The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

"Tristram Shandy comes out only nine years after Tom Jones , but it really turns the novel on its head. It’s a massive turning point and the first experimental masterpiece. As it says in the film of Tristram Shandy , it’s a post-modern novel “before there was any modernism to be post about.” The movie is amazing, by the way. It’s directed by Michael Winterbottom. It’s ostensibly an (auto)biography, like Moll Flanders or Tom Jones , but it refuses ever to get to the life of the subject. The birth of Tristram Shandy and his actual development as an adult are constantly being hijacked by stories about his parents, about his uncle, Toby, who’s a very charismatic veteran from a war in Europe. There’s also Toby’s servant, the Corporal Trim, who’s a funny character, and the local obstetrician, Dr Slop. There’s Susannah, the maidservant, and Parson Yorick, who’s a very famous, colourful character. There are endless digressions with lots of sex jokes, like when Tristram gets an accidental circumcision after a window sash falls on him when he’s a child. It was denounced as highly scandalous and shocking at the time, including by Samuel Johnson, who famously said, “nothing so odd will do long.” But Johnson was wrong, because at the heart of it—among all the silliness and the digression—is this deep sense of the feelings and emotional roller coaster of being a human. Sterne innovates the post-modern novel, but he also innovates what was called ‘the sentimental novel’—novels that give us this deep snapshot of a person’s inner life as they experience it themselves, and which doesn’t necessarily match up with their outer life. It’s about the way in which we all have these profound emotional and unconscious impulses that we’re aware of—or dimly aware of—but which are very hard to communicate or make known to the world. That was what Sterne figured out how to do, to show people’s innermost souls in all their turbulence and chaos. So Tristram Shandy is both funny and outrageous and, frankly, quite hard to read, but it is also incredibly moving. You learn about someone’s struggle to be the hero of their own life, as he puts it. It’s very moving. It does take some tenacity, but there are passages about what it means to be human that are incredibly real and vivid. It’s about loving people, about having parents, about being a child. All these relationships are being explored for the first time through the lens of a person’s individual consciousness. That’s the link to Locke—plus the association of ideas, which gives Sterne license to make these wild leaps and links between unconnected things."

"It crops up in Tristam Shandy , my favourite book. Including De nasis on my list was, I now realise, my way of getting in Sterne’s novel, which not only was and continues to be important to me, but more importantly is a kind of personal talisman; when the right occasion calls for it, like now, I need it to hand. Best of all, it’s a fruitful sort of talisman; I mean, it provides a lot of food for thought: for example, hasn’t it just led you to want to find out what your nose says about your personality? I’m afraid I can’t help you on that front, but I can tell you about a line I found in Movimiento perpetuo by Augusto Monterroso (“Perpetual Motion”), and which you might have found in De nasis , if it existed. In Monterroso’s magnificent book you’ll find “an essay about the only three topics that matter in this world: life, death and flies.” Monterroso is an author I heartily recommend. And Movimiento perpetuo , in its moment, was a contender for the list of five books. The line goes like this: “The fly that today rests on your nose is a direct descendent of the fly that once landed on Cleopatra’s.” Not exactly. I thought: now I understand everything. That is, now I understand why I’ve spent all these years doggedly reading books, as if my life depended on that pastime. I don’t recall having thrown anything out of the window. As for reality and fiction, I see them as an old married couple. In fact, that’s how they appear in a chapter of Mac y su contratiempo ( Mac’s Problem , forthcoming New Directions), my latest book. In it two Italians are talking in the bar of a Swiss hotel. The passing years and loneliness torments them both. Baresi seems to embody the world of fiction writers – the world of those who believe that a work that tells a true story is an insult to both art and the truth; while the other one, Pirelli, seems to represent those who think that reality can be reproduced exactly and that, as such, it shouldn’t be placed between quotation marks, given that there is only one truth. Reality Hunger seems to me to be an anti-novel constructed from literary quotations that discuss concepts of originality and authorship; something to which I wholeheartedly subscribe, of course, given that there has never been such a thing as originality, which is but a kind of fetishism. When we talk about originality we are talking about Plato’s fantasy: that the world itself was a copy. Realism thinks it is copying the real when really it is just copying the copy of the copy of a copy. But David Shields takes the death of the novel as given and there I agree with him rather less. Mac’s Problem revolves around the feeling that there is no progress or change in literature, only repetition. My book questions some old clichés around writers. Like, for example, the myth that a narrator must have his or her “own voice” when really that singular voice doesn’t exist: there is only ventriloquism; there is no identity, only a mask. We talk a lot about the crisis of the novel, but it’s not very well thought through or argued, and Spain especially is full of “offended parties” horrified with metafiction, as if it didn’t originate from El Quijote and as if the novelistic dissidents were trying to entirely banish Catholicism from the country. And really, even if that was their intention, it’s strange that nobody finds it odd to be Catholic whereas it does seem strange to them not to be. But basically, I don’t think this issue of the crisis of the novel is very well considered. Because for decades now it isn’t the novel itself that’s faltering (there are some brilliant novels), but the novel as a genre. In the 16th century, the Petrarchan sonnet was a prevailing genre. It’s a genre that dwindled centuries ago. In the 19th century, the novel was as the Petrachan sonnet had been in the 16th century: it was the great genre, and it clearly sunk at the start of the last century with Joyce, although what is surprising is that many novelists don’t seem to have realised this, perhaps because the public continue to consume novels that are, let’s say, conventional. “Balzac, Dickens and Flaubert were hardly imbeciles – they understood that realism was nothing but a vehicle, a convention, hence why they all had a jolly old time twisting it about” As Bolaño said, you can go on writing those kinds of novels, but as a way of telling a story it was exhausted a long time ago. And here I’d like to clarify that, of course, the possibility of writing great novels like Tolstoy’s hasn’t gone away, just as people can still write great sonnets. But this doesn’t eliminate the challenge faced by today’s novelists: to eschew the “novel genre” as it was formed in the 19th century, and search for new opportunities. That search, I must add, is an exhilarating one, and for almost a century now it has prevented writers from getting bored when working on a novel. But it maddens those who cannot see that the writers who invented literary realism (Balzac, Dickens, Flaubert…) never really believed in it. They were hardly imbeciles, so I imagine they understood that realism was nothing but a vehicle, a convention, hence why they all had a jolly old time twisting it about, always aware that they were pulling the strings of an inevitable and fascinating simulacrum (also known as fiction). Or is it possible that they weren’t familiar with all those riveting and wise works from the Spanish and English tradition: works like El Quijote or Tristram Shandy , which show us that language doesn’t represent reality, but rather makes and unmakes it?"