ADAPTING TRISTRAM SHANDY by Adria Young Submitted in ...

These film conventions, and thus the film's methods of narrativity, all contribute
to the feeling of the Shandean narrative method, precisely because all five operate
simultaneously, or even as a blend of two or more, at various times throughout the film.
This creates a narrative stasis because the confusion of convention stills any sense of
action. We are merely there while the cast and crew sort out what it is they are doing with
the adaptation in these various modes. We are made aware of these various genre
conventions because they are repeatedly broken, ridiculed, or poorly executed, much like
the battle scenes. Moreover, the blend of convention, which constantly challenges
audience expectations of film narrativity, is true to the spirit of Sterne, who also
challenged the conventions of the novel. In absentia of a linear narrative, the film
operates in the Shandean intertexual way, which creates a dialogue between the original
text and the film, and historical and literary contexts of the novel. We can sense the
Shandean spirit throughout the film through Winterbottom’s remediation of Shandean
intertextuality. 103
III. Intertexts and Contexts
A Cock and Bull Storycaptures the spirit of Tristram Shandy by interpreting and
re-creating the contexts and intertexts of the novel to create a dialogue with the original
text. Various contemporaneous allusions substitute Sterne’s original, obscure, eighteenth-
century intertextual and contextual gestures. Gow writes that these modernizations
“encourage viewers to appreciate the wealth of reference in Sterne” (11). 104 Thus, the
theory of Pavlov’s dog substitutes John Locke’s association of ideas, dirty Groucho Marx
jokes take the place of allusions to FrançoisRabelais and Swift, and “Roger Moore and
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