ADAPTING TRISTRAM SHANDY by Adria Young Submitted in ...

history of visual art are used as self-referential gestures to the development of the
medium,and also to Sterne’s place within that history. At various points, Tristram
narrates over or through select Hogarthian panels (Figure 4), reproduced either in full or
in part, which include Gin Lane (1751), Beer Street (1751), and The Reward of Cruelty
(1751). These panels signify the aesthetic relationship between Sterne and Hogarth, and
also Hogarth’s status as an earlier practitioner of visual-sequential storytelling and its role
as critical commentary. 65 An angulated matrix is imposed over the illustration of Trim
reading the sermon (Figure 16), the posture of which is modeled on Hogarth’s aesthetic
principle, the “line of beauty” (Hogarth 37). 66 This nod to the ‘line’ also references the
conventions of comic books, which are, by design, reliant on lines to communicate
sequence, part of the “visual vocabulary” of graphic movement (McCloud 131). Lines
that make up the panels indicate individual stasis; the lines between the panels act as both
the moment of closure and the passing of time. Rather than a linear line, however,
Hogarth’s line is serpentine, and its emphasis here shows the interrelatedness of
narrativity and visuality. Rowson does not use the typical panel structure (equal-sized
boxes balanced evenly on the page) but instead, full-pages, triangles, and so on. There is
no uniform pattern that the visual narrative follows, so we can receive as much as
perceive that the story (and the graphic novel) is non-linear through visual cues like this
one. Conventions need not apply. We receive the contexts through visual resemblance
and iconic allusion. Text and image are thus unified conceptually, for the benefit of the
concept of the novel, by the iconography in Rowson’s Shandean adaptation.
Rowson’s use of icons range from the baroque to the modern, and all refer in
some way to the history of Tristram Shandy. Just as Woolf describes Sterne’s A
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