Homunculus ab ovo: beginning as continuity and discontinuity in Tristram Shandy

This essay starts with an analysis of Laurence Sterne's use of the preformationist idea of the homunculus within the contemporary debate between spermist and ovist theories of reproduction. It shows that, initially, Tristram-as-narrator is fascinated by the spermist theories, which he receives from his father. Walter Shandy, in fact, extols all theories, those of generation included, which reinforce his patriarchal views. Tristram's homunculus, however, is a weakling, and Tristram-as-character is doomed to be a failure in life and to terminate the line of the Shandys, because he is childless and possibly impotent. Thus, Tristram's experience contradicts Walter's conviction about the origins and propagation of humankind. By separating the notion of beginning(s) from that of origin (through Edward Said's study of Beginnings), the essay investigates Tristram's consciousness of the finitude of life (its contingencies), on which he grounds his redefinition of how he was born. Tristram's self-reflexivity makes him more akin to his mother, who is the unacknowledged example of a fertile reaction against death that could liberate the notion of beginning from the fetters of the endless search for one's "true" origins. Tristram succeeds in finding "a new birth" through an act of discontinuity (being derived from free will) and can look forward to a larger continuity of being.