Life is a Digression
Those wanting to discover much about the title character of Tristram Shandy will be disappointed. As with Grandpa Simpson, getting to the point—if, indeed, the point of the book really has anything to do with Tristram Shandy—and, what kind of a name is Tristram, anyway (betcha that half the people who’ve read the book refer to the title character as Tristan)—will be disappointed because the point for Sterne is clearly not to write a book like David Copperfield that tells the life story of a person from birth through death: he wants to have fun. If the previous sentence is not the kind of thing that you find worthy of reading, consider that Tristram Shandy reads something like that paragraph except spread out over hundreds of pages. The implicit promise of an author who titles a book after a character is that you will put the book down having learned something—usually a great deal—about that character. Sterne breaks his promise repeatedly, but does so with such great joy and has such fun that most readers don’t mind.
The Impossibility of Knowing a Person
At every stop along the way, the reader gets subverted in his attempt to learn who this Tristram Shandy actually is. Some pages of the book are left blank while others are just blocks of blank ink. Even more so than the digressions that lead far away from what is expected to be the point, these stoppages in the flow of narrative can be unsettling and seem pointless. In fact, they make perhaps even more a point than the narrative. Picking up a book—even an enormous book—to get a full portrait of a human being is as frustrating an endeavor as trying to get a full picture of any actual human being. Can you know a person? Sterne puts that question to the particulars of literature: can you really know a character?
What is a Novel?
The novel was still a relatively new mode of literary expression when Sterne set to working writing Tristram Shandy. To say that it had not yet become a victim to critical codification of rules and expectations is to ignore the fact that many critics still looked upon the novel as an illegitimate exercise in creative writing. Not enough novels of different types had yet been produced to create any genres, much less generic conventions. The door was still wide open and Sterne stepped through it with the intention of discovering and exploration. The novel is just as much about the writing of a novel as it is about absolutely anything else. Since so few writers until the rise of the postmodern movement followed his lead, one might well suggest that what Sterne might actually have accomplished is issuing a warning to other writers about what not to do when they were writing their novels. By showing what the novel had the capacity to do, Sterne might have ironically contributed to that developing codification of rules for what does constitute a novel.
