The Clock of Mortality: Death and Time in Tristram Shandy and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

The treatment of time in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy[1] and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close[2], is ultimately shaped by the presence of death in both novels. Death is presented as a vague, looming inevitability in Sterne’s work, whereas Foer confronts it more directly, with a focus on two tragic events across two generations. The non-linearity of both novels works as a response to these respective depictions of death. In Tristram Shandy, this structure provides Tristram with an unrestricted narrative freedom that defies the blunt finality of a death he anticipates throughout the novel. In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, it allows for the juxtaposition of time periods which present both the relative normality that precedes trauma, and its long-lasting aftermath. As tragic events form the core of his novel, Foer fixes time directly around death.  In contrast, a primary focus of Sterne’s novel is on the endless possibilities of life and its interconnected nature. Therefore, time stutters and overlaps within Tristram’s writing, both in support of exploration and as a means of opposing death, which relies on its continuous and linear passage.

     An awareness of the infinite within the transience of existence underpins the treatment of time in Tristram Shandy. Tristram delights in the endless possibilities engendered by the mental ability of analysing and forming associations between not just events in his own life, but a vast expanse of human experience. Early in the first volume, Tristram warns that this tendency to branch out from the personal may cause readers that want ‘to be let into the whole secret from first to last’ to feel ‘ill at ease’[3]. However, he urges them to ‘have a little patience’ as his digressions will work to provide a better ‘knowledge of [his] character, and what kind of mortal [he is]’[4]. While this claim is questionable, as Tristram remains enigmatic until the novel’s end, it provides him with a convenient excuse to pursue any tale, theory, discourse or detail, as it will supposedly work to illuminate his own character. This provides an endless choice of subject matter, but also prompts a manipulation of time in order to accommodate these digressions. Therefore, many decades are traversed in Tristram’s retelling of stories such as ‘Slawkenbergius’s Tale’[5], in his description of specific battles including the siege of Namur[6] and in his general fixation on the microhistories of close relatives and distant figures alike. Sterne’s fluid treatment of time allows for the inclusion of these historical examples and details which may provide a depth to ideas, but hinder any meaningful narrative progression. Tristram’s labelling of these digressions as ‘unforeseen stoppages’[7], suggests they are postponing the true course of his narration, but they are in fact the very substance from which it is formed. Tristram later acknowledges their significance when he states that in removing the digressions, ‘you might as well take the book along with them’[8]. He appears to relish the flexibility of time in his writing because it allows him to change the direction of his narrative as he wishes, as opposed to the linear nature of reality which appears predictable and restrictive in comparison. Therefore, Tristram admits that these stoppages ‘will rather increase than diminish’[9] as he continues to write his volumes. The satisfaction he gains from forming connections between distant time periods lies at the heart of the novel’s constant digressions and acts as a driving force for Sterne’s overall manipulation of time.

     The treatment of time in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, whilst also non-linear, works more restrictively than in Sterne’s novel. This is a result of its dual focus on the 9/11

attacks and the Dresden bombings, which anchors the narrative to death and destruction across two particular time periods. Foer is primarily concerned with the lasting impact of these tragic events on generations of the same family, and the novel’s specificity, both in terms of narrative time and subject matter, contrasts with the broader outlook of Tristram Shandy. The scope of Sterne’s novel, although it uses the Shandy household as a starting point, is governed by Tristram’s sprawling, inexhaustible imagination, which perceives the intricacies of life and its infinite potential. Foer, however, effectively confronts the restrictions that Tristram seeks to avoid, by presenting the limitations of life and its vulnerability when confronted by death. The novel’s movement between two time periods is directed by a combination of first person narration and the epistolary form. The present-day perspective of 9-year-old Oskar Schell is always followed by one of his grandparents’ letters from the past, which retain the titles ‘My Feelings’ and ‘Why I’m Not Where You Are Now’, due to their contemplative and often regretful nature. Elaine Safer argues that Oskar ‘presents the letters of his grandfather and grandmother as digressions from the story of his quest’.[10] However, this summation seems to underestimate Foer’s more overarching structural intention, whereby the letters act as a direct access point to the past, and are not, as Safer suggests, merely recurrent objects of the present. The letters lack the supplementary quality of Oskar’s other visual inclusions, such as the photos in his scrapbook[11] or the pad of paper used to test pens in the art shop[12]. These examples appear within Oskar’s narration and are introduced by him before being shown visually, whereas the letters are not physical objects within his chapters, but instead exist as chapters of their own with separate timeframes. This distinction is significant as it shows that Foer’s treatment of time is truly multifaceted, rather than having a singular focus on the present, interspersed with evidence from the past.

     As Foer’s juxtaposed time periods slowly work to illuminate each other, the gradual nature of his exposition results in symbolism that only emerges late in the novel. During Oskar’s present-day narration, his grandmother describes how her husband’s ‘hands were so rough and red from all of his sculptures’[13]. However, when Foer switches perspective to one of Thomas Schell Sr.’s letters, he gives a vivid portrayal of the injuries he sustained in the Dresden bombings, wherein he describes his ‘red, pulsing palms’ and hands that didn’t ‘look like they should be at the end of [his] arms’[14]. This account of personal suffering, written over twenty years prior[15], induces a rare moment of sympathy towards Thomas Sr., who is portrayed as selfish and cowardly for large parts of the novel. The late inclusion of this story is indicative of Foer’s use of time to first obscure and then reveal detail about his characters, in order to challenge the expectations of his readers. Sterne has a contrary approach to characterisation in Tristram Shandy, as he opts to give a thorough description of a character all at once, rather than fragmenting his portrayal over time as Foer does. For example, Tristram’s prolonged description[16] of his Uncle Toby, a man who ‘had scarce a heart to retaliate upon a fly’[17], clearly defines him as gentle and compassionate. This favourable description of Uncle Toby comes relatively early in Sterne’s novel and therefore colours the reader’s attitude towards him throughout. Subsequently, Uncle Toby’s good-nature remains stable, whereas Foer’s fluctuating depiction of Thomas Sr., over various points in time, leads to a much less consistent moral stature.

     With Foer’s alternation between time periods, a tangible pattern is formed whereby the reader begins to expect a perspective change at the conclusion of each chapter. This differs from Sterne’s approach, whose chapters retain an unpredictability throughout, as they are dictated by the urges of a solitary narrator. Tristram himself acknowledges the impulsive nature of his writing after an interruption during Le Fever’s story:  --‘why do I mention it? ---- ask my pen,--it governs me, - I govern not it’.[18] The notion of being controlled by a pen, an instrument of seemingly endless potential, contrasts with the more concrete narrative boundaries of time and place that Foer places upon himself. Through the symbol of the pen, Sterne appears to give free reign to Tristram’s inexhaustible imagination. Subsequently, his narrative imparts a sense of the infinite, as it is able to travel in seemingly endless directions at any given time. Thomas Keymer observes the ‘many underdeveloped nodules scattered’ around the novel as a result of this freedom, including the ‘collection of ‘Plain Stories’ [Tristram] intends to deliver once Toby’s amours are written’ and ‘the catastrophe of Mr. Hammond Shandy’.[19]As Tristram has ultimately failed to relay these matters by the novel’s end, Keymer claims ‘Tristram’s race to prolong his life and complete his transcription has now been lost’.[20] However, while Tristram may have prioritised the telling of some stories over others, it is unlikely that he envisaged a concrete end to his work. This is made apparent by his declaration that he would be ‘publishing two volumes of [his] life every year’ in Volume I, followed by the vow: ‘I shall continue to do so as long as I live’.[21] This claim of longevity is supported by the same allusions to stories left untold which Keymer points out, as they display Tristram’s abundance of subject matter and suggest that his narrative could continue indefinitely. Therefore, the loose ends that Keymer perceives can equally be seen as the open, uncharted paths of a novel which explores the endless possibilities conceivable through writing.

     This narrative freedom, much like Foer’s structure, also has its roots in death. Both Sterne and Tristram’s fixation on the seemingly infinite nature of writing is shaped by their awareness of the finite nature of existence. While an explicit focus on the imminence of death occurs late in the novel, during Volume VII[22], a more general mindfulness of mortality is evident from the start. In Sterne’s opening dedication[23] to William Pitt, he describes himself living ‘in a constant endeavour to fence against the infirmities of ill health’. As this dedication comes after the type-page of Volume I, and ends with the non-specific sign-off ‘The Author’, Sterne’s real-life tuberculosis begins to blur with Tristram’s own lingering illness, referred to as a ‘vile cough’[24] throughout the novel. This consciousness of the vulnerability of life can also be traced more broadly, within the fragmentary and skittish nature of Tristram’s narration. It seems as though he cannot linger on one narrative strand for too long, as he is both aware of the infinite possibilities available for subject matter and the limited time he has to write. Linearity, therefore, seems to oppose Tristram’s expansive, interconnected view of the world, and appears too thorough and ponderous for a man conscious of his declining health. As Sterne wrote in a letter to John Wodehouse in 1765: 'Few are the minutes of life, and I do not think that I have any to throw away on any one being’,[25] nor it seems, could he simply throw them away on a single, linear narrative; a work that would be as restricted by a need for cohesion as he himself was restricted by the imminence of death. In effect, it is Sterne’s consciousness of both the vast possibilities of writing and the restricting inevitability of death which results in Tristram Shandy’s fluid and freeing treatment of time.

     Clarke Lawlor argues that it is not just a general anticipation of death, but the particulars of Sterne’s consumptive illness which shapes his treatment of time in Tristram Shandy. [26] Lawlor outlines the two main forms of the disease, the chronic ‘slow’ consumption and its more acute, ‘galloping’ counterpart,  suggesting that the rhythm of Sterne’s narrative is directed by his real-life experience of these variants.[27] For example, the change of pace at the start of Volume VII, ‘from a trot to a gallop’, [28]  is attributed to a serious haemorrhage that Sterne suffered alongside his more constant illness. Lawlor links this ‘galloping’ symptom of consumption to the galloping pace of the narrative, wherein Tristram begins the volume in an urgent and somewhat panicked manner. Lawlor emphasises the symbolism of consumption which he perceives around the novel’s treatment of time and views its erratic non-linearity as a direct manifestation of Sterne’s disease. However, Volume VII aside, the unrestricted nature of time in Tristram Shandy often opposes the restrictive effect that consumption had upon Sterne’s life. Lawlor appears to overlook the psychologically liberating effect that the possibilities of writing may have provided Sterne, as his narrative structure is not required to obey the same rules as his finite existence. Sterne’s decision not to thoroughly chart Tristram’s journey through life, represents his reluctance to confine his writing to these same parameters. Instead, his non-naturalistic treatment of time allows for a therapeutic realisation of the impossible, such as the reappearance of Yorick after the black pages which mark his death.[29]. Essentially, Sterne’s treatment of time does not embody the consumption that will lead to his death, but instead, his writing works to transcend a sense of mortality by bending the very rules of time which death is reliant upon.

     While a connection between time and death is certainly tangible in Tristram Shandy, it remains more elusive than its distinct presence within Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. This is because death works as the core of Foer’s novel, as he locates a narrative structure directly around the tragic events of 9/11 and the Dresden bombings. Consequently, Foer’s treatment of time consists of an alternation between the eras in which these tragedies, and subsequent untimely deaths, occur. Sterne, however, focuses on a death that is yet to happen and therefore the time of his narrative does not interact with it as directly as Foer’s does. Instead, Sterne’s anticipation of death, which extends to Tristram, has such a freeing effect on the novel’s overall treatment of time, as to almost seem contradictory. The limited time that both the author and narrator have to look forward to, prompts a fervent focus on what has come before. Sterne intends to render the past with as much freedom and possibility that the future, which is effectively obstructed by his disease, typically seems to hold. He achieves this by fragmenting the past, and gains much fulfilment from piecing it together into new, insightful forms. The fluidity of time is key to this process, as it allows for unrestricted movement between the events and stories that Tristram deems noteworthy. While Foer conjoins time to the deaths that occur within his novel, Sterne treats time with a freedom that defies the restrictions of his own imminent demise.

  

Bibliography

Foer, Jonathan Safran, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (London: Penguin, 2006)

Keymer, Thomas, Epitasis, Catastasis, Catastrophe in Sterne, The Moderns and The Novel (Oxford University Press: 2002) 143-149

Lawlor, Clark, Consuming Time: Narrative and Disease in 'Tristram Shandy', The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 30, Time and Narrative (Modern Humanities Research Association, 2000), pp. 46-59

Safer, Elaine, ‘Illuminating the Ineffable: Jonathan Safran Foer's Novels’ Studies in American Jewish Literature, 25 (Penn State University Press: 2006) p.112–132

Sterne, Laurence, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. by Melvyn New and Joan New (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2003)

Sterne, Laurence and Lewis Perry Curtis The Letters of Laurence Sterne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, I935), p. 257

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[1] Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. by Melvyn New and Joan New  
  (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2003)

[2] Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (London: Penguin, 2006)

[3]  Laurence Sterne, I.iv.p.8

[4]  Ibid, I.vi.p.11

[5]  Ibid, IV.p.221

[6]  Ibid, II.i.p.73-4

[7]  Ibid, I.xiv.p.35

[8]  Ibid, I.xxii.p.64

[9] Ibid  I.xiv.p.35

[10] Elaine Safer, ‘Illuminating the Ineffable: Jonathan Safran Foer's Novels’ Studies in American Jewish Literature, 25 (Penn State University Press: 2006) p.115

[11] Jonathan Safran Foer, pp.53-67

[12] Ibid, pp.45-49

[13] Ibid, p.71-2

[14] Ibid, p.216

[15] Ibid, ‘Why I’m Not Where You Are 4/12/78’, p. 208

[16] Laurence Sterne, II.xii.pp.100-2

[17] Ibid, II.xii.p.100

[18] Ibid, VI.vi.p.375

[19] Thomas Keymer, ‘Epitasis, Catastasis, Catastrophe’ in Sterne, The Moderns and The Novel (Oxford University Press: 2002) p.146

[20] Ibid, p.145

[21] Laurence Sterne, I.xiv.p.35

[22] Laurence Sterne, VII, pp 431-444

[23] Ibid, I.p.4

[24] Ibid, IV.xxxii.p.304 and VII.i.p.331

[25] Laurence Sterne and Lewis Perry Curtis, The Letters of Laurence Sterne (Oxford Clarendon Press: 1935)  
 p.257

[26] Clark Lawlor, Consuming Time: Narrative and Disease in 'Tristram Shandy', The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 30, Time and Narrative (Modern Humanities Research Association, 2000), pp. 46-59

[27] Ibid, p. 49

[28] Ibid, p.51

[29]  Laurence Sterne, I.xii.p.31-32