Sterne’s cod-intellectualism with its more recent echoes in among others Flann O’Brien’s

General — July 19, 2010 at 14:50

Sterne’s cod-intellectualism, with its more recent echoes in, among others, Flann O’Brien’s De Selby, is mirrored, only less convincingly, in the real world of literary criticism. In seeking to avoid at all costs a straight, faithful, “heritaged” adaptation of Tristram Shandy (lovingly wrought in sepia and browner tints, on sale in leading National Trust bookshops), I needed to inject, digressively but also integrally, a good measure of modern, or postmodern, or post-postmodern, or even pre-post-post-pre-modern, hindsight.To this end, I’ve structured my version of Tristram Shandy in the following way. And it was here that I found a second and, from a satirical standpoint, more potent starting-point for my adaptation. Now if it is accepted that Paradise Lost is the product of 750 orang-utans, it puts the whole poem in an entirely different light. For a start, it explains once and for all the sympathetic portrayal of Lucifer, whom the apes have written up as a way of getting back at God for making them fat, inarticulate and, worst of all, orange.”And so on. Needless to say, this did absolutely nothing to advance my academic career, and explains why I am a cartoonist and not – although this was never very likely – sequestered in some dreamy cloister counting the phonemes in Pride and Prejudice.)AS the foregoing digression attests, a Shandean criticism is possible and, of course, runs in rich streaks of silver throughout Tristram Shandy itself.

Milton’s daughter and Tzara both then post their manuscripts to their publisher in Bloomsbury who, as is standard practice, only accepts the typewritten manuscript (Milton’s is written, as you’d expect of the 17th century, in longhand). In time (but also, of course, simultaneously), they type out the complete text of Paradise Lost, which Tzara, on reading, recognises as just the kind of unbelievable bullshit he needs for his next Dadaist manifesto. Tzara chains these apes, as a Dadaist act, to 750 typewriters, and leaves them to it. This makes things much easier and allows one to present the following hypothesis.

We may assume that while Milton is sitting in Chalfont St Giles dictating Paradise Lost to his long-suffering daughter, at exactly the same moment Tristan Tzara, the noted Dadaist, has acquired 750 orang-utans to provide the floor show at the Cabaret Voltaire. (To digress for a moment – as a student, bored silly in my Part I exams, I suicidally answered the question “The artistic creations of one age cannot properly be analysed by the critical attitudes of another. Discuss” as follows: “Assuming this statement to be true, it is unanswerable; to make it answerable it is therefore necessary, in this instance at least, to suspend chronology and assume that everything happens at once. Pulling off my cap and bells for a moment and replacing them with a beret (worn at an angle and sheathed in Gauloise smoke), I might, in a stern (Sterne?) moment, suggest the synonym “deconstructionist” – or even (replacing the beret and Gauloise with a floppy fringe and a roll-up) hoarsely whisper “postmodern”. During my supervision long ago in Cambridge I’d made a hesitant stab at formulating an ur-Shandean school of criticism, but without much success. “Shandean” criticism? Of course, that word is impenetrably eponymous, almost (in a Shandean sense) onomatopoeic.