tristram shandy

“Sometimes an abyss opens between
Tuesday and Wednesday but twenty-
six years could pass in a moment.
Time is not a straight line, it’s more
of a labyrinth, and if you press close
to the wall at the right place you can
hear the hurrying steps and the
voices, you can hear yourself walking
past on the other’s side.”

		–Thomas Transtromer, Answers to Letters

Can a work of fiction ever be "unpredictable"? Discuss in light of Lawrence Sterne's “Tristram Shandy”.

In order to address the idea of unpredictability (or “unexpectedness”), we must first acknowledge the fact that works of fiction rarely, if ever, take place entirely in the present. Instead, they are marked by anachronies - departures from the central time-stream in which the past or future is glimpsed, through a lens that transcends linear ideas of duration. In cinematic terms, these anachronies can be respectively labelled as flashbacks (analepsis) and flashforwards (prolepsis). This notion of flashforward serves as a springboard for a far more complex issue, which may be summarised thusly: in some cases of prolepsis, it is not necessary to explicitly reference the future. Instead, we may use "prolepsis" to describe the insertion of events that gain significance later on in a novel, as they have been included with the future of the narration in mind. If this is indeed the case, and works of fiction are entirely calculated around the premise of a hypothetical future - one which exists fully furnished in the mind of the creator, and for the consumer as a sequence of empty rooms to be filled - then what are the implications for our ideas of narrative? The impetus rests upon the author, and in particular the extent to which they choose to reference a potential future.
Broadly speaking, prolepsis is encountered within fictional works in three distinct forms. The first and most common is narratological prolepsis – the aforementioned “flashforward”. Other notable types of prolepsis include structural prolepsis (or rather, the anticipation which takes place in the gap between the narrated and the narrator), and rhetorical prolepsis – defined in purely legal terms as the anticipation of an objection to an argument. In order to understand the distinctions, one might use the example of French Connection’s 1997 ad campaign, which employed all three forms of prolepsis in its controversial slogan “FCUK ADVERTISING”. Rhetorical prolepsis comes from the way in which the slogan anticipates the audience’s first thoughts, and how they will receive the message; structural prolepsis is evident in the gap between reading the message and comprehending it; and narratological prolepsis arises from the fact that the “C” is seemingly located one letter earlier than it ought to be, thus effectively rearranging the linearity of the phrase. When narratological prolepsis occurs in a story, the event in question is effectively moved backwards in the timeline; we are made aware of it before it actually occurs. This brings us to the idea of performative prolepsis – more commonly known in fiction as the self-fulfilling prophecy. a performative prolepsis is defined as looking into the future to predict an event, the knowledge of which alters the future so that the event actually comes about. Tristram Shandy exhibits this device in the form of supplementarity - the paradoxical sequence of events that occur later in a narrative becoming the origin, or precursor, of events which occur earlier. Whilst writing his (presumably unpublished) novel, he addresses his readers openly and refers to them variously as “Sir” and “Madam”, thus turning his own future into the origin of the present – the “present” in this case being the scene of writing, and more importantly the act of writing. Needless to say, this is always true of a literary text; but in “Tristram Shandy” Sterne makes this explicit in a way that denies us any other form of present, providing little information about Tristram’s present self aside from the fact that he is the writer, and thus the means by which we receive the narrative.
It is politic to mention here that temporal prolepsis is not determined by tense alone. The future conditional is not a prerequisite for discussing the future; all that is required is that the narrative acknowledges that a future exists (whether implicitly or explicitly). That being the case, a proleptic narrative can potentially be divided into two parts: the first, which deals with the present, and the second, which deals with the future. The first narrative is the one which contains anachronies, whilst the second employs a form of prophecy, illuminating the events to come even as it shows us how they are brought about. This idea of the dual narrative is problematised by the difficulty of distinguishing between a narrative which begins with analepsis and then moves into the present day, and a narrative which begins in the present day and then employs prolepsis to show us what happened after. The two narratives inform one another, becoming interdependent, and the question of which narrative can accurately be labelled the first is raised. In a sense , “Tristram Shandy” deconstructs this idea of the dual narrative by facilitating the simultaneous co-existence of multiple different timelines – Tristram’s present self, his past self, his future self, and the lives of multiple other characters (such as Yorick, the local preacher, and the unfortunately named Dr. Slop). The story’s set pieces are not chronological; there is no distinct narrative. Even Tristram’s own life is based on the life of others, and it is precisely this aggregation of different voices and timelines which serves to muddy the waters of temporality, unpredictability, and individualisation.
Although “Tristram Shandy” exhibits all three aforementioned proleptic devices in the traditional narratological fashion, the discourse itself makes much of being unpredictable - which is to say, it seeks to emulate the haphazard digressions and excursuses of real-time existence, and of real-time narration. In layman's terms, the eponymous Tristram Shandy purports to be as unaware of the direction of his thoughts as are his readers. However, Shandy is not Sterne; and Sterne's literary moment is something altogether more calculated. The value of his art, effectively, arises from its self-concealment. This calculation being evident, it becomes a rather more complex endeavour to say whether “Tristram Shandy” is truly as digressive as it appears, or whether its constant meandering merely masks its planned purpose. The one antithesis to the argument of premeditation may be the fact that Sterne handwrote his novel, thus composing it in a way that meant he could not go back and make alterations easily. Although there is an undeniable tension between its apparent impetuosity and its status as a constructed work of fiction, in free-form handwriting there is far more of an element of chance. This perspective is, however, rendered somewhat moot by the sheer level of control evident in “Tristram Shandy”, present only when one cares to look for it. Devices that appear random or nonsensical invariably conceal within themselves some narrative purpose, even if the purpose itself is to further the appearance of nonsensicality. A potential example of this is Sterne’s frequent segues into other languages, such as French or Latin (usually in regards to some form of argument or debate). This is a device designed to satirise the legal language of scholastic dispute, laying emphasis on its classism and impenetrability. The same distinction is evident in the Latin phrasing. Sterne mimics gestures of authority, rather than being authoritative himself - although the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive. In some editions, there is a different font, indicating that Sterne is intrigued by the appearance of the text itself, and the idea of texts within texts.
In order to sufficiently answer the question of whether a work of fiction can ever be truly “unexpected”, one must first consider the extent to which “Tristram Shandy” is a novel about time. This leads naturally on to the thornier topic of whether it is possible to distinguish between tales of time, and tales about time – and whether, ultimately, this method of categorisation is even applicable. French philosopher Paul Ricoeur subscribed to the notion that this binary was very much existent in the world of literature, arguing that “tales of time” encompass all fictional works, whereas “tales about time” can be thought of as works in which time itself is the predominant subject. For a novel to be “about time”, Ricoeur argued, time must be at stake – or in simpler terms, the central conflict of the novel must be temporal in nature. In Woolf’s “Mrs Dalloway”, for example, the stakes lie in the conflict between physical time and psychological time. Similarly, in Proust’s “Recherche du temps perdu” the stakes lie in the search for the precise dimension of time, and the effect it has upon those who experience it. As Woolf wrote in “Orlando” (a novel that is itself concerned with the passage and malleability of time): “The time of man works with strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer elements of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented by the timepiece of the mind by one second.”
If this is the case, then “Tristram Shandy” would certainly fall into the category of novels “about time” as well as novels “of time”. The prose is primarily interested in, and motivated by, the future - not the future in relation to the events narrated, but the future in relation to the time the narrator is writing. Sterne maps out the duration of our own reading experience both spatially and topographically, placing “reading-time”, “story-time” and “narrative-time” at odds with one another (much as Woolf does in “Mrs Dalloway”). Whilst the events themselves may remain steady - one thing happens, and then another, and another, ad infinitum - the narrative alters its pace. “I am this month one whole year older than I was this time twelve-month,” Tristram writes in Book III, “and having got, as you perceive, almost into the middle of my fourth volume—and no farther than to my first day's life—'tis demonstrative that I have three hundred and sixty-four days more life to write just now, than when I first set out; so that instead of advancing, as a common writer, in my work with what I have been doing at it—on the contrary, I am just thrown so many volumes back—” Digressions such as these make it clear that Sterne is playing with the reader, abiding by unspoken rules of narrative whilst openly acknowledging their restrictiveness. “Imagine to yourself; – but this had better begin a new chapter,” Tristram writes, thus making reference to the material spatiality of the “novel” format, and predicting the layout of the completed work. What the reader witnesses through phrases such as these is the performance of a man trying to write a book, and by doing so fundamentally reforming our idea of what a book should be.
Whilst Ricoeur’s perspective is not without its merits, he has received a certain amount of criticism by other philosophers for the reductive nature of his argument. In “About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time”, Mark Currie put forward the notion that Ricoeur’s proposed dichotomy was a false one, arguing instead that all novels are actually “about time” - which is to say that every work of literature has the potential to be analysed and interpreted temporally. “If we say that a narrative which obeys a more conventional temporal logic is not about time, we are merely succumbing to its naturalisation,” Currie wrote, adding, “When we think that narratives are not about time, we are accepting the way that conventional narrative temporality has embedded a certain view of time in our universe.” Seen from this perspective, it becomes possible to discern elements of formalism in Ricoeur’s insistence that all novels are “of time”. Instead of taking the formalist stance that all works of fiction are united by a shared structure and language of signs, he holds that all works of fiction are united by a shared experience of time. Given the vastly divergent ways in which time is portrayed in the literary canon, it is nigh-impossible not to see this notion as flawed. If, then, all novels are “about time”, the element of surprise - the “unexpectedness” of a narrative - is rendered unstable, open to doubt. A work of fiction which acknowledges the possibility of temporal analysis acknowledges, however obliquely, a future; and thus everything that occurs is premediated, structured around an impending conclusion.
This leads by necessity to the notion of conscious prolepsis versus unconscious; although I have myself conceived of a third category, one which does not fit quite so concisely into either of these definitions. Conscious prolepsis is synonymous here with narratological prolepsis; it is a form of fourth-wall breaking, permitting the narrator to reference what will occur. Possible example here. The third category of prolepsis (I will leave the matter of the unconscious until last, for reasons that I hope will become clear) is intradiegetic. This is arguably the rarest technique, and often seen in works of fantasy and science fiction. Intradiegetic prolepsis requires that the future be referenced in-universe - not by an omniscient narrator, but by a character who should not have the capability of doing so. In Philippa Pearce’s novel “Tom’s Midnight Garden”, the young Tom glimpses his friend Hatty as an grown woman – although this is ultimately subverted by the revelation that the timeline he is inhabits at night is one of the past, and the Hatty of his present timeline is already a “shrunken old woman”. It is no coincidence that one of the arc phrases of the novel is “time no longer”. Likewise, in Ian McEwan’s “The Child in Time” the protagonist’s mother witnesses her child’s face at the window of the pub whilst she is pregnant with him – an event which compels her to keep the baby, rather than aborting it (as she had initially planned to do). Intradiegetic prolepsis requires that different timelines overlap with one another, emphasising both the notion of temporal fluidity and the co-existence of multiple narratives at once.
The type of prolepsis most relevant to our argument, however, is indisputably the type known as unconscious prolepsis: a far more common narrative technique than either of the previous two, and one which lies at the very heart of the multifaceted relationship between fiction and the unexpected. In unconscious prolepsis, events align in such a way that they confirm a future which has not yet happened. This is most consistently evident in crime novels, wherein the reader knows that there must be a solution, and during the journey towards it is presented with clues, scraps of evidence which may be used to unravel the mystery. These clues are placed within the narrative with full authorial awareness of what they imply, and how, precisely, they contribute towards the final outcome. Even when the characters are unaware of the solution, the author is not. Whilst this may seem like undebatable evidence that no work of fiction can be unexpected, it is complicated by the fact that one cannot tell upon first reading which pieces of evidence are relevant to the novel’s conclusion and which are not. “Red herrings” subvert the reader’s expectation of what does, or does not, factor in to the future: they might appear to be proleptic simply because they point towards a possible consequence, but in truth they have no relation to what is about to happen. The question can thus be whittled down to this: "If a story knows what is going to happen next, as works of fiction invariably do, are the narrated events therefore proleptic in nature?"
	One possible response to this might be that the events in question count as proleptic only if they are ultimately revealed to have relevance to the narrative future – or in Currie’s words, “an event or object is proleptic…when it anticipates an event which does indeed confer significance on it.” From this perspective, “red herrings” are not proleptic because they have no part in what is to come; they do not inform our knowledge of the future. However, there is a circularity to this argument that precludes it from fully answering the question. If an event is included with the intention of “tricking” the reader, then it is not accidental, but carries an awareness of the future with it. The author, in simpler terms, has included it with the knowledge that it will not have relevance to other upcoming events. We can only conclude that this is another form of rhetorical prolepsis. Much like French Connection’s “FCUK ADVERTISING” slogan, the device of the red herring anticipates how the reader will interpret an event, and plays on that, double-crossing them with the eventual disclosure of its narrative insignificance. This disclosure is not accidental, nor is it unexpected. It is entirely calculated – as much so as the inclusion of events that are relevant to the final outcome. Self-subversion, then, is as much a form of prolepsis as prophecy, flashforward, and anachrony.
It must therefore be concluded that even in the case of novels such as “Tristram Shandy”, which purport to be entirely unplanned, the future is always evident; authorial intent colours the narrated events with the anticipation of an ultimate conclusion, one which cannot help but by informed by what has gone before it. There is no room for surprise. Every work of fiction is proleptic from start to finish, as novels foresee future events in a way that real life does not. The controlled waywardness of “Tristram Shandy” is merely a conceit designed to mask the author's prognostication. Sterne is highly conscious of the way in which a fictional world is immune to many of the forms of chance, accident, providence and dissociation with which he experiments. He is primarily invested in making his novel seem entirely random and uncalculated, and by doing so he creates a narrative that both unfolds in the present and is located in the future. The story exists for us, as it is, pre-written. Even unread, the ending lies in wait; and the gun introduced in the first chapter, to use Chekhov’s analogy, has already - in a purely synchronistic sense - been fired.