ADAPTING TRISTRAM SHANDY by Adria Young Submitted in ...

CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION
Sterne’s Tristram Shandy is a text that is known for its inherent difficulty, its
narratalogical manipulations, its experimentation with conventions, its layered
characterizations, and its humour, penis jokes included. Since these Shandean qualities
make the text’s transfer from the novel to new media difficult in terms of the usual
processes of adaptation, another method of adaptation is at work here. Recognizing that a
direct text-to-screen transfer is denied by the text itself, and that a modernized adaptation
would seem artificial, Tristram Shandy is adapted on the conceptual level of adaptation:
the spirit of the text, its Shandean-ness, is what is captured and remediated by Rowson
and Winterbottom. The Shandean sense of things is a quality of the text that supersedes
the text on the page; the Shandean sense of things is the way that the text is constructed,
the way it appeals to its contexts, and the way that it challenges the reader’s expectations.
Because these are all ways of doing things, rather than things spelled out in the text itself,
I recognize the Shandean as a method, and this method is the spirit of the text.
The qualities of the Shandean as defined in Chapter I make it difficult for an
adaptation to adhere to the usual processes of adaptation. Tristram Shandy is concerned
with the convergence of media, as Sterne brings together the textual and the visual to
disrupt the narrative, which thus gives the visual as much narratological power as the
textual. The narrative, however, is already disrupted, since the Shandean method of
narration is digressive and progressive and thus simultaneously moving and still. The
convergence of narrative conventions, modes, and genres helps accomplish this sense of
being in the moment with Tristram. We jump between a romance tale, a travel story, a
84