The life and opinions of tristram shandy gentleman

Notes on the Critical History of
THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF TRISTRAM SHANDY, GENTLEMAN
Laurence Sterne
A paper by
Carol Fox

 

To begin with, I will admit that my first reading of Tristram Shandy (after decades of being aware of its existence and intending to read it) was a frustrating and somewhat irritating experience.  I agreed with critic A.A. Mendilow that “on a cursory reading…Tristram Shandy gives the impression of being haphazardly constructed.”  I was somewhat  mollified by the comments of a writer for the Guardian book club, who confessed that after  initially struggling with the book  he finally “got it” when he realized that  “It isn't a novel. It has no plot. Chapters break off in mid-sentence because, advises the narrator, ‘… the best plain narrative in the world, tacked very close to the last spirited apostrophe to my Uncle Toby, would have felt both cold and vapid upon the reader's palate; therefore I forthwith put an end to the chapter, though I was in the middle of my story.’ And which story might that have been? …[Any one of Sterne’s episodes!] Enough. If you've ever sat spellbound listening to a witty, satirical, outrageous, digressive raconteur regaling you with endless stories about preposterous characters that lead nowhere but keep you hanging on every word, trust me --they learned their craft from Sterne.”

Sterne composed The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman over a period of more than seven years, publishing the nine volumes in six installments between 1760 and 1767—volumes I and II in 1760; volumes III-IV in early 1761, and V-VI later the same year; then volumes VII-VIII in 1765, VII-VIII in 1766, and volume IX in 1767.   The 2006 “Casebook” on the novel edited by Prof. Thomas Keymer notes that “[d]ebate still surrounds the question” of whether volume IX presents a “genuine conclusion” to the work or rather only “terminal interruption” by Sterne’s death in March of 1768.  Likewise, “to what extent the work as a whole was composed according to a preconceived plan” is a matter of continuing critical discussion.  Scholars have painstakingly traced connections between dates of events mentioned at various spots, and found that such details are almost flawlessly drawn; yet at the same time, improvisation is apparent when Sterne incorporates into later volumes material that had not occurred and “could not have been predicted” earlier in the writing process.  How, then does this work relate to the genre of “novel” as it was being practiced in Sterne’s time and as it has developed since? 

The action covered in Tristram Shandy spans the years 1680-1766.  But Sterne obscures the story's underlying chronology by rearranging the order of the various pieces of his tale. He also subordinates the basic plot framework by weaving together a number of different stories [including Tristram’s  conception, birth, naming, and accidental circumcision; Uncle Toby’s military-strategy hobby-horse; and the adult Tristram’s trip through France] as well as such disparate materials as essays, sermons, and legal documents.

Interest in Sterne and criticism of his work was high during its publication, and continued with varying degrees of approval through the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In 1776, less than ten years after the last installment came out, Samuel Johnson noted that “[n]othing odd will do long…. Tristram Shandy did not last.”  Clearly the second part of Johnson’s assertion was mistaken, since here we are focusing on Tristram centuries later.   Thackeray “despised” Sterne’s  work; Coleridge, though “mildly disapproving,”  perceptively analyzed the complexity of Tristram’s point of view.  In its function as literary autobiography Tristram Shandy seems to have influenced such nineteenth-century authors as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and DeQuincey—and Byron explicitly called his Don Juan “a poetical T Shandy.”

Critical consensus summarized in 2006  casebook  includes the underlying agreement that  “the protean character of Tristram Shandy goes beyond the richness of meaning and openness to interpretation that are central to our idea of any classic” If this is a fair assessment, what entries give us best access to this richness?

As noted above, the work attracted a lot of attention in its time and through the following century.  Some contemporary critics responded negatively (complaining that it presented “no meaning at all” and was “a riddle without an object” ), but the reading public expressed enough interest to make Sterne an international celebrity in his time, and to make his book “the pocket-companion of the nation.” Sterne took advantage of this celebrity and the spaced-out pattern of publication to include his own reactions to his critics and to current events in the calculation of subsequent volumes.  These factors figure into one assessment of the overall work as topical satire, offering criticism of contemporary literature, science, politics, and religion.   Sterne himself pitched the work to publishers as a sort of universal satire, “taking in…every Thing…which I find Laugh-at-able in my way.”

But the real explosion of critical interest in Tristram Shandy came with the twentieth century’s increased focus on psychological content over plot arrangement in development of the modern novel.  James Joyce and Virginia Woolf found in Sterne’s work innovative literary practices which influenced their creations, and recent critics have discerned the “reach” of “Sterne’s dazzling repertoire of metafictional devices” in the works of later novelists such as Carlos Fuentes, Milan Kundera, and Salman Rushdie.  Various scholars have approached analysis of Sterne’s work “through its narrative reflexiveness, its learned wit  satire, or its invocations of Lockean philosophy, Christian theology, sentimental ethics, or current affairs.”  Nietzsche wrote that Sterne’s technique established him as “the great master of ambiguity” and “the most liberated spirit of all time.”

Scholars in the first half of the 20th century worked on Tristram’s relevance to their interest in reader-response theory (the concept that every reading of a work creates a new entity, by combination of the text with the reader’s reaction to it) and in the importance of psychological time.  Where more typical 18th- and 19th-century novels relied on linear plot development (with flashbacks and other time-shift devices clearly indicating their “points of departure and return” ), in Tristram Shandy “digressions are not properly digressions, for there is no forward-moving architectonic plot from which to digress.” 

In 1941, Benjamin H. Lehman wrote in  Of Time, Personality, and the Author: “To see what Sterne’s achievement really was, is I believe only in these last years possible, in a mind made aware by The Magic Mountain, Ulysses, and The Remembrance of Things Past. In its author’s time and for long after, Tristram Shandy seemed only a most singular work, engaging and diverting, the beneficiary of a quality largely called style, bawdy and touching by turns, the bizarre emanation of irregular genius. … [Rather, it is a] precocious work of art with an ascertainable specific gravity, qualities of its own, understood in terms of the implied first principles of its imagined cosmos.”  The book is, Lehman asserts, “serious throughout.”  Although it is comedy, its laughter is philosophic laughter, where philosophy is “considered as the wisdom of acceptance after recognition, … --the mental climate of an imagination served by a true eye and deeply imbued with a reverence for reality….”  This is laughter meant to “prick” the “iridescent bubble of human vanities,” and thus to revive “the ironic, the dreadful function of the jester in Elizabethan tragedy”—a post which Sterne himself notes had “for near two centuries…been totally abolished….”

Lehman also, as his title suggests, discusses the time element in Tristram Shandy,  focusing on the slightness of chronological time compared to the importance of psychological time in the work [as perhaps in life].  Lehman asserts that Tristram is “at once a fragment and a whole.  Like nature, [it] does not begin anywhere or end anywhere….Where it began and ended and by what connections it got from one point to the other was a relative matter, depending on who viewed it and where he stood….”

With those selected insights, let us bring our own perspectives to bear on this substantial book, and see how our collective inputs and perspectives enlighten the responses we make to it.

 

Selected sources

Laurence Sterne: A Collection of Critical Essays (Twentieth Century Views) edited by John Traugott. Prentice Hall, 1968.

Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: A Casebook, edited by Thomas Keymer, Oxford University Press, 2006.

 

Discussion Questions
[with credit to internet sources]:

Does haphazardness or authorial design predominate in Tristram Shandy?  [Is the author in control of his digressions, or does the story actually run away from him?]

 

Tristram suffers a series of early accidents that might be fairly trivial by any standard except his father’s.  To what extent do Walter Shandy’s theoretical obsessions contribute to his son’s misfortunes?

What is the effect of Tristram’s frequent direct addresses to his audience? Do we sense a relationship between the narrator and the author?

 

How does the seventh volume (travels through Europe) relate to the rest of the book?  Could it have been omitted?

Do you think Sterne intended to end the novel with the ninth volume?  Why or why not?