Tristram Shandy as Autobiography

Tristram Shandy as Autobiography: Autobiography:

Lecture note- Dr Ashok K Mohapatra Semester II, English Department, Sambalpur University Conventionally, in a simplistic way autobiography has been viewed more as records of personal experience than as work of art. At least this was the perception of literary critics when they began examining this genre of literature in the early 20 th century. However, now critics tend to view it as a work of imagination and care for its aesthetic value. If at all it is believed to have any truth  value, its veracity and the autobiographer’s sincerity are no longer regarded as the chief value of autobiography. At times in autobiographic writings we find some fascinating characters with extraordinary life stories that seem unbelievable. This phenomenon persuades us to believe that the realism of an autobiographic writing is no different from the realism of fiction. Like fiction, autobiography has thematic designs and structural unity of plot construction. It does not span the entire life of the protagonist, but certain fragments of it, imposing on it a certain unity, plotting select events towards certain preconceived ends that seem to suggest that the life narrated embodies some ideals and a vision. In his  Art of Autobiography, O.A.J. Cockshut observed that autobiography, like fiction, fiction, reveals the complexities of the self which gets narrated through through its tonal qualities and suggestive gestures. Thus fiction can be autobiographical as much as autobiographies can be fictional. For examp le Stendhal’s Henry Brulard   , which is a genuine autobiography, playfully playfully claims to be fiction and ends up up fearing that it might be be For its part, Tristram Shandy, which is a fictional work, pretends pretends to be autobiographical. But it disturbs the autobiographic conventions. Tristram, the protagonist, begins to write a convoluted, long-winded and digressive self-narrative and also the history of Shandy family. In a bid to write about his own origins, which many autobiographies begin with, Tristram goes to the extreme of going back to his own conception, stating the reason that life begins from the foetal stage. In this manner his life story begins ab ovo, and by doing so questions the arbitrary nature of the beginning beginning of a life-story from the birth, although it appears appears pretty natural. Interestingly, as the narrative unfolds we begin to perceive that it is not merely that Tristram’s birth is being narrated, but this very narration parallels the narration of the book. It is not just Tristram, but the book is born, as it were.

 An autobiography or a fictional work invites the reader r eader to imaginatively participate in the lives of its characters, identify with them and be transported into this world. The work becomes so transparent that that the reader does not become conscious of the materiality of the narration through which characters and events emerge as if these were real. But Tristram Shandy deliberately makes it difficult for the reader to identify with the characters and events , since it foregrounds its own fictionality.

 It is interesting to observe that the difference between Tristram Shandy and the great majority of unself-conscious unself-conscious literary works is that the former acknowledges its own bookish bookish nature,  whereas the latter pretend to have no knowledge of their materiality. These pretentfully represent life as a gallery of characters and a series of events. However, Tristram Shandy reminds us often it possesses an objective objective existence as a book, book, or a physical thing. thing. It never allows us to forget that it exists alongside all those concrete objects that figure so prominently in it: all those buttonholes and noses and knots, sash-windows, chamber pots, whiskers, and the right and  wrong ends of a woman. But the incident which best illustrates Sterne's determination to point up the paradox of his work's dual existence as objective phenomenon and as imagined life is the one in which Uncle Toby requires Corporal Trim to look for a sailing chariot in a work by a certain Stevinus: ". .. see if thou canst spy ought of a sailing chariot in it (101),"Uncle Toby requests. But when Trim can find no such illustration and playfully turns the work upside down in the effort to shake out the chariot itself, Yorick's long lost sermon falls out instead. On the one hand, this may be seen as a device for introducing the sermon into the work with a superb randomness that constituted. The randomness that has been built into the very structure of the novel disturbs the linearity and unity of autobiographic narrative. The violation of chronological order of events through digressions complicates the nature of the organicity and wholeness of a story. In the novel as Uncle Toby explains to Walter that the durational time that seems to be in disagreement with the narrative time is becau se of the ‘’quick succession of our ideas’. In fact it  was part of Sterne’s plan, in agreement with John Locke’s epistemology, to develop a narrative of the unmediated flux, chain or quick quick succession of ideas that would map onto a durational time. By highlighting this durational time he intends to question the artificiality and fictionality of the narrative time of autobiography. This is the reason why the narrative structure of the novel incorporates the very narrative thread of narrating the narrative. The narrator, from time to time, addresses the reader in Chapters XVIII and XXI of Volume 1, Chapter XIII of Volume 4, Chapter  XL of Volume 6, Chapter I of Volume 7 and Chapter I of Volume 9, informing him of the time span of the writing the book from 9 MARCH 1759 to 12 AUGUST 1766 and progress of the narrative, nature of the story line with regard to Uncle Toby and himself. This order of time seems to be a comment upon the making of the time order of the narrative that begins from 1694 to 1741(the Namur expedition expedition of Uncle Toby to his own own travel through Europe). Europe). The result of the entire exercise is that the novel becomes a fictional work of an attempt to write an autobiography that never gets completed. That an autobiography is theoretically incomplete, and that the narrative ending of an autobiography is only a formal feature, with an illusory sense of an ending is very well demonstrated by Tristram Shandy. Like the life story of Tristram, which remains incomplete, the book remains unfinished. His story is chaotic just the way the life stories of all human beings are. Autobiographic narrative only imposes order and unity on one’s life, which is the mental history of the chaotic mass of impressions and experiences of the person concerned. That is why the narrator remarks, using the metaphor of architecture: "With all my hurry and precipitation, precipitation, I have but been been clearing the

ground to raise the building-and such a building do I foresee it will turn out as never was planned, and as never was executed since Ad am”.  A book like a human being is an accidental object, written against all odds by one man and printed and bound by others. It is no wonder, therefore, that as happens somewhere between Toby and Trim, a tale some- times gets lost, or as occurs during the binding, ten pages are apparently mislaid. In this novel, which presents itself as a book we have the famous blank, black and marbled pages, the lines and rows of asterisks, the graphic representation of the plot outlines and of the flourish of Trim's stick in the air.

In this connection, it is an essential characteristic of the two works under discussion that their subjects are both men of letters, whose knowledge of life is infused with an abundance of bookderived learning. Both narrators are seen to encounter the complexity and paradox of attempting to represent syntagmati- cally and on paper lives that at every moment were subject in the world to endless paradigmatic elaboration The problem is both "authors" are obliged to narrate not from the perspective of a specific moment in time but from a present of narration that is itself more or less protracted- several years in the case of Sterne, several months in the case of Stendhal. The result in both works is not that satisfying periodicity of infancy, youth, maturity and age, but fragmentation and discon- tinuity. The raw materials of both a real and an imagined life are allowed to frustrate the aesthetic impulse to fashion them into plot. Much of the curious pleasure in reading Tristram Shandy, in fact, derives from the tension Sterne generates between Tristram's repeatedly avowed purpose of getting his story told and the manifold comic devices invented to frustrate that purpose. The work fre- quently even defies the attempt we all make, as part of the effort to make sense of a novel, to distinguish between the progressive and the digressive, between what Tomashevsky classified as "bound" and "free" motifs. Sterne consciously promotes such confusion in his reader and nowhere more so than through what one might call the multiple suspension of the narrative line. I am thinking, for instance, of the episode in Vol. 8, Ch. 19, where no less than four stories are held in suspense simultaneously-Tristram's autobiography gives way to the account of Uncle Toby's amours but this is interrupted by Trim's tale of the King of Bohemia, which is abandoned for the story of Trim's falling in love which in its turn is broken by a dispute as to whether knee pains or groin pains are harder to bear. Such episodes function on one level as parody of the traditional artifice of the interpolated story. On another level, they suggest through transgression the limits imposed on an author by the rules of narrative intelligibility. By giving us a fictional au- thor who struggles to conduct a story that conducts him, Sterne opens the door on to the chaos which stories usually reduce to their own peculiar order. -----