The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, also known as Tristram Shandy, is a humorous novel by Laurence Sterne. It was published in nine volumes, the first two appearing in 1759, and seven others following over the next seven years (vols. 3 to 6 in 1761; vols. 7 and 8, 1765; vol. 9, 1767). It purports to be a biography of the eponymous character. Its style is marked by digression, double entendre, and graphic devices. The first edition was printed by Ann Ward on Coney Street, York.
Sterne had read widely, which is reflected in Tristram Shandy. Many of his similes, for instance, are reminiscent of the works of the metaphysical poets of the 17th century,[1] and the novel as a whole, with its focus on the problems of language, has constant regard for John Locke's theories in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.[2]Arthur Schopenhauer called Tristram Shandy one of "the four immortal romances".[3]
While the use of the narrative technique of stream of consciousness is usually associated with modernist novelists, Tristram Shandy has been suggested as a precursor.[4]
Synopsis
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 Tristram's own birth is not reached until VolumeIII.
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 minor characters: the chambermaid Susannah, Doctor Slop, Toby's love interest the Widow Wadman, and the parson Yorick, who later became Sterne's favourite nom de plume and the protagonist of Sterne's next novel.
Though Tristram is always present as narrator and commentator, the book contains little of his life, only the story of a trip through France and accounts of the four comical mishaps which he says have doomed him to an unfortunate life. Firstly, while he was still only an homunculus, Tristram's implantation within his mother's uterus was disturbed. At the moment of procreation, his mother asked his father if he had remembered to wind the clock. The distraction and annoyance led to the disruption of the proper balance of humours necessary to conceive a well-favoured child. Secondly, during his birth Tristram's nose was crushed by Dr. Slop's forceps, an ill omen according to his father's pet theory was that a large and attractive nose is important to a man making his way in life. Third, a mistake caused him to be christened with an inauspicious name: another of his father's theories was that a person's name exerted enormous influence over that person's nature and fortunes, and he intended to use an especially auspicious name, Trismegistus. Susannah mangled the name in conveying it to the curate, and the child was christened Tristram. According to his father's theory, this name, being a conflation of "Trismegistus" (after the esoteric mystic Hermes Trismegistus) and "Tristan" (whose connotation bore the influence through folk etymology of Latin tristis, "sorrowful"), doomed him to a life of woe and cursed him with the inability to comprehend the causes of his misfortune. Fourth and finally, as a toddler, Tristram suffered an accidental circumcision when Susannah let a window sash fall as he urinated out of the window.
In between such events, Tristram as narrator finds himself discoursing at length on sexual practices, insults, the influence of one's name and 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. 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.
Composition and publication
First editions of the nine volumes of Tristram Shandy
First two volumes
Sterne was an obscure and financially struggling Anglican clergyman in York when he wrote his first piece of fiction, the satireA Political Romance, in 1759.[5] This pamphlet was published in January of that year,[6] and was not received well within clerical circles: the Archbishop of York considered it embarrassing to make church conflicts so public,[7] and the pamphlet was burned.[8] Nonetheless, Sterne felt he had discovered his true talent for humour writing, and immediately began writing a new work.[9] He began and abandoned a "Rabelaisian Fragment" satirizing sermon-writing, then began Tristram Shandy.[10] Ultimately, this novel would be published in nine volumes over an eight-year period, from 1759 to 1767.[11]
1760 portrait of Laurence Sterne by Joshua Reynolds, commissioned by Sterne to celebrate his newfound literary fame. His elbow rests on a manuscript of Tristram Shandy.
On 23 May 1759 Sterne offered the manuscript of the first volume to the publisher Robert Dodsley, promising a second volume before the end of the year.[13] He asked £50 for the copyright to the text; Dodsley counter-offered £20;[14] Sterne instead printed the first two volumes at his own expense in December 1759, with Dodsley as distributor.[15] This first print run, produced in York by Ann Ward,[16] was small – perhaps only 200 copies, and no more than 500 – and Sterne had to borrow money for the printing costs.[17] That he took on the financial risk himself is often seen as a sign of his confidence that the work would be a commercial success.[17] Volumes one and two were released in late December 1759, with the year 1760 printed on the title page.[18] The novel was an immediate success, which made Sterne's name for the rest of his life.[11] Dodsley purchased the copyright to both volumes in March 1760 for £550, and also promised £380 for the next two volumes;[19][note 1] he released his second edition, featuring an illustration by William Hogarth, in London on April 2, followed by several more editions as the novel continued to sell out.[21][11] Sterne visited London from March to May 1760 to promote the book and enjoy his newfound literary celebrity,[22] then returned to Yorkshire to write the next volumes.[23]
Later volumes
The first page of text in volume five, with Sterne's signature to authenticate that it is not the work of an imitator. Sterne signed all first edition copies of volumes five, seven, and nine.
Two more installments of the novel appeared relatively rapidly: volumes three and four in January 1761,[24] and five and six in December 1761.[25] He finished volume three by August 1760, three months after his return to Yorkshire, and continued to make modifications until both it and volume four were printed.[26] Sterne commissioned William Hogarth to produce a frontispiece illustration.[27] Volumes three and four were published on 28 January 1761,[24] printed and sold by Dodsley in London and J. Hinxmann in York.[28] By November of that year, he had completed the next two volumes.[29] Dodsley and Sterne had ended their publishing relationship,[30] and Sterne did not sell anyone the copyright to volumes five and six.[31] In December Sterne arranged for Thomas Becket and Peter Dehondt to print and sell volumes five and six,[30] which appeared on 22 December 1761,[25] with 1762 on the title page.[32] By this time, fraudulent continuations by other authors had become so prevalent that Sterne autographed every copy of volume five to assure readers that it was legitimate; he repeated the practice in future installments, signing all copies of volumes seven and nine.[11]
Sterne's study at Shandy Hall, his home in Coxwold where he composed most of Tristram Shandy
Sterne's intensive writing efforts worsened his tuberculosis, and in January 1762 he travelled to France to benefit from the warmer climate.[33] There, he wrote much less.[34] In Paris, Sterne enjoyed dining out on his literary celebrity in the persona of Tristram Shandy.[35] He had several dangerous bouts of illness, including six weeks sick in an epidemic fever.[36] From August through November 1762, he worked on material about Uncle Toby which would eventually be used in volumes eight and nine.[37] In March 1764, Sterne returned to England, travelling via Paris and London and finally reaching Yorkshire in June.[38] There, he continued to delegate his clerical duties to the curate who had performed them during his absence,[39] and wrote slowly.[40] Volumes seven and eight were finally completed in November 1764.[41] According to Sterne's biographer Arthur Cash, Sterne finished volume eight (primarily about Uncle Toby) before writing volume seven (primarily a travel narrative) but presented them in the reverse order within the novel.[41] He travelled to London to oversee the volumes' publication, and they appeared 23 January 1765.[42] As with volumes five and six, Sterne served as his own publisher, with Becket and Dehondt as distributors.[43]
Sterne departed for another journey to France, and this time Italy as well, in October 1765,[44] and resumed writing Tristram Shandy on his return to Yorkshire in June 1766.[45] He decided to publish only one volume, to more easily begin a new serial novel, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy.[45] In January 1767, he visited London, where he corrected the proofs for the forthcoming ninth volume.[46] Its release was advertised for January 8, but actually occurred January 29.[47] In March of 1768, Sterne died, very shortly after publishing the first installment of the new serial A Sentimental Journey.[48] It remains uncertain whether Tristram Shandy should be considered a finished novel, or one that simply stopped with his death:[49] when he first planned A Sentimental Journey, he stated that he intended to continue Tristram Shandy alongside it,[45] but volume nine brings most of the storylines to satisfying stopping points so there are many scholars who consider it a fundamentally complete work.[11]
Analysis
Humour
Dr. Slop whispering a line fully censored by asterisks, from Martin Rowson's 1996 graphic novel adaptation
A constant line of humour in the novel is innuendo, especially sexual double entendre.[50] In the words of the literary scholar Elizabeth Harries: "We quickly become aware that noses, whiskers, button-holes, hobby-horses, crevices in the wall, slits in petticoats, old cock'd hats, green petticoats, and even 'things' have more than one meaning– and that Sterne wants us to be aware of them all."[50] In many cases, the innuendo is implied through aposiopesis, a technique the novel draws attention to:[51]
"My sister, mayhap, quoth my uncle Toby, does not choose to let a man come so near her ****" Make this dash,——'tis an Aposiopesis.—Take the dash away, and write Backside,—'tis Bawdy.—Scratch Backside out, and put Cover'd-way in,—'tis a Metaphor;—and, I dare say, as fortification ran so much in my uncle Toby's head, that if he had been left to have added one word to the sentence,—that word was it.
—2.6.116
As another form of humour, Tristram Shandy gives a ludicrous turn to solemn passages from respected authors that it incorporates, as well as to the consolatio literary genre.[52][53] Among the subjects of such ridicule were some of the opinions contained in Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy. Burton's attitude was to try to prove indisputable facts by weighty quotations. His book consists mostly of a collection of the opinions of a multitude of writers; it discusses everything, from the doctrines of religion to military discipline, from inland navigation to the morality of dancing schools.[53] Much of the singularity of Tristram Shandy's characters is drawn from Burton, and Sterne parodies Burton's use of weighty quotations.[53] The first four chapters of Tristram Shandy are founded on some passages in Burton.[53] In volume 5, chapter 3, Sterne parodies the genre of consolatio, mixing and reworking passages from three "widely separated sections" of Burton's Anatomy, including a parody of Burton's "grave and sober account" of Cicero's grief for the death of his daughter Tullia.[52]
Unconventional visual elements
A black page memorializing the death of the character Yorick
The novel is still remembered for several surprising visual elements, which required innovative printing techniques.[54] One page is printed entirely in black in mourning for a character's death.[55] Another page is marbled, a complex and expensive addition which required the page to be individually added to each copy by hand.[54][26] At one point, a page is left blank; in other places, entire paragraphs are censored with asterisks.[54] Diagrams of wiggly lines are inserted as visualizations of the novel's wandering narrative structure.[54] The narrator claims to have taken out a chapter because it was so good, the rest of the novel would seem worse in comparison; the chapter numbering and pagination both skip ahead as if the pages had been physically removed.[54] The literary historian Judith Hawley describes the reading experience as "paradoxical", because "Sterne draws attention to the physical medium of the book and the intellectual sophistications of the reading process, while also introducing us to a cast of charmingly individualized characters" who inspire an emotional attachment to the narratives that are continually interrupted.[56]
Allusions and influences
His text is filled with allusions and references to the leading thinkers and writers of the 17th and 18th centuries. Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift were 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 also contributed ideas and frameworks Sterne explored throughout the novel. Other major influences are Cervantes and Montaigne's Essays, as well as the significant inter-textual debt to The Anatomy of Melancholy,[52] Swift's Battle of the Books, and the Scriblerian collaborative work The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus.[57]
"The Smoking Batteries": Trim, Toby's corporal, invents a device for firing multiple miniature cannons at once, based on a hookah. Unfortunately, he and Toby find the puffing on the hookah pipe so enjoyable that they keep setting the cannons off. Illustration by George Cruikshank.
The shade of Cervantes is present throughout Sterne's novel. The frequent references to Don Quixote’s horse 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.[58]
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. Sterne borrows from and argues against Locke's language theories (on the imprecision and arbitrariness of words and usage), and consequently spends much time discussing the very words he uses in his own narrative –with "digressions, gestures, piling up of apparent trivia in the effort to get at the truth".[2]
Tristram Shandy draws on a tradition of learned wit satire.[59] D. W. Jefferson wrote[60]
The learned wit in Tristram Shandy would be all the less interesting if the intellectual tradition to which Sterne was indebted did not exert some influence on the imagination, discernible in his treatment of concrete, everyday things.
A major influence on Tristram Shandy is Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel.[52][61] Rabelais was by far Sterne's favourite author, and in his correspondence he made clear that he considered himself Rabelais's successor in humorous writing. One passage Sterne incorporated pertains to "the length and goodness of the nose".[62][63][64]
The Sterne scholar Melvyn New highlights that Sterne was not particularly influenced by the writers who eventually came to be known as the major novelists of the eighteenth century: Sterne never mentions Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, or Henry Fielding, and he only acknowledges Tobias Smollett through the unflattering parodic character Smelfungus. As such, despite writing prose fiction, Sterne stands apart from the development of the novel as a genre.[11]
Reception
1760 caricature of Sterne, holding a bag of cash in one hand and Tristram Shandy in the other, promising "My next two Volumes come out at Christmas" to a crowd of people quoting the novel
Eighteenth-century response
The literary historian Judith Hawley wrotes that Tristram Shandy's first appearance in 1759 "dazzled readers with its originality and daring".[56] Some of Sterne's contemporaries did not hold the novel in high esteem, but its bawdy humour was popular with London society.[citation needed]Samuel Johnson in 1776 commented, "Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last."[65] Schopenhauer privately rebutted Samuel Johnson, saying: "The man Sterne is worth 1,000 Pedants and commonplace-fellows like Dr. J."[66]George Washington enjoyed the book.[67]
The success of Sterne's novel got him an appointment by Lord Fauconberg as curate of St Michael's Church in Coxwold, North Yorkshire, which included living at Sterne's model for Shandy Hall. The medieval structure still stands today, and is under the care of the Laurence Sterne Trust since its acquisition in the 1960s. The gardens, which Sterne tended during his time there, are daily open to visitors. There is also a Shandy Hall in Geneva, Ohio named after the house in Tristram Shandy.[citation needed]
Sterne incorporated into Tristram Shandy many passages taken almost word for word from Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, Francis Bacon's Of Death, Rabelais and many more, and rearranged them to serve the new meaning intended in Tristram Shandy.[52]Tristram Shandy was highly praised for its originality, and nobody noticed these borrowings until years after Sterne's death. The first to note them was physician, poet and Portico Library Chair John Ferriar, who did not see them negatively and commented:[52][73]
If [the reader's] opinion of Sterne's learning and originality be lessened by the perusal, he must, at least, admire the dexterity and the good taste with which he has incorporated in his work so many passages, written with very different views by their respective authors.
Ferriar believed that Sterne was ridiculing Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, mocking its solemn tone and endeavours to prove indisputable facts by weighty quotations.[53][74]
Victorian critics of the 19th century, who were hostile to Sterne for the alleged obscenity of his prose, used Ferriar's findings to defame Sterne, claimed that he was artistically dishonest, and almost unanimously accused him of mindless plagiarism.[52] Scholar Graham Petrie closely analysed the alleged passages in 1970; he observed that while more recent commentators now agree that Sterne "rearranged what he took to make it more humorous, or more sentimental, or more rhythmical", none of them "seems to have wondered whether Sterne had any further, more purely artistic, purpose". Studying a passage in VolumeV, chapter3, Petrie observes: "such passage...reveals that Sterne's copying was far from purely mechanical, and that his rearrangements go far beyond what would be necessary for merely stylistic ends".[52]
The novel's success has resulted in permanent additions to the English lexicon;[78] within the text of Tristram Shandy Sterne describes the novel as "Shandean", coining a term which still carries the meaning that Sterne originally attached to it when he wrote, "I write a careless kind of a civil, nonsensical, good humoured Shandean book..."[79] Strongly influenced by Cervantes' Don Quixote, Sterne's Tristram Shandy also gave rise to the term "cervantic" (which Sterne at the time spelled "cervantick").[80]
The curvy line from Volume IX, Chapter IV of Tristram Shandy is reprinted at the start of Balzac's novel La Peau de chagrin.
Tristram Shandy is often referenced in other literary works. Honoré de Balzac's novel La Peau de chagrin (1831) begins with an image from Tristram Shandy: a curvy line drawn in the air by a character seeking to express the freedom enjoyed "whilst a man is free".[82] In Anthony Trollope's novel Barchester Towers (1857), the narrator speculates that the scheming clergyman, Mr Slope, is descended from Dr Slop in Tristram Shandy. Surprised by Joy (1955) by C. S. Lewis self-consciously references Tristram Shandy when Lewis discusses his father.[83][b] In the Hermann Hesse novel Journey to the East (1932), Tristram Shandy is one of the co-founders of The League.[84]
In 1766, at the height of the debate about slavery in Britain, Ignatius Sancho wrote a letter to Sterne[85] encouraging him to lobby for the abolition of the slave trade.[86] The next volume of Tristram Shandy included a "a tender tale of the sorrows of a friendless poor negro-girl".[87][88]Sterne and Sancho's correspondence was widely publicised and became an integral part of 18th-century abolitionist literature.[89]
Eponymous mathematical paradox
In philosophy and mathematics, the "paradox of Tristram Shandy" was introduced by Bertrand Russell in his book The Principles of Mathematics to evidentiate the inner contradictions that arise from the assumption that infinite sets can have the same cardinality—as would be the case with a gentleman who spends one year to write the story of one day of his life, if he were able to write for an infinite length of time. The paradox depends upon the fact that the number of days in all time is no greater than the number of years. Karl Popper, in contrast, came to the conclusion that Tristram Shandy—by writing his history of life—would never be able to finish this story, because his last act of writing (that he is writing the history of his life) could never be included in his actual writing.[90]
↑ He says: "The author of Tristram Shandy reveals to us the profoundest depths of the human soul; he opens, as it were, a crevice of the soul; permits us to take one glance into its abysses, into its paradise and into its filthiest recesses; then quickly lets the curtain fall over it. We have had a front view of that marvellous theatre, the soul; the arrangements of lights and the perspective have not failed in their effects, and while we imagined that we were gazing upon the infinite, our own hearts have been exalted with a sense of infinity and poetry."
↑ My father—but these words, at the head of a paragraph, will carry the reader's mind inevitably to Tristram Shandy. On second thoughts I am content that they should. It is only in a Shandean spirit that my matter can be approached. I have to describe something as odd and whimsical as ever entered the brain of Sterne; and if I could, I would gladly lead you to the same affection for my father as you have for Tristram's.[83] (The text of Tristram Shandy uses the phrase "my father" at the head of a paragraph fifty-one times.)
1 2 Arthur Schopenhauer, "On the Comparative Place of Interest and Beauty in Works of Art", in The Art of Controversy, in The Complete Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer (New York: Crown Publishers, n.d.), p. 51. The other three are Don Quixote, La Nouvelle Héloïse, and Wilhelm Meister.
↑ J. A. Cuddon, A Dictionary of Literary Terms. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), p. 661; see also Robert Humphrey, Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel (1954). University of California Press, 1972, fn. 13, p. 127.
↑ Nietzsche, Friedrich (1913). Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. Translated by Paul V. Cohn. MacMillan. pp.58–60, §113. The Freest Writer. – In a book for free spirits one cannot avoid mention of Laurence Sterne, the man whom Goethe honoured as the freest spirit of his century.
↑ Nordmann, Alfred (2005). Wittgenstein's Tractatus: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press. p.116.
↑ Wood, James (2005). The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel. Pimlico. p.3. Tristram Shandy ... is in multifarious ways a marvellous book, but it is written in a tone of such constant high-pitched zaniness, of such deliberate 'liveliness', that one finds oneself screaming at it to calm down a bit.... The 'hysterical realism' of such contemporary writers as Pynchon and Rushdie is the modern version of Sterne's perpetual excitement and digressions.
↑ Sterne, Laurence. Tristram Shandy. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1980. ISBN0-393-95034-4. p. 426. The image in Balzac's novel is a mirror image of the original.
↑ Rowson, Martin; Sterne, Laurence (2010). Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, The: Amazon: Martin Rowson: Books. Metro Media Limited. ISBN978-1906838133.
Harries, Elizabeth W. (2010). "Words, sex, and gender in Sterne's novels". In Keymer, Thomas (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne. Cambridge University Press. ISBN9781139002592.
Alter, Robert (1968). "Tristram Shandy and the Game of Love". American Scholar. 37: 316–323.
Bosch, René (2007), "Labyrinth of Digressions: Tristram Shandy as Perceived and Influenced by Sterne's Early Imitators", Costerus, New Series, 172, translated by Piet Verhoeff, Amsterdam: Rodopi, ISBN978-90-420-2291-1
Sterne, Laurence (1965). Ian Watt (ed.). The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Houghton Mifflin. ISBN978-0-395-05145-0. Collects Brady and Jefferson's essays.
↑ For context, Sterne's annual salary as the vicar of Sutton-on-the-Forest was around £80.[20]
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