『 트리스트람 섄디 』 밖에 트리스트람 섄디는 없다: 트리스트람의 정체성과 사생아적 수사

Abstract

This article aims to examine the writing strategies of Tristram Shandy in connection with the identity of Tristram Shandy, its narrator, from the belief that a writer’s/narrator’s identity is embodied in his/her works. Tristram, “the continual sport of Fortune,” believes that his identity is shaped by three unfortunate accidents which gave him damaging traumas: animal spirits’s desertion of Tristram’s homunculus at Mrs. Shandy’s “unseasonable” question raised by the association of ideas, the crushing of Tristram’s nose during his delivery, and misnaming caused by Susannah’s bad memory. Tristram’s narrative is not premeditated, but developed and controlled by whim and chance, like his identity shaped and formed by Fortune in the guise of accidents. That is, his identity shaped by accidents and chance is embodied in the narrative itself whose development is unpredictable because of its control by chance and accidents. Another features of Tristram’s narrative are its excessive amount of digressions as well as its rhetoric of indeterminacy accompanied by the possibility of multiple interpretation. In this, his narrative is radically different from traditional authoritative texts whose meaning are determined and fixed by their authors, because Tristram gave up his authority as an author, acknowledging his readers as his partners who should participate in the creation of his narrative. The reason that Tristram adopts such a stance is that he is or is suspected of being a bastard who cannot maintain his authority in an orthodox society. Therefore, his narrative becomes that of bastardy, assuming unorthodox aspects manifested in his “bastardy digressions” and unchronological development of narrative, while allowing multiple interpretations triggered by the “suicide of an author.” As seen above, Tristram’s identity is united with the text, because “in creating his world, Tristram creates himself.” If we extend the meaning of this statement, we may say that Tristram is the text or that the text is Tristram himself who exists only in the text, because he is just “a literary sign on paper.” That is, there is no Tristram Shandy outside Tristram Shandy because Tristram Shandy is Tristram Shandy, the text.