A Parodying Novel:Sterne's Tristram Shandy

“A Parodying Novel: Sterne’s Tristram Shandy”
Viktor Shklovsky

In

Laurence Sterne: A Collection of Critical Essays
Ed. John Traugott

By
Fayrouz Fahmy, Marwa Sobhy,
Ahmed Adel & Khalid Zahran


1. The Disordered Structure of the Novel:

1.1. “Sterne was an extreme revolutionary” with regards to the general laws of novelistic form.
1.2. The impression of any reader who dares to read Sterne’s novel would be that “the novel is chaos.”
1.3. “When one begins to examine the structure of the book, one sees, first of all, that this disorder is intentional, that the work possesses its own poetics. It is all according to law.”
1.4. “In the book everything is displaced or transposed,” the best example of which is “the displacement of chapters 18 and 19 of Volume IX so that they follow chapter 25.” His motivation is, “to let people tell their stories in their own way.”
1.5. “Sterne used new methods; or, rather, employing old ones, he exposed their conventionality, blew the convention up, played with it.”


2. The Use of “Time-Shift”:

2.1. The “time-shift” in Sterne’s novel “is made obvious throughout the entire work” without a motivation.
2.2. “The ‘time-shift’… brakes whatever action may seem to be developing.”
2.3. “Sterne... simply lays bare his ‘time-shifts’ with no pretence of motivation from the story line.”
2.4. “Causes are given after effects, after deliberately implanted possibilities of false conclusions”, such as “the anecdote about the interruption of the sexual act (in which Tristram was begot) by Mrs. Shandy’s question.” The reader is left without an explanation of the significance of the mother’s question. “Only several pages later do we get the explanation of the strange punctiliousness of the father’s domestic habits.”


3. The Description of Poses:

3.1. “Sterne was the first to introduce descriptions of poses into the novel.”
3.2. “These poses are very strangely represented – more precisely, they are made strange.”
3.3. An example on this device is when Sterne described Mr. Shandy’s pose: “The palm of his right hand, as he fell upon the bed, receiving his forehead and covering the greatest part of both his eyes, gently sunk down with his head… till his nose touched the quilt.”




4. The Use of Motifs:

4.1. The novel is full of “heterogeneous material, laden with lengthy quotations from works of various pedants, [that] would have shredded the novel to bits had it not been held together by the motifs that run through it.”
4.2. The motif of the knots is one example of these motifs.
4.3. Another example is the motif of impotency; it opens the novel and concludes it.
4.4. “No single motif is fully developed and made real; the motifs merely reappear from time to time, and their realization is postponed into an ever-receding future.”
4.5. “Their presence throughout the full length of the novel holds its episodes together.”


5. Sentimentality:

5.1. “Sentimentality cannot be the content of art if not for no other reason than that art does not have a separable content.”
5.2. “Art is outside emotion.”
5.3. “‘Blood’ in art is not bloody; it rimes with ‘love’.”
5.4. “Art is… without compassion, or outside it, except in those instances when the feeling of commiseration serves as material for an artistic pattern.”
5.5. Sterne is beyond compassion as shown in the story of Bobby’s death; it is not presented in a tragic way.
5.6. Sterne used death to create a “misunderstanding – a common fictional device in which two people speak about different things while thinking that they are talking about the same thing.”


6. Digressions and Insertions:

6.1. “The materials introduced into the narrative by Sterne are not arbitrary; each fragment is relevant to some continuous strain in the novel’s composition.”
6.2. Sterne sometimes uses plot-shift for only one reason – “delay.”
6.3. The novel has a lack of “consecutiveness”. Its characteristic trait is precisely “the unusualness of the pattern of deployment often of its typical elements.”
6.4. Sterne uses the method of slowing down and the disruption of the normal plot scheme.

7. Endings of Sterne’s Novels:

7.1. “Nothing at all… motivates the conclusion of Tristram Shandy.”
7.2. Leaving the story unfinished is usual with Sterne.
7.3. “Such endings are… distinct stylistic devices varying according to requirements of particular stories.”
7.4. “Sterne worked against the background of the adventure novel with its firmly established form and its rule of ending the story with a wedding.”


8. Conclusion:

8.1. “It is commonly insisted that Tristram Shandy is not a novel.”
8.2. “Tristram Shandy is the most typical novel of world literature.”