Shandyfest

The TLS on the Laurence Sterne tercentenary.

As people and Penguins (Penguin Classics, that is) like to point out, Samuel Johnson seemingly got it wrong when he said that Tristram Shandy was an oddity that would not last; the coming commemorations show that it’s “lasted” long enough to still be read around the time of Sterne’s 300th, and recognized as an ancestor of certain experimental, playful approaches to storytelling. Eminent admirers include Marx, Goethe and that other novelistic devourer of encyclopaedic knowledge James Joyce.

Suitably quirky forms of admiration would include Shelley taking the adjective “Slawkenbergian” from Sterne’s “great and learned” authority on noses (one of the many mock-authorities mixing with real ones throughout the book), to describe the “prodigious” conk of somebody he disliked. “I, you know, have a little turn up nose”, he added, “Hogg has a large hook one but add both of them together, square them, cube them, you would have but a faint idea of the nose to which I refer.”

See also, Virginia Woolf on Tristram Shandy.