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The novel takes us to life slow and soothing, talking much about the accident of his birth which almost never happened and would have certainly been a coitus interruptus due to the question of winding clocks being asked by the wife to the husband at the wrong time. The paper explores the desultory and rambling nature of this novel as almost postmodern, long before the term was invented. The novel is also frank about its obsession with sexuality and talks about it in an oblique way in consonance with the time. All possible themes of life and living are explored through the narrative.

The aim is to prove that Tristram Shandy though written in the 18^th century was ahead of its time and a  very postmodern novel where the stream of consciousness of the writer takes us through the twists and turns of his and his near and dear ones lives.

Uncle Toby received his wound in his groin at the siege of Namur . His obsession with the wars , sieges etc grows when his wound does not heal, he becomes an expert in the art sieges. Knowledge had unrolled her ample page tohim. As Sterne says, the more my uncle Toby drank of this sweet fountain of science, the greater was the heat and impatience of his thirst Sterne says the “search for truth is endless and the desire for finding out whether the trajectory taken by the bullet was a hyperbola or a parabola, a semicircle or an angle of incidence will end up in the mazes of a labyrinth. He urges his dear Uncle Toby to fly from it as from a serpent, as it will freeze the genial current of his soul, waste his animal spirits, and has ten old age.” (The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, p. 63)

The expression hobby horse comes from this hobby of Uncle Toby’s obsession with sieges and forts. And his orderly Trim too is wounded in war two years before Toby by a musket bullet on his knee. And the two decide to indulge their hobby, make the bowling green a fort with a moat and other projections, a project in miniature of an actual wars where each employs stratagem to win.

The author dwells frankly on child birth too. Where Walter Toby and his wife are at odds. She wants an experienced midwife to assist her but her husband wants Dr Slop the obstetrician to assist her. Out of modesty she wants nothing to do with the good doctor. The two men have identical views on childbirth and the doctor and Walter Shandy believes in Caesarean sections which are named after Julius Caesar who was pulled out from near his mother’s stomach. Walter Shandy, who is sorely disappointed in his first sons intellect, comes to the conclusion that the second son must be birthed through C -sec if it all he must have some I Q. His theory being that the head going through the narrow birth canal causes it to lose shape and degenerate and never become normal again. His wife turns ashen when she listens to these theories and puts her foot down, to have her delivery the normal way.

Since the man servant Obadiah ties up the delivery instruments too tightly in the green bays bag, Dr Slop is unable to open it up and assist in the delivery causing him to curse Obadiah through the words of the master curser Ernulphus himself, Uncle Toby who expresses his discomfiture by whistling Lillabulleroas loud as he can. Another of Walter Shandy’s idea about birthing has been disproven by advancement in medical science, he believes that the breech position or legs coming out before the head is the best possible way which is certainly not the case. This, too he believes is best to prevent damage to the brain, so time and again he imposes plainly wrong ideas on his wife who poor woman seems to have great patience and forbearance. And Dr Slop too is to blame for some of the misfortunes which occur to Tristram, his nose is squashed by the male midwife’s forceps.

Another problem of the Shandy household is that small repairs never get done, for example the hinges of the doors creak  and Walter Shandy is never able to nap and is always disturbed when someone walks in. the ending of the wars of Spanish succession and the demolition of the fortress at Dunkirk ending the war has a strange effect on Toby, he was so long occupied with the war reading regular news of it on the Gazetteer now seems lost and becomes susceptible to the charms of widow Wadham and his help Trim too feels emboldened to court Bridget and the two had a small accident of falling into the fosse or ditch because their arms were interlinked.

Lawrence Sterne far ahead of his times, first to base his story on stream of consciousness technique. He bases the protagonist’s life from inception to adulthood on a series of accidents. Another mishap to befall Tristram when and how he gets misnamed due to the curate not guessing the right name from the mouth of Susanah. The father who dislikes the name more than anything else but has to accept the name is heartbroken at this sudden turn of events and goes and lies down, a defeated man.Indeed, we get to know how the family coat of arms on the coachhas been painted with the bend sinister instead of the bend dexter. On the left side or bend sinister would imply that Shandy’s are the descendants of illegitimate mistresses which clearly was not the case. But the coat of arms on the coach was messed up by a left-handed painter explains Tristram much to the chagrin of his father.

Uncle Toby undertakes the journey in his regimental uniform and the wig looking like a smart army man that he was. The learned philosophers, Phutatorius, Didius, Yorick, Gastripheres have a discussion on how patriarchal judgement managed to deny the consanguinity of mother and son and ruled instead for the aunt , or father’s sister to have right over the nephew’s estate over and above the mother. But the commoners called the vulgar did not approve of the court’s judgment. And it is the much-reviled Aunt Dinah who leaves a sum of money to her brother, even though he was the most embarrassed by her misdemeanor of having an affair with the coachman and spoiling their name.

Death occursoften in the novel, with Bobby, Tristram’s brother dies as does Yorick who is supposedly the guise for Lawrence Sterne, death does haunt the novel. Ultimately coming for Tristram’s closest relatives sadly which is unique in a comic novel. A macabre yet fascinating anecdote was that Sterne’s corpse was stolen from his grave and soon after appeared in a dissection at Cambridge university. Yorick himself is a symbol of death and his death happens early, he is also molded on Lawrence Sterne. And Sterne enacted the role of the good parson in society as mentioned by Ian Campbell Ross who calls Tristram Shandy,“a rare comic novel that doesn’t shy away from death.” (Ross, 2003)

One of the last accidents to befall Tristram is the falling of the window sash on his privy parts when Susanah made him urinate from the window. Trim felt he was partly to blame as it was, he who had removed the screws from the frame of the windows. Fortunately for Tristram he was saved from castration from this accident and only subject to circumcision, a practice abhorrent to some persons but prevalent in other parts of the world. Especially in Jews, Noelle Gallagher argues in the Jew’spenis, circumcision, and sexual pathology in 18th century England. “Jewish men had long been accused of lasciviousness, effeminacy, and sexual deviance. (Gallagher, Medical Humanities. https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2021-012362)” Also eighteenth-century culture  had a  interest in sexual pathology, borne in part from the growing medical anxiety around venereal disease In addition, it was believed that they are not able to consummate due to these very reasons and these are very same symptoms of people attacked by venereal disease and impotence, the foreskin becomes in Tristram Shandy,for Noelle Gallagher believes a valuable , sexual and reproductive help which unfortunately Tristram is devoid of and also so is half the population of the male species, thus a commodity hotly coveted by genitally deficient Tristram. Is it all necessary to undergo circumcision, then why is it forced down so many children in the name of custom and religion is also explored in the novel.

Is Uncle Toby impotent, this is the question which haunts widow Wadham and us too, a legitimate question because he did sustain a bullet shot in the siege of Namur. Impotence runs through the novel says Ted Scheinman. From the very beginning Tristramblames his parents for being deficient in a few aspects because she interrupted himat the moment of his conception, asking whether the drawing room clock had been wound.And then again Walter is obsessed with noses and Tristram has an almost flat nose,  and the Slawkenbrergius’tale remind one how the  inhabitants of thecity of Strasburg  meet their doom running after a massive nosed man called Deigo. They follow Diego as if under the spell of a pied piper, has been a code for thephallus, something 18th century politesse could not put into his novel directly,the nose was a gage of sexual health,and  his disfigured nose is a sign of venereal infections. His stubby nose is the result of Dr Slop breaking his nose with a pair of forceps during delivery, which is the result of the forceps not being available for him at the right time. Obadiah had tied up the green bays bag into so many knots that Dr Slop cuts himself trying to retrieve the forceps, and ultimately renders his thumb useless and breaks Tristram’s nose at his delivery.

The obsession with sexuality is real as when hot chestnuts fall in the groin of Phutatorius, when Didius, Yorick, Gastripheres are having endless discussions on sermons, names. The meeting was called upon to see if baptism and chestnuts burning the sensitive private parts of Phutatorius occasion much laughter, when Yorick picks it up ,Phutatorius is convinced that Yorick was behind the incident and makes an enemy of him. Yorick acquires enemies because he’s against grave and serious deportment, these he thinks as a “mysterious carriage of the body to cover the defects of the mind.”, Yorick,like Sterne is slandered in the press, and he is made out to be anti-British irreligious person, ultimately Yorick is outnumbered by his detractors and ultimately murdered most gruesomely, as B.M. Nortantells us. Tristram mourns him fitfully off and on throughout the novel.

Ted Scheinman proposes an interesting ideas, he says that  in the internet age of constant entertainment, Sterne writes a novel particularly suited to the internet age because it rambles from one topic to another. Its difficult to go through a novel which is very lengthy and its all the more tedious when the novel is about a single , sustained theme, like the novels of George Eliot later. He proposes that reading Cervantes, Fielding, Dickens is about as difficult as walking on a well lit path, but Sterne is a winding road which goes though many twists and turns and is a maze of events and digresses so often that the reader is left flummoxed (Scheinman, 2016).

The chapters are so rambling that the narrator hardly gets born until the third volume, he forgets to be born. Other chapters include chapters on inane topics like buttons and hinges and jack boots, on whether boys should wear tunics or breeches and suchlike mundane aspects of life, one or two chapters are left blank for the reader, presumably to exercise his writing skills. One chapter consists of a marble pattern, and one is all about various doodles done by the author. Steve Coogan says, “Shandy was a postmodern classic before there was modernism to be post about.” (Schienman, 2013) Schienman declares it to be akin to the very prevalent and modern disability of ADHD , where children and adults alike are constantly distracted , ADHD is a modern disease brought about with the impairment of the executive functions of the brain where, humans are constantly distracted and unable to finish any tasks they set out to do, exactly as in Tristram shandy the whole point about the book is that it is futile to set long term goals or plans because those will be thwarted, so Tristram doesn’t get named Trismegistus thanks to the curate misreading Susannah’s pronunciation of Trismegistus, and Dr.Slop breaks Tristram’s nose while delivering him, he gets circumcised when no one actually plans it , due to window sash falling on his penis.

Some other amusing anecdotes come from France, when Tristram goes to France partly to escape death and disease, but the journey to France is far from pessimistic, it’s a full travel guide to the cathedrals of France and gives interesting account of the draught horses used as a means of transport. The horses, mules or donkeys drawing the post chaise of the provinces is extremely slow and temperamental beast. Then he goes on to relate ascurrilousstory about how the abbess and her novice went on a journey to search for a cure for their physical ailments but amidst their journey their muleteer / coachman felt like some ale at the alehouse abandoned his mule and his worthy passengers, leaving them all alone on a lonely stretch. Then the abbess and her novice have only one option, that is to whisper an obscene phrase in the ear of the mule, which is the only way the mule will move. this occasions another Freudian moment where sexuality is brought to the front through the mouth of a holy functionary of the church, the mother abbess and her novice which occasions sacrilegious laughter in the minds of the reader. The author is an animal lover and expresses concern about donkeys and horses and says he prefers them to men. And  whenever he finds an ass or donkey , he s never cruel to it but always has a civil word to say to him, in fact it’s also acharacteristic of Uncle Toby that he’s never hurt a fly in his life. (Ojeda, n.d.) So the novel is surprisingly modern in the short attention span of its hero and historical in giving us a vignette of life of a genteel joint family in a small country town and in its concern for asses, donkeys, horses and even flies.

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