Narrativity and Stasis in Martin Rowson's Tristram Shandy

When Wayne Booth, who taught me Tristram Shandy, used to say that it was a comic book, he meant that Sterne had created a potentially infinite text that, like the satirical "Li'l Abner" or the sentimental "Little Orphan Annie," could be extended indefinitely, or at least as long as the writer kept pleasing his readers and gratifying his publisher.

Tristram Shandy could extend itself because once Tristram is born, the novel's capacity to generate further story--its narrativity, as we would call it today--took the form not of instabilities in the relations of the characters generating expectations and desires, but of very literal gaps between promises made and promises kept. Tristram promises "a chapter upon WHISKERS" on the last page of book IV, and it duly appears in the first chapter of book V very late the following year, after a mock-apologetic commentary on the impossibility of writing anything about WHISKERS. If Tristram promises that "the amours of my uncle Toby" will be "the choicest morsel in my whole story" we rightly anticipate, in spite of the violations of normal temporal sequence, that we will hear about them before, and not much before, the denouement of book IX.

The opposite of narrativity would be stasis: the occasions when the narrative, instead of hurtling us forward into the future, comes to a dead stop, as though we were in a swamp which a river enters and leaves but where the current can scarcely be felt. This too is an important element in Sterne's text. It is with a sense of being somewhere as opposed to getting anywhere that we listen, enraptured, to the mellifluous exfoliations of the Shandy marriage articles, the curse of St. Ernulphus, or the ninth tale of the tenth decad of Hafen Slawkenbergius. How would such issues as narrativity and stasis work themselves out within a Tristram Shandy translated into graphic text? The answer to this question is, perhaps, the choicest morsel of my story, for which we must therefore wait.

Martin Rowson is an English artist/cartoonist with an angular visual style like Ronald Searle's, and his previous adaptational trip up to Parnassus was his 1990 version of The Waste Land as film noir, in which Christopher Marlowe, private eye, takes on the case of the Hyacinth Girl, and winds up following up the clues contained in her multilingual babblings through mean streets and rough dives all over Europe and America, a riddle that comes to its mysterious climax as Phlebas the Phoenician's car, with his body trapped inside, is lifted from Los Angeles harbor. [illustration from Rowson The Waste Land]. Rowson's Waste Land is a hilariously transgressive travesty of the Eliot Waste Land as it was taught to me in the 1960s: a promise of transcendent meaning that degenerates into a game of symbolic "hunt the slipper" among the footnotes to Dante, Baudelaire, Spenser, and Wagner's Tristan.

Rowson was not angry with Tristram Shandy's author in the way he was at the author of The Waste Land. As Rowson said, "I found my potential collaborator [Sterne] sympathetic and admirable (unlike Eliot, who it was my intention to canard mercilessly; as one reviewer put it, 'If Eliot were alive to read this it would kill him all over again'). In fact, Rowson's version appears, at least at first sight, to be a fairly straight adaptation of Sterne into the form of the graphic novel, not with a flatfooted, reverent, "Classics Illustrated" style but with the sort of parodic inventiveness Sterne richly deserved. Unlike Rowson's Waste Land, which would be entirely incomprehensible to readers who haven't read The Waste Land, his Tristram Shandy can be read with enjoyment by students who haven't read Sterne's Tristram Shandy, and a new colleague of mine used it at the University of Toronto to open the book up for students who found Sterne rough going.

The opening frame [Illustration 2: page 1, RTS] duplicates the opening sentence of Tristram Shandy, its locale deftly placed within Piranesi's Carceri, which may tempt the reckless doctoral candidate to imagine a representation of the prison-house of language. In fact, once Tristram and his three listeners embark from that cave onto a boat piloted by an eager and huge-nosed representation of Tristram's homunculus [Illustration 3: p. 3] on his way to his embryonic destiny, it becomes clear that the carceral location of the opening frame must have been somewhere deep within Walter Shandy's scrotum.

This is not to say that Rowson's Tristram Shandy is just a recapitulation, tarted up with eighteenth-century visuals, of Sterne's print work. While at times Rowson replicates Sterne's strategies, his book is actually doing something rather different. One could put it this way: Sterne's Tristram Shandy is a story of the struggle to get a story told. It is an antinovel about writing one's autobiography, in which a faux-naif narrator pretends to be a bumbling fool who keeps getting so distracted by one thing and another that it takes him until the middle of Book IV to get born.

But Rowson's Tristram Shandy is an antinovel not about WRITING but about READING Sterne's Tristram Shandy. Thus in Rowson Tristram is portrayed, not as a hopeless bumbler but as a wickedly controlling narrator, leading his readers (literally!) by the nose. The narratees appear visually in Rowson's novel, and early on Tristram puts rings through their noses to which he attaches ropes as he rides off on his hobbyhorse---a hobbyhorse whose head looks like the standard portrait of John Locke---through his up-hill-down-dale collection of anecdotes. Those three readers [Illustration 4: p. 12], costumed for the eighteenth century but not of it, are identifiable as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and a tricorn-wearing version of Martin Rowson himself.

But at this point, about fifteen pages into the text, a spot that corresponds to the end of Volume I, Chapter 6, Rowson leaves this passive role and becomes a narrator exterior to Tristram. Here the role of highest-level commentator shifts from Tristram to Rowson, either by himself or in dialogue with Pete, Rowson's fictional talking dog (a former denizen of Rowson's political cartoons in the Independent). [Illustration 5: RTS p. 13] Rowson (Shandean 5: 69) calls this an "punctuation" to "the narrative flow" of Tristram's story, but it is inevitably more than that because the comic strip form remains no longer a more-or-less transparent representation of Tristram's narration. From here on the narrative foregrounds what had always been true from the outset, that it is through the artist, however infrequently he may be represented, that Tristram's story gets told.

Artist and mutt focalize the story for us. They may be represented within the text as naive figures who aren't sure how they are going to manage to get the story READ. But of course the naivete here is faux-naivete as well: the artist merely pretends to be incompetent, to be flummoxed by Tristram's manoeuvres at every turn, even to be scarcely able to follow the book he is so brilliantly precis-ing. But the real state of power/knowledge is revealed in this wonderful frame taking off from the Joseph Wright of Derby "Experiment with the Airpump" painting. (Illustrations 6 and 7: RTS airpump and JWD airpump)

As you can see here, even though it's Tristram whose tongue is still wagging uncontrollably, it is Rowson -- not Tristram, - -whose face is substituted in the place of Wright's projector, who is astonishing--and sometimes deeply dismaying--the lay audience.

So while it's the story of a reading rather than a writing, Rowson in Fishean fashion writes the story he reads, so that it turns out to be yet once more a story of the struggle to get the story told, and thus the same sort of story as before. (Hope that is sufficiently confusing and deconstructive.)

This dedoublement appears again and again: for example, just as Tristram offers to auction his dedication to the highest bidding noble lord, Rowson complains about Tristram's having anticipated and thereby negated his own dedication, designed to flatter his publisher and extract a bigger advance from its worthy accounts department. [Illustration 8] .

The extra level of narrative provided by Rowson's commentary is illustrated nicely in the Yorick passage in terms of literal levels: high above it all soars Tristram in a phallic balloon, below on the ground level are given the events of Yorick's decline and death, and in the middle are the artist and mutt in a biplane commenting on the "special pleading" and the "mawkish load of ----" Tristram/Sterne is ladling out. The levels collapse, momentarily, as balloon and biplane both crash into the black page, while Yorick/Sterne cackles with glee. [Illustrations 9 and 10.]

I said that Rowson is not angry at Sterne as he had been at T.S. Eliot, this is not to say that he is not angry about what has been done to Sterne. Much of the comic book version consists of Rowson's parodic rejoinders to all the ink the Eng Lit Crowd has spilled on Sterne. Those who nod their heads in agreement every time the C-18 Listserv goes into one of its periodic anti-theory paroxysms will be pleased by Rowson's take on deconstruction, marxism and queer theory as applied to Tristram Shandy, but the fact is that Rowson is an equal-opportunity satirist, as much up in arms at comma counting scholars as at slash-and-burn theorists. At one point Tristram and his readers are swallowed by a whale--this is a backhanded reference to Swift's Tale of a Tub--a whale who has previously swallowed a huge shipload of critics.... [Illustration 11] As one can easily see, Rowson has it in for the whole lot of us back to Samuel Johnson. And in fact it isn't just us either: Rowson has it in for the grandees of popular culture as well. Just after Stevinus's sailing chariot has carried Rowson and Pete through a conclave of academic Shandeans arguing about the queer marriage of Toby and Trim [Illustration 12], they crash into a theatre playing Oliver Stone's "Tristram Shandy: From a Place Called Namur to Hell and Back," where De Niro is telling Tom Cruise "Toby, Ya ma bruddah! I love ya! Ye gotta forget Namur! Ya tearin dis family apart!" while Corporal Trim, played by Meryl Streep, elaborates a plot to assassinate William III. [Illustration 13]

Christopher Fanning called Rowson's tone "cynical" and while that's not the word I would use, he is pointing to something real: the tonal difference between Sterne's wonky tolerance of the ridiculous systems of latter- day scholastics like Walter Shandy (a tolerance that sometimes rises to bemused pleasure in system for its own sake) , and Rowson's rather outraged portrayal of OTHER readers of Tristram Shandy (both litcrit types and the Hollywood moguls) as deeply SELF-involved, using the literary text merely as a backscratcher to their own narcissistic itches.

And just as Sterne generates narrativity out of the question whether Tristram will ever get his "life and opinions" under control and bring it to a conclusion, Rowson creates for himself a pickle even more serious. Tristram may spend over a year writing about his gestation and birth, but Rowson manages to use up on the first four books of Tristram Shandy about 90% of his graphic novel. As the readers of Rowson's book, or at least the ones that have already read Sterne, recognize that five volumes of Sterne are going to have to be encapsulated in the dwindling number of pages to the right of the spinal fold, the suspense---Will Martin Rowson finish Tristram Shandy???--becomes nearly unbearable. It is a happy ending, I suppose, when they manage, after an epic detour through several versions of hell, to skip through most of the last five volumes in a few pages and end with the joke about Walter Shandy's bull.

If Rowson's way of capturing the narrativity of Tristram Shandy is to reduplicate its strategies at a higher level of commentary, his technique for bringing the text to a complete halt is entirely different. For me, at least, the moments of rapt stasis found scattered through the graphic novel are the places where Rowson has elaborately travestied a visual text I'm familiar with. For example, in illustrating the passage, in Chapter 19 of Volume II--about Walter's theories on the site of the soul--we get this illustration taken from the last plate in Hogarth's Stages of Cruelty. (Illustrations 14 and 15)

One could turn Rowson's page, and of course eventually one will do just that, but for the moment as long as it lasts my attention is fixed on the wondrously clever illustration, or perhaps it rather wanders back and forth between Rowson's illustration and my memorial copy of the Hogarth.

There are many frames that evoke similar pleasures. Rowson has in fact substituted for the longest static passage in Tristram Shandy, the story from Slawkenbergius, a gallery of travestied pictures in which identifiable plates by various engravers from Dürer through Georg Grosz are presented as illustrations for the story about the stranger with the big nose. (Illustrations 16-20--- show illustrations if there is time.) But these pleasures can be found at other moments as well. In fact while exploring the "death of Yorick" passage whose narrative structure I've already discussed, I noticed that the last frame was a travesty of Constable's "Haywain" with appropriately Shandean or Rowsonian alterations--the gnomes in the foreground and the haycart turned hearse. (Illustration 21)

I would posit that frames like these have a double function: they not only substitute for the moments of rapt stasis within Tristram Shandy, they substitute in part for its participation in what D. W. Jefferson called the "tradition of learned wit." Most of today's readers haven't had the education Sterne's readers had: they don't have the frame of reference to appreciate the brilliantly silly ways Tristram misquotes Horace, say, for his own purposes. Footnoted editions can let us in on most of these jokes, but the jokes can't give us the same pleasure those readers took who had had Horace beaten into them at the age of nine or ten. But our own culture, however impoverished in other ways, is visually rich. Most of our students have seen Hogarths and Constables and Piranesis, or, at worst, Leonardos. (Illustration 22)

This was my choicest morsel, but I want to end not in this utopian vision of Tristram Redux but with one of the many unsolved puzzles that have nagged at me ever since I picked up this book: Has anyone a clue whom it is the devil is grilling on a spit seven pages from the end (Illustration 23)?