Tristram Shandy: storytelling, noses, death, and more

There were a lot of interesting things about Tristram Shandy. One of the things that is interesting is how the novel deals with storytelling, with its countless digressions suggesting how impossible it is to tell the story of a life, but how compelling it is to try to do so. Toby's attempts to retrace the events leading to his injury are funny and seem crazy, except that it is understandable that a terribly painful, life-changing event could become an obsession, and there is something comforting about creating a narrative to make sense out of life. In narrating a life, an identity is created. But he doesn't just do it for himself, he does it so that he can explain what happened to other people who weren't there. So there is the desire to communicate that to others, to bear witness, to make others understand the events that shaped and scarred him, and there is also the therapeutic narration--making sense out of one's history. The novel, though, suggests that that is impossible, and that you can never get to the heart of the story (or perhaps the suggestion is that there is no story). There is always more than can be told--for instance, Trim promises to tell the story of how his brother came to be taken by the Inquisition--"a story that will make your heart bleed"-- some day when there's more time for it (89), but we never get around to it. Telling the story is a thing in itself, to be experienced apart from or in addition to the actual thing that happened. And the problem isn't just that the truth is hard to grasp--the narrator also tells us that the truth sometimes needs to be decorated (65).

Another thing that is interesting in the novel is the interest in the body. The references to noses stood out to me the most because I've never read a book that paid them so much attention, and because it is such a strange point of focus, but of course internal organs and reproductive organs are also frequently mentioned. (Eyes, interestingly, don't come up as often, except in the passages dealing with love in the last volume, such as when Toby is besotted by Mrs. Wadman's intent gaze. I wonder if eyes speak too clearly, at least according to convention, to fit into the untellable story. Or maybe they're just too commonly discussed to be interesting to Sterne).

Why the interest in noses? Part of it is the absurdity of it. It's hard to interpret noses as meaning something important. They aren't expressive like mouths or eyes. They sit on the face doing nothing as far as other people can see. But Walter Shandy thinks that you can tell a person's character by his nose, and entertains ridiculous ideas about the nose being shaped by something other than heredity, such as by the imagination or by nursing. Body parts in this novel are often described as diseased, broken, or melting. They often can change their shape like Tristram's flattened nose, or there is an anxiety that they can do so, such as Walter's fear that his son's brain will be squished in the birth canal. It is as if the body is not quite a stable home for the soul. Toby asks Walter if noses can be "dissolved" (173) and later says that the "solutions of noses" explaining why noses are different lengths can only be that it is God's will that they be that way (174). When Walter is searching Erasmus's writings for a "mystic meaning" (167) explaining different nose lengths, it is funny that he is looking for deep meaning where there isn't any. It's funny when the "Nosarians" and the "Antinosarians" (190) in Slawkenbergius's Tale argue over the possible existence of a gigantic nose. There is also the idea of focusing on one feature, the nose, as if the whole face cannot be taken in at a glance. This relates to the way the story is told, that there are a lot of parts but not a whole. I'm sure there's more happening with noses that I haven't discussed...

Death is another interesting theme in the novel. In the passage on Bobby Shandy's death, the novel manages to ruminate on mortality without being morose, partly because, since we don't know him, Bobby's death isn't emotionally taxing for the reader. However, we get to see the way the principal characters respond to it. Walter deals with Bobby's death by saying "excellent things" (246)--cliches about how lucky the dead are to escape suffering, and so forth, using words to separate himself from the experience. Trim's dropping his hat to express the transience of life is a fitting tribute to the demise of a character who was already absent from the story. (There is another example of shape-shifting bodies here, when the other characters in the kitchen "melt" (253) in response to Trim's gesture). The reader sees the characters' grief from the outside, and then, just like the cities that Walter says are gone but for their names, Bobby is again gone from the story.

The passage is interrupted with the narrator's babbling about "chamber-maids and buttonholes" and making some bawdy jokes (254). The interruption of the present moment of the narration into the characters' grief is a reminder that life is happening now. There are some suggestions in the book that connecting the past with the present through the writing of history is a vital experience, but there are also suggestions throughout that even in history, an individual can be annihilated, such as when Tristram goes to visit the Tomb of the Lovers and it is gone.

In volume 7, death has a stronger presence and is personified as chasing Tristram. The grand tour is like a frenzy to experience life. The narrator's fleeing from death is emphasized by descriptions of his rushing about and having brief encounters with random women. At one point, he entertains a fantasy of escaping his life and living with a random "nut brown maid" with whom he feels a "transient spark of amity" (378). Instead, he has settled down with the characters in his narration, and developing them more fully seems to provide a more effective illusion of escape from death. But we find out in Volume 6 that Toby and Trim, characters the reader has also settled down with, are dead at the time of the narration.

(Incidentally, I knew I had seen the distinctive phrase "nut brown maid" before; I googled it and found that there is apparently an Old English ballad by that name, about a constant peasant girl who falls in love with an earl. I think it might also be in one of the Inkle and Yarico poems. It reminds me of descriptions that I've seen in other fantasies of a free-wheeling simple life, where a wealthy man or a European traveler wants to escape to a simpler life and thinks he can use a peasant girl or an island girl to save him. The girl tends to get the short end of the deal).


If this post is long and rambling, it's because I'm still not sure what to make of it all. There are other interesting things in the novel, too. There's the display of knowledge, the Enlightenment interest in the sciences (and parody of this interest), the theme of heredity, and the interest in names. I'm thinking of a line from one of Joyce Carol Oates's novels, about how literature gives structure to life. I wonder how that would apply to Tristram Shandy.