1. Introduction
As the previous presentations have striven to prove, there are a few dominant traits of the 18th century English novel - and please allow me to briefly summarize them – no matter the form, be it epistolary , pseudo-autobiographical or “historical”, the novel must fulfill two major purposes, both dictated by the mentalities of the epoch – to represent the reality as faithful as to mimic it on the one hand and to serve as a moralizing instrument, or, to put it otherwise, to offer teachings and moral exampla through entertainment. Defoe, Richardson, Fielding and Smollett imposed and abided by the rules, played along and managed to create what the 18th century reader would have presumably desired. However, Sterne did not go with the flow, on the contrary, he put together a piece of literary work such controversial that entitled an authoritative voice of the period, i.e. Samuel Johnson to describe it as an oddity and to predict it a short life, but, on the other hand, proved itself of such interest as to be considered, this time by authoritative voices in the criticism and literary theory in the 20th and 21st century, as the very forerunner of Post-Modernism as a genre, of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf or David Lodge in particular. Arguments lay in its apparently chaotic and disrupted structure, but first and foremost in the novel’s dual purpose. Contemporary criticism name Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman a meta-novel[1] and an anti-novel, or, to put it less formal, a novel that transcends the form and content of the regular novel, generally by means of parody. Since the two concepts are co-dependent when it comes to Tristram Shandy, I shall further try to make up an inventory of elements that are usually markers of a creative writing bearing the afore - mentioned attributes. In this respect, the narrative structure, the intertextuality, the recurrent items, the visual elements, the stream of consciousness and digressive techniques shall be focussed upon along this presentation. I shall, nevertheless, permit to consider that the novel is little known, if not completely unknown by the addressees, therefore, prior to embarking myself to an analysis that may sound too scholarly at times, I shall make an attempt to sketch the novel in a few introductory lines, although it is a fact that Tristram Shandy can hardly be abridged. To add coherence to this summary, I intend to rearrange the very few elements of the story in an approximate chronological order, on a time scale. In the end, in order to pinpoint more firmly the narrative patterns, a genettian model of analysis will be applied on a given fragment, which is “the kitchen scene”[2].
2. Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. A summary.
The first paratextual element that announces a different kind of novel is the title itself. If the fashion of the time brought upon titles – and subsequently storylines – of the “life and adventures of...” pattern, Sterne makes the first step outside the margins of the conventional literature of his time. His novel is, indeed, within the boundaries of the genre, with the use of the anti-hero as a character-bound, but this time the reader won’t accompany this anti-hero into an actual travel, will not witness his mocking-heroic adventures, but rather a mind travel to which (s)he is insistently invited to take part actively. Hence “the opinions” from the title, although they rarely actually belong to the “main character”. But who is the main character of Tristram Shandy? Arguably Tristram himself, since his presence in the novel is rather insignificant. Walter Shandy – the sentential father and Toby Shandy – the bonhomme uncle actually “dispute” the position. As a paranthesis, the issue has been masterly debated in the “mockumentary” A Cock and Bull Story (2006), where the actor impersonating Toby Shandy claims repeatedly that he should actually be considered as having the lead part. Other few characters worth mentioning are: Corporal Trim, the personal Sancho Panza of uncle Toby, Parson Yorick, bearing a Shakespearean heritage which I think doesn’t require further clarification, acting as a tool of misfortune and mishappening with the erroneous Christening, Dr. Slop, a truly parodic character, again with an “agent of fate” role – he will crush the nose of the newborn Tristram with his forceps, an element of modernity preferred to the traditional midwife asked by a more traditional mother of Tristram, Widow Wadman, uncle Toby’s object of passion. The loving couple has, naturally for the parodic purpose I would say, a replica in the servants’ world: if the master courts the lady, the servant will undoubtedly woo the maid. Shandy Hall also hosts servants like Obadiah and Susannah.
Sterne pushes the boundaries of the “auto-biography” as much as the debut the book will not be the commonplace of the birth of the hero, but the night of his conception. But if the book starts only 9 months before the actual moment in which we can treat Tristram as a character or as a homodiegetic narrator, as you like it, the narration will balance in time many years back and forth. Among other elements, which I shall pinpoint at their time, this is one of the reasons for which Tristram Shandy is such an unbridgeable novel. The hero, to use the conventional term, will be born during the 3rd book and his birth, as much as his very conception, is marked by a series of misfortunes – his nose is crushed, his name, which supposed to carry an overwhelming importance over his character and future, is forgotten by Susannah and becomes, from the designated Trismegistus, an awful Tristram, which, in his father’s lamentation will make the newborn “a child of wrath! child of decrepitude! interruption! mistake! and discontent!” (Vol. IV, ch. XIX, p. 215). The untimely death of a brother Bobby never mentioned before, otherwise, will serve about three different purposes: a digressive discourse on death – which shall be dealt upon later -, Walter Shandy’s decision to write a Tristrapaedia, a book of learnings for his younger and unfortunate son and Tristram’s self-awareness as a bound-character: “from this moment I am to be considered as heir-apparent to the Shandy family --- and it is from this point properly, that the story of my LIFE and my OPINIONS sets out” (Vol. IV, ch. XXXII, p.236). Inaccurate, of course, as the story will go on only to depict a Tristrapaedia never finished, another unfortunate accident of the child – Susannah is again guilty, but the actual cause is in fact uncle Toby’s hobby-horse, on which I intend to elaborate later on in this presentation. The 7th volume is but a more explicit parody of the travel literature, but, at the same time, the one and only chapter in which Tristram is actually a character, not an infant. When one might think the novel is finally going in a direction, it suddenly goes back a few years before Tristram’s birth, to deal with the love affair between uncle Toby and Widow Wadman and to offer an explanation regarding both his hobby-horse and his coyness – his accident in the groins area, during the Namur siege. Otherwise, the pages are filled with various digressions, embedded stories, even of the sentimental type – see Le Fever’s death, sermons, and long savant speeches of Walter Shandy. We shouldn’t forget to mention the history of the death of Parson Yorick, occurring – naturally – in the first book, although it is him whom the very last line in the novel belongs to. [3]
Now, rearranged in a chronological order, the novel would have had the following course of events:
Toby is wounded at the siege of Namur (1697)
Toby and Trim go to Shandy Hall (1702)
Walter Shandy leaves London and moves to Shandy Hall / Toby’s wooing the widow (1713)
Tristram is conceived (March 1718) and born (November 1718) –
Tristram suffers from an accident with the windows sash (1723)
The Grand Tour in France (1741).
The last chapter takes place around 1714, therefore 4 years before Tristram’s birth.[4]
3. Narrator and narratee. Hobby-Horses. Visual elements. Types of digressions. Stream of consciousness technique.
“It is common practice to assert that Tristram Shandy is not a novel. Those who speak in this way regard opera alone as true music, while a symphony for them is mere chaos.
Tristram Shandy is the most typical novel in world literature.”[5]
Definitely a novel, Tristram Shandy actually respects, despite its chaotic form, the principles of the genre, even more, it manages to surpass its contemporaries in what the verisimilitude is concerned. It may not be “the most typical novel in world literature”, nevertheless, through its ways of writing, Tristram Shandy acquires, in fact, the most accurate representation of the outer reality. Sterne’s tools of the trade are various and, at times, unexpected, beginning with the abundance of the visual elements or the order of the narrative, which is not, as we repeatedly stated, the chronological one, but the very order of the mind. One cannot think in a given order, why would, after all, write as such? Be it rendered as an interior monologue or, as it is the case of Tristram Shandy, as a form of dialogue between the extradiegetic narrator and a never-ending list of narratees – “dear folks”, “Madam”, Jenny”, Your Reverences”, “Your Worships”, “my critics”, “my Lord”, “dear anti-Shandean” etc etc , the ideas, the associations come with the ideas may not seem logically arranged but they are obviously naturally put together. The psychologist William James proposed the term “stream of consciousness” for this narrative mode of portraying the point of view within the written equivalent of the thought’s processes. Further on, literary criticism applied it to a number of literary works, here including Sterne’s.
The digressions are elements of an overwhelming relevance when analysing (or even reading) Tristram Shandy. At the first reading they may seem to make the novel difficult to follow, let alone the fact that they slow down a lot the tempo of the writing. They are, however, part of the same narrative technique – to put it in very simple words, Sterne seems to be writing as the very stream of his imagination dictates. This is why he never hesitates to interrupt actions, sentences, even words of the characters. They are not left unfinished, but to be found taken up further on, when least expected. I will rely on Bowman Piper’s description of the various types of digressions to be found in the Shandean written universe, faithfully following his categorization, as rendered in the article Tristram’s Digressive Artistry. The critic divides the digressions in Tristram Shandy into three distinct categories: explanatory, opinionative and interludes. The first bears quite a self-explanatory name and it is rendered in the text wherever needed, with motivations as “the readers could never imagine on their own” included. As Bowman Piper puts it, they truly fill in with information. The second ones, the opinionative, occuring usually after the narrative matter from which they derive, are meant to make the events more meaningful to his audience. The third category, the interlude, does not refer to Tristram directly, nor does it represent opinions derived from or related to the narrative course. To name a few –the homunculus and the animal spirits (vol.I), The Sermon upon Conscience (vol. II), the pseudo-intertextual translation of Slawkenbergius (vol. IV), the Whiskers anecdotes (vol. V), the death of Le Fever (vol. VI), the story of Amandus and Amanda (vol. VII) and, of course, the paratextual elements as the preface (misplaced in the middle of the 3rd volume with the following reasoning: “All my heroes are off my hands; --'tis the first time I have had a moment to spare,--and I'll make use of it, and write my preface”[6]) or various dedications, some of them even put up to auction.
As we have reached the point of noticing the presence of the preface in the middle of the 3rd volume –and maybe it is also the right time to remark that it is also a paratextual element escaping from the ordinary, through placement and content together – we should as well add a few more details regarding the form of the novel itself, which is structured in 9 books, with irregular number of chapters per volume and with an even more irregular length per chapter – from just a few lines to more than fifty pages. It doesn’t come out as a surprise any longer that chapters are here and there displaced from their normal position – e.g. chapters XVIII and XIX of volume IX come after chapter XXV, whereas chapter XXIV in volume IV fails to appear at all. The argument of the author’s fictionalised persona is “All I wish is, that it may be a lesson to the world, 'to let people tell their stories their own way”[7] . This is only one out of many remarks of a Tristram, the mature narrator - character impersonating the author himself in what concerns the purpose of a literary work and the way in which it should be written. The extensive use of blank or black pages, drawings, scales, lacunae represented through asterisks, substituting fragments or words, but also of entire paragraphs serves the same purpose of transporting the reality into its fictionalised representation, as well as that of breaking with the literary conventions.
“The presence in the novel of such games with typographical conventions, that should be perceived as part of the wider range of authorial strategies of educating his readers and providing them with appropriate reading instructions, is, in fact, one of the many aspects that motivate the critics’ looking upon Tristram Shandy as being a meta-novel, paving the way for the great metafictional explorations of postmodernism” [8]
The communication between the extradiegetic narrator and narratee is not at all Sterne’s literary invention, however, he will practically abuse the device in question in order to express his opinions through the words and actions of his fictionalised persona, i.e. Tristram Shandy. In fact, it is here where the novel qualifies as meta (see definition on p.1), since many of his digressive remarks refer directly to the act of writing, which he sees as an act of conversation. This is why he takes the liberty to transcend “my darling reader” formula inasmuch as his narrator’s addresee will transcend as well his/her function in the text. Tristram Shandy’s implied reader must be obviously very cultured to be able to cope with the huge amount of intertextual elements, but, then again, this affirmation stands as correct for Fielding, too. In addition, Sterne/Shandy feels an urge to emphasize his expectations towards his ideal reader – (s)he is given guidelines, reading grids, (s)he is required to possess an inquisitive mind, moreover, as in the famous case of “Madam” from Book 1, ch. XX, the reader is sent back to re-read a chapter, paying much more attention to the details. Tristram, the narrator, is usually informal when addressing the narratee, irrespective of his/her condition and relationship. His narratees can be “my Lord”, “Madam”, “Your Worships and Reverences”, but also “Jenny”, “Julia”, “good folks”, even “my dear anti-Shandean” – but they are all treated as travel companions alongside Tristram Shandy’s mental journey and his tone can be easily described as colloquial: “Rub your hands thrice across your foreheads – blow your noses – cleanse your emunctories – sneeze, my good people! – God bless you”[9]. Still, aware of the novel’s traps and its high probability of misinterpretation, Tristram will also doubt his narratee’s ability to cope with the meanings of the text. This is why, after describing his writing as a “careless kind of a civil, nonsensical, good humoured Shandean book, which will do all your hearts good”, he will conclude with an unexpected “and all you heads too – provided you understand it”[10].
However, what is providing the narratorial game with even more puzzlement is the idea of Sterne to play within the diegetic levels. The extradiegetic narrator acts like a demiurge force, as a puppeteer – but I intend to come back to this issue in the analysis of the fragment, since we deal with a clear instance there, but even more than that, he dares to ask the narratee to intervene in the very action, to help him make the characters move – “Now give me all the help you can.” (IX –XX). Thus, besides, enticing the narratee to guess various parts of the text missing or being replaced with asterisks, besides the permanent preservation of the contact with formulae like “I would this moment give the reader an account of it” ( I, XIX) or with proleptic promises of chapters that would never be actually written, besides allowing him/her to actually engage in the dialogue, he will even ask the narratee to close the door of the Shandy Hall or to help Mrs Shandy go to bed – and this is the very moment where the diegetic levels overlap, resulting in a comic effect, if not in confusion on the part of the real reader.
Before starting discussing Sterne’s construction of the characters and the parodic substrata, elements of uttermost importance from our point of view, it would be high time the narrative discourse in Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent was briefly analysed using the terminology proposed by Genette, although some aspects would be actually reiterated.
In terms or order, the narrative discourse is highly anachronical. We are dealing with a great amount of heterodiegetic analepses concerning either uncle Toby’s military past or any other event prior to the birth of Tristram, where this event is regarded as the first narrative. As for the prolepses, they only occur at a declarative level – the narrator makes a lot of promises to tell one thing or another sometime in an undetermined future. However, he usually doesn’t, therefore the anticipatory function is not fulfilled in these cases. In terms of frequency, the novel is primarily singulative, but there are also instances of repeating narrative – as it is the case of the wounding of uncle Toby at the siege of Namur, an event that is anachronically brought into discussion for so many times, to be eventually put an end to in the last book. The tempo of the narrative is as slow as possible – it takes 4 books and approximatively 250 pages for the hero to be born and christened and the most part of these is occupied with the very day of the birth. The effect is achieved through the multitude of digressions, which have been already dealt upon. The scene is favourited, the novel is constructed on vivid dialogues, reported speech, even during the narrator’s interventions, he is still using dialogue (see the narrator – narratee relationship above). Not very fond on descriptions, not even during “the Grand Tour”, where they could have found a fit place, Sterne introduces the pause by the means of the interlude digressions – the varied list of heterodiegetic stories, letters, sermons etc. Therefore, we can classify Tristram Shandy as showing. In terms of voice, the narrator is homodiegetic, even autodiegetic actually, also, as Booth puts it, self-conscious[11] whereas the narration is of the subsequent type and the narrative level, as mentioned before, is extradiegetic in the main course and hypodiegetic[12] at the level of the embedded stories. The frequent overlapping of the levels, i.e. the extradiegetic narrator and narratee’s intervention into the diegesis (see above) are defined by Genette as metalepsis. As for the perspective, or focalization, things are not at all as simple as the definitions might indicate, for although Tristram is a character in the story, that would imply a fixed internal focalization, he is, nevertheless, absent for the most part of the narration, not a participant, which would subsequently suggest an external focalization.
In what the construction of the relevant characters is concerned, Sterne uses mainly flat characters, with little description notes regarding each. The feminism criticism observed a certain tendency to endow women with very little importance – Tristram’s mother is just playing a role of an echo to her husband and her “job” in the novel is only limited to giving birth, Susannah is the careless servant, Widow Wadman is individualized only by her marrital wishes, Aunt Dinah is promiscuous, the abbess of Andouillets is just a representation of the clergycal hypocrisy. Men, on the other hand, benefit of large characterizations, with stories from their past and intertextual references – see Parson Yorick, with a reccurent reference to the Shakespearean homonymous jester of Hamlet, going as far as to present fabricated sermons that would better portray his wit. Best represented are, however, Walter and Toby Shandy. Both their characters are constructed on the ground of the hobby-horses, that is their respective obssession, in fact all the portrayed characters have one, even Tristram Shandy, the narrator, whose hobby-horse appears to be the act of writing itself. If “my uncle Toby’s” hobby-horse is quite innocent – that is the military strategy – innocent, but a great time and energy consumer, for him and Corporal Trim together, the theorizing dominant trait of Walter Shandy is primarily the source of the immense barriers in the communication between the characters. Thus, he will always have a philosophy he is ready to embrace, no matter its absurdity, he will develop secondary obsessions regarding various causes and effects in a man’s life – the most prominent ones appear to be the theory according to which a man’s course of life is dictated by his name, as well as the one about noses. The two determine the occurence of the events – the crushing of the nose, the mis-christening, as well as a reason for Sterne to bring about embedded stories – the Slawkenbergius's Tale. The two brothers are often annoyed by the other’s hobby-horse and, more important, they often seem to pay less attention to the other, being consumed by their own focus. If Toby, the warm-hearted character, only manifests his disapproval by whistling Lillabullero, Walter clearly loses his temper when it comes to his brother’s mania with battles and fortifications: “with all my heart, replied my father, I don’t care what they call you, but I wish the whole science of fortification, with all its inventors, at the Devil – it has been the death of thousands – and it will be mine in the end”.[13]
4. Intertextuality . Parody.
Although too many relevant details concerning the narration and the narrating might have skipped this presentation, I shall put an end now to this aspect, to refer shortly to another issue of interest in analysing Tristram Shandy as a meta-novel, that is its parodic implications and I shall start by quoting a series of definitions of parody, for a simplified understanding of the issue. Thus, J.C.Riewald says – “parody must be a wilful distorsion of the entire form and spirit of a writer, captured at his most typical moment”, Linda Hutcheon – “parody is a form of imitation characterized by ironic inversion”, Mikhail Bahtin – “a form of textual dialogism” – Genette sees the parody as the “relationship between the hypotext and the hypertext, a transformation as a particular manifestation of the intertextuality.[14] At this point, I think it will be useful to offer as well a definition of intertextuality, as given by Julia Kristeva in 1967 – “each text is an intersection of texts where at least one other word (text) can be read...any text is the absorption and transformation of another. The notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity, and poetic language is read as at least double”[15].
Having hereby the concepts defined, we should further embark in a completely different form of analysing Tristram Shandy, this time on the basis of these specific aspects. However, allow me only to review the main influences, the most important direct quotations and/or references, as the time will not permit us to develop the issue as much as it would be worth of.
Wandering among a vast list of authors, from whom he would borrow from a line to the narrative structure itself, Sterne is, nevertheless, primarily indebted to four main sources, i.e. Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote, Rabelais – the Gargantua and Pantraguel series, John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. Other worth mentioning sources are Montaigne, Pope, Swift, Shakespeare. The great minds of the classical antiquity aren’t left aside and one can meet references to Horace, Cicero (direct quotation), Homer, Quintilianus, Justinianus, Flavius Josephus, Aristotle, Tacitus etc, or even the biblical references - "by their fruits ye shall know them", Matt. VII.20 (book II, ch. XVII). In the presentation of (my) uncle Toby’s hobby-horse on fortifications, many historians and engineers are also quoted. If from Rabelais Sterne borrowed the skills in dealing with bawdiness and the double-entendre to create a comic effect, if he took from Cervantes the very reasoning of the novel, that is the mocking of reality and the mocking of his contemporaries’ literature altogether, characters’ s typologies – as it is the case of the couple my uncle Toby – Trim, mirroring the famous Don Quixote – Sancho Panza couple, the other hundreds of references, including the fictitious ones – to authors that never existed –either support or are there only to contradict the ideas of Sterne himself or of his fictionalised personae and also help in characterisations:
“This can be said above all for the character of Tristram's father: the quotations which embellish his discourses give the idea of a learned person, but also of a finicky man, stubborn and, above all, bizarre. The character of uncle Toby, on the other hand, suits the quotations of a military order, which illustrate his obsession for fortifications.”[16]
5. Are we not here now and gone in a moment?
Having thus all the main aspects of the Sternean narrative universe sketched, we should further on rely on a practical illustration in order to simplify the understanding of the techniques he made use of. Of course, the term anti-novel itself presupposes – among other various already specified – a certain disorder at the level of the narrative structure, hence what applies for the kitchen scene, might not stand as correct for a different chapter. Still, since a pattern is visible in the fragment quoted – and that is dialogue – digression – dialogue – digression and so on and so forth, we might as well open the book at any other page and still find this sequencing applicable. Therefore, the kitchen scene, or, to be specific, Volume V, ch. VII-IX, p. 252-255. op.cit. can stand as representative.
Before starting to analyse the narrative structure and the stylistic devices, we have to briefly summarize what actually happens in the chapters to be discussed. In a few words – we are told in the middle of the book – Vol. IV – ch. XXXI, op cit - that Walter Shandy is not sure how to calculate his expenses to solve two issues – one would be the fencing of Ox-moor, the other – the Grand Tour for a brother Bobby that, typically for Sterne, otherwise, is mentioned for the first time. In about same lines, the death of this brother Bobby is proleptically announced, for the letter announcing the tragic event will be disclosed starting with Volume V, chapter II – “When my father received the letter which brought him the melancholy account of my brother Bobby’s death, he was busy calculating the expence of his riding post from Calais to Paris and so on to Lyons” (p.243). The scene to be further on discussed presents actually the servants’ reactions towards the same misfortunate event and it involves five of the secondary characters – i.e. Corporal Trim, Susannah, Obadiah, the coachman and “a fat foolish scullion” on one hand, and Tristram as a narrator and his narratees – at this point “your worships and reverences” for the digressive parts. The scene – for we deal with a dialogue completed and adnoted by the homodiegetic narrator – begins, we might say “in media res”, with Obadiah, having previously found out about the Bobby’s death, announcing the sad news to Susannah – “My young master in London is dead”!. Right away the narrator renders Susannah’s thoughts, which aren’t of the devout kind whatsoever, as it would be expected after being shared such news, but a “procession”, to quote the exact term Sterne used – of the clothing articles Mrs Shandy must give up at, once gone into mourning. Susannah’s association of ideas allows the narrator to introduce a direct intertextual reference to his dear source – John Locke – Essays on Human Understanding. “Well might Locke write a chapter upon the imperfections of the words”. As a paranthesis, the chapter which Locke “might write”, had been actually written more than half a century before – Book III – Of Words – Chapter IX: Of the Imperfection of Words. The dialogue between the two and Trim and Jonathan, the coachman, will be interrupted at times by the stupid interventions of the “fat scullion”, creating an amusing effect that annihilates the seriousness of the matter debated in the kitchen: “He’s dead, said Obadiah ---he’s certainly dead!---So am I not, said the foolish scullion”; “Oh, he’s dead – said Susannah --- As sure, said the scullion, as I’m alive”.
At the very heart of the scene lays the “infinitely striking” discourse of Trim on death, disrupted by two different types of digressions – an opinionative one, in close relation with Trim’s discourse and an interlude, where the issue of the promised and never told chapters about chamber-maids and button-holes brought into discussion again, is to be settled, this time with another habit of the Sternean text, which hasn’t been yet mentioned in the course of this presentation – that is the double entendre, in other words the choice of words with dual meaning and sexual allusion – “which is nothing, an’t please your reverences, but a chapter of chamber-maids, green-gowns and old hats”. The footnote of the Norton edition of the book indicates: “green-gowns – slang for whores, old hats: slang for female genitals”.
That would be in a nutshell the sjuzet of the three chapters. In terms of duration we are dealing with a scene, and it is the moment to point out that Sterne’s scene is almost theatrical due to the extensive use of the stage directions, most of them rendered in parentheses: ( e.g. “dropping his hat plumb upon the ground and pausing before he pronounced the word”; “continued the corporal (standing perpendicularly)”; “(Susannah laid her hand upon Trim’s shoulder) [...] (Susannah took it off)”. Also, Trim’s monologue on death and the perishability of the human body – “are we not here now and are we not gone! in a moment?”, “are we not like a flower of the field [...] is not all flesh grass? – Tis clay, -- ‘tis dirt.”, beyond the high intensity of sentimentalism that carries, may be easily associated with grandiose monologues of the world’s theatre – and I am only thinking about Hamlet’s “alas poor Yorick” monologue in the 5th Act. Perhaps I am not too far-fetched tracing this instance, as there are indeed many references to Hamlet in Tristram Shandy, as I have already pointed out in the previous chapters of this presentation.
To go back to Genéttian pattern of analysis, we deal with a sole instance of repeating narrative (“and are we not here now [...] and are we not [...] gone! in a moment!” – the striking words of Trim are rendered twice with the visible aim of emphasizing), otherwise the narration is singulative. In terms of distance, we are dealing with showing, the most mimetic form, reported speech, again an argument for the theatricality of the fragment and, going further, for its verisimilitude. What actually goes against verisimilitude and favours the meta-novel is the habit of the homodiegetic narrator to put aside his external focalization and mingle into the storyline, together with his narratees – the metalepses I have already explained. An instance is the way he interrupts Trim’s speech : “Stay, I have a small account to settle with the reader before Trim can go on with his harangue. It shall be done in two minutes”. With no great effort of imagination, we can picture the characters standing still and quiet, until their demiurge – or if you prefer, puppeteer – will decide to let them talk again.
The self-conscious narrator manifests himself vividly within the digressions – he knows that his books has debts and promises to discharge of in due time, he realizes that he’s “gone a little about”, although he sees no problem at all, since “’tis for health”. Another clear instance is the repetition of “we are not stocks and stones”. At first this declaration appears in connection with the emotional discourse of Trim, in the small sequence of summary in which the narrator tells how the companions of Trim reacted to the speech, to be further on brought about and developed within the explanatory digression that follows. The rendering would be like: “I wrote this, I should have written that, I am fully aware of my status as a narrator here” and therefore it completely proves the self-consciousness Wayne Booth was talking about.
During the first digression the instance I was talking about earlier in this presentation is clearly represented, i.e. the firm way in which the narrator admonishes his narratees to pay attention to the text: “I do demand your attention --- your worships and reverences, for any ten pages together, take them where you will in any other part of the work, shall sleep for it at your ease”. And later on, under the form of an invocation – “ye who [...] meditate, meditate, I beseech you, upon Trim’s hat”.
To conclude with the Genéttian analysis, we must add the time of the narrating to the category of voice – that is subsequent, since the homodiegetic narrator Tristram Shandy uses the past tense - said, continued, took off, laid – and of course, due to the fact that we know, although we are never told in this very fragment, which is the temporal connection of the narrator with the course of the events. To be more specific, Tristram is writing about “his life and opinions” at full maturity, whereas the scene we are talking about takes place only a little later than his very birth. Of course, we can regard the whole fragment as being also interpolated – as having the scene indeed subsequent, but the digressions actually simultaneous.
The tone of the implied author , although he chooses at times high-flown addressing such as “your worships and reverences”, is still intimate and colloquial. The narratees are his companions alongside his mind journey, they accompany and, at times, help him, they are – in two words – his friends, hence the addressing with formulae such as “I love you for this [...] dear creatures”. However, towards his characters, he opts to be ironical – note the procession of the clothes in Susannah’s mind and the exaggerate way in which he describes Trim’s gestures and especially the increased importance that the narrator seems to grant the hat with – “the mortality of Trim’s hat”. The hat and the way Trim dropped it is presumably of great significance, since it deserves a long series of action verbs – “had he flung it, or thrown it, or cast it, or skimmed it, or squirted it or let it slip or fall”, followed by another series of similes – “like a goose, like a puppy, like an ass [...] like a fool, like a ninny, like a nincompoop”. The narrator thus implies that the gesture of dropping the hat is definitive for the emotional effect, moreover, he overbids with the invocation – “ye who govern the mighty world” and with the verb “to beseech” when asking the narratee not more, not less than “to meditate upon Trim’s hat”. The effect is comic as much as possible, hence the unreliability of the narrator, who seems to be speaking as seriously as possible.
In terms of syntax , the sentences are long, loose, with parenthetical constituents, especially when Trim’s speech is rendered, helping both in amplifying the discourse, but also in the characterization of Trim, whose personal hobby-horse is to hear himself talking, as much and as high-flown as possible: “To us, Jonathan1/, who know not2/what want or care is, 3/who live here in the service of two of the best of masters – (bating in my case his majesty King William the Third4/, whom I had the honour to serve both in Ireland and Flanders) –5/ I own it6/, that from Whitsontide to within three weeks of Christmas – ‘tis not long1/ – tis like nothing7/ – but to those , Jonathan8/, who know what death is9/and what havock and destruction he can make10/, before a man can well wheel about 11/– ‘tis like a whole age8/”. The abundance of co-reference terms indicates a high degree of repetitiveness – the pronoun “us” will be further on “explained” – “who know not...”, “who live here”, “who had the honour” and the same exact treatment will have an oppositive “they” (those) – “who know what death is”. The structure is obviously disrupted – the main clauses “to us ‘tis not long”, “to us ‘tis like nothing”, juxtaposed, are difficult to observe at first sight in the sea of attributive subordinates and direct object clauses and that is but one example meant to render the sinuous sentence structure so dear to the stream of consciousness prose.
Experimental, metafictional, anti-novel, anachronical, sentimental, novel of sensibility, stream of consciousness prose, realism of the mind, satiric, comic, humorous, witty, scholastic, travel (of the mind) literature, incomplete, dirty, mockery, ODDITY - all these and many others have been used since 1760 till today in order to describe accurately The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. But author's own description, Shandean, comprises them all. There is no other novel like Tristram Shandy and, to rephrase Victor Shklovsky's words, there is no other novel that is as much a novel as Tristram Shandy.
6. Bibliography/ Webliography
1. Anderson, Howard (ed.), Laurence Sterne. Tristram Shandy. An Authoritative Text. The Author on the Novel. Criticism, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, London, 1980.
2. Bowman Piper, William, Tristram’s Digressive Artistry, in Anderson, Howard (ed.), Laurence Sterne. Tristram Shandy. An Authoritative Text. The Author on the Novel. Criticism
3. Colipcă, Gabriela Iuliana, Experimenting with narrative structure: Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Iași, 2003
4. Colipcă, Gabriela Iuliana, The Ways of the Novel Or, The Quest for Verisimilitude in the Eighteenth Century French and English Novel, Leiden University, 2005
5. Farias, Adelina, Clona literară (Repere pentru o discuţie asupra parodiei)
6. Fludernik Monika, An Introduction to Narratology, Routledge, 2009, available books.google.com/books?id=PTjSZy81nGEC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=&f=false
7. Keymer, Thomas (ed), Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. A Casebook, Oxford University Press, 2006, excerpts available: https://books.google.com/books?id=JLeSB-k3cxUC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=&f=false
8. Landow, George P. , Tristram Shandy and the Comedy of Context at https://www.tristramshandyweb.it
9. Olteanu, Tudor, Morfologia romanului european în secolul al XVIII-lea, Editura Univers, București, 1974
10. Pasta, Elena, Intertextuality at https://www.tristramshandyweb.it
11. Shklovsky, Victor, The Novel as Parody in Theory of Prose, Dalkey Archive Press 199; available: https://www.dalkeyarchive.com/article/show/125
12. Surdulescu, Radu, Form, Structure and Structurality in Critical Theory. Pre-Structuralist and Structuralist Narratology, Bucharest, 2003 , available: https://ebooks.unibuc.ro/lls/RaduSurdulescu-FormStructuality/Pre-Structuralist%20and%20Structuralist%20Narratology.htm
13. Tadie, Alexis, Sterne's whimsical theatres of language: orality, gestures, literacy, Ashgate Publishing LTD, 2003 excerpts available: https://books.google.com/books?id=W6yQlXmRo60C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=&f=false
[1] “A metanovel is a work in which an inner fiction, narrated by an inner persona, is intercalated in an outer one. the innovation implied by this technical intrusion of an inner fiction is that the central conflict between fiction and reality is reproduced within the structure of the novel itself.” (Lowenkron, David Henry, The Metanovel at https://www.jstor.org/pss/376420 )
[2] Sterne, Laurence, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Volume V, chapters VII-IX, p. 252-255, W.W.Norton, 1980, edited by H. Anderson
[3] A more extensive book by book presentation can be found at https://www.tristramshandyweb.it/ , A Table of Contents for Tristram Shandy by Charles Parish
[4] The rearrangement is based on A Tristram Shandy Chronology at https://www.tristramshandyweb.it/
[5] Viktor Shklovsky, The Novel as Parody in Theory of Prose, Dalkey Archive Press
[6] Sterne, Laurence, Op. cit, vol III, ch. 20, p.140
[7] Sterne, Laurence, Op cit, vol IX, ch. XXV, p.446
[8] Colipcă, Gabriela Iuliana, Experimenting with narrative structure: Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Iași, 2003, p.4
[9] Laurence Sterne, op.cit, vol IX, ch. XX, p.440
[10] Laurence Sterne, op. cit, VI/XVII, p. 307
[11] “Narrators can be classified as self-conscious, when they know that they are narrating or writing and possibly comment on their labor (Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy, Holden Caulfield)”, Surdulescu, Radu, Form, Structure and Structurality in Critical Theory. Pre-Structuralist and Structuralist Narratology
[12] Term coined by Mieke Bal, to replace Genette’s metadiegetic (Fludernik Monika, An Introduction to Narratology, Routledge, 2009, p. 100)
[13] Laurence Sterne, Op. Cit. Volume II, Chapter XX, p.80
[14] All the definitions are quoted and translated from Adelina Farias, Clona literară (Repere pentru o discuţie asupra parodiei)
[15] Quoted from https://www.metapedia.com/wiki/index.php?title=Intertextuality
[16] Elena Pasta, Intertextuality at https://www.tristramshandyweb.it
