Narrative Beginnings: Theories and Practices

5. “The More I Write, the More I Shall Have to Write”

5 “The More I Write, the More I Shall Have to Write” The Many Beginnings of Tristram Shandy T I T A C H I C O When Laurence Sterne’s wide-eyed Tristram Shandy eagerly takes up the project of writing his bildungsroman, “the history of myself,” he expresses a fervent desire to begin at the beginning: he promises “to go on tracing every thing in it, as Horace says, ab Ovo” (1: 5). With his faulty allusion to Horace (who, of course, praises Homer for beginning in the middle, not at the beginning), our narrator opens The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67) in his parents’ bed and in one sense imagines the beginning of a story as the moment of conception. The conception of Tristram can be located in a time and a place, but it is not a narrative beginning, or at least not one that Sterne will define as a narrative beginning. So Tristram tries to begin again. In volume 3, Tristram-as-author announces , almost breathlessly, that everyone is offstage, which now finally gives him time to produce the book’s preface: “All my heroes are off my hands;—’tis the first time I have had a moment to spare,— and I’ll make use of it, and write my preface” (1: 226). As a subject he is born over the course of several chapters, most of which are occupied with narrating everything but his birth. The syuzhet of the novel, experienced when we read from beginning to end, takes us from the moment of Tristram’s conception to—by volume 9—a time before his birth, when the Widow Wadman woos his uncle Toby. By the end of the novel we are back not at the beginning but to an episode that takes place before Tristram is conceived. And, perhaps not surprisingly, there are even chapters in which Tristram 84 T I T A C H I C O the author gets “lost” and promises to “begin” that part of the story again (2: 557–61). Tristram Shandy is a novel that never seems to get going, always sliding back to tell us more. What is remarkable is that we witness Tristram forever straining to say enough so that he can begin his story. In volume 1, chapter 14, Tristram confesses that “I have been at it these six weeks, making all the speed I possibly could,—and am not yet born.” He goes on to qualify himself and points to a distinction that comes to shape the novel: “I have just been able, and that’s all, to tell you when it [his birth] happen’d, but not how;—so that you see the thing is yet far from being accomplished” (1: 42). Beginning in time—whether his parents’ bed or his own birth—does not satisfy Tristram’s requirements for narrative. It is this “how” that remains elusive throughout Tristram Shandy, the reader’s need to know everything to be able to understand anything, and the simultaneous glimmer of hope that this can happen. Tristram resolves this problem—at least momentarily—with the promise that he will continue to write, though he also acknowledges that writing produces the need for more writing: he admits that “I had no conception of” the need to write the “how,” “but which, I am convinced now, will rather increase than diminish as I advance” (1: 42). Why? Since the novel’s publication, readers have struggled to explain this phenomenon. Some have borrowed Sterne’s own vocabulary to argue that the narrative is both obsessed with progression and daunted by the impossibility of adhering to it (Moglen, Irony 147–62; González 55–64), sometimes calling the work dialogic (Tadié 1–3) or arguing that it is variously doubled (Lamb, Fiction 23–30, 73–76).1 Tristram, in one of his many moments of apparent (if fleeting) conviction, gives critics the language for this model of interpretation: “In a word, my work is digressive, and it is progressive too,—and at the same time” (1: 81). It is the kind of reading Horace Walpole took from the text in 1760 when he observed that Tristram Shandy’s “great humour . . . consists in the whole narration always going backwards” (4: 369). For Walpole, this is also the novel’s great liability: “I can conceive a man saying that it would be droll to write a book in that manner, but [3.17.28.48...