ADAPTING TRISTRAM SHANDY by Adria Young Submitted in ...

ook. Using chiaroscuro, “a stark contrast of light and dark” (Duncan 315), Rowson
begins Tristram Shandy in a Piranesian vault that represents Walter Shandy’s scrotum,
since the story famously begins ab ovo. 58 Caricatures of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce
stand with Tristram as he begins his narrative. In her 1932 collection of essays, The
Common Reader, Woolf claims that, because Sterne’s novels are “as close to life as we
can be,” he is “of our own age” (Woolf np). The psychological realism of the Modernist
era is indebted to the fragmented, self-reflexive narrativity practiced by
Sterne. 59 However, Rowson inverts this opinion by illustrating Woolf and Joyce in full
eighteenth-century dress (Figure 5); in this version, that is, they are of Sterne’s age, and
uncomfortably so, as Tristram soon puts bullrings through their noses and pulls them
along with reins.
Figure 5: Joyce and Woolf.
Woolf’s appeal to the ‘real-ness’ of Sterne’s text also speaks to Bolter and Grusin’s sense
of remediation as an attempt to “achieve the real” through media forms (53). This is
accomplished through the play with conventions, the convergence of media, and the self-
awareness of the text. Woolf and Joyce speak indialogue confusedly through Tristram’s
narrative. Eventually, Joyce calls the story a “STREAM of CONSCIOUSNESS”
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