43. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne

To say this title is misleading would be an understatement. The book contains hardly any of the life, and precious few of the opinions of Tristram Shandy. Tristram doesn’t get born for two hundred pages, and the story – insofar as there is one – revolves around the doings of characters such as Tristram’s Uncle Toby, Toby's servant Trim, Doctor Slop and Parson Yorick. The book is instead a massive experiment in narrative, featuring oddities such as black or blank pages, even little graphs intended to illustrate the progress of the plot (a device later independently discovered by Kurt Vonnegut). Essentially the book is a series of digressions, a shaggy dog story, or as the author sums it up in the final sentence, the story of ‘a COCK and a BULL’.

The name Tristram Shandy, does, however, reveal a secret intention. Sterne’s greatest influence was the sentimental, satiric, circumlocutory Don Quixote, the story of ‘the peerless knight of La Mancha, whom…I love more, and would actually have gone further to have paid a visit to, than the greatest hero of antiquity.’ The Arthurian name ‘Tristram’ was intended as an English knightly counterpart to the knight of La Mancha (Sir Tristram was a prince of Lyonesse, and the lover of Isolde). The derivation from the French triste allows us to arrive at ‘the sad knight’; and since ‘shandy’ is a Yorkshire dialect word for crazy (Sterne was a Yorkshire priest), the final translation can only be ‘the crack-brained knight of the sorrowful countenance’ of Cervantes himself.

Consulted:
Ricks, C, ed.: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne (1967)

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