Tristram to the Hebrews: Some Notes on the Institution of a Canonic Text

Abstract

In Tristram Shandy, the narration of the birth of Tristram, the narrator, is constantly displaced and deferred, as everybody knows.1 Things fall, get in the way, have to be explained. The pointed failure of his attempt to narrate the event of his own birth is not an indifferent matter for an autobiographer, however, since that moment could be described as the absolute pre-condition of any narration at all. Inasmuch as this is a particularly self-conscious, self-reflexive narrative we are always tempted to try to read any of these which substitute for the narration of that birth as symbolical or allegorical, as figures for the moment of narrative self-constitution. One of the problems with this temptation, of course, is the fact that so many things get in the way. We are confronted with apparently an almost endless variety of possible figurative self-representations, so many heterogeneous possible selfallegorizations that we are non-plussed about which one to privilege. In fact, the narrative of Tristram Shandy seems almost nothing more than a series of mises en abyme, none of which is adequate