ChadGayle reviewed The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, gentleman by Laurence Sterne (Penguin classics)
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4 stars
[Personal notes on Tristam Shandy recorded in 1999.]
No point in describing the plot of Tristam Shandy, since it’s the method and the character of the book which are important. The plot—if it can even be said to have one—consists of small, usually inconsequential events that always provide Sterne with another chance to digress, to move away from the “present” subject of conversation.
Maybe it’s best to call it a book of conversations. Although Tristam Shandy is supposed to be an autobiography of a man, a chronicle of a life lived, this is simply a convenient way of drawing us into the world Sterne knows best, and that is the world of casual conversation. While other novelists were examining the nature of the individual, Sterne’s focus is the social setting. Even the many chapters on buttons or hobby-horses and so on that are addressed directly to the reader (which …
[Personal notes on Tristam Shandy recorded in 1999.]
No point in describing the plot of Tristam Shandy, since it’s the method and the character of the book which are important. The plot—if it can even be said to have one—consists of small, usually inconsequential events that always provide Sterne with another chance to digress, to move away from the “present” subject of conversation.
Maybe it’s best to call it a book of conversations. Although Tristam Shandy is supposed to be an autobiography of a man, a chronicle of a life lived, this is simply a convenient way of drawing us into the world Sterne knows best, and that is the world of casual conversation. While other novelists were examining the nature of the individual, Sterne’s focus is the social setting. Even the many chapters on buttons or hobby-horses and so on that are addressed directly to the reader (which aren’t, in other words, direct examples of conversations in a social setting) employ the tools of conversation. In these chapters, the narrator modulates his tone and rhythm and loses track of his subject (or abandons it for its tangent) just like a quirky, talkative neighbor who has come by your house to borrow a gardening implement but can’t help bringing up the exploits or annoyances of her Aunt Dinah.
While virtually every novel from the same period used social settings to say something about the characters in its pages, Tristam Shandy uses the social setting as its narrative mode. In other words, what we are to learn about ourselves and about the nature of Time and Being, we will learn by participation. In the average novel, we learn what we learn by becoming one of more characters or by becoming so involved in the story that our own version of reality is subsumed by the reality of the novel we’re reading. But in Tristam Shandy, although we do get many descriptions of the “minds” of father Shandy, uncle Toby, and of Corporal Trim, these descriptions are themselves the products of conversations, and they really just serve as necessary exposition to make the way ready for the other conversations we are about to get lost in.
To think of Tristam Shandy as a fantasy, as some have, is to misread it completely. If anything, it is an example of ultra-realism, a novel which refuses to stray a single step from the world as we know it, which is absurd, disordered, sometimes funny, often tedious, and full of things that we quickly lose sight of—not unlike a party that continues well into the night.
