Time in "Tristram Shandy"

It is amazing how self-reflexive the arts can be. Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, published just in the middle of the century which saw the creation and development of the novel, already is able to manipulate, mock, and distort the novel’s still developing conventions. Even when in comparison to the small selection of novels we have read for this class, we can see how Tristram Shandy works to emphasis while still undermining novelistic conventions, such as linear time and storytelling. Linear storytelling is abandoned in favor of a story that not only continually leaves the plot in long digressions, but also skips between past, present, and future. Sterne experiments with time in so many ways that I cannot possibly give justice to all of his ideas in this blog is, but a few instances will highlight some of his varying uses of temporal relationships.

Time and the conventional revealing of a narrative plot work to complicate the story that Shandy struggles to tell. The use of time and temporal relations in the novel calls attention to both the creation of the novel and the reading of the novel in a completely different way than that used by Richardson and Defoe. By using the act of writing in a diary, both Defoe and Richardson present their novels as being written as the action is occurring, with very little time passing between the actions and the recording of those actions. Rather, in Tristram Shandy a number of years have passed between the actual action occurring and the recording of that action; indeed, a majority of the narrative occurs before Shandy’s birth. Shandy’s complicated storytelling methods convey that this story is already in his mind in various shambles but does not replicate itself in such an easy linear manner.

Yet, despite the fact that Shandy is commenting on these events years after they have passed, at times he writes of them as if they are happening concurrently with the writing. Thus, the narrative and the events are interlinked in the same temporal landscape. After a long digression interrupts a scene with his father and uncle Toby, Shandy comes back to the scene writing, “But I forget my uncle Toby, whom all this while we have left knocking the ashes out of his tobacco pipe” (47). Though this scene occurred before Shandy was born and, therefore, could possibly have a memory of it, the narrative works to suspend the action in an interesting connection between the written word and lived experience.

This manipulation of time appears, as many of the other characteristics of this novel, incredibly modern. In thinking through the use of time in Tristram Shandy, I was reminded of Virginia Woolf’s use of time in To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and The Waves. Yet, here is Sterne exploring the same issues over 150 years prior to Woolf’s novels! The same ebb and flow of a fluid time, which develops into a subjective temporal experience that Woolf presents in her novels (especially Orlando), is seen in Tristram Shandy as well. Illustrating time as a personal and subjective matter, Sterne writes, “It is two hours, and ten minutes,—and no more,—cried my father, looking at his watch, since Dr. Slop and Obadiah arrived,—and I know not how it happens, brother Toby,—but to my imagination it seems almost an age” (137). Despite the insistence of conventional time as a fixed and universal objective quantity, time does not always fall into the laws of man and measurement. Rather, in this instance Walter Shandy feels and experiences time in a completely different reality than the two hours and ten minutes set aside. An age has gone by and perhaps it has in Walter’s own lived experience.