Now comic as well as odd
David Nokes
THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF TRISTRAM SHANDY, GENTLEMAN by Martin Rowson Picador, £15.99, pp. 176 How gratifying it is when pundits get things wrong. 'Nothing odd will do long', Dr Johnson famously declared; 'Tristram Shandy did not last'. Note that did not. There he was in the mid-1770s, happily dismissing a 1760s novel, just as we might confidently write off as passé some Salman Rushdie novel published all of six months ago. But what's this we find? Tristram Shandy not only alive and well (or as well as such a valetudinarian figure could ever be) and looking odder than ever. Martin Rowson's cartoon-book version of Sterne's comic classic is just the kind of erudite spoof the vicar of Coxwold would have loved. Just as Sterne filled his pages with outrageous parodies and obscene puns, so Rowson offers a glorious lampoon of art- work ancient and modern. Here are Hoga- rth elasticated by Disney, Diirer arranged by Steve Bell and Aubrey Beardsley sharing a sequence with George Grosz. The influence of Giltray is all-pervasive, with baroque speech-bubbles that swag like Bologna sausages or soar like hot-air bal- loons. And what of all that clever talk about Tristram Shandy as the first post- modernist novel? Here we have Sterne's novel bounced on by a merry troupe of French deconstructionists, down-loaded into cyberspace, adapted by Andrew Davies (`this one's sex, sex, sex all the way, okay?) and ripped off by Martin Amis (Yeah right. Innit. So like Bobby was dead. Snuffed it. Yours Truly's Big Brother Bob. Big Bro Roberto. A stiff. Kicked it. Putre- fying. Noshtime for the maggots. . . Yeah. Right.) Tristram Shandy would seem the perfect candidate for this kind of cartoon treat- ment. After all, Sterne had such problems with words himself that he interspersed his text with squiggles, diagrams, mysterious gaps and black or marbled pages.
His chapters, like his characters, share a tantalising instinct for coitus interruptus. His sentences ejaculate prematurely in a typographical cascade of asterisks and dashes. Yet there is a problem about realis- ing in such clear graphic lines the images which Sterne left so deliberately, and sug- gestively, indistinct. Like his mentor Locke, Sterne was an adept in exploiting the asso- ciation of ideas, and as Mrs Shandy's impertinent question to her husband indi- cates (Tray, my dear, have you not forgot to wind up the clock?') the disastrous charm of such associations lies in their perversely individual nature. Rowson's decision to explain the joke by depicting the clock itself as a giant penis sacrifices the subtlety of Sterne's innuendo. (It became a fashion among prostitutes at the time to approach potential punters with the query, 'Would you like to have your clock wound up?') 'Throughout this long chapter of Noses', Tristram warns us, 'and in every other part of my work, where the word Nose occurs — I declare, by that word I mean a Nose and nothing more, or less.' We may choose to assume that he actually wishes to suggest something other than just a nose; but to have the phallic joke realised in a graphic landscape of erect male mem- bers risks coarsening Sterne's coy humour. `Here are two roads', Tristram declares, 'a dirty one and a clean one — which shall We take?' The reader may keep both roads in mind, but the cartoonist is forced to make a choice.
Rowson's cartoon book is a gloriously anarchic celebration of Sterne's novel, cal- culated for a modern audience. In place of the parody of mediaeval schoolmen and the tricks of the Grub Street trade, we find caricatures of modern critics and the jargon of the Internet. 'Bloody Hell! We've been digitalised' cries Tristram, like a time- travelling Dr Who faced with a full page of electronic codes. 'But you haven't read the book' complains his ET alien companion. `Of course I haven't read the book, ya wit- less mutt!' replies Tristram, tapping at the keyboard of his Heath Robinson computer which is built like a cathedral organ; 'Who has??!? Hang on . . . Bingo! We're in!!'
Previous page
