LAURENCE STERNE (1713-68)

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

NOVEL WITHOUT A PATTERN

defies all classifications:

inaugurates - ANTI-NOVEL in English fiction - satirizes techniques, rules, and

mechanical approaches to writing
COMIC
PHILOSOPHICAL/ PSYCHOLOGICAL
QUIXOTIC
SENTIMENTAL

anatomy - a form of prose fiction . . . characterized by a great variety of subjectmatter (and forms, and styles) and a strong interest in ideas

modern examples - Moby-Dick, Ulysses, Gravitys Rainbow (Northrop Frye - Anatomy

of Criticism: Four Essays Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957)
COMIC

delicacy of humour

Tristram:

misbegotten at conception;

damaged at birth (nose crushed with forceps)

mutilated in childhood

Laughs. Cumulated: tragic vision: life difficult and winding path, death
awaits.

PSYCHOLOGICAL/
PHILOSOPHICAL NOVEL

John Locke: Essay Concerning Human Understanding

"Of who? what? where? when?" "It is a history-book, Sir,. . .of what passes in a man's
own mind"

RELATIVITY OF TIME:

objective, exterior time & subjective, interior time

Obadiah's fetching Dr. Slop:

(III, 8): it is 2 hours and 19 minutes, and no more, cried UT, looking at his watch,
since Dr Slop and Obadiah arrived, and I know not how it happens, brother Toby, but
to my imagination it seems almost an age

(II, 8): if the hypercritic will go upon this, and is resolved after all to take a
pendulum, and measure the true distance between the ringing of the bell and the rap
at the door, and after finding it to be no more than 2 minutes, 13 sec. And 3 fifths,
should take upon him to insult over me for such a breach in the unity or rather the
probability of time; I would remind him that the idea of duration is got merely from
the train and succession of our ideas

Fleeting human moods, vagaries of mental processes - FAILURE TO

COMMUNICATE WITH OTHERS

Dr Slop makes a bridge to repair Ts nose (III, 26)

Walter refers to Socrates 3 children, (V 13,15)

Obadiah tells Susannah that Bobby has died (V, 17)

ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS: SPONTANEOUS and HAPHAZARD activity

of the mind

disordered pattern of the novel: follows vagaries of authors own mind

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS: renders thoughts of T as they

spontaneously come to his mind (VII, 17). Anticipates 20th c psychological novel:
Woolf, Joyce

PROCESSES OF THE MIND: depicts vagaries of human mind, confusions of

speech, misunderstandings, outwardly incomprehensible changes and break-offs of
conversation

Ts conception; Ts christening (Trismegistus > Tristram)

QUIXOTIC

confrontation ILLUSION-REALITY: complex gallery of eccentric Quixotes: Walter,

UT, T, Yorick: naivety and impracticality of scholars

e.g. Walter Shandy: impractical theorist: understanding of reality

distorted by inclination to philosophy

HOMUNCULUS (I,2)

NOSES (III, 38)

NAMES (I, 19)

FIELDING - History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749) - archetype of the

"well-made novel" - presents the "life and adventures" of its hero; everything
happens in an orderly, progressive way. The hero appears as an infant in the
3rd chapter, and the major part of the book deals with his adventures as a
young man.

no such orderliness in Tristram Shandy: - born a third of the way through the
book, and the last 45 chapters of the book deal with events that took place five
years before his birth

Misleading TITLE: text purports to set out the "autobiography" of

Tristram Shandy, however, the birth of the hero does not finally occur until
volume iv and he is not breeched until volume vi

the novel largely concerns itself with events and personages from before the
author's birth

tells the end of a story first, then the beginning, and then the middle

manipulates the years and the event

places, displaces, and replaces the people of his family (including himself) as
he likes

their stories give way for his OPINIONS

INDIVIDUALS and EVENTS, moves in direct response to the

CONTROLLING CONSCIOUSNESS of the author

Tristram views his life through the medium of his opinions, and his opinions control
the presentation of his reminiscences

META-NOVEL: reflections on the nature of the BOOK

discusses authorial difficulties

novel about writing a novel (Tristrapaedia, echoing Xenophons Cyropaedia)

authors comments on plot & characters: WRITING & MAKING

CONVERSATION ARE SYNONYMOUS

Writing when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a
different name for conversation II, 11

WHAT the story is about ?

HOW it is told.

PERFORMATIVE NARRATIVE

not so much a story but an extended act of and meditation on story-telling

critique of the book as a material object

a cross - when Dr. Slop crosses himself

a black page "mourns" the death of Yorick

squiggly graphs indicate the progress of the narrative line

drawings, asterisks, lines, crazy diagrams, dashes, unconventional punctuation

blank pages

mis-placed chapters

All my heroes are off my hands; -tis the first time I have had a moment to spare, - and Ill
make use of it, and write my Preface.
THE AUTHORS PREFACE.
No. Ill not say a word about it here it is in publishing it I have appealed to the world
and to the world I leave it it must speak for itself.

PLOT

Nonlinear narrative

No plot, no conflict

lack of apparent design and of homogeneity

Epictetus motto- Not the deeds but the teachings of deeds are what concern man

Writing a coherent plot

configuration of memorable characters who continuously assert their memorable

opinions

Incidents not methodically organised or chronologically ordered: bewildering

digressions & interruptions & postponement

UTs speech interrupted in I, 21, to be continued after 20 pages in II, 4

Father & UT start to descend stairs in IV, 9 and finish action in IV, 13

Mother passes by open door of parlour, hears word wife (UT) and remains to
eavesdrop: holds breath, bends head, uncomfortable position, remains suspended for a
long period (V, 5)

Dislocations of time, Shifts back and forth in time

semantic experiments (puns, ambiguities, compound and foreign words)

unexpected points of view

shifts from one mode to another & from one language to another

stories within stories

CIRCULARITY: DIGRESSION & PROGRESSION

lack of pattern: beginning & end suspended === CIRCULAR STRUCTURE:

reader can enter book at any chapter he chooses: linear reading suspended

wants to begin heros life ab ovo, goes beyond birth to moment of conception: only
apparently begins the book: makes fun of the "begin from the beginning" novel - gives
details not of his birth But of his very conception

denounces his own method a few pages later: for in writing what I have set about, I
shall confine myself neither to his rules, nor to any mans rules that ever lived

PLAYFUL CONSCIOUS SELF-CONTRADICTION

central astronomical metaphor: CIRCULAR MOVEMENT = BASIC

COMPOSITIONAL STRATEGY in Tristram Shandy

Chapters 14 & 22 of Book I: digressive technique

When a man sits down to write a history he knows no more than his heels what
lets and confounded hindrances he is to meet with in his way if he is a man of the
least spirit, he will have 50 deviations from a straight line to make with this or that
party as he goes along, which he can no ways avoid. (Ch. 14)

for in this long digression which I was accidentally led into, as in all my digressions there is
a masterstroke of digressive skill, the merit of which has all along been overlooked by my
reader, not for want of penetration in him but because tis an excellence seldom looked for,
or expected indeed, in a digression; - and I is this: that though my digressions are all fair, as
you observe and that I fly off from what I am about, as far and as often too as any writer in
Great Britain; yet I constantly take care to order affairs so that my business does not stand
still in my absence.
I was just going, for example, to have given you the great outlines of my uncle Tobys most
whimsical character; when my aunt Dinah and the coachman came across us and led us a
vagary some millions of miles into the very heart of the planetary system. Notwithstanding all
this you perceive that the drawing of my uncle Tobys character went on gently all the time;
not the great contours of it that was impossible but some familiar strokes and faint
designations of it were here and there touched in as we went along so that you are much
better acquainted with my uncle Toby now than you were before.
By this contrivance the machinery of my work is a species by itself: 2 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.
This sir is a very different story from that of the earths moving round her axis, in her
diurnal rotation, with her progress in her elliptical orbit which brings about the year, and
constitutes the variety and vicissitude of seasons we enjoy (though I believe the greatest of
our boasted improvements and discoveries have come from such trifling hints.
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. One
cold eternal winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the winter --- brings in
variety, forbids the appetite to fail
[] I have constructed the main work and the adventitious parts of it with such intersections,
and have so complicated and involved the digressive and progressive moments, one wheel
within the other, that the whole machine, in general, has been kept agoing. And whats
more, it shall be kept agoing these forty years, if it pleases the fountain of health to bless
me so long with life and good spirits. (Ch. 22)

READER

publicly oriented narrator

plays all kinds of games with the narrator-narratee relationship he sometimes

personifies his reader as a Lady or a Gentleman whom he interrogates, teases,
criticizes and flatters, asks to make conjectures

narrators efforts to make his personal experiences effectively public

My good people, readers, Madam, Sir, My dear girl, Your worships and
Reverences

"How could you, Madam, be so inattentive in reading the last chapter? I told you in it,
That my mother was not a papist. - Papist! You told me no such thing, Sir. Madam, I
beg leave to repeat it over again, That I told you as plain, at least as words, by direct
inference, could tell you such a thing. - Then, Sir, I must have miss'd a page. - No,
Madam, - you have not missed a word. - Then I was asleep, Sir. - My pride, Madam,
cannot allow you that refuge. - Then, I declare, I know nothing at all about the matter.
- That, Madam, is the very fault I lay to your charge; and as a punishment for it, I do
insist upon it, that you immediately turn back, that is, as soon as you get to the next
full stop, and read the whole chapter over again."

Flickering ontologies Brian McHale

overlap: AUTHOR, NARRATOR, MAIN CHARACTER

presence of the author no longer unique, reliable, multiplied in a POSTMODERNIST fashion

STRUCTURE OF THE NOVEL?

work organised in terms of LOCKES doctrine of ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS: this

principle manifests itself in the behaviour of the characters

ORDER IN DISORDER - curious feeling for ORDER - accompanied by a delight

in confusion - twisted pattern - complicated description of how Obadiah tied up Dr
Slops bag of instruments (III, 8)

prolepsis & analepsis

SIGNIFICANCE of DETAIL, MEANING EMBODIED IN THE PATTERN

HOBBY-HORSE

THEORY OF CHARACTERISATION - characters ruling passion theory of

humours

If people had windows in their breast, we could tell at a glance what someone was
like. But they don't, and we are liable to make many mistakes about their character. To
avoid these errors, Tristram says, "I will draw my uncle Toby's character from his
HOBBY-HORSE."