The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne

Notice the novel is titled “Life and Opinions….” not “Life and Adventures…” There is no adventure in Tristram Shandy, hardly even any incidents. Nearly all of the action takes place in the sitting room of a modest house, “Shandy Hall”, sometimes extending to other rooms, or the grounds outside, sometimes including a few locations in the village. The characters talk to each other and the narrator talks to the reader, addressing us continually as “Sir,” “Madam,” “My lord” and so on. The sense is of a good company, including the reader, sitting around a table in a pub, swapping tales. The stories are humorous, trivial. The story-tellers pretend to erudition, display their wit, betray their personal obsessions, bemoan their little troubles, and variously sympathize with or genially poke fun at the foibles of others. Sterne sums up the entire book in the closing sentences when one character asks, “What is all this story about?” and another answers, “A COCK and a BULL… And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard.”

Neither does the reader get much of Tristram Shandy’s life or opinions. Tristram Shandy is the narrator but he’s not the main character. He isn’t even born until the end of the fourth volume – about halfway through the novel’s nine volumes. The main characters are actually Tristram’s father, whose name is Walter but is always called, “My father” and Walter’s brother, always called, “My uncle, Toby.” These two are Laurel and Hardy types. Walter is the aggrieved straight man who thinks he’s wiser than he is. Toby is the genial side kick attempting to keep up with the baroque thoughts and schemes of his friend. The tone puts me in mind of Fawlty Towers: minor matters spiral into chaos but only pride is ever seriously injured. Surrounding Walter and Toby are a handful of minor characters. Uncle Toby is accompanied by a servant and friend, Corporeal Trim; they were soldiers together. There’s a clergyman named Yorick, like Hamlet’s jester, and a Doctor named Slop. The female characters are few and minor: Tristram’s mother, and a love interest for Uncle Toby, Widow Wadman, who appears at the end of the novel.

Tristram himself does get one important section of the book to tell his own story, as an adult, that’s volume VII, but most of the novel reads as written by an omniscient author who relates details about scenes where he isn’t present. The confusion of Sterne’s authorial voice and Tristram’s narrator voice is constant. Additionally, Laurence Sterne was himself a clergyman who published a collection of his sermons under the name Yorick. So the character of Yorick can be read as yet another stand-in for Sterne.

The novel’s nine volumes were published serially between 1761 and 1767. Pity the poor reader who had to wait seven years to complete the series. I binge-read it in seven days. Sterne/Tristram is a delightful companion on a wandering, far-reaching, back-tracking, determined, but unhurried, journey to tell not just the landmarks of a life (the usual birth, school, career, marriage/family, death), but all the constellation of details and determinants that affect and color that life, or push and shove it into being, or sometimes thwart it. So expansive is the biographical program that Sterne never gets to recounting much of Tristram’s “life”, but no matter. I’ve attempted to read Tristram Shandy before and couldn’t bear it. It’s frustrating for a reader who has maybe read Dickens and just wants Sterne to get on with it already. A reviewer on Amazon gave the book a single star and said she threw the book into the fire. But if the reader understands that the “it” of it, is not Tristram’s story but Sterne’s story-telling, a reader’s patience is rewarded. This is a great book. Just relax and let it be the unique novel it is.

Here are the few incidents of the plot. Volumes I – IV: Tristram’s conception, birth, naming, all of which come out badly. His conception is nearly lost when his mother suddenly calls out asking if his father has remembered to wind the clock. His birth is marred when Doctor Slop squashes his nose with the foreceps. His name was intended to be Trismegistus, but in a rush to get him christened the servant girl and the assistant curate botch the name. All of these incidents contradict principles of vital importance to Tristram’s father, which he explains through long discourses on quasi-scientific theories on births and names and noses. (Carl Jung also had a theory about names becoming destiny). Volume V: a childhood mishap results in Tristram’s accidental circumcision: for lack of a chamber-pot the boy is pissing out a window when the sash drops. A lot of the novel concerns itself with penises, penis-size, and doubts about male potency. The endless talk of noses isn’t really about noses, you understand. The book was labeled “bawdy” in the eighteenth century, which I’m sure served as both criticism and fascination. Uncle Toby tells war stories, which he remembers with his servant/friend Corporeal Trim. They also re-enact battles on a model battlefield set up on the “bowling green” outside the house. Uncle Toby has his own penis problem. He received a war wound in his groin, the unknown details of which are a vexation to the Widow Wadman in Volumes VIII and IX.

The delights of Sterne’s story-telling go beyond the humorous content and the playful digressions. He subverts all the conventions of novels. A conversation is interrupted mid-sentence and is picked up again pages later. He writes a prologue that comes toward the end of the book. The death of a character is followed by a page covered entirely, both sides, in black printer’s ink as an illustration of mortality. Later there’s a page left entirely blank where the reader is invited to sketch their own version of an idealized woman rather than depend on the author to provide her description in prose. Sterne/Tristram talks about his writing in a meta-fictional manner, his process, his inspiration, ideas he intends to write about later, why he feels forced to interrupt the story again, now. One of Yorick’s sermons is read. A couple of fables are told. Sterne/Tristram and other characters, especially Tristram’s father, often cite other writers, and Uncle Toby recounts actual battles so it’s helpful to read an edition that includes footnotes to explain the references. (My copy was published by the Odyssey Press, New York, in 1940, edited by James Aiken Work, who also provided a very helpful and thorough Introduction). A reader who has read Cervantes or Rabelais would be well-prepared, although it isn’t required. (I haven’t)

Volume VI concludes the more or less chronological story of Tristram from conception through being fitted for pants. Tristram’s father organizes a plan for his education. The volume ends with a long set-up for a story yet to come of Uncle Toby’s romantic affair with the Widow Wadman (which occurred before Tristram was born) and will be told finally in Volumes VIII and IX. Meanwhile, in Volume VII, in a novel filled with minor swerves, there comes an enormous shift. Suddenly Tristram (or is it Sterne?) is an adult, making a hurried trip from England to the south of France for his health, pursued by death. The writing takes the form of a satiric travel-guide, but there is seriousness here, too, more than is present in the rest of the novel. Tristram/Sterne names the little French towns he quickly passes through: the inns, the carriages, his expenses. It’s still funny but for the first time there’s real darkness. Sterne/Tristram might die before he can get back to the story he was telling. We realize now all the ribaldry had been in the face of mortality. We had been enjoying the fun. We forgot the funeral.

Sterne suffered from tuberculosis throughout his life with both chronic symptoms and occasional acute symptoms of bleeding from his lungs. He actually made a trip to Europe following the publication of Volume VI seeking a healthful climate. He wrote about his travels in another book called A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, published in 1765, two years before he returned to Volume VII of Tristram Shandy. So here the conflation of Sterne and Tristram, author and character, becomes complete. Knowing Sterne’s own situation, and bringing that context to Tristram’s autobiography lifts the novel from amusement to genius. What seems like an anomaly within the nine volumes becomes the key to the work’s greatness. Sterne includes an epigraph to Volume VII from Pliny the Younger, which I think Sterne meant literally: “For this is not an excursion from it, but is the work itself.”

Volume VII ends with Sterne/Tristram safe in the south of France, in good health, having out-run death. The final scene in the volume is a charming story when he chances upon a woman he names Nanette, working in a field. He’s beguiled by a slit in her petticoat that reveals a glimpse of her skin and restores him to life.

Then back to England for Volumes VIII and IX. At last we’re told the story of Uncle Toby and the Widow Wadman. It is the same tenor and tone of the earlier novel, though the thread of Tristram’s autobiography is now entirely abandoned. The widow is finally brave enough to ask Uncle Toby exactly where he was wounded. Toby says, “You shall see the very place.” “You shall lay your finger upon the place.” The Widow is startled. Then Uncle Toby sends his friend Trim to fetch a map of the battlefield.