N a r r a t i v e1 1 3they usually supply us with a lot of detail that really is pretty
random. They might tell us that a brain surgeon who puts in a
brief appearance has huge, hairy hands, whereas she might easily
have been equipped with smooth, dainty ones with no loss to the
storyline. The detail is entirely arbitrary. It is there simply to fabri-
cate a sense of the real. A realist novel may have its heroine hail a
maroon- coloured taxi, whereas an experimental novel might make
the taxi maroon on one page, no colour at all on another, and with
a driver made entirely out of marzipan on a third. In doing so, it
would deliberately let the realist cat out of the bag. It would expose
to view what the realist novel gets up to behind our backs. This, in
effect, is the aim of Tristram Shandy. No sooner had the novel form
emerged in Britain than it was deviously deconstructed.
Tristram’s purpose is to write his autobiography. Yet if he is not
to deceive the reader he must leave nothing out, with the result that
he never gets his story beyond childhood. After completing two
sizeable volumes of the work, he has still not got himself born.
After nine volumes, we do not even know what he looks like. To
recount his life- history, he is forever having to nip from one time-
stream to another, double back to clarify a point, or hold up one
part of narrative while he gets on with another bit. His history, he
remarks, ‘is digressive, and it is progressive too – and at the very
same time’. He must also keep a vigilant eye on what one might call
the reader’s time- stream, urging us to slow down or speed up as the
case may be. Strictly speaking, the hero would need to stop living
while he was writing, otherwise he would never be able to catch up
with himself. The more he writes, the more he will have to write,
since the more living he will have done in the meanwhile. For the
sake of completeness, he would also have to include the act of
writing his life- history in his life- history.