Tristram Shandy- characters, overall analysis, themes

Characters

Tristram Shandy  -  Tristram is both the fictionalized author of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy and the child whose conception, birth, christening, and circumcision form one major sequence of the narrative. The adult Tristram Shandy relates certain aspects of his family history, including many that took place before his own birth, drawing from stories and hearsay as much as from his own memories. His opinions we get in abundance; of the actual details of his life the author furnishes only traces, and the child Tristram turns out to be a minor character.

Walter Shandy  -  Tristram's philosophically-minded father. Walter Shandy's love for abstruse and convoluted intellectual argumentation and his readiness to embrace any tantalizing hypothesis lead him to propound a great number of absurd pseudo-scientific theories.

Elizabeth Shandy (Mrs. Shandy)  -  Tristram's mother. Mrs. Shandy insists on having the midwife attend her labor rather than Dr. Slop, out of resentment at not being allowed to bear the child in London. On all other points, Mrs. Shandy is singularly passive and uncontentious, which makes her a dull conversational partner for her argumentative husband.

Captain Toby Shandy (Uncle Toby)  -  Tristram's uncle, and brother to Walter Shandy. After sustaining a groin-wound in battle, he retires to a life of obsessive attention to the history and science of military fortifications. His temperament is gentle and sentimental: Tristram tells us he wouldn't harm a fly.

Corporal Trim -  Manservant and sidekick to Uncle Toby. His real name is James Butler; he received the nickname "Trim" while in the military. Trim colludes with Captain Toby in his military shenanigans, but his own favorite hobby is advising people, especially if it allows him to make eloquent speeches.

Dr. Slop -  The local male midwife, who, at Walter's insistence, acts as a back-up at Tristram's birth. A "scientifick operator," Dr. Slop has written a book expressing his disdain for the practice of midwifery. He is interested in surgical instrument and medical advances, and prides himself on having invented a new pair of delivery forceps.

Parson Yorick -  The village parson, and a close friend of the Shandy family. Yorick is lighthearted and straight-talking; he detests gravity and pretension. As a witty and misunderstood clergyman, he has often been taken as a representation of the writer, Sterne, himself.

Susannah -  Chambermaid to Mrs. Shandy. She is present at Tristram's birth, complicit in his mis-christening, and partly to blame for his accidental circumcision by the fallen window shade.

Obadiah -  Servant to Walter Shandy.

Bobby Shandy  -  Tristram's older brother, who dies in London while away at school.

Widow Wadman  -  A neighbor who has marital designs on Captain Toby Shandy, and with whom he has a brief and abortive courtship.

Bridget -  Maidservant to Widow Wadman. Corporal Trim courts Bridget at the same time that Toby courts Widow Wadman, and Trim and Bridget's relationship continues for five years thereafter.

The midwife  -  The local delivery-nurse who is commissioned to assist at Mrs. Shandy's labor.

Eugenius -  Friend and advisor to Parson Yorick. His name means "well-born," and he is often the voice of discretion.

Didius -  A pedantic church lawyer, and the author of the midwife's license.

Kysarcius, Phutatorius, Triptolemus, and Gastripheres  -  Along with Didius, they form the colloquy of learned men whom Walter, Toby, and Parson Yorick consult about the possibility of changing Tristram's name.

The curate -  The local church official, also named Tristram, who misnames the baby when Susannah fails to pronounce the chosen name "Trismegistus."

Aunt Dinah -  Tristram's great aunt and, in Tristram's estimation, the only woman in the Shandy family with any character at all. She created a family scandal by marrying the coachman and having a child late in her life.

Lieutenant Le Fever  -  A favorite sentimental charity case of Uncle Toby's and Corporal Trim's. Le Fever died under their care, leaving an orphan son.

Billy Le Fever  -  The son of Lieutenant Le Fever. Uncle Toby becomes Billy's guardian, supervises his education, and eventually recommends him to be Tristram's governor. 

Overall Analysis and /Themes

The most striking formal and technical characteristics of Tristram Shandy are its unconventional time scheme and its self-declared digressive-progressive style. Sterne, through his fictional author-character Tristram, defiantly refuses to present events in their proper chronological order. Again and again in the course of the novel Tristram defends his authorial right to move backward and forward in time as he chooses. He also relies so heavily on digressions that plot elements recede into the background; the novel is full of long essayistic passages remarking on what has transpired or, often, on something else altogether. Tristram claims that his narrative is both digressive and progressive, calling our attention to the way in which his authorial project is being advanced at the very moments when he seems to have wandered farthest afield.

By fracturing the sequence of the stories he tells and interjecting them with chains of associated ideas, memories, and anecdotes, Tristram allows thematic significance to emerge out of surprising juxtapositions between seemingly unrelated events. The association of ideas is a major theme of the work, however, and not just a structural principle. Part of the novel's self-critique stems from the way the author often mocks the perverseness by which individuals associate and interpret events based on their own private mental preoccupations. The author's own ideas and interpretations are presumably just as singular, and so the novel remains above all a catalogue of the "opinions" of Tristram Shandy.

Much of the subtlety of the novel comes from the layering of authorial voice that Sterne achieves by making his protagonist the author of his own life story, and then presenting that story as the novel itself. The fictional author's consciousness is the filter through which everything in the book passes. Yet Sterne sometimes invites the reader to question the opinions and assumptions that Tristram expresses, reminding us that Shandy is not a simple substitute for Sterne. One of the effects of this technique is to draw the reader into an unusually active and participatory role. Tristram counts on his audience to indulge his idiosyncrasies and verify his opinions; Sterne asks the reader to approach the unfolding narrative with a more discriminating and critical judgment.

Tristram Shandy- context, summary, adaptations

Context

Laurence Sterne was born in 1713 in Ireland, the son of an army officer. After graduating from Cambridge University, Sterne settled in Yorkshire and remained in England for the remainder of his life. He became a clergyman there, and then married a woman with whom he did not get along. His two major novels, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman and A Sentimental Journey, were written near the end of his life. He died in March, 1768, at the age of 55.

Sterne wrote Tristram Shandy between 1759 and 1767. The book was published in five separate installments, each containing two volumes except the last, which included only the final Volume 9. The numerous cliffhangers and anticipations Sterne put in the closing chapters of each installment are conventional features of serially published works, meant to arouse curiosity and maintain interest in the volumes to come. Tristram Shandy was enthusiastically received from the beginning, though it was also criticized for being bawdy and indecent in its frank treatment of sexual themes.

For its time, the novel is highly unconventional in its narrative technique--even though it also incorporates a vast number of references and allusions to more traditional works. The title itself is a play on a novelistic formula that would have been familiar to Sterne's contemporary readers; instead of giving us the "life and adventures" of his hero, Sterne promises us his "life and opinions." What sounds like a minor difference actually unfolds into a radically new kind of narrative. Tristram Shandy bears little resemblance to the orderly and structurally unified novels (of which Fielding's Tom Jones was considered to be the model) that were popular in Sterne's day. The questions Sterne's novel raises about the nature of fiction and of reading have given Tristram Shandy a particular relevance for twentieth century writers like Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, and James Joyce.

Summary

The action covered in Tristram Shandy spans the years 1680-1766. Sterne obscures the story's underlying chronology, however, by rearranging the order of the various pieces of his tale. He also subordinates the basic plot framework by weaving together a number of different stories, as well as such disparate materials as essays, sermons, and legal documents. There are, nevertheless, two clearly discernible narrative lines in the book.

The first is the plot sequence that includes Tristram's conception, birth, christening, and accidental circumcision. (This sequence extends somewhat further in Tristram's treatment of his "breeching," the problem of his education, and his first and second tours of France, but these events are handled less extensively and are not as central to the text.) It takes six volumes to cover this chain of events, although comparatively few pages are spent in actually advancing such a simple plot. The story occurs as a series of accidents, all of which seem calculated to confound Walter Shandy's hopes and expectations for his son. The manner of his conception is the first disaster, followed by the flattening of his nose at birth, a misunderstanding in which he is given the wrong name, and an accidental run-in with a falling window-sash. The catastrophes that befall Tristram are actually relatively trivial; only in the context of Walter Shandy's eccentric, pseudo-scientific theories do they become calamities.

The second major plot consists of the fortunes of Tristram's Uncle Toby. Most of the details of this story are concentrated in the final third of the novel, although they are alluded to and developed in piecemeal fashion from the very beginning. Toby receives a wound to the groin while in the army, and it takes him four years to recover. When he is able to move around again, he retires to the country with the idea of constructing a scaled replica of the scene of the battle in which he was injured. He becomes obsessed with re-enacting those battles, as well as with the whole history and theory of fortification and defense. The Peace of Utrecht slows him down in these "hobby-horsical" activities, however, and it is during this lull that he falls under the spell of Widow Wadman. The novel ends with the long-promised account of their unfortunate affair.

 

Adaptations

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.

Spanish writer Javier Marías translated the novel into Spanish. In the prologue he stated his enthusiasm for the novel and deemed his translation "my best novel, by far". It was translated into Italian in 1958 by Antonio Meo, under the title of "La vita e le opinioni di Tristram Shandy, gentiluomo", with a foreword by Carlo Levi. It was translated into Hungarian in 1956 by Győző Határ under the title of "Tristram Shandy úr élete és gondolatai".

Tristram Shandy-Techniques and influences; reception of the novel

Artistic incorporation and accusations of plagiarism

Sterne incorporated into Tristram Shandy many passages taken almost word for word from Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, Francis Bacon's Of Death, Rabelais and many more, and rearranged them to serve the new meaning intended in Tristram Shandy.^[1] Tristram Shandy was highly praised for its originality, and nobody noticed until years after Sterne's death. The first to note them was physician and poet John Ferriar, who did not see them negatively, and commented:^[1][2]

Critics of the 19th century, who were hostile to Sterne for other reasons, used Ferriar's findings to defame Sterne, claim the he was artistically dishonest, and almost unanimously accused him of mindless plagiarism.^[1] Scholar Graham Petrie closely analyzed the alleged passages in 1970; he observed that while more recent commentators now agree that Sterne "rearranged what he took to make it more humorous, or more sentimental, or more rhythmical", none of them "seems to have wondered whether Sterne had any further, more purely artistic, purpose." Studying a passage in Volume V, chapter 3, Petrie observes: "such passage ... reveals that Starne's copying was far more from purely mechanical, and that his rearrangements go far beyond what would be necessary for merely stylistic ends."^[1]

 

Rabelais

A major influence on Tristram Shandy is Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel.^[3][1] Rabelais was by far Sterne's favourite author, and in his correspondence he made clear that he considered himself as Rabelais' successor in humour writing, and instead distanced himself from Jonathan Swift:^[4][5]

I ... deny I have gone as far as Swift: he keeps a due distance from Rabelais; I keep a due distance from him.

One of its many passages that Sterne incorporated is the one about "the length and goodness of the nose".^[6][7][8] 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]}

Sterne had written an earlier piece called A Rabelaisian Fragment, which indicates his familiarity with the work of the French Monk and practicing Doctor. But the earlier work is not needed to see the influence of Rabelais on Tristram Shandy, which is evident by the generally implausible story line and pervasive satirical, comedic portrayals of everyday life. 

Ridiculing solemnity

Sterne was no friend of gravity, a quality which excited his disgust; Tristram Shandy gave a ludicrious turn to solemn passages from respected authors that it incorporated, as well as to the Consolatio Literary Genre.^[9][1]

One of the subjects of such ridicule were some of the opinions contained in Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, a book that mentioned sermons as the most respectable type of writing, and that was favoured by the learned; Burton's attitude was to try to prove indisputable facts by weighty quotations; his book consisted mostly of a collection of the opinions of a multitude of writers, to which Burton often modestly refrained to add his own, divided into quaint and old-fashioned categories; it discussed and determined everything from the doctrines of religion to military discipline, from inland navigation to the morality of dancing-schools.^[9]

Many of the singularity of Tristram Shandy character are drawn from Burton. Burton introductory address to the reader, where he indulges himself in an Utopian sketch of a perfect government, form the basis of Tristram Shandy's notions on the subject. Burton's quaint and old fashioned categories inspired Sterne for many of his ludicrous chapters titles. And Sterne parodies Burton's attitude by weighty quotation.^[9] The first four chapters of Tristram Shandy are also founded on some passages in Burton.^[9]

In Chapter 3, Volume 5, Sterne makes a parody of the Consolatio Literary Genre, mixing and reworking passages from three "widely separated sections" of Burton's Anatomy, including a parody of Burton's "grave and sober account" of Cicero's grief for the death of his daughter Tullia.^[1]

 

Other techniques and influences

His text is filled with allusions and references to the leading thinkers and writers of the 17th and 18th centuries.^{[citation needed]} 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. Other major influences are Cervantes, Montaigne's Essays, and John Locke.^{[citation needed]} It also owes a significant inter-textual debt to Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy,^[1] Swift's Battle of the Books, and the Scriblerian collaborative work, The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus.^{[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.^[10]

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.

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]}

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. ^{[citation needed]} 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.

Reception

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."),^[12][13] 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 and styles, such as visual writing.

The success of Sterne's novel got him an appointment as curate of St. Michael's Church by Lord Fauconberg in Coxwold, Yorkshire, which included the living at (what Sterne called) Shandy Hall. The medieval structure still stands today under the care of the Laurence Sterne Trust [1] after its acquisition in the 1960s. The gardens, which Sterne tended to during his time there, are daily open to visitors.

TRISTAM SHANDY -LAURENCE STERNE(Introduction, synopsis)

Introduction

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.

Summary

The action covered in Tristram Shandy spans the years 1680-1766. Sterne obscures the story's underlying chronology, however, by rearranging the order of the various pieces of his tale. He also subordinates the basic plot framework by weaving together a number of different stories, as well as such disparate materials as essays, sermons, and legal documents. There are, nevertheless, two clearly discernible narrative lines in the book.

The first is the plot sequence that includes Tristram's conception, birth, christening, and accidental circumcision. (This sequence extends somewhat further in Tristram's treatment of his "breeching," the problem of his education, and his first and second tours of France, but these events are handled less extensively and are not as central to the text.) It takes six volumes to cover this chain of events, although comparatively few pages are spent in actually advancing such a simple plot. The story occurs as a series of accidents, all of which seem calculated to confound Walter Shandy's hopes and expectations for his son. The manner of his conception is the first disaster, followed by the flattening of his nose at birth, a misunderstanding in which he is given the wrong name, and an accidental run-in with a falling window-sash. The catastrophes that befall Tristram are actually relatively trivial; only in the context of Walter Shandy's eccentric, pseudo-scientific theories do they become calamities.

The second major plot consists of the fortunes of Tristram's Uncle Toby. Most of the details of this story are concentrated in the final third of the novel, although they are alluded to and developed in piecemeal fashion from the very beginning. Toby receives a wound to the groin while in the army, and it takes him four years to recover. When he is able to move around again, he retires to the country with the idea of constructing a scaled replica of the scene of the battle in which he was injured. He becomes obsessed with re-enacting those battles, as well as with the whole history and theory of fortification and defense. The Peace of Utrecht slows him down in these "hobby-horsical" activities, however, and it is during this lull that he falls under the spell of Widow Wadman. The novel ends with the long-promised account of their unfortunate affair.

Synopsis and style

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 the chambermaid, Susannah, 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.

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.

Though Tristram is always present as narrator and commentator, the book contains surprisingly little of his life, only the story of a trip through France and accounts of the four comical mishaps which shaped the course of his life from an early age:

·         While still only a homunculus, Tristram's implantation within his mother's womb was disturbed. At the very moment of procreation, his mother asked his father if he had remembered to wind the clock. The distraction and annoyance led to the disruption of the proper balance of humors necessary to conceive a well-favored child.

·         One of his father's pet theories was that a large and attractive nose was important to a man making his way in life. In a difficult birth, Tristram's nose was crushed by Dr. Slop's forceps.

·         A second theory of his father was that a person's name exerted enormous influence over that person's nature and fortunes, with the worst possible name being Tristram. In view of the previous accidents, Tristram's father decreed that the boy would receive an especially auspicious name, Trismegistus. Susannah mangled the name in conveying it to the curate, and the child was christened Tristram.

·         As a toddler, Tristram suffered an accidental circumcision, when Susannah let a window sash fall as he urinated out of the window because his chamberpot was missing.