The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, gentleman

This book has been on our shelves ever since I remember; I think it belonged to my mother, though I don't know if she ever read it. Sixty years ago a friend at university who was doing English II said he was reading it, and remarked on its peculiarities, especially its extreme discursiveness, and the diagrams that appeared at various points in the narrative to illustrate this.

I tried to read it but lost interest, and so it sat on our shelves unread through several moves from one house to another, until the Covid19 epidemic came along, and with all the public libraries closed I turned to the unread books on our shelves and this was one of them.

The title tells us that it concerns "the life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman", but there is little of his opinions and even less of his life. There are nine Books, each with over 30 chapters, and he only gets born in Book 4. The preceding books recount the lives and labours of the midwife and the obstetrician who attended his birth, and how the latter's use of new-fangled obstetrical forceps flattened his nose.

We learn a great deal about his Uncle Toby, whose hobby is playing soldiers since he was wounded at the siege of Namur, and about how Uncle Toby fell in love with and wooed the widow Wadman, with plenty of digressions along the way. It is said that [a:Lawrence Sterne|16655528|Lawrence Sterne|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] pioneered the "stream of consciousness" novel which was popular in the early 20th century, and that could be so, as he tells the story the way most people think, jumping from one topic to another for no particular reason.

Though it was first written and published in the 18th century, it seems surprisingly modern. Much of the usage is still current today, and at several points I was surprised that usages i thought were quite recent seem to have been current 250 years ago.

I also think of all the books and articles and courses on creative writing, and how to write a novel, and what is acceptable to publishers' editors and what is not. And I think if I had been a publsiher's editor I would have rejected this one for its very discursiveness, it's failure to get to the point. Dammit, the protagonist has no goals! And a protagonist without a goal, we are told, is the biggest no-no in novel writing. Yet 250 years later Tristram Shandy is still in print, and a lot of novels published 10 years ago are not.

[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.