ADAPTING TRISTRAM SHANDY by Adria Young Submitted in ...

CHAPTER 4: STERNE AND WINTERBOTTOM
TRISTRAM: When I said this was a cock and bull story,
it was my cock I was talking about.
Director Michael Winterbottom and screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce’s 2005
film, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, is the first attempt at a film adaptation of
Laurence Sterne’s nine-volume novel. But this film is no ordinary literary adaptation. 75
In A Cock and Bull Story, Winterbottom’s styles and conventions of the cinema range
from drama to mockumentary, and all converge in his adaptation of a text within which
styles and conventions of the print medium also converge. 76 While it received mixed
reviews, A Cock and Bull Story comedically presents the notoriously “unfilmable” novel.
Yet, Ekart Voigts-Virchow holds that there are “no unfilmable texts” (141), which is true
if we accept definitions of ‘film-ability’ that embrace the interpretive and creative
opportunities of the adaptation process, instead of viewing films through typical
frameworks like “fidelity criticism” (McFarlane 8). Fidelity, and thus ‘film-ability,’
needs to be re-imagined; the transfer of “themes,” or the spirit of the text, is the best
transfer for film adaptation (Hutcheon 15). Like Rowson’s graphic novel version of
Tristram Shandy, the spirit of the text is interpreted and re-presented in A Cock and Bull
Story. For some filmmakers, the fidelity approach presents a smooth transition from text
to screen. Tristram Shandy, however, plays with and interrupts the usual structure of the
novel and the linear narrative. A recreation of the text has to thus mediate the narrative
disorder in an unconventional way; so, how? Winterbottom captures the chaotic spirit of
Tristram Shandy through a mixture of narrative modes and conventions. Like the novel,
the film operates through narrative stasis: moments when the wheels turn in the mud and
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