ADAPTING TRISTRAM SHANDY by Adria Young Submitted in ...

digressive, and it is progressive, too, -- and at the same time” (Sterne 64). There is a
sense in which Sterne’s narration, digressive and regressive and yet progressive, works
towards a refusal of the conventional structures of narrativity through simultaneity
(Williams 1036). “The machinery of my work,” Tristram writes, “is of a species by itself;
two contrary motions are introduced into it” (Sterne 63-4) to operate together. While the
digressions appear to be subsidiary of the main narrative, the digressions are part of the
narrative “as a whole” (Williams 1035). That is, the digressions “inscribe the narrative
function” as simultaneous with, as part of, the narrative itself (Williams 1036). To digress
is to narrate, in the Shandean order of things. Robert Folkenflik suggests that Sterne’s
project arose from an “awareness of reigning conventions and their growing staleness”
(53), in the eighteenth-century novel. Breaking conventions or making new ones is a
feature of the Shandean method.
Until 1759, when the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy hit the market,
narratives attempted to create, and then conform to, the developing conventions of the
novel, which came to be mainly linear in structure. Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, certain
works of Defoe, Fielding, and Richardson, and Johnson’s Rasselas, all offer examples of
linear narrativity. And most of these examples operate as (attempts at) cohesive
representations of human experience. Further, this attention to personal experience grew
out of the popularity of biography and autobiography by mid-century due, in large part, to
the successes of Johnson’s various Lives. But, because of these texts, the conventions of
the novel by mid-century “had stabilized enough to be ridiculed” (Barchas 48). Tristram
Shandy “calls attention to the fictional nature of its text” (Williams 1038), and, moreover,
to the fictional nature of linearity as accurate representation. This is not to say, however,
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