ADAPTING TRISTRAM SHANDY by Adria Young Submitted in ...

contexts and manipulated to a great degree. The marriage contract of Walter and
Elizabeth (Sterne 35-38), for instance, mocks the legal ethos: the verbosity of legalese is
contrasted to the colloquial and conversational features of Tristram’s speech. And various
Latin prayers are only partial in relation to the English ‘translations’ that face them on the
recto (Sterne 154-163). While these textual features of the novel speak to Sterne’s interest
in textual manipulation, a more tangible element of Sterne’s narrative control is the
convergence of media forms, especially the visual arts. Sterne’s interest in the medium of
the book, and the possibilities of manipulation within that format, is part of the Shandean
narrative.
Sterne blends elements from other forms of media with his digressive narrative.
As Shaun Regan argues, Tristram Shandy is the eighteenth-century novel that is “most
concerned with, and most dependent upon, the material conditions of its production”
(289). Sterne was very interested in the graphic and visual arts, and even tried his hand at
amateur painting (Gerard 20). He was certainly an expert doodler. The graphic and visual
elements of the text are not only an integral feature of Shandean narrativity, but
sometimes replace the textual narrative with a visual one. Peter Jan De Voogd writes that
“the text of Tristram Shandy is characterized by the highly unusual nature of its many
non-verbal features” (“Aesthetic” 383). These non-verbal features take many forms, and
it is important to remember that the overall function of the graphic elements, their
Shandean quality, is the convergence of many forms of media within the particular
medium of the book. The graphic element that we first encounter is the woodcut of Trim
reading the sermon, by William Hogarth (and, later, an illustration of Tristram’s
christening), which Sterne solicited for the London/Dodsley reprint of the first two
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