ADAPTING TRISTRAM SHANDY by Adria Young Submitted in ...

Yorick is drawn as the likeness of Sterne from Thomas Patch’s 1768 engraving, of which
there have been many replicas.
While the novel is full of icons and symbols of the context, Rowson also visually
adapts the bawdiness of Tristram Shandy. It is no secret that Tristram Shandy is a story
about “a Cock and a Bull” (Sterne 588). The novel is full of allusions and jokes about
penises, genitals, pubic hair, and groins, often coded in eighteenth-century vernacular and
double-entendres. But in a graphic novel
adaptation, how is such wordplay visually
represented? This aspect of adaptation, the
text-to-image transfer, is one way in which the
visuality subordinates the textuality. What
would take pages of text to describe, or an
arsenal of clever puns to execute, can be
represented by a single image. Moreover, the
bawdiness and vulgarity for which the novel
was abhorred is represented by the image: in
one panel, Joyce and Tristram piss on the
panels while Joyce lets out a fart (Figure 11).
But, let us stick with the penises. In Sterne’s text and
time, sexual representation became more phallocentric than ever, and the size and shape
of penises represented not only sexual fertility but intellectual virility (Harvey 133).
Moreover, semen was considered the creative life force of the British nation. 69 With
changing conceptions of the male image and sexuality, the nose came to correspond to
53
Figure 11: Joyce and Tristram on a break.