Cock and Bull

It would be hard to find a more apt description of Tristram Shandy than Tristram's own account of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding:

I will tell you what the book is. – It is a history. – A history! of who? what? where? when? Don't hurry yourself – It is a history-book, Sir, (which may possibly recommend it to the world) of what passes in a man's own mind.

Woolf called it "the greatest of all novels" – though Hume was more reserved:

[As] to any Englishman, that Nation is so sunk in Stupidity and Barbarism and Faction that you may as well think of Lapland for an Author. The best Book, that has been writ by any Englishman these thirty Years […] is Tristram Shandy, bad as it is.

In a similar vein, the best film to appear in the last few months is Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, bad as it is – "A Remark which may astonish you; but which you will find true on Reflection."

Tristram Shandy is, in part, a book about the suspicion of words: the deferral of contact with the world that permits it to out-pace its own articulation – as Tristram finds that the narration of his first day takes a year; – and Walter struggles to prepare his Tristra-paedia,

at which (as I said) he was three years and something more, indefatigably at work, and at last, had scarce completed, by his own reckoning, one half of his undertaking: the misfortune was, that I was all that time totally neglected and abandoned to my mother; and what was almost as bad, by the very delay, the first part of the work, upon which my father had spent the most of his pains, was rendered entirely useless, – every day a page or two became of no consequence. –

Sterne is cheerfully haunted by the aspiration to represent nature in its own terms – a pure resemblance theory. – Consider Uncle Toby, modeling the progress of the battle day by day in the miniature trenches and forts of his kitchen garden, and never falling behind; – or the page on which we are invited to draw our own impression of widow Wadman. – Tristram Shandy is a comical version of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.

It follows that the filming of the book must pose a special challenge and a special opportunity. For the medium of film inspires one form of the illusion that Sterne is out to mock: what Bazin has called "the Myth of Total Cinema" – "a recreation of the world in its own image, an image unburdened by the freedom of interpretation of the artist or the irreversibility of time."

There are brilliant moments here – as when Uncle Toby's map of Flanders comes alive; – the melon that stands in for baby Tristram's head is crushed by a pair of forceps; – Steve Coogan dances to the agony of a "real" hot chestnut dropped down his trouser-front.

Yet the film's exploration of the central issue – its own mimetic character – feels routine. Yes, Steve Coogan plays "himself," or a version of himself. – And what seems to be the filming of another film of Tristram Shandy turns out to be the filming of "itself." None of this is sufficiently new to match the shock and intellectual penetration of the book.

– But perhaps that is the point? Moving pictures falling short of words – a further repudiation of the resemblance theory, made with tongue in cheek.

You may object that I am taking all this too seriously. – I can only plead, like Walter, that my thoughts proceed "after the manner of the gentle passion, beginning in jest, – but ending in downright earnest."