Prospero | Remembering Laurence Sterne

Early irreverence

His "Tristram Shandy" still evokes laughter nearly 300 years on

By J.W.

LAURENCE STERNE was born 300 years ago in County Tipperary. Raised in Yorkshire, he studied at Jesus College, Cambridge, and entered the Church. This gave him a living back in his home county until, in the 1760s, the popularity of a book he began writing aged 46 made him rich and famous.

"The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman" was published in nine volumes between 1759 and 1767. The book excited a new kind of laughter. Notionally, it was a novel. But the reading classes of the time guffawed at something unexpected: mockery of everything they held dear, such as marriage, churchgoing and an education. The book became a bestseller.

"Tristram Shandy" is rude and anarchic. It eschews plot. Early on, a moment of mourning is illustrated by an entire page of black. Later there’s a marbled page for no reason at all. Such jokes run over 600 pages. The book's chronology is thoroughly, deliberately muddled. The narrator of this fictional autobiography does not recount his own birth until a third of the way in.

By 18th-century standards, "Tristram Shandy" is avant-garde. But laughter and sales aside, what was the book's real achievement? It subverted conventional expectations for the novel. For half a century until the 1750s, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift and Henry Fielding had made their mark with tales that pretended to be “true”. Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" and its successors were English culture’s first published fictions. Sterne, a lover of Rabelais, wrote a book that questioned every established element of this new form: plot, character, the omniscient narrator.

His influence ran deep. In 1978 Peter Conrad, a literary critic, put Sterne at the heart of Romanticism in his book "Shandyism". Sterne’s eccentric game-playing hovers in a realm between tragedy and comedy, Mr Conrad observes, and gives his novel the “character of Romantic irony”. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a poet and Romantic ironist to the core, acknowledged in 1818 his debt to "Tristram Shandy", citing its “delicate rendering of trifles of thought and feeling”. Coleridge followed Sterne to Jesus College as well, attending in 1791, 23 years after Sterne had died of TB. Their portraits hang today opposite each other in the college’s dining-hall.

Sterne influenced others as well, and "Tristram Shandy" continues to inspire. In "Ulysses" in 1922 James Joyce displayed an exuberant Sternean disregard for narrative conventions. Nearly a century later Michael Winterbottom’s film "A Cock and Bull Story" attempted with some success to put the book on screen. Then in 2010 Martin Rowson produced a graphic novel based on it.

Few English novels from the 18th century continue to resonate like "Tristram Shandy". And this from the pen of a consumptive country parson who, until just eight years before his death, hadn’t realised he was any kind of novelist at all.

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