A Film Canon

Just as the novel starts to glimpse itself as a legitimate, independent subcategory of literature, Tristram Shandy removes it to the foot of an interminable genealogy of syncretic, interdisciplinary, picaresque "systems", thereby subsuming its privileged mode of individuated, sympathetic immersion into one of collaborative, pseudo-ceremonial, crypto-exposition, and focusing all its attention on those remaining hinges between authorial visibility and invisibility that, in previous and contemporary novels, tend to be relegated to the tactful distance of prefaces, opening chapters, and opening paragraphs. In fact, Sterne's masterpiece is little more than an extended preface, in which Tristram's attempt to tell his life in accordance with Locke's Essay Upon Human Understanding - the most recent and reputable of these systems, along with Don Quixote, and, to a lesser extent, the works of Burton and Rabelais - requires an ever-more expansive, incidental and, above all, retrospective collation of facts, expanding these hinges into the digressions that Sterne considered his most enduring signature, and ensuring that the narrative never progresses beyond the first day of Tristram's life, with the exception of a travel interlude that lays the foundations for A Sentimental Journey. In particular, Sterne's taste for medical speculation translates every "system" into an anatomy, producing a hyperbolic delineation of the most incidental bodily attitudes or positions, and an unprecedented dissection of the material constituents of the book itself, as the various organs that compose the page - ink, typography, formatting, the awareness of preceding and succeeding pages - are isolated and displayed. It feels as if Sterne ultimately wants to place the reader in a position where their body - and especially their eyes - cuckold their brain, just as his proportionate attention to the organic, genealogical character of words themselves perpetually cuckolds any attempt at sustained discourse, whether on his own part or that of his characters; a reduction of epistemology to fortification, and pedagogy to the tabulation of auxiliary verbs.