Tristram
Shandy begins his autobiographical tale with the story of his
conception, in which his mother interrupts the sexual moment by asking
an irrelevant question about the winding of the clock. The author
speculates that the circumstances in which a child is conceived
profoundly influence its eventual mind, body, and character. He laments
his parents' careless demeanor at this decisive juncture: "had they
duly consider'd how much depended on what they were then doing...I am
verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the
world." As it stands, he blames his own "thousand weaknesses both of
body and mind" on their negligence. Tristram reveals that the whole
circumstance of his coming into the world occurred as a series of such
accidents and misfortunes. Stating succinctly that he was born on
November 5, 1718, he promises to give the full details of his birth
eventually, but only after a detour through his "opinions." He admits
from the beginning that his narration will be unconventional, and he
begs the reader to be patient and to "let me go on, and tell the story
in my own way."
Meandering through the history of
the town midwife, Tristram takes the opportunity to satirize the obscure legal
language of her license document. He also introduces the character of
Parson Yorick, whom he relates to the jester Yorick in Hamlet
and to Cervantes's Don Quixote. At the suggestion of his wife, Parson
Yorick sponsors the training of the midwife as a service to the town.
The parson actually stands to benefit personally from this benevolent
gesture, since the townspeople were frequently borrowing his fine
horses to ride the seven miles to the nearest doctor. In order to
secure himself against charges of ulterior motives, he has vowed always
to ride the decrepit old horse on which we now see him. Yorick's
constant joking and acid wit make him many enemies; his unpopularity
eventually drives him to a miserable early death.
The transition
from the satire of legal language to the story of Yorick and his horses
takes place by means of a brief, essayistic account of "hobby-horses":
the narrow and often esoteric pursuits (hobbies, essentially) that
interest people--often, to the point of obsession. The stories of
Yorick and the midwife are also interrupted by the Dedication in
Chapter 8, and by a passage in which Tristram forecasts his own
literary fame. Tristram again defends his digressive style, promising
"to go on leisurely, writing and publishing two volumes of my life
every year" until he dies.
The marriage
settlement between Tristram's parents stipulates that Mrs. Shandy could
choose to bear her children in London, where she would find superior
medical care. It also states, however, that if she made the trip to
London on any false alarms, the husband could require her to stay in
the country on the next occasion. This is the clause Walter Shandy
invokes at the time of Tristram's birth. While Tristram thinks the
legal arrangement, on the whole, a fair one, he thinks it "hard that
the whole weight of the article should have fallen entirely, as it did,
upon myself." He chalks this up as another one of his misfortunes,
since it led him to be born with a flattened nose (the explanation
about how this came to pass is deferred). Mrs. Shandy, since she cannot
have "the famous Dr. Maningham" of London, insists on employing the
midwife to deliver the baby--out of peevishness, Tristram suggests.
Walter feels strongly that she should have Dr. Slop instead, and they
finally agree to pay him to wait downstairs, in case of emergency.
Tristram
introduces his father's theory that "there was a strange kind of magick
bias, which good or bad names, as he called them, irresistibly
impress'd upon our characters and conduct." The most disadvantageous
name of all, and the one Walter most detests, is Tristram. The narrator
declares that he cannot yet tell the story of how he came to be called
Tristram, appealing to the necessity that "I should be born before I
[am] christened." He follows this statement with a more academic
version of the same argument (about the proper order of the rituals
surrounding birth), quoting a long and abstruse document dealing with
the question of whether fetuses can be baptized in the womb.
Walter and
Uncle Toby sit downstairs while Mrs. Shandy is going into labor. Before
any dialogue gets properly underway, Tristram interrupts to give an
account of Toby's character, promising to return to their conversation
subsequently. Toby, we learn (after a few asides about the English
climate and the scandalous marriage of Aunt Dinah) is notable for his
overweening modesty, the fuller explanation of which Tristram, as
usual, reserves for later, telling us only that it stems from a wound
to the groin that Toby received during the siege of Namur.
Tristram then enters into a
digression on
digressions, explaining that his work is both digressive and
progressive. Though the story may sometimes seem to be sidetracked or
standing still, he claims that it is actually moving forward all the
while. He then returns to Toby's character, which he says will be best
illustrated by means of his uncle's strange hobby-horse. He relates how
Toby, after being wounded, spent four years confined to his bed, where
he was frequently called upon by sympathetic visitors. They usually
wanted to hear the story of his injury, a fact that caused Toby some
consternation--for reasons that Tristram declines to supply until the
next volume.
Commentary
Tristram's story begins ab Ovo
("from the egg"), in defiance of the Homeric epic tradition that begins
stories in the middle of things and then allows the background to
unfold along with the action. The alternative, seemingly, would be to
begin with the beginning; Tristram takes this possibility to an almost
ludicrous extreme by beginning before
the beginning, from his conception rather than his birth. This strategy
leads him into the problem of relating events of which he could have no
knowledge, which would call into question his status as an
autobiographical narrator. He anticipates and answers this concern by
explaining that he has learned the story of his conception from his
Uncle Toby, who in turn heard it from Walter Shandy. The effect is to
emphasize that Tristram's accounts are not fictional--but neither
should we take them as perfectly objective. Tristram represents a type
of authorial presence different from that of Sterne himself: he is not
free to invent characters or imagine events, but rather filters a
"real" world (and a drastically limited and personal one, with a radius
of but five miles) through his own experience, memory, personality, and
opinions.
It quickly becomes apparent that
the chronology of the story will be more complex and unorthodox than
just its ab Ovo
beginning. The narrative oversteps its own declared limits, including
events that took place long before even the night of conception, and
also drawing Jenny, the author's companion as the story is being
written, into the book. And not only does Tristam stretch his
chronological coverage to its extreme possibilities, he also disrupts
it internally by presenting events in the wrong order, interrupting one
anecdote with others or with essayistic digressions, and scrambling the
beginnings, middles, and ends of his sequences. Yet, he maintains, the
story is going on all the while. This is largely true because the
narrator's own voice and interpretations provide a source of
continuity. By listening to Tristram, we are getting to know him, which
was the whole point, and which takes precedence over the details of his
birth, or any other single episode. "As you proceed further with me,
the slight acquaintance that is now beginning betwixt us, will grow
into familiarity; and...will terminate in friendship."
The idea of
the hobby-horse, which is introduced casually here, will become a major
thematic concern. There is nothing inherently sinister about these
hobby-horses; most people have them, and Tristram confesses readily to
having a few of his own (we are clearly to assume that his writing is
one). But the novel will dramatize the way they can lead into a state
of total self-absorption, when they become such a constant
preoccupation that everything in the world gets subordinated to a
single, all-consuming idea. In exploring this possibility, Sterne seems
to see it as simply an extreme instance of what is already our innate
psychological nature: drawing on Locke's chapter on association in the Essay Concerning Human
Understanding,
he dramatizes the way ideas that seem to be unrelated become connected
in our minds. The novel will explore the implications of these
associations for scientific knowledge, for our everyday understanding
of cause and effect, and for social interactions.
The
digressiveness of the narrative, in the way it follows chains of
association rather than sticking to a rigid, formal structure, is also
a manifestation of this principle. Obsessively formal thinking can be a
kind of hobby-horse. Walter is the prime example of this deluding
approach to the world: "like all systematic reasoners, he would move
both heaven and earth, and twist and torture everything in nature to
support his hypothesis." The open form of Tristram's writing, then, is
an effort to take in the world in all its variety and flux. It is a
resistance, in part, to the distortions and manipulations that Tristam
sees his father performing to force evidence for his preconceived
ideas. It remains for the reader to decide whether Tristram's approach
offers any more objective window on reality, or whether Tristram's own
set of hobby-horses gives rise to just as much distortion.
Another open
question is whether Sterne's attitude toward Tristram and his project
is one of endorsement or irony. Tristram's frequent addresses to the
reader (imagined variously and flexibly as Sir, Madam, Dear Reader,
your worships, etc.) draw us into the novel. From Tristram's
perspective, we are asked to be open-minded, and to follow his lead in
an experimental kind of literary adventure. The gap between
Tristram-the-author and Sterne-the-author, however, invites us not only
to participate with Tristram, but also to assess his character and his
narrative.
© "Section 1"
Santos, Matilda.
SparkNote on Tristram Shandy.
1 Nov. 2008
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/tristram/section1.html