ADAPTING TRISTRAM SHANDY by Adria Young Submitted in ...

linear as the original; at least, as much as it can be in a particularly linear medium.
Reviews of the film consistently referenced the novel’s “unfilmable” status (Ebert np).
Even within the film, we see Coogan in a press interview; the interviewer asks why
Coogan would tackle the “unfilmable” novel and he answers by repeating Winterbottom:
“that's the attraction.” 84 But, by and large, the film received criticism for its execution. 85
Moreover, it made almost as much money in theatres as it cost to produce (Ebert np),
which is considered a ‘flop’ in the film-making business. In Rolling Stone, Peter Travers
not only comments on the “unfilmable” quality of the novel, but also the “unreadable”
quality of the novel (Travers np), which, accidentally, speaks to the film’s success as an
adaptation of the textual spirit of Tristram Shandy. But reviewers still missed
Winterbottom’s point. “The notion of turning [the novel] into [a film],” Richard Corliss
reviews, “raises two stubborn questions: How? and Why?” (Corliss np). In The New
Yorker, Shauna Lyon critiques the “lack of formula” in Winterbottom’s “meta-film” that
soon becomes “another, linear, film about the making of a film” (Lyon np). 86 Yet, Roger
Ebert finds it “just as well” that the novel is “unfilmable” since it makes for an art that is
“endearingly shabby” (Ebert np). Only those in the know (academics) praised the film’s
meta-relationship to the text, even if viewed through a postmodern, Lyotardian lens. 87
Because the film attempts to re-create the reading experience of Tristram Shandy in a
visual medium, film narrativity and film conventions are challenged or manipulated just
as written narrative and print conventions are challenged by Sterne's novel, even if those
challenges were largely unperceived by modern audiences; the connection between the
original and adaptation is up to the viewer. 88
Because intertextuality and intermediality function through a series of cognitive
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