Experience to Expression in Tristram Shandy

Abstract

Tristram Shandy, a novel of which the subject is its own composition, is necessarily concerned with the relation between reality and art, experience and expression, and with the process by which the flesh is transformed into words, and the word is made flesh. Sterne as novelist and Tristram as autobiographer are self-conscious authors par excellence, making their presence as artists the very lifeblood of the book, and scrutinizing the means by which experience can be narrated and a piece of narration can itself have the quality of experience, in an attempt, as Henri Fluchère has put it, “to bridge the gap that separates an artistic creation from reality”.¹ When Tristram throws off a phrase, “as long as I live or write (which in my case means the same thing)”,² he reminds us again that this volume, Tristram Shandy, is in some sense indeed the life as well as the opinions of Tristram Shandy, gentleman. And as Tristram makes the process of ordering chapters, fitting in necessary digressions, manipulating chronology, retaining the reader’s attention — in fact, the whole craft of writing — his constant subject matter, so Sterne has deliberately invented incidents and created characters that, besides having a vital life force of their own, are part of his main subject of the relation between experience and expression, the world of things and the world of words. He explores and articulates this relation particularly through the alignments and conflicts between his four major characters, the Shandy brothers Walter and Toby, and the son of one and servant of the other, Tristram and Trim.