Digressive and Progressive Movements: Sympathy and Sexuality in Tristram Shandy; or, Plain Stories
The digressive nature of Tristram Shandy is notoriously challenging for the reader and rewarding for the critic. Because Sterne as Tristram not only digresses but theorizes about the significance of digression, Tristram Shandy has become a useful illustration of narrative principles for a range of critics and theorists. His squiggly experiments provide material for studies of the nature of the novel and of narrative beginnings, middles and levels (Shklovsky 1965; Said 1975; Brooks 1984; Genette 1996).1 Tristram Shandy provides a prop to arguments in studies of literature as different as Renaissance poetry and the modern Italian novel (Cotterill 2004; Santovetti 2007). There is disagreement among critics of Tristram Shandy about what Sterne’s digressions amount to. There are those who think that there is method in his madness (Baird 1936; Piper 1961) and those who conclude he is crazily chaotic. Early critics dismissed Tristram Shandy as a mess, even as imitators queued up to copy him (Bosch 2007: 259; for a selection of early responses, see Howes 1974: esp. 46–8, 119–24, 127, 138–9, 160, 168–9, 180–3). Samuel Johnson and Horace Walpole dismissed his narrative experiments as gimmicks. Two recent critics challenge Johnson’s pronouncement on the oddity of Tristram Shandy by comparing him to his predecessors and successors (Keymer 2002; Bosch 2007).