Tristram Shandy as Autobiography:

Lecture note- Dr Ashok K Mohapatra

Semester II, English Department, Sambalpur University
Conventionally, in a simplistic way autobiography has been viewed more as records of personal
experience than as work of art. At least this was the perception of literary critics when they began
examining this genre of literature in the early 20
th
century. However, now critics tend to view it as
a work of imagination and care for its aesthetic value. If at all it is believed to have any truth
value, its veracity and the autobiographers sincerity are no longer regarded as the chief value of
autobiography. At times in autobiographic writings we find some fascinating characters with
extraordinary life stories that seem unbelievable. This phenomenon persuades us to believe that
the realism of an autobiographic writing is no different from the realism of fiction. Like fiction,
autobiography has thematic designs and structural unity of plot construction. It does not span the
entire life of the protagonist, but certain fragments of it, imposing on it a certain unity, plotting
select events towards certain preconceived ends that seem to suggest that the life narrated
embodies some ideals and a vision. In his Art of Autobiography, O.A.J. Cockshut observed that
autobiography, like fiction, reveals the complexities of the self which gets narrated through its
tonal qualities and suggestive gestures. Thus fiction can be autobiographical as much as
autobiographies can be fictional. For example Stendhals Henry Brulard , which is a genuine
autobiography, playfully claims to be fiction and ends up fearing that it might be
For its part, Tristram Shandy, which is a fictional work, pretends to be autobiographical. But it
disturbs the autobiographic conventions. Tristram, the protagonist, begins to write a convoluted,
long-winded and digressive self-narrative and also the history of Shandy family.
In a bid to write about his own origins, which many autobiographies begin with, Tristram goes to
the extreme of going back to his own conception, stating the reason that life begins from the
foetal stage. In this manner his life story begins ab ovo, and by doing so questions the arbitrary
nature of the beginning of a life-story from the birth, although it appears pretty natural.
Interestingly, as the narrative unfolds we begin to perceive that it is not merely that Tristrams
birth is being narrated, but this very narration parallels the narration of the book. It is not just
Tristram, but the book is born, as it were.
An autobiography or a fictional work invites the reader to imaginatively participate in the lives of
its characters, identify with them and be transported into this world. The work becomes so
transparent that that the reader does not become conscious of the materiality of the narration
through which characters and events emerge as if these were real. But Tristram Shandy
deliberately makes it difficult for the reader to identify with the characters and events , since it
foregrounds its own fictionality.

It is interesting to observe that the difference between Tristram Shandy and the great majority
of unself-conscious literary works is that the former acknowledges its own bookish nature,
whereas the latter pretend to have no knowledge of their materiality. These pretentfully
represent life as a gallery of characters and a series of events. However, Tristram Shandy reminds
us often it possesses an objective existence as a book, or a physical thing. It never allows us to
forget that it exists alongside all those concrete objects that figure so prominently in it: all those
buttonholes and noses and knots, sash-windows, chamber pots, whiskers, and the right and
wrong ends of a woman. But the incident which best illustrates Sterne's determination to point
up the paradox of his work's dual existence as objective phenomenon and as imagined life is the
one in which Uncle Toby requires Corporal Trim to look for a sailing chariot in a work by a
certain Stevinus: ". .. see if thou canst spy ought of a sailing chariot in it (101),"Uncle Toby
requests. But when Trim can find no such illustration and playfully turns the work upside down
in the effort to shake out the chariot itself, Yorick's long lost sermon falls out instead. On the
one hand, this may be seen as a device for introducing the sermon into the work with a superb
randomness that constituted.
The randomness that has been built into the very structure of the novel disturbs the linearity and
unity of autobiographic narrative. The violation of chronological order of events through
digressions complicates the nature of the organicity and wholeness of a story.
In the novel as Uncle Toby explains to Walter that the durational time that seems to be in
disagreement with the narrative time is because of the quick succession of our ideas. In fact it
was part of Sternes plan, in agreement with John Lockes epistemology, to develop a narrative of
the unmediated flux, chain or quick succession of ideas that would map onto a durational time.
By highlighting this durational time he intends to question the artificiality and fictionality of the
narrative time of autobiography. This is the reason why the narrative structure of the novel
incorporates the very narrative thread of narrating the narrative. The narrator, from time to time,
addresses the reader in Chapters XVIII and XXI of Volume 1, Chapter XIII of Volume 4, Chapter
XL of Volume 6, Chapter I of Volume 7 and Chapter I of Volume 9, informing him of the time
span of the writing the book from 9 MARCH 1759 to 12 AUGUST 1766 and progress of the
narrative, nature of the story line with regard to Uncle Toby and himself. This order of time seems
to be a comment upon the making of the time order of the narrative that begins from 1694 to
1741(the Namur expedition of Uncle Toby to his own travel through Europe). The result of the
entire exercise is that the novel becomes a fictional work of an attempt to write an autobiography
that never gets completed. That an autobiography is theoretically incomplete, and that the
narrative ending of an autobiography is only a formal feature, with an illusory sense of an ending
is very well demonstrated by Tristram Shandy.
Like the life story of Tristram, which remains incomplete, the book remains unfinished. His
story is chaotic just the way the life stories of all human beings are. Autobiographic narrative
only imposes order and unity on ones life, which is the mental history of the chaotic mass of
impressions and experiences of the person concerned. That is why the narrator remarks, using
the metaphor of architecture: "With all my hurry and precipitation, I have but been clearing the
ground to raise the building-and such a building do I foresee it will turn out as never was
planned, and as never was executed since Adam. A book like a human being is an accidental
object, written against all odds by one man and printed and bound by others. It is no wonder,
therefore, that as happens somewhere between Toby and Trim, a tale some- times gets lost, or as
occurs during the binding, ten pages are apparently mislaid.
In this novel, which presents itself as a book we have the famous blank, black and marbled pages,
the lines and rows of asterisks, the graphic representation of the plot outlines and of the flourish
of Trim's stick in the air.

In this connection, it is an essential characteristic of the two works under discussion that their
subjects are both men of letters, whose knowledge of life is infused with an abundance of book-
derived learning.
Both narrators are seen to encounter the complexity and paradox of attempting to represent
syntagmati- cally and on paper lives that at every moment were subject in the world to endless
paradigmatic elaboration
The problem is both "authors" are obliged to narrate not from the perspective of a specific
moment in time but from a present of narration that is itself more or less protracted- several years
in the case of Sterne, several months in the case of Stendhal.

The result in both works is not that satisfying periodicity of infancy, youth, maturity and age, but
fragmentation and discon- tinuity. The raw materials of both a real and an imagined life are
allowed to frustrate the aesthetic impulse to fashion them into plot.

Much of the curious pleasure in reading Tristram Shandy, in fact, derives from the tension Sterne
generates between Tristram's repeatedly avowed purpose of getting his story told and the
manifold comic devices invented to frustrate that purpose. The work fre- quently even defies the
attempt we all make, as part of the effort to make sense of a novel, to distinguish between the
progressive and the digressive, between what Tomashevsky classified as "bound" and "free"
motifs. Sterne consciously promotes such confusion in his reader and nowhere more so than
through what one might call the multiple suspension of the narrative line. I am thinking, for
instance, of the episode in Vol. 8, Ch. 19, where no less than four stories are held in suspense
simultaneously-Tristram's autobiography gives way to the account of Uncle Toby's amours but
this is interrupted by Trim's tale of the King of Bohemia, which is abandoned for the story of
Trim's falling in love which in its turn is broken by a dispute as to whether knee pains or groin
pains are harder to bear. Such episodes function on one level as parody of the traditional artifice
of the interpolated story. On another level, they suggest through transgression the limits imposed
on an author by the rules of narrative intelligibility. By giving us a fictional au- thor who struggles
to conduct a story that conducts him, Sterne opens the door on to the chaos which stories usually
reduce to their own peculiar order.
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