What the story is about, however, is of secondary importance to how it is told. Tristram Shandy is thoroughly performative, not so much a story but an extended act of and meditation on story-telling. Sterne's narrative logic is one which favours the endless freeplay, the infinite possibilities of writing over the exigencies of plot, the logic of cause and effect and the desire for closure. Each time our narrator verges on a new event, or we think that we are about to pick up the thread of a previous storyline, the text suddenly veers off on yet another tangent. This is Shandy's logic of digression:
Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine;--they are the life, the soul of reading;--take them out of this book for instance,--you might as well take the book along with them; [...] restore them to the writer;--he steps forth like a bridegroom,--bids All hail; brings in variety, and forbids appetite to fail. (95)Sterne's self-reflexive commentary is an aspect of Tristram Shandy's critique of the book as a material object. Sterne employs a number of techniques to call attention to the materiality of the text and undermines the apparent "naturalness" of its faux conversational tone. A cross appears when Dr. Slop crosses himself, a black page "mourns" the death of Yorick, squiggly graphs indicate the progress of the narrative line, blank pages appear to represent pages torn out and a very different kind of blank page is offered to the reader for the purpose of composing his or her own description of Widow Wadman's beauty. Moreover, supposedly mis-placed chapters suddenly appear out of sequence--all of these are not only very funny, but insightful critiques of the illusion of linguistic transparency offered by the traditional readerly text.
With its heterogeneous materials, non-linear narrative, regular appeals
to the reader, and self-reflexive commentary on the nature of the book,
Tristram
Shandy anticipates many of the techniques of hypertext fiction. Though
it achieves its effects in part because the reader is still forced to proceed
through the text page by page, from beginning to end (and thus its frustration
of linearity becomes all the more apparent), Sterne's novel remains not
only a rich resource of ideas and techniques for writers (and readers)
interested in the possibilities of the writerly text, but a perfect meeting
of formal innovation and comic genius.