On figurative paper, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is up my alley. Ostensibly a Bildungsroman, Sterne inverts the tropes of a story which dictate that the author detail the main character’s life from childhood to marriage or death (what other options are there for a novelist, anyway?). Sterne instead begins the story of Tristram Shandy’s life before his birth, with a preface appearing on page 153 [cf. my semi-recent review of The Pale King by David Foster Wallace] and with Tristram Shandy being born somewhere around page 230. The nonlinearity of the narrative has all the marks of a postmodern tale, despite being written in the 1700s, and I should like it.
On literal paper, though, I cannot get past Sterne’s narrational style. The work is divided into nine books and further sub-divided into chapters on a range of inane topics that lift or plagiarize from Sterne’s similarly grotesque referents: Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel and Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. Methinks there is something of The Arabian Nights and The Decameron in the mix as well, though I would say it’s not nearly as successful. In The Arabian Nights and The Decameron, there are more thoroughly established plot threads and, while digressive, they (generally) ultimately return to the central plot. Sterne, however, revels in the digressions—at first, it’s funny in its excess, but there’s never any payoff that justifies it. In that regard, Tristram Shandy is master of the anti-joke.
Late in the text, Sterne illustrates the spirals and digressive turns of his plot explicitly, but I think it’s much more clever when Tristram Shandy includes a tangent about Copernicus early in the text. Sterne writes, “By this contrivance the machinery of my work is of a species by itself; two contrary motions are introduced into it, and reconciled, which were thought to be at variance with each other. In a word, my work is digressive, and it is progressive too, —and at the same time” (58). Outlining this approach to literature first, Sterne then illustrates it by going into a discussion of earth’s motion: two contrary motions—literature and astronomy—reconciled: “This, Sir, is a very different story from that of the earth’s moving round her axis, in her diurnal rotation, with her progress in her elliptick orbit which brings about the year, and constitutes that variety and vicissitude of seasons we enjoy” (58). Sterne then justifies his work: “Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; —-they are the life, the soul of reading; —take them out of this book for instance, — you might as well take the book along with them” (58). In my mind, that passage is the most successful of Sterne’s style. The parallels between literary digressions and the retrograde motion of Earth are well-established and justify their inclusion in the work. For Sterne, the digressions are the point.
Once in a while, the digressions are, in fact, funny. There’s a section in which Sterne offers a vague dedication and then solicits its purchase to whomever might pay. It’s an amusing concept to have a blank dedication, particularly since Sterne is emerging from a literary tradition in which seeking courtly approval was the only way to justify writing as a noble profession. Here, it seems wilfully obtuse, even to the extent of breaking down the price into its separate components: you pay 20 guineas for style, 14 for its content, and so on—and for that low low price you can pretend that you’re the person to whom the work is dedicated.
This notion of projection is also critical to the work. Sterne satirizes the relationship between the author and reader. On one page, an unpredictable design emerges as a result of the printing process and Sterne essentially tells the reader to interpret it like a Rorschach test. In navigating the licentiousness of the work, Sterne leaves asterisks to censor the more explicit details. In one section, he leaves two pages blank: the audience can only imagine the scandals that transpire—that is, until Sterne offers up the official record a few chapters later. Sterne leads his audience on that risqué line throughout the text; in one lengthy digression about nose sizes, it’s pretty clearly a substitution for penises, but he pretends to correct the audience’s dirty minds throughout. It’s a little funny, but also goes on for what feels like 100 pages, so it gets tiresome.
I’ve already referred to some of the literary influences Sterne draws from (though I omitted Don Quixote, which is actually a wonderful book). I also picked up on a number of Shakespearean references, and in particular Tristram Shandy is peppered with phrases from Hamlet. As such, I can’t help but feel that Sterne’s novel is narrated entirely by the long-winded Polonius. Sterne’s lengthy and circular sentences are reminiscent of Polonius trying to define madness and being interrupted by Gertrude, who says, “More matter with less art.” That remark summarizes my attitude towards this novel.
I can’t blame Sterne for this in particular, but since his novel jumps around so too shall my review. If Sterne gets a chapter on buttonholes and a chapter on lines, I offer here a chapter on footnotes. I am curious how certain footnotes come to be, particularly allusive ones. For instance, various items are glossed as references to notable people of Sterne’s time. A horse is named Patriot, which is glossed to Lord Whoever the Third—but the footnote never explains how that reference was deduced. Elucidate! Other times, the footnotes gloss words that are obvious while other times they gloss challenging items with equally challenging synonyms. I’m also curious how and when people identified the allusions. Were Sterne’s contemporaries familiar enough with Burton to know he was lifting passages from The Anatomy of Melancholy? Or do we just have the benefit of time to track down these allusions? I think the answer to that question is significant for the reception of Sterne’s work.
While I have to commend its influence on postmodern literature and media, I got almost nothing out of Sterne’s novel either intellectually or emotionally (or does rage count?). To me, the novel is entirely bound up in its conceptual project. What is interesting to me is where Sterne’s literary thread gets picked up. I think you could make the argument that Marcel Proust borrows something from Sterne, though where Proust is in search of lost time, Sterne is in the process of actively wasting it. Both projects are, in some ways, a series of reflections but where Proust has his madeleine, Sterne has Tristram Shandy’s Uncle Toby’s groin injury. It’s an unlikely juxtaposition, but you might trace a through-line from Sterne to Seinfeld, as well. Famously a “show about nothing,” Seinfeld borrows something from Tristram Shandy’s generative digressions.
While I have almost nothing to say about this book, I nonetheless feel compelled towards a digression of my own. In my first year, I had a TA that I quite liked and in my third year she had become a part-time professor for a Restoration Literature course. She loved Restoration Literature, and she was a wonderful instructor, but to this day I can’t understand its appeal. Perhaps it’s because so much of Restoration Literature is rooted in satire — Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, etc. —- but the humour just doesn’t land. Humour changes over time. The audience’s frame of reference changes. What counts as pushing the boundaries changes (sure, Sterne can offer a nose-penis joke, but there are way more explicit dick-jokes now that deflate the titillating risqué nature of a 17th century work). We might still appreciate the craftsmanship of a joke: set-up and punchline, tonal delivery, etc., but the content no longer seems to connect. In turn, we can appreciate the joke from a theoretical standpoint, but not from the heart. Many people have theorized why tragedy occupies a more privileged standpoint in the hierarchy of the arts, and I think what it comes down to is this: sad things stay sad; humour changes much more rapidly. The world moves on, but the words on the page stay static. To borrow from Sterne’s metaphor about Copernicus, our orbit drifts away and our relative position to the humour becomes so vast that it’s not worth looking across space and time.
I must say, I’m quite disappointed that (likely) my last read for the summer felt like such a time suck. Luckily, there are a number of people I know and respect that love this book, so hopefully they’ll be able to explain its appeal and why I’m such a dope for getting nothing from Tristram Shandy—but good luck getting me to re-read it.
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