers are often confused or at least surprised by the often-digressive narrative technique used by Sterne in his masterpiece, Tristram Shandy continues to find an audience. Furthermore, unlike the works of his major near-contemporaries—Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding—Sterne’s novel is, on the surface at least, not an obvious product of its time. This does not necessarily mean that the novel is ahead of its time, despite the playful technique that may remind readers of modernist and post-modernist experimentation in its lack of a traditional beginning, middle section, or conclusion. It is perhaps more accurate to say that Tristram Shandy is in its own time, particularly as time is one of the novel’s most important aspects.
Sterne vowed to continue writing the novel until his death and produced volumes one to nine from 1760 until 1767. He filled his rendition of a life with multiple digressions and authorial interference, producing a remarkably personal account of a protagonist that mirrors much of his own life and ideas. Highly influenced by the satire of Jonathan Swift in works such as Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Sterne modeled his tale to gain momentum from its themes, rather than its plot.
While a proponent of sentimentalism, Sterne tempered his sentiment with a sharp wit and a keen sense of humor. He peppered his volumes with characters representative of both his enemies and his friends, with Parson Yorick closely resembling himself—a resemblance he would perpetuate by inserting one of his own sermons into Yorick’s mouth and by publicly referring to himself as Yorick and his home as “Shandy Hall.”
In the more optimistic early volumes, Tristram supposedly relates his “life and opinions” to his reader, yet he gives the reader nothing resembling a life history as he waits in the womb for his birth. Indeed, readers learn more about several of the other characters than about Tristram. Walter Shandy, Tristram’s father, is a would-be scientist in constant conflict with his wife. Tristram’s Uncle Toby was a soldier, wounded in the groin, whose hobbyhorse is to re-create battle scenes assisted by his friend Corporal Trim.
The corporal spends volume five producing a running commentary on morality, his own hobbyhorse. Sterne suggests that such hobbyhorses stifle true communication, as the speakers become so immersed in their own passions that they end all successful verbal communication with those around them. However, they do remain united by sentimentality, or love. Those characters reflect some aspects of the failed military career of Sterne’s father and his unwise marriage to the widow of a captain, possibly because he owed her father money. After his father’s death from malaria, Sterne lived with a disinherited uncle who resembled Uncle Toby.
It is not until the third volume that Tristram is born, his nose crushed by the appropriately named Dr. Slop (an incident that, somewhat surprisingly, is not a major part of the novel), who makes clear his hobbyhorse is Catholic doctrine. Walter Shandy feels responsible for the baby’s injury, blaming it on his habit of winding his clock on the first day of each month—one of multiple references to time. Tristram continues after his birth to stretch time. In volume four, he announces: “I am this month one whole year older than I was this time twelve-month; and having got, as you perceive, almost into the middle of my fourth volume—and no farther than my first day’s life—. . .”
As many critics have pointed out, Sterne comments on the digressive and discursive manner of the act of writing as he engages in that act. Demonstrating the arbitrary nature of plotting, Yorick reappears in the novel following his supposed death, and Sterne’s next novel, A Sentimental Journey (1768), would have Yorick participating in travels to France and Italy, although he had already died. Various pages contain wiggly lines, brackets, asterisks, Gothic printing, and other freakish insertions, with much of the punctuation including dashes and an occasional set of dots. Chapter lengths vary greatly, and some appear out of order.
Readers eventually follow Tristram as he attempts to closely examine short, isolated, and unconnected moments in his life, and in this way attempts to stop time, only to find in the end that time outside the page has continued and (as with Sterne) his death will soon come. The disconnections in Tristram’s narrative emphasize the difficulty in telling anyone’s life, due to the labyrinthine nature of human existence.
Sterne did not publish volumes seven and eight until 1765, while the ninth and final volume did not appear until 1767. Much of this writing reflects the influence of Sterne’s travels in his later years, as well as a feeling of melancholy brought on by his failing health. For example, in volume seven, Tristram finally faces the passing of time by moving away from the moment of birth and writing of the current time—when he is facing death. Tristram promises to write until the end of his days, and Sterne did exactly that.
When Tristram had described the death of Yorick (supposedly a descendant of Shakespeare’s Yorick and, like Sterne, a parson) as a sort of tribute to the character, he presented readers with a black page. His own death will not be represented by a black page but by a lack of pages.
Sterne’s digressions and colloquialisms are influenced by his favorite authors: Rabelais, Cervantes, and Robert Burton. He also borrowed from, and ridiculed, ideas contained in John Locke’s famous An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Locke theorized that multiple ideas or impressions that occur at the same time in an individual’s mind would forever remain associated for that individual. According to critic Lionel Stevenson, Tristram Shandy, on the one hand, seems to agree with Locke’s theory, demonstrating that “the workings of every individual brain are controlled by a different pattern of irrelevant associations and personal quirks.” However, Locke believed his “associative theory” to be an important move toward human communication, while Sterne makes clear that such association of ideas in the individual mind will prevent that communication.
In volume eight, Tristram again attempts to prolong time: he now goes back to the time before his birth. It is in this chapter that we are told of the “amours” of his eccentric Uncle Toby, perhaps Sterne’s greatest comic creation. But as he acknowledges in the final volume, every “adieu” and “every absence which follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are shortly to make.”
The novel ends in a fairly unambiguous fashion. Having again gone back in time, Sterne gives Parson Yorick, now alive, the novel’s appropriate final words. When asked by Tristram’s mother, “what is all this story about?” he replies, “A cock and a bull, . . .”—And one of the best I ever heard.”
While no one can say whether Sterne might have added further volumes to Tristram Shandy had time allowed, it is difficult to imagine a more appropriate ending. Tristram’s tales may indeed be a lot of “cock and bull,” yet through all of the strangeness, through all of the tall tales, few stories have lasted any better than Tristram Shandy.
Bibliography
Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Interpretations: Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.
Stevenson, Lionel. The English Novel: A Panorama. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960.
Watt, Ian. Introduction to Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965, vii–xxxv.
Categories: British Literature, Experimental Novels, Literature, Novel Analysis
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