ADAPTING TRISTRAM SHANDY by Adria Young Submitted in ...

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In the last decade, a slew of biopic films have popularized this genre: Erin Brockovich
(2000), A Beautiful Mind (2001), Hitler: The Rise of Evil (2003), Ray (2004), Walk the
Line (2005), Factory Girl (2006), I’m Not There (2007), La Vie en Rose (2007),
Frost/Nixon (2008), The Young Victoria (2009), The King’s Speech (2010), and The
Social Network (2010) only scratch the surface of this film genre’s popularity in North
America and the UK. This is not to say that it hasn’t been a popular genre since the
invention of film, either.
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Both the personal assistant and Coogan's spouse are named Jennie, an allusion to the
addressee of many of Sterne’s chapters.
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See Ita Mary Gibley. Realism in Laurence Sterne.Diss. (MacMaster University, 1975).
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An allusion to the story beginning ab ovo and carrying on before Tristram is even
born.
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(Gow 10).
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The obscurity of Sterne’s references (at times) is evidenced by the Florida editions of
Sterne’s works. Edited by Melvyn New and Joan New, the Florida editions are the most
comprehensive annotations.
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It is probably a stretch to say that the Marx references are gestures towards the
influence Sterne had over a young Karl Marx (see Karl Marx. Selected Writings.Ed.
Hugh Griffith (London: CRW Publishing, 2009):15), but either way, my favourite Marx
joke in the film is when Coogan speaks to the screenwriter, who just had his seventh
child; he says, “You know there’s a Groucho Marx story about that; he meets a woman
with seven children and says, ‘why have you got seven kids?’ And she says, ‘because I
love my husband.’ And he says, ‘Well, I love my cigar but I take it out now and again.”
Everyone chuckles, and the scene moves on.
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Another of my favourite moments: as the personal assistant rummages through
Coogan’s pants for the chestnut, Coogan shrieks at him to get his hand out of there. Once
the chestnut is out, we see Coogan crumpled up on the floor in pain; he looks to the
personal assistant and says, “You had your fingers in me arsehole . . . at least buy me a
drink first.” The film’s modernized comedic moments speak to the original comedy of the
text.
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In Volume VIII, Tristram writes, “It is not enough that thou art in debt, and that, thou
hast ten cartloads of the fifth and sixth volumes still – still unsold, and art almost at thy
wit’s end how to get them off thy hands” (8.6).
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Voigts-Virchow also argues that this “blurring of dimensions” parallels “Sterne’s own
play on his author identity (variously, as Anonymous, Yorick, Tristram and Bramin”
(150).
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Voigts-Virchow pushes this as a subtextual reference to the obsession with penises in
the novel (143).
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See Chapter 1.
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See n. 28.
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