Tristram Shandy — Commentary

In brief

Tristram Shandy sets out to tell the story of his life and opinions from the very beginning, which he takes to be the night of his conception, when his mother interrupted his father at the critical moment by asking whether he had remembered to wind the clock. He does not get himself born until the third volume. By the end of the ninth he has been named wrongly, had his nose crushed by a doctor’s forceps and suffered an accident with a window sash at the age of five, and the book closes some years before his own birth, on a joke about a bull.

In between, almost nothing happens and everything is discussed. The father, Walter, has a theory for every occasion. The uncle, Toby, wounded in the groin at Namur, rebuilds the fortifications of Flanders on a bowling green with his servant, Corporal Trim. A parson dies, and the next page is black. It is the funniest long novel in English, written by a coughing Yorkshire clergyman who knew he was dying.

The argument

The book’s joke is also its discovery: a life cannot be written down, because writing takes longer than living. Tristram does the sum himself in vol. IV, ch. 13. He is “one whole year older” than when he began, he has reached only “my first day’s life”, and so he has “three hundred and sixty-four days more life to write just now, than when I first set out”. The more he writes, the further behind he falls. Other novels dodge this. Sterne makes it the plot.

The cause is in the philosophy of the day. John Locke had argued that the mind builds its contents from experience and warned of ideas stuck together by accident. Sterne seizes on this in vol. I, ch. 4: Walter winds the clock on the first Sunday night of each month and attends to his marital duties at the same time, so that Mrs Shandy can never hear one without thinking of the other. That is what minds are like, says the book, and so no two people ever mean the same thing. Each man rides his own hobby-horse, and conversation is a set of riders passing at speed.

What rescues this from despair is the affection. Walter and Toby never once understand each other, and they love each other, and that is Sterne’s real answer to Locke. Words fail, but a pipe knocked out or a hat dropped on a kitchen floor can get across. When Toby catches a fly that has been tormenting him all through dinner, he carries it to the window and lets it go: “This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me” (vol. II, ch. 12). Tristram says that he owes half his philanthropy to that moment. It is meant to be sentimental.

The shape of the book

Sterne published in five instalments over eight years: volumes I and II at the end of 1759, then III and IV in 1761, V and VI at the end of that year, VII and VIII in 1765, and IX in 1767. Readers complained and he answered them in the next instalment. “Writing, when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation,” Tristram says in vol. II, ch. 11.

It moves on two tracks. The life of Tristram gets started, stalls, and gives way to the earlier story of Toby, which is the book’s real destination. “Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine;” says vol. I, ch. 22, “they are the life, the soul of reading!” He boasts that his work is digressive and progressive at once, and it is true. The story of what Walter and Toby were saying by the fire when Tristram’s birth began is broken off in vol. I, ch. 21 and picked up in vol. II, ch. 6, Toby’s pipe still in his hand.

Volume VII breaks away altogether. Death knocks at the door (vol. VII, ch. 1), and Tristram runs for France. This is Sterne’s own flight from tuberculosis, as farce. Volumes VIII and IX return to Toby and the Widow Wadman, whose real question is exactly where he was wounded. Whether the book was meant to stop at vol. IX, ch. 33 is disputed. Its last words are hard to beat as a verdict: “L—d! said my mother, what is all this story about?” And Yorick’s answer: “A COCK and a BULL”, “And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard.”

The pages themselves

Sterne treats the printed book as a physical thing that can be made to joke.

The black page. After Yorick’s death in vol. I, ch. 12, and the epitaph “Alas, poor YORICK!”, Sterne had the next leaf printed solid black on both sides. It is a mourning card bound into a comic novel.
The marbled page. In vol. III, ch. 36 Tristram warns that without much reading you will never penetrate “the moral of the next marbled page (motly emblem of my work!)”, any more than the world has unravelled what lies “under the dark veil of the black one”. Then comes a marbled leaf, the kind bookbinders use for endpapers, made and added by hand to each copy, so that no two match. A book that claims to be unique to each reader’s mind here actually is.
The blank page. In vol. VI, ch. 38 Tristram despairs of describing the Widow Wadman’s beauty and hands the job over: “Sit down, Sir, paint her to your own mind”. Then comes a blank page for the purpose, a page “which Malice will not blacken”.
The lines. In vol. VI, ch. 40 he draws the wandering plots of the first five volumes as squiggles, and promises to go straight. In vol. IX, ch. 4 Trim flourishes his stick to show what freedom is, and the flourish is printed, a single loop running down the page: “Whilst a man is free”.
The gaps. A chapter is torn out, leaving “a chasm of ten pages” (vol. IV, ch. 25), on the plea that it was too good for the rest. Chapters 18 and 19 of volume IX appear blank and are written later, after ch. 25. The author’s preface turns up in the middle of vol. III, because everyone was busy until then.

The free edition linked here, the 1912 Everyman on Project Gutenberg, keeps the marbled image and the lines, but it renders the black page as a black tombstone and the first editions’ two black sides are lost. To see those, look for a facsimile.

The people

Tristram

The narrator is thin, coughing and fond of his readers, and hardly a character in his own story. Walter’s son is meant to be christened Trismegistus, but Susannah cannot carry the word down the passage, and the curate makes it Tristram, the name Walter most detested. The sash falls in vol. V, ch. 17: “nothing was well hung in our family”. His attention is always on his audience, above all “Madam”, who is sent back to reread a chapter.

Walter Shandy

Walter Shandy is a retired Turkey merchant who holds that a child’s fate depends on the circumstances of his conception, the length of his nose, the name he is given and the use of auxiliary verbs. He writes a system of education for his son, the Tristra-pædia, so slowly that the boy outgrows it. His speech when he hears of his elder son Bobby’s death (vol. V, ch. 3) is one of the great things in the book, a string of consolations from the ancients that he delights in as he recites.

Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim

Captain Toby Shandy is the gentlest man in English fiction. He cannot talk about his wound at Namur without confusion, and buys a map to explain it. With Trim he moves to the country and rebuilds each siege on the bowling green as the wars of Marlborough go on, a toy war run by men who would not hurt a fly. His reply to Trim’s report on the dying Lieutenant Le Fever was the most admired thing in the book in the 1760s. Trim is his equal in everything but rank, and when he lets his hat fall to show how quickly a person dies (vol. V, ch. 7) he does what Walter’s eloquence could not.

Yorick, Slop and the rest

Parson Yorick, said to descend from Hamlet’s jester, is Sterne’s self-portrait, on a thin horse, killed by his own jokes (vol. I, ch. 11). Sterne published his real sermons under that name, and the one Trim reads aloud in vol. II, ch. 17 is one he had actually preached. Dr Slop, the squat Catholic man-midwife with his new forceps, is made to read out the curse of Ernulphus against Obadiah (vol. III, ch. 11). Maria, the mad girl with the pipe and goat, passes through in vol. IX, ch. 24, and would be brought back in A Sentimental Journey.

How it was made

Laurence Sterne was born in Clonmel, County Tipperary, in 1713, the son of a poor army ensign, and spent his boyhood moving among barracks in Ireland and Britain. Jesus College, Cambridge, took him as a sizar. He was ordained and held a Yorkshire living at Sutton-on-the-Forest for some twenty years, with an unhappy marriage and damaged lungs.

In 1759 a satire on church quarrels, A Political Romance, was burned, and Sterne found he had a talent. He offered the first volume of Tristram to Dodsley, was refused his price, and had two volumes printed in York at his own expense. They went on sale in the last days of 1759 and he was the toast of London by the spring. Dodsley bought the rights for £250. Reynolds painted him, Hogarth drew for him, and he said, “I wrote not [to] be fed, but to be famous”. He wrote fast, “trusting to Almighty God for the second” sentence (vol. VIII, ch. 2), signing later volumes by hand to beat the forgers. He went to France for his lungs. A Sentimental Journey appeared in February 1768, and Sterne died in Old Bond Street three weeks later.

He took a great deal from others. Rabelais and Cervantes he named as his masters (vol. III, ch. 19). Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy he plundered, with Montaigne and Bacon. John Ferriar exposed the borrowings in 1798 without much minding them, and Victorians turned his list into a charge of theft.

Readers and critics

The success came with a scandal, since a priest had written it. Horace Walpole called it “a very insipid and tedious performance”, and Samuel Johnson predicted its fall with the most famously wrong sentence in English criticism: “Nothing odd will do long.” Thackeray’s lectures fixed the Victorian charge of “a latent corruption”. Goethe and Heine admired him, young Karl Marx imitated him in an unfinished novel, Schopenhauer named it among the four immortal romances, and Wittgenstein counted it among his favourite books. In 1766 Ignatius Sancho asked Sterne to take up the slaves’ cause, and their letters became abolitionist reading.

The twentieth century thought it had invented what it found in him. Viktor Shklovsky called this “the most typical novel of world literature”, because it lays bare the devices that others hide. Bertrand Russell gave Tristram’s name to a paradox of infinite sets: writing a year for each day, he would, given endless time, finish everything.

Joyce’s debt

James Joyce shared Sterne’s Irish origin, his taste for bawdy learning and his habit of treating a book as a machine. In the “Oxen of the Sun” episode of Ulysses he parodied Sterne among his procession of English styles. The larger debt is to the method. Thomas Keymer calls Tristram Shandy a natural touchstone for Joyce when he explained his attempt “to build many planes of narrative with a single esthetic purpose” in Finnegans Wake.

In both books the plot lies under commentary, and both trade on the sexual pun, make learning comic and write for the ear. The margins and footnotes of the Wake’s II.2 make the printed page a game, as Sterne’s black and marbled leaves had done. Joyce is the more ruthless: Tristram keeps trying to get on with it and fails, while the Wake has given up the idea of getting anywhere.

The names surface in the Wake’s own text. On page 21 the Prankquean “kidsnapped up the jiminy Tristopher and into the shandy” west; on page 36 a figure is “swift to mate errthors, stern to checkself”; on page 66 comes “twist stern swift”. Whether each is a nod is open to argument, but Swift and Sterne, the two Irish-born comic clergymen, keep running together there.

Afterlives

Denis Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist takes up the narrator who will not tell you what you want, Machado de Assis’s Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1881) took the same freedoms in Brazil, and Balzac opened La Peau de chagrin with Trim’s flourish. Javier Marías, who translated it into Spanish at twenty-five, said it taught him almost everything he knew about writing novels. The best adaptation does the only honest thing: Michael Winterbottom’s A Cock and Bull Story (2006) with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon is a film about failing to film it. Sterne’s house at Coxwold, Shandy Hall, is kept by the Laurence Sterne Trust.

How to read it

Give up on the story at once. Enjoy the talker’s company.
Take it in sips. The chapters are short, and a few a night work better than a charge at the whole.
Do not skip the set pieces. The Latin curse and the Slawkenbergius tale of the stranger’s nose are jokes at length, so let them build.
Stay for Toby. Volumes VI, VIII and IX pay for all your patience.
Choose your text. The linked Gutenberg file (#39270) is the 1912 Everyman, complete with an introduction by George Saintsbury and anchors for every chapter; it calls the volumes Books. Standard Ebooks is a clean alternative. In print the Oxford (Ian Campbell Ross) and Penguin (Melvyn and Joan New) editions have the notes you will want, and the Norton (Judith Hawley, 2019) adds contexts and criticism.

Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey (1768). Yorick in France, shorter, tenderer, and the book that gave the word sentimental its career.
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605–15). The original hobby-horse, and the book Sterne loved most after Rabelais.
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). The great hoard Sterne raided.
Machado de Assis, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1881). The most brilliant of the Shandean heirs, narrated by a dead man.
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939). What happens if you take the digression all the way.