The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman: A Norton Critical Edition Book

Before I began on this book----

Wait a moment, don't climb on your hobby-horse, or rather, don't pounce on your keyboard to tell me that I didn't begin this book, that it was Laurence Sterne who began this book more than two hundred and fifty years ago, long before I was even a * in my mothers's eye or an answering * in my father's----

So, before I began reading this book, like many amongst you, I had preconceived ideas about what----

Yes, it is worth paying attention to the wording here because the Life and some of the Opinions of Tristram Shandy relate to a time even before the moment of his own ✹----

But the Life and Opinions is still a good title, and the Opinions themselves, dating as they do from the 1760s, must have been preserved in the finest liquor to have retained such a freshness of spirit that you would think they had taken their first breath of Life a mere five minutes before----

Did I mention Time?

So yes, before I began reading Sterne, I had a sort of bias against this innocent book----

No, not innocent as to what happens between its covers, no, for it treats of everything in the world and doesn't mince its words in the telling, doesn't strut about like a turkey cock but rather talks turkey, as in gets straight to the----

But to go back to where I began, that period of time before I picked up Shandy and conceived the fancy----

No, not that kind of fancy. Why is it that we humans are ever occupied by conceptions of a double-meaning nature, as if words were not already weighty enough without adding----

Although generally, at least today, few of us seem capable of constructing sentences fortified with the kind of ravelins or outworks favoured by Tristram's uncle Toby and his trusty henchman Trim. For you must accept, if you are to read Sterne that the work is a very well fortified construction, that every sentence contains at least two facets or aspects, and each aspect faces off at an angle as in goes in a different direction and therefore the time taken to read----

Did I mention Time, because the notion, the very conception of Time is very central to any coherent understanding of the relationship between the writing of this book and the reading of it----

And speaking of the reading, we mustn't underestimate the importance of the Opinions of the reader; although not mentioned in the title, the Opinions of the reader are nevertheless----

The narrative, such as is, is interrupted by frequent digressions directed at the reader and when these asides are aimed in particular at the female reader, well----

Broadsides are not out of place to mention, in fact the terminology of the battlefield is used for even the most peaceful-sounding conversations, not to speak of matters amatory----

And although seemingly random, the trajectory of the narrative is very precisely plotted between order and chaos, between sense and nonsense, between mysteries and riddles, between the spiritual and the natural, between abstract philosophy and practical wisdom, between noses and----

Since the writer, together with his appendages, is always present in his own writing, just as every man is present at the shaving of his own beard, Laurence Sterne may also be----

We can't but speculate that the subacid personality Sterne gives Tristram's father, a man who is pedantically obtuse and razor-sharp at the same time, and the ridiculously cautious diplomacy he allows Tristram's mother (though it is a clever and perfectly impenetrable protection against the father's razor wit, and blunts it nicely from time to time), plus the childlike humanity with which he endows Tristram's uncle Toby----

However, it is the character of the parson Yorick, who, like his namesake in Hamlet, that fellow of such 'infinite jest', has a great appreciation of nonsense which he allies with a paradoxical impatience of folly and verbosity, and the whole may give us the truest picture of Laurence----

I'm reminded of Joyce's 'Man in the Macintosh', the ghost-like figure who flits in and out of Ulysses, and aren't there many such elusive raincoated men in Beckett too----

So yes, I think Sterne may well have inserted himself into his own novel via Yorick, his Jester of a parson----

But for this speculation, I have no proof, at least ready, so I will_that point unless some hypercritick reader of this review wants to ↵ to it----

The last word I will allow to Sterne:
Therefore, my dear friend and companion (reader), if you should think me somewhat sparing of my narrative on my first setting out,---bear with me,----and let me go on, and tell my story my own way:---or if I should seem now and then to trifle upon the road,--or should sometimes put on a fool's cap with a bell to it, for a moment or two as we pass along,--don't fly off,--but rather courteously give me credit for a little more wisdom than appears upon my outside;-----and as we jog on, either laugh with me, or at me, or in short, do any thing,-----only keep your temper.