The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Synopsis and style
As its title suggests, the book is ostensibly Tristram's narration of his life story. But it is one of the central jokes of the novel that he cannot explain anything simply, that he must make explanatory diversions to add context and colour to his tale, to the extent that we do not even reach Tristram's own birth until Volume III. Consequently, apart from Tristram as narrator, the most familiar and important characters in the book are his father Walter, his mother, his Uncle Toby, Toby's servant Trim, and a supporting cast of popular minor characters including Doctor Slop and the parson Yorick. Most of the action is concerned with domestic upsets or misunderstandings, which find humour in the opposing temperaments of Walter – splenetic, rational and somewhat sarcastic – and Uncle Toby, who is gentle, uncomplicated and a lover of his fellow man.
In between such events, Tristram as narrator finds himself discoursing at length on sexual practices, insults, the influence of one's name, noses, as well as explorations of obstetrics, siege warfare and philosophy, as he struggles to marshal his material and finish the story of his life.
Techniques and influences
Sterne's text is filled with allusions and references to the leading thinkers and writers of the 17th and 18th centuries. Pope, Locke, and Swift were all major influences on Sterne and Tristram Shandy. Satires of Pope and Swift formed much of the humour of Tristram Shandy, but Swift's sermons and Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding contributed ideas and frameworks that Sterne explored throughout his novel. Sterne's engagement with the science and philosophy of his day was extensive, however, and the sections on obstetrics and fortifications, for instance, indicate that he had a grasp of the main issues then current in those fields.
Four influences on Tristram Shandy overshadow all others: Rabelais, Cervantes, Montaigne's Essays and John Locke. Sterne had written an earlier piece called A Rabelaisian Fragment, which indicates his familiarity with the work of the French monk. But the earlier work is not needed to see the influence of Rabelais on Tristram Shandy, which is evident in multiple allusions, as well as in the overall tone of bawdy humor centered on the body. The first scene in Tristram Shandy, where Tristram's mother interrupts his father during the sex that leads to Tristram's conception, testifies to Sterne's debt to Rabelais.
The shade of Cervantes is similarly present throughout Sterne's novel. The frequent references to Rocinante, the character of Uncle Toby (who resembles Don Quixote in many ways) and Sterne's own description of his characters' "Cervantic humour," along with the genre-defying structure of Tristram Shandy, which owes much to the second part of Cervantes' novel, all demonstrate the influence of Cervantes.
The novel also makes use of John Locke's theories of empiricism, or the way we assemble what we know of ourselves and our world from the "association of ideas" that come to us from our five senses. Sterne is by turns respectful and satirical of Locke's theories, using the association of ideas to construct characters' "hobby-horses," or whimsical obsessions, that both order and disorder their lives in different ways. It also owes a significant inter-textual debt to Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, Swift's Battle of the Books, and the Scriblerian collaborative work, The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus.
Today, the novel is commonly seen as a forerunner of later stream of consciousness, self-reflexive and postmodern writing. However, current critical opinion is divided on this question. There is a significant body of critical opinion that argues that Tristram Shandy is better understood as an example of an obsolescent literary tradition of "Learned Wit", partly following the contribution of D.W. Jefferson.
An historic site in Geneva, Ohio called Shandy Hall is part of the Western Reserve Historical Society. The home was named after the house described in Tristram Shandy.
Literary influence
A number of later works seem to owe a significant debt to Tristram Shandy, among them:
- Pushkin's Eugene Onegin
- Diderot's Jacques le fataliste et son maître
- Robert K. Merton's The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity: A Study in Sociological Semantics and the Sociology of Science
- Gogol's The Nose
- James Joyce's Finnegans Wake
- Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman
- Machado de Assis' Dom Casmurro, one of the masterpieces of Brazilian literature, and The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas
- Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children
- Luigi Pirandello's Uno, nessuno e centomila
Thomas Jefferson's personal correspondence was influenced by Tristram Shandy. Mainly his letter while serving as the United States Ambassador Plenipotentiary to the French court before the French Revolution. Numerous letters Jefferson wrote at the time to Maria Cosway cite Shandy.
Trivia
- Virginia Woolf hailed the book as "The Greatest of all Novels."
- The novel has been cited by John Updike as the one novel he wants to read before he dies.
- According to John Hodgman in his satirical book The Areas of My Expertise, Tristram Shandy was the hobos' favorite novel, and on some alley walls in Depression-era whistle-stop towns you might find a cryptic translation of the complete text.
- The German writer Ernst Jünger, who was a great admirer of Tristram Shandy, first read the book in the trenches before an attack in The First World War. During the attack he was wounded, and when he later woke up in a field hospital heavily drugged by morphine, he took up the reading again. He later stated that he was unable to distinguish the book, the battle and the morphine from each other, but rather saw this as an essential approach to a work that he loved ever after. See Jünger's In Stahlgewittern (1920).
Adaptations
Tristram Shandy has been adapted as a graphic novel by cartoonist Martin Rowson. It has also been adapted on film in 2006 as A Cock and Bull Story, directed by Michael Winterbottom, written by Frank Cottrell Boyce (credited as Martin Hardy, in a complicated metafictional twist), and starring Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Kelly Macdonald, Naomie Harris, and Gillian Anderson.
