Tristram Shandy and the Irish: An Ancestry of the ‘Odd’

Abstract

Samuel Johnson’s famous dismissal of Sterne’s "Tristram Shandy" (“Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.”) might well be one of the most short-sighted critical claims in literary history. In recent years, Sterne’s novel has been successfully adapted as a film and as a graphic novel and has been repeatedly cited as a major influence on Modernism and Postmodernism, a forerunner to the major metafictional texts of the Twentieth Century, and Calvino’s claim that "Tristram Shandy" is the “undoubted progenitor of all avant-garde novels of our century,” offers an indication of the value in which it is held among many experimental fiction writers. This paper will present a case that it is precisely Tristram Shandy’s ‘oddness’ that has ensured its place in an alternative novelistic tradition in Europe, a tradition that finds ample correspondence with the non-realist tradition in the history of the Irish novel, a tradition that has formal and philosophical dissonance at its centre.