Tristram Shandy: Postmodern texts

Tristram shandy Postmodern schoolbooksDoes Tristram shandygaff nominate that there can be postmodern texts before Postmodernism?Laurence Sternes Tristram shandy dominated the London literary market determine during its serial publication from 1759-1767. handle his contemporary writers, Sterne engages in debates concerning what we would now regard as the disciplinary edge between literary works and philosophy which has established its canonical status as a work of postmodern fictionalisation. It is difficult to ascribe, as many scholars have, to Tristram shandygaff the title of postmodern. To char effecterize this young through a incoming literary movement which defines itself through the rejection of the principles of the previous movement is incongruous. How can a reinvigorated which precedes postmodernism by over a century and a one-half reflect the cultural and liquidal formations which sparked the movement itself? However, Tristram Shandy does contain fictional and narrative members which clearly invite comparison with the fiction of the postmodern movement. born(p) into the Augustan Age, Sternes discordant writing hits him await out of place in his make era Differing drasti makey from the contemporary imaginative literature of Defoe, Richardson and Fielding and the philosophical writing of Johnson, Tristram Shandy has been justifyed by critics as an employment of process writing, a text presented in the very act of creation and change. This analysis can be applied to Sterne himself moving outside(a) from the Augustan poets and the sentimental writers, Sternes writing is termed postmodern because it is a rejection of realism, bend from the objectivity of outer truth to examine inner states of consciousness. Sternes novel clearly exhibits the postmodernist speculation of metafiction, in which the writing self-consciously points to itself as an object in order to question the relationship between frankness and fiction. Sterne was cert ainly non alone in critiquing methods of narrative construction and exploring the fictionality of the external world, but what sets Tristram Shandy apart from its contemporary fiction is the use of lyric poem as an arbitrary system.The atoms of Tristram Shandy which inspire comparisons with the postmodernist movement be clear questioning the relationship between text and the self, and an argument for the organic strength of language. Postmodern scholars question the fundamental federal agency of identity and accounting itself, that is, history as what really happened as opposed to history as an objective narrative of what happened. Sterne has a clear understanding of how some element of self-definition and identification is involved in the fictional writing process, and freely admits the element of autobiography in his writing. Tis a picture of myself he assorts David Garrick in regards to Tristram Shandy (Letters 87). The autobiographical element in Sternes writing sugges ts multiple definitions of the equivalent reality, which depend upon perspectives sort of than objective truth. This comes across as a gnarled and fragmented narrative that confuses fiction and reality, narrative and truth. Tristram himself says of his sustains masterpiece, the Trista-paedia, My father spun his, every thread of it, out of his own brain, or reeled and cross-twisted what all otherwise(a) spinners and spinster had spun before him (Sterne 93). Sterne, like his character Tristram, spins his own narrative in an intricate and complex web, so convoluted and transp arnt that it is difficult to tell where it ends and he begins.Tristram Shandy clearly embodies this ambiguity between reality and representation through language. James Swearingen writes that in Tristram Shandy language does not undecomposed facilitate conversation it establishes the phenomenal horizon in which speakers and things spoken active are constituted(Swearingten 117). Tristram constructs his bi ography through textual language, which reveals itself to be an dubious rather than a concrete medium. He admits that he is better associated with the text itself than the subject to which it refers. Tristrams escape from his inevitable death is described as a journey in which vivification follows the pen (Sterne 754). Once once again returning to the autobiographical element of Sternes writing, if Tristrams journey follows the pen, thusly he, like Sterne, is creating and documenting his own existence, shaping his narrative according to his liking rather than according to objective truth.At the same time that Sterne celebrates the constructive power of language, he reveals its ultimate failure. Sterne was concerned almost exclusively with the problem of communication among men wrote John Traugott, illuminating both the genius and failure of Sternes text. When words fail, as they sooner or later do, communication becomes the note of sensibility. My uncle toby jug looked brisk at the sound of the word siege, but could make neither head nor tail of it (Sterne 312). Traugott concludes that Tristram Shandy seeks to re-establish a community where reason, in the form of language, threatens to destroy it (Traugott 15). Rather than basing a notion of community upon concrete notions of order and hierarchy, the Shandy world is built on the unstable shew of subjectivity. In Sternes world, each individual consciousness establishes itself at the heart of a universe of feeling and ignores any such thing as objective reality, until the subject of Tristram Shandy finally seems to be the nature of fiction itself (Byrd 59). Virginia Woolf has noted Sternes unexpected prose as a means of exploring a materialist critique of the conventions of the novel itself.The jerky, disconnected sentences are as rapid and it would seem as little under control as the phases that fall from the lips of a brilliant talker The order of the ideas, their suddenness and irrelevancy, is more tr ue to life than to literature Under the influence of this extraordinary style the book becomes semi-transparent. The coarse ceremonies and conventions which keep the reader and writer at arms duration disappear (Woolf 79)Stylistically, Sternes novel deconstructs the narrative and linguistic form of the novel in favour of multiplicity and ambiguity. Indeed, the authors preface is found in volume three, chapters are disordered, and symbols and blank pages are found end-to-end the book. Playing with novelistic conventions, Sterne draws attention to the instability of the written form itself, paralleling the ambiguity of the text with the ambiguity of the self.Sterne uses reflection to expose the constructedness of his narrative, encouraging the reading to approach it not as subjective truth but as an aesthetic. This is clearly plain in the treatment of various forms of madness within the novel. Madness thinks prominently in Tristram Shandy. The metaphor of madness appears in many critical reciprocation of the novel because helps to underscore the link between Sterne and his contemporary Augustan satirists, for whom the classic idea of madness as supernatural inspiration is missing. Indeed, Sterne seems to anticipate the amorous poets who, by contrast, represent madness as a sign of alienation, in which the faculty of imagination is the source of anxiety rather than creative freedom. In Tristram Shandy many kinds of madness are manifest. Characters such as Toby and Walter serve simply as the necessary comic eccentricity, similar to the figure of Yorick to whom Tristram refers throughout his story. Tristram, however, cites John Locke as an explanation of why my poor arrive could never hear the clock wound up, but the thoughts of some other things unavoidably popped into her head (Sterne 39). The sort of unreasonableness which Locke describes is, ironically, the driving force behind Tristrams unorderly pattern of narration. Tristram clearly expresses Ste rnes own narrative technique By this contrivance the machinery of my work is of a species by itself two contrary motions are introduced into it, and reconciled, which were thought to be at variance with each other. In a word, my work is digressive, and it is progressive too, -and at the same time (Sterne 95). Sterne questions what it means to get in a world in which the boundaries of the self and the body politic are redefined. Challenging the conventions of body narrative form and philosophical notions of the self, Sterne questions, is a man to follow rules or rules to follow him? (Sterne, 583)One bibliographer described Tristram Shandy as postmodernist in every sense except the mo in which it was written, and most critics have agreed. However, despite the similarities between Sternes own engagement with philosophical and literary critique in his novel, it is impossible to call Tristram Shandy a postmodernist text, if purely for semantic reasons. It is tempting to explain instan ces of extraordinary forms of artistic and critical reflection with the tools of the present, but this is a fallacy. Sternes novel engages with the epistemological, philosophical and literary crises of his time, and cannot possibly be explained with a theory born out of the crises of the twentieth century. As Tristrams mother exclaimed, Ld what is all this story about? It is, and will remain, A ripple and a BULL, And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard (Sterne 615). whole works CitedByrd, M. (1985) Tristram Shandy London George Allen Unwin.Swearingen, J. (1977) Reflexivity in Tristram Shandy An Essay in Phenomenological Criticism New Haven Yale University Press.Sterne, L. (1967) The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, London Penguin Classics. -(1775) Letters to his Friends on Various Occasions, London.Traugott, J. (1954) Tristram Shandys World Sternes Philosophical Rhetoric. Berkeley Univ. of California Press.Woolf, V. (1932) The Common Reader gage Series. London Hogar th Press.