ADAPTING TRISTRAM SHANDY by Adria Young Submitted in ...

or does not relate at all; however, the text is also simultaneously presented as a
“montage” (McCloud 155) because Rowson disorders the already disordered original. In
most cases, the images within the panels go beyond the meaning of the text. And,
Rowson’s graphic novel only loosely follows the Volumes of Tristram Shandy. Unlike
most other graphic novels, Rowson’s is not paginated, which suggests that there is no
direct correlative to the original text, but instead a textual and visual system of symbolic
expression that operates through closure; as Carrier suggests, “even when the words do
not seem to fit the image, we [make] some connection between them” (32). Because there
are critical interruptions beside, over, under, and between Sterne’s text, each page is a
series of dialogues between various caricatures contained within speech balloons, which
act as participatory “element[s] in the visual field” (Carrier 44) and are visual
components of the panel. Because comics use “text and picture to tell one story” (Carrier
72), however, the intertexts, contexts, and paratexts of Tristram Shandy are mainly
represented by visual icons.The text-to-image transfer in Rowson’s graphic novel
incorporates “semiotic modality” through both convention, the “symbolic signs,” and
resemblance, “the iconic signs” (Ellestrom 22-23). But the text is secondary to the image.
In most comic books, the text and image cooperate interdependently, and are of equal
importance in the panel. The conventional balance of text and image, Carrier notes,
achieves the “ideal unity” of the comic strip (67). Rowson’s version relies more on the
visual, the “received” information, than the textual, the “perceived” information
(McCloud 49) to visually represent ideological signifiers.
In this convergence, Rowson uses the comic book format to include the intertexts
and contexts of Tristram Shandy. To be more specific, symbols and images from the
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