Stern

As a cleric in the eighteenth century Laurence Sterne was already well aquainted with the idea of the Homunculus -- the proto individual that inhabited the seed or germ of a person upon conception -- and Stern uses this to cast his character tristam shandy back in time to the very momeent of his geniture or conception. But it is here that something goes fundamentally wrong , where Tristam Shandy's life would become fatally entagled like a fish in netting, a point dramatized by a lost mooment, an interruption, a suddent discontinuity, -- this syncope or caesura was precipitated we find out later by an unfortunate association that his mother had in her mind , his father being a very exact and habitual person wound the big clock a the head of the stair by hand the first Sunday of every month, and being given to schedules, also made it a routine to have be their sexual intimacy the same day each moth, but but he uses to it case his life The becoming of Tristam Shandy starts prior to his birth, with his conception, or geniture as Sterne calls it. In Chapter 2 we first learn of the Homunculus

"I was begot in the night, betwixt the first Sunday and the first Monday in the month of March, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighteen. I am positive I was.-- But how I came to be so very particular in my account of a thing which happened before I was born, is owning to another small acendote known only in our own family, but now made pubic for the better clearing up this point."