Tristram ShandyLaurence Sterne

Sterne brought out Tristram Shandy in nine volumes between 1759 and 1767. The narrator sets out to write his own life and never manages it. He is not born until the third volume, not breeched until the sixth, and the book closes on events four years before he was conceived. The interruptions are the content: a black page for Yorick's death, a marbled page, a blank page where the reader is told to draw the widow Wadman, chapters printed out of order, a preface arriving in the middle.

The engine is Locke. Sterne takes An Essay Concerning Human Understanding on the association of ideas and on duration and runs it as a machine for generating comedy. A clock wound on the first Sunday of the month binds itself in Mrs. Shandy's mind to another monthly duty, and her question at the moment of Tristram's conception scatters the animal spirits that were to have shaped his character. Each Shandy rides a hobby-horse. Walter has his theories of names, noses, and auxiliary verbs; Uncle Toby has the campaigns of Marlborough, which he refights in miniature on the bowling green because a wound at Namur left him unable to say plainly where he was hurt.

Duration in the book runs at whatever speed a mind runs. Sterne makes narrative time depend on the succession of ideas instead of the clock, and he proves the point by writing a novel that cannot keep pace with its own subject. Adler cites the work under Time, Memory and Imagination, Idea, Custom, Language, and Man.