The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  (Redirected from Tristram Shandy)
Jump to: navigation, search
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman  

"The Smoking Batteries": Toby's colonel invents a device for firing multiple minature 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.
Author Laurence Sterne
Country Britain
Language English
Publisher Ann Ward (vol. 1–2), Dodsley (vol. 3–4), Becket & DeHondt (5–9)
Publication date December 1759 (vol. 1, 2) – January 1767 (vol 9)
Pages 9 vol.

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (or, more briefly, Tristram Shandy) is a novel by Laurence Sterne. It was published in nine volumes, the first two appearing in 1759, and seven others following over the next 10 years. It was not always held in high esteem by other writers (Samuel Johnson responded that, "Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.")[1][2], but its bawdy humour was popular with London society, and it has come to be seen as one of the greatest comic novels in English, as well as a forerunner for many modern narrative devices.

Contents

[edit] Synopsis and style

"The Jack-boots transformed into Mortars": Trim has found an old pair of jack-boots useful as mortarboards while he was doing home repairs. Unfortunately, they turn out to have been Walter's great-grandfather's. (Book III, Chapters XXII and XXIII)

As its title suggests, 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 we do not even reach Tristram's own birth until Volume III.

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 popular minor characters including Doctor Slop and the parson Yorick.

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.

"The long-nosed Stranger of Strasburg": Book IV opens with a story from one of Walter's favourite books, a collection of stories in Latin about noses.

In between such events, Tristram as narrator finds himself discoursing at length on sexual practices, insults, the influence of one's name, 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.

[edit] Techniques and influences

Sterne's text is filled with allusions and references to the leading thinkers and writers of the 17th and 18th centuries. Pope, Locke, and Swift were all 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 contributed ideas and frameworks that Sterne explored throughout his novel.

Sterne's engagement with the science and philosophy of his day was extensive, however, and the sections on obstetrics and fortifications, for instance, indicate that he had a grasp of the main issues then current in those fields.[citation needed]

"My Uncle Toby on his Hobby-horse": Toby's hobby-horse is the military, and in this scene, he gets himself and Trim so excited by his discussion of military matters that they begin acting them out. George Cruikshank's illustration of Book IV, Chapter XVIII.

Four influences on Tristram Shandy overshadow all others: Rabelais, Cervantes, Montaigne's Essays, and John Locke.

Sterne had written an earlier piece called A Rabelaisian Fragment, which indicates his familiarity with the work of the French monk. But the earlier work is not needed to see the influence of Rabelais on Tristram Shandy, which is evident in multiple allusions, as well as in the overall tone of bawdy humor centered on the body.

The first scene in Tristram Shandy, where Tristram's mother interrupts his father during the sex that leads to Tristram's conception, testifies to Sterne's debt to Rabelais.[citation needed]

The shade of Cervantes is similarly present throughout Sterne's novel. The frequent references to 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.[citation needed]

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.

It also owes a significant inter-textual debt to Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, Swift's Battle of the Books, and the Scriblerian collaborative work, The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus.[citation needed]

Today, the novel is commonly seen as a forerunner of later novels' use of stream of consciousness and self-reflexive writing. However, current critical opinion is divided on this question.

There is a significant body of critical opinion that argues that Tristram Shandy is better understood as an example of an obsolescent literary tradition of "Learned Wit", partly following the contribution of D.W. Jefferson.[who?][citation needed]

A historic site in Geneva, Ohio, called Shandy Hall, is part of the Western Reserve Historical Society. The home was named after the house described in Tristram Shandy.[3]

[edit] Adaptations

"The Quarrel of Slop and Susannah": Book VI, Chapter III: While trying to give the young Tristram some medicine, Susannah and Dr. Slop get into a fight, and attack each other with the weapon most readily at hand: The medicine. Chapter IV sends them back to the kitchen to prepare another treatment.

Tristram Shandy has been adapted as a graphic novel by cartoonist Martin Rowson.

Michael Nyman has been working off and on Tristram Shandy as an opera since 1981. At least five portions of the opera have been publicly performed and one, "Nose-List Song", was recorded in 1985 on the album, The Kiss and Other Movements.

The book was adapted on film in 2006 as A Cock and Bull Story, directed by Michael Winterbottom, written by Frank Cottrell Boyce (credited as Martin Hardy, in a complicated metafictional twist), and starring Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Keeley Hawes, Kelly Macdonald, Naomie Harris, and Gillian Anderson. The movie plays with metatextual levels, being a mockumentary about a supposed movie adaptation of the book, with various actors playing fictionalized versions of themselves.

Recent literary history has brought to light the Shandy by Irving Washington--a dilatory epic adaptation of Laurence Sterne's novel. Book I was published in the April/May 2006 issue of The Grub Street Grackle Literary Magazine, in which the editor writes that "Mr. Irving Washington of Forest City, Iowa sent me the entire manuscript of his Shandy--a tremendous epic poem in twenty-four books--just a few days before he died on April 1 of this year. The poem is too long to print here all at once, but I shall be glad to release it one book at a time, one each for the next twenty-three years."[4] Book II was published in the Late Spring 2007 issue.

[edit] Gallery

"The Effects of Trim's Eloquence"

"Obadiah leading in Dr. Slop

"Trim's relation of Tristram's misfortune"

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ "LAURENCE STERNE (1713-1768)". The Guardian (UK). Retrieved on 20 October 2007.
  2. ^ Random House Author Spotlight - Laurence Sterne
  3. ^ Harper Family Papers, The Western Reserve Historical Society
  4. ^ Grub Street Grackle, Vol. I, no. 5, April/March 2006

[edit] References

  • Alter, Robert. "Tristram Shandy and the Game of Love". American Scholar, 37 (1968): 316–323.
  • Bosch, René, Labyrinth of Digressions: Tristram Shandy As Perceived and Influenced by Sterne's Early Imitators. Translated by Piet Verhoeff. Costerus, new series, v. 172. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. ISBN 9042022914.
  • Brady, Frank. "Tristram Shandy: Sexuality, Morality, and Sensibility". Eighteenth-Century Studies, 4, no. 1 (Autumn, 1970): 41–56. doi:10.2307/2737612.
  • Halliday, E. M. Understanding Thomas Jefferson. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2001. ISBN 0060197935.
  • Jefferson, D. W. "Tristram Shandy and the Tradition of Learned Wit". Essays in Criticism, 1 (1951): 225–48.
  • New, Melvyn. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Laurence Sterne. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992. Collects Brady and Jefferson's essays.
  • Towers, A. R. "Sterne's Cock and Bull Story". ELH, 25 (1957): 12–29.

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_and_Opinions_of_Tristram_Shandy,_Gentleman"
Personal tools