Reading Laurence Sterne’s 18th-century novel Tristram Shandy (more properly The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman) is an experience like no other. You open it up expecting it to be what it purports to be: a Bildungsroman along the lines of, say, David Copperfield, or its close contemporary, Fielding’s History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. What you get instead is something completely unprecedented, which appears to be at least two hundred years ahead of its time, with its use of non-linear narrative, intertextuality, self-referentiality, and an unreliable narrator. The book, published in nine volumes between 1759 and 1767, was popular in its time, especially with readers in London, but some important men of letters were not amused. Samuel Johnson, for instance, wrote in 1776 with amazing lack of foresight that “Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.” And Sterne’s fellow English novelist Samuel Richardson wrote that he could only describe Sterne’s volumes as “execrable.” At the same time, though, George Washington was apparently an admirer of the novel, as was Karl Marx, and Goethe wrote admiringly of Sterne in his Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years. In Victorian England, Sterne was disparaged for his “obscenity” and for his alleged plagiarism of numerous well-known authors, but in the twentieth century the novel’s reputation enjoyed a significant comeback. Philosophers in particular have been interested in Tristram Shandy: Schopenhauer called it one of “the four immortal romances,” and Wittgenstein said it was one of his favorite books. Bertrand Russell, in his book The Principles of Mathematics, introduced what has become known as the “paradox of Tristram Shandy,” involving the notion that a man may spend an infinite amount of time writing about a single day in his life.
Accordingly, recent lists of “greatest novels” (particularly in Britain, where the novel is better known) include Sterne’s book: it appears on the Guardian’s list of the 100 greatest novels in English, the Observer’s list of the 100 greatest novels in world literature, and the BBC’s list of the 100 greatest novels. It also appears on the Norwegian Book Clubs’ list (made in conjunction with the Nobel committee) of the 100 greatest novels in world literature. It was translated into German by 1769, Dutch by 1779, French by 1785, Russian by 1807, and more recently into Hungarian, Italian, Czech, Slovene, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Norwegian, and Finnish. And I am including it here as book number 80 on my list of the “100 Most Lovable Novels in the English Language.”
To summarize Sterne’s novel is, well, an impossible task. Not because the plot is simply way too complex as, for instance, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest or, perhaps, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, although you may be reminded of those epic post-modern ventures while reading this eighteenth-century tome. No, the difficulty in summarizing Tristram Shandy is the fact that the novel consists almost entirely of digressions. Sterne’s narrator, the eponymous Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, proposes to write an autobiography, but is immediately distracted by recollections about his father and his Uncle Toby that he feels must be told before he can tell about his own birth—and then realizes that there is a good deal of background he needs to explain before he can say anything about his father or Uncle Toby. And so on, so that Tristram does not even get born until the third of Sterne’s nine volumes. The historian Edmund Burke described the novel as a “perpetual series of disappointments”—which he did not mean as a compliment. But in fact that is precisely what contemporary readers find so fascinating about it: Sterne plays with his reader’s expectations and continually frustrates them. Throughout the history of narrative, readers have relied on the plot of the novel to distill from the overall chaos and clutter of everyday living a logically ordered story with a beginning, a sequence of events moving logically through a cause/effect relationship to the climax of the action, followed by a denouement the ties up the loose ends and relates the story’s final outcome. In Tristram Shandy, you simply have none of this. Instead, you have the very chaos and clutter that make up the narrator’s everyday world, and the various and infinite directions his consciousness might take.
So instead of summarizing, I’ll just describe a few parts of the novel. In the very first chapters, Tristram decides that rather than simply describing his birth, he should go all the way back to the moment of his conception, which he notes was disrupted when his mother suddenly interrupted his father at a critical point by asking him if he remembered to wind the clock. This is followed by a discussion of whether the lady should have a midwife or a doctor at her delivery. During Tristram’s mother’s interminable (three-volume) labor, his father Walter and Uncle Toby (a retired soldier forced out of the service due to a serous wound in his groin) discuss with the doctor, Dr. Slop, and with the clergyman Yorick (who believes himself to be descended from Shakespeare’s jester) a wide variety of subjects, including Uncle Toby’s “Hobby-Horse” of building elaborate model of forts and military campaigns, and his father’s elaborate theory of the importance of names and the poor prospects of anyone given the unlucky name of “Tristram”—so that by the time we reach the point of the narrative that ends Tristram Shandy’s first day of life (a year after he has begun writing), we are in volume four of the novel, and the narrator says
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 to my first day’s life—’tis demonstrative that I have three hundred and sixty-four days more life to write just now, than when I first set out; so that instead of advancing, as a common writer, in my work with what I have been doing at it—on the contrary, I am just thrown so many volumes back— at this rate I should just live 364 times faster than I should write–It must follow, an’ please your worships, that the more I write, the more I shall have to write–and consequently, the more your worships read, the more your worships will have to read.
It is apparent by this time that Tristram would need an infinite amount of time to tell his life story, and we as readers the same to finish it (this is Russell’s aforementioned paradox).This does not deter Tristram from writing another four and a half volumes, during which he gives us a kind of travel narrative of his “grand tour” of Europe, during which, as you might suspect, we don’t really see him get anywhere, and finally a long digression about his Uncle Toby’s courtship of his neighbor Widow Wadman, which it takes him eleven years to begin and which never seems to advance because Widow Wadman is too modest, and Toby too innocent, to clear up the question of whether or not Toby’s groin injury has left him impotent. The whole situation is reminiscent of the Fisher King in the Grail Quest and the Grail Knight Perceval’s inability to ask the question that will heal the wounded king. Here too, once again, the end is frustrated.
But the reader need not be. It’s important not to bring to the reading expectations that this book will follow the typical patterns if prose fiction. Sterne was after something quite different, and the best the reader can do is follow his lead when the narrator says “I would go fifty miles on foot, for I have not a horse worth riding on, to kiss the hand of that man whose generous heart will give up the reins of his imagination into his author’s hands.” Trust me, he says. And he takes you on a wild ride that pokes fun at Sterne’s pet peeve, “solemnity,” usually by satirizing the opinions of respected authors and their works—most notably Robert Burton in his highly regarded Anatomy of Melancholy, from which he lifts whole passages in order to demolish them. Sterne was accused of plagiarism for these practices, but he use such passages in order to make fun of them.
Still, Sterne did not come up with his highly unusual approach out of thin air. His most important influence was Rabelais, whose irreverent humor and outrageous episodes in Gargantua and Pantagruel made him Sterne’s favorite predecessor. He had written a short piece earlier entitled “A Rabelaisian Fragment” in the style of the French author, and includes a section early in Tristram Shandy dealing with “the length and goodness of the nose” that recalls Rabelais. Certainly the episodic structure of Gargantua and Pantagruel influenced Sterne as well. Cervantes is also a significant influence on Sterne, who alludes to the Knight of the Woeful Countenance and his horse Rosinante quite often. Tristram’s idealistic and unconventional Uncle Toby seems a quite Quixotic character, and the self-reflexive nature of the second part of DonQuixote is a technique used by Sterne throughout his novel. Among his nearer contemporaries, Sterne seem most influenced by the satire of Swift, especially in his Battle of the Books.
In a lot of ways, Tristram Shandy is a better fit for contemporary readers than it was for eighteenth-century ones. There has even been a 2006 film adaptation of the novel written by Frank Cottrell Boyce and directed by Michael Winterbottom called A Cock and Bull Story, which plays with the kind of self-reflexiveness about the adaptation process that Sterne does about the writing process. It’s well worth a viewing, but read the book first or you really won’t get the humor.