ADAPTING TRISTRAM SHANDY by Adria Young Submitted in ...

novel (iconic art and text reworked in a graphic novel that reworks its original). The
visual advantage of the graphic novel helps to show “important ambiguities that are
central to the told [textual] version” (Hutcheon 28), which are, in this case, Sterne's puns
on noses. In Rowson's version, it is unambiguous that noses signify penises because all
we see are penises! (Figure 15) 74 Rowson creates a metacritical version that answers the
text of Tristram Shandy with the image. The more we are reminded that we are reading a
graphic novel, the more the text recreates the Shandean reading experience: “Read, read,
read, read, my unlearned reader! read” (Sterne 203-4). Rowson disrupts the “priority and
authority” of the original (Hutcheon 174) to create his own version of the text in a new
format. The graphic novel format offers a way for the text to be re-created and can thus
be critical of both the original text and mode of its re-presentation.
III. Closure
In his review of the graphic novel, Rowson remarks that the graphic novel
medium is the exact medium where he could stick to the “spirit” of Tristram Shandy,
“while abandoning the thousand letters” of it (Rowson 75). His adaptation of the text is a
remediated version, which provides the sense of immediacy that Sterne's original
accomplishes, and critically engages with Tristram Shandy’s various contexts and
intertexts. By elevating the iconic over the textual, Rowsonsignifies panel-by-panel what
the text signifies word-by-word. The incomplete nature of Rowson's adaptation follows
the “incomplete” original, and comments on the novel's particular defiance of the typical
properties of its genre. In the final panel, Joyce and Woolf walk out into oblivion,
58