The Importance of Being Excursive

The Importance of Being Excursive: Confronting Adaptation in Martin Rowson’s Tristram Shandy

Jon Crylen

“ Shall we for ever make new books, as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another?” So asks the not-so-humble narrator of The

Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman at the outset of the novel’s fifth volume (Sterne 275). It is, above all else, a question of originality. Tristram suggests that newness per se is impossible, that nothing “new” represents a defiance of precedent so much as it is a recycling of the familiar—taking what is established as “old” and placing it in a different context, a new vessel, or perhaps creating hybrids among elements from different vessels that have not previously interacted or whose interactions have escaped previous notice. Even when Pound later said “Make it new,” he was advocating a mixture—a radical mixture, to be sure—of familiar but disparate elements not necessarily limited to literary tradition; to use his axiom and argue that modernism was a complete break from previous traditions amounts to a misinterpretation. After all, there were Sterne and his Tristram Shandy before there was Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, or

Pound himself.

Tristram’s question also has special relevance to the matter of adaptation in the sense that an adaptation involves the transference of a text (which we might think of as a mixture of its miscellaneous influences) from one medium to another. That I say

“involves” is an important distinction. Transference is not the same as adaptation, only part of the process; what transfers between two narrative media is what inherently carries 2 over without interference caused by the differences between the two media, and because narrative is what the two media have in common in the first place—novel and film, say, or as I will shortly address, novel and graphic novel—the narrative at certain levels is also the chief transferable element (McFarlane 12-13). Yet because transference accounts for only a small part of adaptation—because there are so many elements of a text that can only be represented by rough equivalents across media—what is striking about the analogy to adaptation as pertains to newness is that it seems almost impossible for an adaptor not to create a work that seems new compared to the source. The seeming inevitability of newness is a benefit to any adaptor, to be sure, but also a potential conflict of interests. An adaptation must, after all, retain a certain number of recognizable elements of its source text if it is to remain an adaptation.1 And as adaptation theorists tend to agree, retaining the recognizable elements of a source text without necessarily compromising other elements is nowhere a greater problem than in adapting modern and postmodern novels across visual media.

The problem arises because modern and postmodern novels do not adhere to traditional literary conventions, and it is hard to break conventions across any two media in a way that is representative of—or “faithful” to—a source text. Furthermore, much of their literary unconventionality specifically owes a debt to the conventions of visual media.2 What is thus challenging and unconventional in literature tends to become

1 Where we draw the line between an adaptation and, say, a work merely “inspired by” an acknowledged source, without bending to authorial “intent,” is too arbitrary and uncertain to determine here but is a matter we ought to keep in mind in the present discussion. 2 For modern and postmodern novels, the visual media influence is primarily filmic. In Joyce’s Ulysses, for example, the omniscient narrator of “The Wandering Rocks” hovers over Dublin like a camera, zooming in on different locales to give us slices of daily life; Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow not only alludes heavily to cinema and likens its narrative techniques to cinematic ones, but goes so far as to model its row-of-squares section breaks after the sprocket holes in film. In Tristram Shandy, the visual influence is painting, underscored by the fact that Tristram is a painter, as Sterne was in life. According to Peter de Voogd, Sterne shared a concern with modernist writers to figure out how to capture the immediacy of the visual image in writing: “Sterne, that very painterly writer, was always intent on making us visualize his scenes, 3 entirely unremarkable when adapted into a visual medium. Adapting Tristram Shandy, as might be suggested by its often being referred to as one of the earliest examples of the modern and postmodern novel in English literature, would therefore seem an impossible endeavor, and how Martin Rowson deals with this impossibility in his 1996 graphic novel version deserves a thorough examination.

David Richter, one of the few critics to write on Rowson’s adaptation, compares the two texts by saying that whereas Sterne’s Tristram Shandy is an antinovel about writing—particularly, but not limited to, autobiography—Rowson’s is “an antinovel not about WRITING but about READING Sterne’s Tristram Shandy” (Richter). I think we can go further than that. Here I will argue that Rowson’s graphic novel is an antinovel not only about reading Sterne’s novel, but also about adapting it: a mock-battle of authorial figures (Tristram and Rowson’s cartoon alter-ego, a fundamentally digressive role) in which Rowson finally, and ironically, must become obedient to Tristram Shandy and the source text he represents—obedience I shall then explore with regard to additional authorial problems created by the narrative eye and intertextuality.

The authorial struggle in Rowson’s graphic novel is enabled by the fact that

Tristram can no longer be a first-person narrator in a visual medium. There is no precise equivalent for a first-person narration in a visual medium, at least none that is sustainable for the length of an entire narrative. The detached, third-person “eye” that filters the images for us implicitly assumes the role of highest observer. Therefore, while Tristram remains a central figure in Rowson’s book, he is no longer the central figure, as he has necessarily lost some of his narrative authority. In a role that compensates for this fundamental change, he becomes a sort of tour guide, leading a small group of readers on ‘turning readers into spectators’” (de Voogd 283). 4 through the same scenes of his life that describes in the novel. (These readers, all but unidentifiable on account of their eighteenth-century apparel, are James Joyce, Virginia

Woolf, and Martin Rowson himself; together they replace us as the mock-readers

Tristram directly addresses in the novel, a further decentering of the original narrative

[Richter].)

The most striking change in Tristram, however, is his very demeanor. Instead of the playful, faux-naïve, self-ironic Tristram from the novel, we are presented a Tristram who is cruel, stentorian, and rather frightening—more martinet than mock-humble narrator. He always seems to be yelling, he bangs on doors and other characters with his walking stick, and instead of teasing his readers into following him through his digressions, he coerces them—literally leading them by the noses, with ropes and nose- rings. In line with his cruelty, Tristram’s digressiveness seems reduced entirely, even though his narration here is identical to his narration in the novel, if occasionally abridged. This seemingly reduced digressiveness is partly because the speech bubbles in

Rowson’s adaptation are all unusually hefty and verbose for comics books—a transference of the novel’s verbosity. They overwhelm the reader, and together with the sheer detail of the illustrations, make the adaptation as difficult and demanding of our attention as Sterne’s novel. But that Tristram’s dialogue is in a more formal font than the other characters’ outside his narrative, one with serifs, and preserves the novel’s letter- casing and punctuation, makes his speech seem less frenetic than everyone else’s and more imposingly legalistic, codified. (Other characters speak in dialogue that looks the same as Tristram’s, not to make them imposing but to clarify for the reader that the other characters are a part of his narrative.) That he does not interrupt himself with 5 overlapping speech bubbles (which, one imagines, could easily have been the case if

Rowson’s adaptation were more concerned with Tristram’s colliding trains of thought, with making him a more pronounced center of attention) further adds to the rigid legalism, transforming the vigor and spontaneity of his digressions in the novel into something rigid and authoritarian here. Such rigidness would be especially apparent to readers familiar with the novel, who can equate the reproduced narrative here with the various legal and clerical documents reproduced in Tristram’s original narrative— documents that Rowson often depicts visually in his adaptation, such as Tristram’s belated dedication to William Pitt and Mrs. Shandy’s marriage settlement.

Tristram is not the sort of tour guide any sensible person would want to follow for long, and the struggle for textual authority is formally initiated when Rowson abandons

Tristram—and by extension, the novel he represents—and embarks on his own parallel narrative in which he and his talking dog Pete do a lot of critical reading in order to figure out how to adapt Tristram Shandy. In the spirit of Sterne’s novel, we might call this parallel narrative a digression, made possible by the cartoon Tristram’s very lack of digressiveness. It would be more apt, however, to say that absolutely everything about

Rowson’s graphic novel, except for the large blocks of text taken verbatim from Sterne’s novel, is a digression—and that Rowson’s parallel narrative serves to call our attention to them. Hence, as all of Rowson’s digressions are implicitly a part of his adaptation,

Rowson’s decision not to follow Tristram through the novel’s narrative, not to be

Tristram’s reader, calls our attention to the adaptation process itself. The page on which the parallel narrative begins addresses all these things. In these frames, we see the mock-

Rowson in the role of a learned scholar, perusing a stack of “Kritical Tomes,” making 6 unnecessarily pretentious use of such literary-critical terms as caesura, amanuensis, and

Verfremdüng, and making various metatextual references (“‘tis only meat & rite that we, too, should intrude to reveal our controlling hands”)—leering smugly all the while. That all the frames appear to be plastered on the back cover of Sterne’s novel further calls attention to both his digressions and the adaptation process. Because it is the back cover, the page further suggests that it is only when a source text ends that critics, readers, and adaptors alike are able to make their voices and opinions heard.

It is in reference to this point in the text that David Richter, one of the few critics to write on Rowson’s version, observes that, “the role of the highest-level commentator shifts from Tristram to Rowson” or the pairing of Rowson and his dog. His reasoning is that, from here on out, the narrative “foregrounds what has always been true from the outset, that it is through the artist, however infrequently he may be represented, that

Tristram’s story gets told.” The point is a valid one, as it is inescapable that an artist, however we define him or her, channels what we read and see through his or her subjectivity, regardless of intent or originality. Yet I think we would be glossing over much of the complexity of Rowson’s adaptation—and adaptation as Rowson embodies it

—if we accepted Richter’s assessment at face value. Even if the artist ultimately has primacy, the mock-conflict between the cartoon Tristram and the cartoon Rowson suggests a far more serious conflict in adaptation, that of which text or which author ultimately takes primacy, and whether the adaptation or the adaptor even can.

To phrase it in different terms: the conflict is a matter of whether Rowson must finally defer to his source text, not only as a matter of artistic fidelity, but also possibility.

Throughout the graphic novel, Rowson’s digressions ultimately follow Tristram’s lead, 7 and he never quite overtakes Tristram as a primary authority—only in bursts.

Emblemizing this predicament are the instances throughout the narrative in which

Rowson finds himself trapped, and only Tristram can lead the way out. For example, midway through the text, all the characters, except for those within Tristram’s narrative— that is, the novel—are swallowed by a whale. (There are no whales in Sterne’s novel, but there is one in Swift’s Tale of a Tub, a work that many critics have noted as an influence on Tristram Shandy, an observation to which the mock-Rowson alludes.)3 Inside the whale’s belly, Rowson and his dog become interchangeable with hordes of deconstructionists, queer theorists and others aboard a vessel named “The Legendary

Lost Wandering Ship of Critics,” all of whose contradictory and incomprehensible claims are implicitly rendered null and void by the narrative that inspires them all. (A sullen Dr.

Johnson is also present, repeating his famous condemnation: “Nothing odd will do long.

Tristram Shandy did not last.”) Their interchangeability and futility is further made apparent when Tristram addresses his preface to them all, calling them his “dear Anti-

Shandeans & thrice-able critics” and wishing them a healthy dose of the wit and judgment they sorely lack. Indeed, if it were not for Tristram whacking the whale’s uvula with his cane, causing the whale to (symbolically) vomit up everyone inside, they would remain lost, and the cartoon Rowson would have to halt his narrative altogether.

3 Max Byrd helpfully observes that Sterne’s novel’s chief influence was in fact Swift’s Tale. He writes that of all its influences, “the formal elements of Tristram Shandy most nearly resemble those of the Tale—the digressions piled precariously upon digressions, the mock-scholastic parodies of literary decorum (Swift’s endless Apology, Dedication, Preface, and Introduction), the volleys against critics, the proposals for other books, the division of emphasis between actual narration and the encroaching personality of the narrator” (Byrd 39). He adds that Tristram’s obsessions with brains, noses, and horses are also traceable to Tale, and that should we think Sterne’s novel thus verges on the plagiaristic, or is merely a retread of another work, what differentiates the two texts is that Swift wrote a satire and Sterne a novel (40). That Rowson’s graphic novel shares many of these similarities invites us to consider it as distinctly influenced by Swift’s rather than just alluding to its whale, and other famous whales the swallowed characters list for us—Moby Dick as well as the ones that swallowed Jonah and Pinocchio. 8

The suggestion that Rowson is interchangeable with the lost critics introduces the notion that adaptors are themselves critics, that their adaptations function as critical commentary on the source text.4 This notion arises elsewhere in the graphic novel, when

Rowson finds himself cornered at every turn by hypothetical bad adaptations: Oliver

Stone turns the novel into a self-aggrandizing war film, capitalizing on Uncle Toby’s groin injury at Namur to make another film about Vietnam; there is a sexed-up BBC adaptation in which Toby is played by what looks like a shirtless Colin Firth; and we see other versions by D.H. Lawrence, Martin Amis, and in the styles of film noir and magic realism. Each parodically represents a narrow and misguided interpretation of Sterne’s work, not unlike those of the critics aboard the legendary lost ship. At the same time, each more seriously represents the inevitable problem Rowson encounters with his digressions. Like Tristram’s in the novel, they ultimately lead him nowhere except into conflict with the task at hand; the bad adaptations resemble the digressions that detract from a proper telling of the story.

It seems, then, that Rowson’s only recourse, if he is to complete his adaptation, is to defer to the other narrator in the textual power struggle, Tristram, and thus the novel he represents. This necessity is revealed on the last page of the graphic novel, when the filtering eye pulls back to reveal that Tristram has been drawing Rowson and his dog the

4 Commentary is, of course, one of the three categories of adaptations suggested by Geoffrey Wagner, and as he describes it, occupies a middle-ground among adaptations as the moderate alteration of the source text due to “a different intention” on the part of the adaptor; the other two are transposition, which is the most literal-minded type, and analogy, which “must represent a fairly considerable departure for the sake of making another work of art” (qtd. in McFarlane 10-11). However, his suggestion that only a minority of adaptations can be classified as commentary on the source text is misleading. Surely all adaptations are commentaries on their respective source texts, some (analogy) far more explicitly so than others (transposition); every adaptation arises from a unique interpretation of the text, and every interpretation is a commentary. That said, we might place Rowson’s adaptation somewhere between the commentary and analogy categories. It also shares characteristics with all three of Michael Klein and Gillian Parker’s categories: fidelity to the main narrative thrust, preservation of the structural core while reinterpreting and deconstructing it, and using the source text as a springboard for original work (McFarlane 11). 9 entire time. What is notable here is that Tristram is not drawing at the moment— although, because he is a painter, we assume that it is his work. Instead, we see him smoking a pipe and leisurely slashing the canvas with a scythe, an act that seems designed to remind us of his own narrative’s canonization and the relative insignificance of Rowson’s—insignificance bolstered by the picture’s depiction of a defeated Rowson whose last resort is to make a musical adaptation instead.

Of course this revelation of the artist or author is parodic and highly ironic, meant to call further attention to Rowson’s mastery of both Sterne’s novel and his own—a further irony. When Rowson’s adaptation assaults the smug “mastery” of Sterne’s novel by the wandering critics and in self-important adaptations such as Oliver Stone’s, we know better than to privilege, finally, Rowson’s work above anyone else’s, whether a critics’ or adaptors’, whether actual or made of whole cloth. The preceding page, after all, provides a commentary on the futility of last words, when Rowson attempts to one-up

Yorick’s famous pun that implies Tristram’s entire narrative is a cock-and-bull story with his obvious joke about noses (which suggests, as so many Freudian critics have, that there’s just the cock, and no bull about it). Rather, if we are to say the graphic novel depicts a conflict between two authors, the final image of the graphic novel suggests that the conflict is an endless one in which neither voice can have a final say; the implicit revelation of artists beyond Tristram is open-ended and self-perpetuating. It is what J.

Hillis Miller points toward when he likens endings to the words (aptly chosen) ravel and unravel: “The word cannot be given a closure no matter how extravagant the series of doubling negatives attempting to make the initial opening into closure: ravel, unravel, un- unravel, un-un-unravel, and so on” (55). His analogy is significant here; no number of 10 frames could bring closure to the graphic novel’s ending, even if the revelation of one additional frame implies the revelation of infinitely more, including and beyond the page.

Such an infinite revelation is possible because the pull-back raises the question of whose eye is filtering the images for us to begin with, and whether there is more than one narrative eye filtering the text. Surely we cannot discount Rowson’s eye, because we know that it is Rowson who has made the graphic novel, drawn it, chosen what we see and where the frames begin or end—just as in the novel, we can say that Tristram’s words are also Sterne's in that Sterne wrote them. (To return to Richter, it is through the artist or author that any version of Tristram Shandy gets told; to return to Tristram’s analogy of bookmaking to apothecary mixtures, we can say that the vessel is not only the medium through which the story gets told in adaptation but also the artist or author who subjectively filters what we see or read.) At the same time we can only attribute control, not intent, to the artist or author; with regard to the eye in a hand-drawn medium, although the artist controls what we see and how we see it, the same control allows for the deliberate clouding of intention and the matter of whose eye views the frame.

(Consider photographic and cinematographic works, on the other hand, where intent cannot be clouded in the same way because of the difficulties of restricting what a camera sees, and how we subsequently choose to see what the camera has seen—lighting, lenses, angles, and focus can only change how the camera sees, not what it sees.)5 In Tristram

5 Here I turn to Stanley Cavell: “[A]ny camera necessarily imposes on its subject its own conditions of capture” (121). And so a further question: rather than the artist or author being the filter that selects what we see and read, is it not the tools that the author or artist uses? Any number of tools used for writing and painting are essentially the same to the writer or painter that the camera (with its additional lenses, film stock, and other variable accessories) is to the photographer or cinematographer, and these tools are additional filters through which each artist must channel his or her vision. Barring the rare, absolute mastery of the tools of one’s artistic trade, any of those tools used to channel an artistic vision must therefore always impose its own conditions of capture on a given subject. The matter of the camera is perhaps not an exception, but the norm. 11

Shandy, we have reason to believe it is not Rowson’s eye that filters the images throughout the text, because the camera-like pull-out that reveals Tristram suggests that, in painting, Tristram has been filtering the text for us the entire time. Tristram—or

Rowson’s idea of Tristram, a deliberate subversion of his own textual authority— becomes the vessel through which Rowson channels his own vision of the text. Adding to this sense of Tristram’s watching is the fact that we never see his eyes. (The only frame in which we do is in the frame depicting Martin Amis’s adaptation-gone-awry, where Tristram’s eyes are big and blood-shot; yet because he not the same Tristram narrating to Joyce and Woolf, as the style of the dialogue lets us know, this appearance of eyes is incidental.) They are kept hidden from us, his pointed hat pulled down so far as to cover his broken nose, visually replacing it so that he loses no masculinity or authority to other characters with bigger, more phallic noses. (That the hat resembles his shoes in shape adds to his apparent hostility and the dominance he holds over his readers—the threat of kicking, or stomping on them.) That we cannot see them in any frame suggests their separation from Tristram, the possibility that they in fact filter what we see in each frame, that the viewer and viewed are one and the same, that the eye filtering the images mirrors the subject of the images. Of course, when we assume the role of viewer, the implication is that, if Tristram is watching, we are ourselves mirrored, to some degree, by the text, or vice versa; related to this implication Sterne once wrote that a reader would ideally find the reading experience “like reading himself and not the book” (qtd. in Lamb

795). Yet because it is unclear whose eye implicitly filters each and every frame, including the larger frame of every page, we cannot always tell through whose eye we are 12 being mirrored; and our own irresolution at how the images are filtered is further perpetuated by the endless ending’s question of which eye ultimately takes primacy.

I would like to turn my exploration of the problem of authority in Rowson’s text toward the matter of intertextuality, and how the destabilization of controlling factors in a text via intertextuality relates to adaptation. Of importance here is the notion of fidelity

—or as Robert Stam calls it, the chimera of fidelity. Fidelity, he writes, is a fundamentally subjective term that gains its persuasiveness “from our sense that some adaptations are indeed better than others and that some adaptations fail to ‘realize’ or substantiate that which we most appreciated in the source novels” (Stam 54, my italics).

The word has no objective meaning as relates to any aspect of any text. It is also problematically linked to the notion of authorial intent; as Kamilla Elliott notes, adaptors are prone to define faithfulness with an agenda they read into the source text, whether personal or financial or one representative of a larger cultural movement, and justify it with the source author’s intentions (224).6

Of intertextuality, then, Stam writes that it “helps us transcend the aporias of

‘fidelity,’” that it “refers to the infinite and open-ended possibilities generated by all the discursive practices of a culture, the entire matrix of communicative utterances within which the artistic text is situated, which reach the text not only through recognizable influences, but also through a subtle process of dissemination” (Stam 64). We might rephrase this by saying that the difficulties created by “fidelity’s” essential vagueness and openness to agenda-pushing are assuaged, even negated, by a text’s destabilization of itself through its capacity for reference and allusion. The practice of referring to a text’s 6 As an example, Elliott cites Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the very title of which suggests that it is somehow an authoritative adaptation, and about which Branagh justifies substantial narrative changes that enable Elizabeth to be a stronger female presence by saying “I’m convinced [Shelley] intended Elizabeth to be a strong character” (Elliott 225). 13 externals lessens our sense of a text’s authority—both in itself as a self-contained force that can or cannot be represented faithfully across media and as created by one author, rather than by the author through whose subjectivity the subject matter is filtered in addition to other authors whose texts have influenced the text at hand. Both versions of

Tristram Shandy are highly allusive and referential, and that Rowson’s calls as much attention to its own intertextuality through instances of reading (the mock-Rowson is often seen reading other books, such as on the page when his parallel narrative begins, and other characters read other documents, such as the lawyer on the set of the BBC film who read a politically correct litany of grievances against Rowson’s version) as does

Sterne’s (the lengthy transcriptions of other texts, the many instances of characters reading from those other texts) inherently lessens the adaptation’s obligation to “fidelity.”

Both texts destabilize the notion that they are self-contained entities that adapt or are adapted into another self-contained entity in a different medium, as well as the notion that authorship is concrete. At the same time, that both texts share the same destabilized attributes automatically suggests the faithfulness of Rowson’s version to Sterne’s; the text’s self-destabilization through intertextuality is one of the most transferable elements across any two media.

Along these lines, it seems that intertextuality functions in much the same way as digressiveness does; indeed, we might think of intertextual instances as digressions from the text itself, rather than from narrative linearity. Furthermore, every text is intertextual, and every text is digressive—although perhaps not as rampantly or overtly as either of the versions of Tristram Shandy under discussion. There is no escaping the relationships between any given text and its antecedents, and narrative digressiveness is also 14 inevitable, necessary to any text that is to sustain a reader’s—or for that matter, a writer’s

—interest. As Tristram explains in the novel: “Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine;——they are the life, the soul of reading;---take them out of this book for instance,--you might as well take the book along with them” (Sterne 58).

A question arises here: if digressions are necessary to a text if it is to sustain interest, are they really digressions—that is, irrelevant narrative threads—at all? J. Hillis

Miller suggests that most narratives inherently prevent such a distinction from being made: “The strangeness of any narrative line lies in the impossibility of distinguishing irrelevance from relevance, digression from the straight and narrow” (68). That Miller writes “straight and narrow” suggests moral or legal rigidity (he goes on to analogize a moral text with the straight narrative line that holds no interest), and certainly that our general reading habits are not limited to moral texts perhaps explains the impossibility of distinguishing irrelevance to relevance; we are too accustomed to reading digressive, irrelevant, and interesting texts to differentiate competently between relevance and the

“straight and narrow.” For Tristram to say that we might as well take the book along with any expurgated digressions is not merely to say that we would be bored to death, but that we would potentially have no idea where his digressions end. (He dares us to try, but of course his narrative, which he acknowledges as being both “digressive” and

“progressive” “at the same time,” so that progression cannot exist without digression and vice versa, seems to be proof against our efforts [Sterne 58].) As we have already made much of Tristram’s non-digressiveness in the graphic novel, his status as a strict, unyielding martinet (an advocator of the “straight and narrow,” perhaps) we might further state that we cannot delineate where his non-digressiveness ends and the digressive 15 elements of the graphic novel begin—certainly the narrative that is copped verbatim from the novel lies along that boundary, but even that’s tentative. Rather, the very presentation of the words—how, regardless of differences in font, the words are put on paper by the same hand and contain the same pen strokes as the illustrations and other characters’ dialogue, elements of the graphic novel we might more categorically describe as digressive—blurs the line between Tristram’s rigidness (and streamlined representation of Sterne’s novel) and the excursiveness of the rest of the adaptation. That the digressive and linear elements of a narrative are inextricably linked suggests that such a thing as a linear narrative may not exist in the first place—or, for that matter, a digressive one.

Here, we should return to the ending of Rowson’s graphic novel, because in light of the inseparability of digressiveness and linearity, the previous analysis—that

Rowson’s digressiveness, like Tristram’s, ultimately leads him nowhere, that the only way he will finish his adaptation is by a final deferral to the novel Tristram Shandy, just as Tristram must defer to Uncle Toby’s story and give up his own—now seems rather glib. There is, first of all, no need to defer to anyone because there is no artistic primacy; the wealth of intertextuality and the problem of the eye both assure us of that. Moreover, the notion of deferral to another narrative is incoherent because it presumes that there is an absolute narrative linearity from which Rowson can digress in the first place. That the graphic novel depicts such a deferral, and builds the deferral up to be such an absolute exigency—Rowson takes over half his graphic novel to adapt Sterne’s novel, and he’s running out of pages—serves primarily not to create suspense, but instead to call our attention to the sheer inseparability of narrative digressiveness from narrative linearity.7 7 Regarding suspense, my claim is contrary to David Richter’s: “As the readers of Rowson's book, or at least the ones that have already read Sterne, recognize that five volumes of Sterne are going to have to be encapsulated in the dwindling number of pages to the right of the spinal fold, the suspense---Will Martin Rowson finish Tristram Shandy???--becomes nearly unbearable.” How suspense could be worth triple 16

The two are intertwined, enough so that it might be best for us to say there is neither digressiveness nor linearity, only narrative, however it progresses. To return to one of my opening points, then, that much of the tension of adaptation is the capacity for newness that it must resist—in other words, that it must resist digressing too far from the source text, all in the name of fidelity—we might also say that there is neither fidelity nor infidelity, just adaptation.

question marks when Rowson’s inability to finish is a mere transference of Tristram’s in the novel is a far more perplexing question. 17

Works Cited

Byrd, Max. Tristram Shandy. Boston: George Allen & Unwin, 1985.

Cavell, Stanley. “What Photography Calls Thinking.” Cavell on Film. Ed. William

Rothman. Albany, NY: SUNY P, 2005. de Voogd, Peter J. “Laurence Sterne, the marbled page, and ‘the use of accidents.’”

Word & Image 1.3 (1985): 279-87.

Elliott, Kamilla. “Literary Film Adaptation and the Form/Content Dilemma.” Narrative

across Media: The Languages of Storytelling. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P,

Lamb, Jonathan. “Sterne’s System of Imitation.” The Modern Language Review 76.4

(1981): 794-810.

McFarlane, Brian. Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation. New

York: Clarendon P, 1996.

Miller, J. Hillis. Reading Narrative. Norman, OK: U of Oklahoma P, 1998.

Richter, David. “Narrativity and Stasis in Martin Rowson’s Tristram Shandy.” Accessed

19 February 2006

rowson.html>.

Rowson, Martin. The Life and Times of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Woodstock, NY:

The Overlook P, 1996.

Stam, Robert. “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation.” Film Adaptation.

Ed. James Naremore. 54-76. 18

Sterne, Laurence. The Life and Times of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Ed. Ian Campbell

Ross. New York: Oxford U P, 1983.