ADAPTING TRISTRAM SHANDY by Adria Young Submitted in ...

critical interpretation (what ideological and social forces influence Elizabeth Bennet?
How can we portray them?). A Cock and Bull Story is a demonstration of the
interrelatedness of media in the convergence and clash of film conventions in a movie
about the making of a movie based on a novel about the writing of a novel. 82 A Cock and
Bull Story is faithful to the spirit of its original text because it is also intermedial and self-
referential. 83 The traditional notion of fidelity for text-to-screen transfers is displaced in
favour of a kind of fidelity that lays claim to the original but also interprets and
“refashion[s]” it (Bolter and Grusin 56) by adapting the spirit, the conceptual elements, of
the text. Fidelity to the spirit creates a new, revitalized work of art.
II. “A Womb with a View”
For the most part, North American audiences were slow to catch the inventiveness
and “metadaptation” (Voigts-Virchow 137) of A Cock and Bull Story. The 94-minute
film flips back and forth between eighteenth-century historical recreations of Namur, the
neurosis of the film’s actors, the competitive dynamic between Steve Coogan and Rob
Brydon, the film’s financial woes, Coogan’s flashbacks, a sultry affair, and moments of
the text recreated. The film ends anticlimactically in the screening room with a deflated
cast and crew who are disappointed with the film’s final cut, mirroring the closing of
Tristram Shandy in the dining parlour: “what is all this story about?” (Sterne 588). Aside
from the consistency of Coogan’s ego-maniacal and self-absorbed persona, or a portrait
of a “foolish man stumbling toward maturity” (Lyon np), there is little offered by way of
a narrative arc, and only a few earnest “heritage” moments. It is as digressive and non-
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