ADAPTING TRISTRAM SHANDY by Adria Young Submitted in ...

Rowson also illustrates context via Slawkenbergius. “Slawkenbergius's Tale,” is
one of Sterne's fictional textual injections at the beginning of Volume 4. From the text
that is an “institute of all that [is] necessary to be known of noses,” (Sterne 217),
Slawkenbergius's chapter is but a fragment that Tristram translates from Latin and
includes as a prologue to the volume, continued from Volume 3, which is a moment of
closure for the reader, to be sure. As an incomplete fictionalized explanation of Walter’s
love of noses, Rowson creates a visual-contextual commentary on the tale's presence in
the text. He includes a mock-critical editor's note to explain that he includes
“adaptations” of the tale to illustrate “what Slawkenbergius's 9 th tale might actually be
about” (Rowson np). Five successive panels follow that imitate the art of Albrecht Durer,
Hogarth, Aubrey Beardsley, and George Grosz. Rowson gestures towards the history of
his own medium and the visual arts; he refashions iconic images in the context of the
nose-penis relationship. Rowson remarks that, because the ninth tale is about, “um, how
big is his cock?” Rowson uses Beardsley in particular because he “did those famously
obscene pictures of people with huge cocks”
(Rowson, TS). The remade panels feature characters
with large noses, and the Hogarthian panel is a
pastiche drawn from many of his panels and
reworked to centralize and signify noses. These
adaptations within the adaptation call particular
attention to the medium itself, its mode as
adaptation, and the intermediality of the graphic
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Figure 15: Penis balloon.