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The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67) by Laurence Sterne is the strangest and most innovative novel in the English language — a work that uses the novel form to demolish the novel form, by following its narrator's attempt to write his autobiography and watching that attempt fail comprehensively. Tristram Shandy cannot write his story because every story requires context, every context requires more context, and every digression spawns further digressions, so that by Volume III he has reached the second year of his life. The novel includes blank pages, black pages, a marbled page, chapters that appear in the wrong order, chapters that are left blank for the reader to complete, and a dedication that is for sale to whoever will pay the most for it. Sterne's innovations — the digression as subject rather than interruption, the self-awareness about the novel's formal conventions, the joke played on the reader — anticipated the formal experiments of Modernism by a hundred and fifty years and influenced Joyce, Woolf, Beckett, and virtually every subsequent writer who has thought about what fiction can do.
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Tristram Shandy (1759)
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Tristram Shandy
Laurence Sterne·1759
Tristram Shandy — Frequently Asked Questions
Why doesn't Tristram Shandy have a conventional plot?
Sterne's argument, implicit in the novel's structure, is that conventional plots are lies — that life does not organize itself into tidy sequences of cause and effect, that what matters to a person cannot be separated from an infinite regress of context and association, and that a novel that truly captured a life would therefore be infinite. The novel's most famous demonstration of this argument is in Volume IV, when Sterne calculates that since it has taken him two years to write the first two days of his life, and since he is living (and therefore having more life to write about) while he is writing, he will never catch up with himself — his autobiography will always be going further behind. This is a philosophical joke, but it is also a serious claim about the impossibility of autobiography and the artificiality of conventional narrative.
Who is Walter Shandy?
Walter Shandy is Tristram's father — one of the great comic characters in English fiction, a man obsessed with theories: about the influence of names on character (hence his horror when his son is accidentally christened 'Tristram'), about the influence of the circumstances of conception on the character of children (hence his obsession with the precise moment at which his wife interrupted him with a question about the clock), about noses, about auxiliary verbs, about everything except the practical management of his household. He is a satire of the Enlightenment philosopher who explains everything except what needs explaining, and his relationship with his brother Captain Toby Shandy — an equally obsessed but much gentler man who has devoted himself to recreating the siege of Namur on his bowling green — is the emotional heart of the novel.
Is Tristram Shandy actually difficult to read?
Tristram Shandy is less difficult than it sounds and less difficult than Ulysses or Finnegans Wake, which are the contemporary works it most resembles in reputation. The prose is eighteenth-century in style — longer sentences than modern prose — but Sterne's voice is warm, funny, and continuously engaging with the reader as a friendly presence. The digressions are entertaining as digressions rather than obstacles to the story, once the reader accepts that the story is the digressions. Most readers who approach it with patience find it genuinely funny — one of the funniest novels in English — and formally exciting in a way that very few long novels are.
What else did Sterne write?
Sterne's other major work is A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768), published shortly before his death — a short, digressive, charming account of a journey to France and Italy that is largely about the narrator's emotional reactions to what he encounters rather than about what he actually sees. The word 'sentimental' in the title was Sterne's coinage and it defined an entire literary movement: the cult of feeling, of emotional responsiveness, of tears and sympathy as social goods. A Sentimental Journey is the easiest and most accessible of Sterne's writings and an ideal companion to Tristram Shandy.
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