The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759–67)

This information concerning his conception is told to Tristram Shandy by his Uncle Toby. Indeed, critics have remarked that the ‘life and opinions’ of the book’s title are in many ways not Tristram’s own, but based on his Uncle Toby’s life and on his father’s opinions. In terms of content, the opening, we later find out, deals with the moment Tristram was conceived, at an instant when his mother suddenly asked her husband if he had wound the clock, which he always did on the same night each month when they had sex. In terms of form, the opening poses clearly for the reader the question of when a life begins, which is as complicated as the question of when a book begins. Sterne is also concerned here, if very playfully, with the philosophical problem of when a human being becomes a human being: at conception, at birth, at first consciousness or, even, at maturity? To start an autobiography at ‘the start’ is to begin where? Similarly, the same question is posed by a recent memoir, Blake Morrison’s And When Did You Last See Your Father? (1993), from the other end of a lifespan. Morrison is not sure whether he should think the last time he saw his father was when he saw his father’s corpse, or saw him before he died, or before he became ill with cancer, or when his father last seemed ‘completely himself’: fully the man Morrison had known. Tristram Shandy will actually take over a hundred pages to get himself born, so punctilious is he in starting from the beginning of his life: comically raising the problem of cause and effect, in life, in narrative, and in logic. Perhaps, in order to understand anything at all, we need to know its circumstances and what preceded it, and in order properly to understand those circumstances we need to know their circumstances and what preceded them, and so on. Similarly, in order to understand who Tristram Shandy is, perhaps we need to know about his parents, and their parents, and so on, stretching back to lives and circumstances far beyond the knowledge of anyone living. It is best to stop this discussion here as otherwise, like many critics of Sterne’s novel, I will soon be repeating the digressive style of the novel, which itself makes the point well that endless circumlocution is inevitable as soon as one attempts, foolishly, to explain anything fully, or perhaps even adequately. At such a pace, as many critics have noted of Tristram Shandy, the narration of a life proceeds more slowly than the life itself.