From Homunculus to Homo: Smallness in 'Tristram Shandy'

This essay examines smallness as a central formal and conceptual principle in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Focusing on Tristram’s initial representation as a microscopic homunculus, it argues that Sterne uses diminution not merely as a source of comic disproportion but as a means of investigating generation, cognition, and narrative selfhood. The essay situates Sterne’s ‘little gentleman’ within seventeenth- and eighteenth-century debates about preformation, while broadening accounts that treat the homunculus as an exclusively embryological figure. Because early modern natural philosophers generally distinguished spermatic animalcula from the alchemical homunculus, Sterne’s terminology may allude to a Paracelsian tradition of artificial generation, medical imposture, and masculine reproductive fantasy. This broader genealogy illuminates the novel’s satire of Walter’s system-building and Dr Slop’s mechanised obstetrics, both of which seek technical mastery over biological and intellectual formation. The discussion places Sterne’s homunculus in dialogue with the grotesque physician of the anonymous poem Homunculus, or the Character of Mezereon (1715) and with Goethe’s artificially created Homunculus in Faust II. Whereas these figures embody, respectively, quackery and the desire to transcend artificial existence, Tristram survives as a damaged person and a self-reflective narrator. The essay contends that Tristram’s smallness does not confirm biological or paternal determinism. Rather, through retrospective narration, interruption, and comic self-examination, the preformed ‘little man’ becomes capable of revising the meanings of his origins.