Charlotte Bloomfield
Trinity Term 2nd Week
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How experimental is Laurence Sterne with regards to form? Does this experimentalism
affect the ‘sentiment’ of ‘Tristram Shandy’ and ‘A Sentimental Journey’?
“Let us leave, if possible, myself: - But ‘tis impossible,
- I must go along with you to the end of the work”
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey are fundamentally selfconscious pieces of literature. In the reality presented by Sterne, the narrator questions the
very narrative choices with which we are presented. The reader often finds himself perplexed
rather than finding resolution in his opinions of Sterne’s work: there are no easy answers to be
found in these books; rather they present us with a vision that attempts to present a vision of
the very essence of human life.
Sterne is consistently interested in exploring the relationship between the narrator and reader;
between the reader and the narrative; between the narrative and narrator. The narrator is
placed in the prime position of the narrative, and thus Sterne insists that the self-referential
comments are very much part of the foreground rather than part of the background. The very
title of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy suggests the fact that the novel is
autobiographical in its aims. However, as Everett Zimmermann points out in The Boundaries of
Fiction: A History of the Eighteenth Century Novel, there is a fundamental structural conflict
between autobiography and biography, which Sterne exploits in his creation of an experimental
form. While Tristram presents us with very much his own point of view, and insists on his own
representation of life through his opinions his sense of his own identity is presented very much
through a group of people – through Walter Shandy and Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim etc – a
group who in turn are formed by events that occurred before his very conception let alone his
birth.
The structure is based on no apparent chronological order; Tristram’s conception is based
upon events that supposedly happened nine months before his birth in 1718, while the events
which with Sterne ends the novel are based upon the courtship of Uncle Toby and Widow
Wadman, which precede the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713. Sterne – or Tristram – is rather
concerned with presenting us with a pattern of events that have a certain order with regards his
life, rather than having a certain order within his life. The story is contracted through
connections that are the historian’s responsibility; Sterne writes,
Why, sir, your Julius Caesar, who gave the operation a name; - and your Hermes
Trismegistus, who was born so before ever the operation had a name; - your Scipio
Africanus; - your Manlius Torquatus; our Edward the sixth, - who, had he lived, would
have done the same honour to the hypothesis…
Everett also calls to our attention the fact that that the foregrounding of problems of narrative
configuration inevitably places the reader’s temporality within the book – because he must unite
all other temporalities that he comes across.
Such unconcealed narrative manipulation is central to the intention of Tristram Shandy;
Tristram is reluctant to separate the narration about the writing of his story from the story itself
– it is indeed “part of the configuration, not a dispensable element” 1. Sterne – or rather Tristram
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Zimmermann, The Boundaries of Fiction
Charlotte Bloomfield
Trinity Term 2nd Week
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– is exceedingly self-conscious. It seems that the character of Tristram grows with the story,
and his identity is defined as much as by the telling of the story as by his position in it. There is
an emphasis on the “being” of a text, rather than simple “being” in a text2. Tristram is identified
so completely with the text that he is writing:
“every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity Life follows my pen”
In this inherent association, however, between Tristram’s human self and the telling of the
story, the very narrative becomes an example of his mortality: “human death is not mitigated by
a dying text”3. When Tristram admits to the reader that even he is losing his way, we see the
narrative form as somehow intrinsically linked with textual disintegration: it is a testament to
transience, with the book informed by a sense of its narrator’s mutability and the writing a very
metaphor for mortality:
“Blessed Jupiter! and blessed every other heathen god and goddess! for now ye will all
come into play again, and with Priapus at your tails – what jovial times! – but where am
I? and into what a delicious riot of things am I rushing? I – I who must be cut short in
the midst of my days, and taste no more of ‘em than what I borrow from my
imagination.”
There is a certain tension created, however, between this deep impression of transience and
the fact that the book is here in a very physical sense. Its “palpability denies the metaphysical
claims of its disintegration”4. The presence of the black page and the marbled page suggest
that the author is very much aware of the book’s corporeal presence. The existence of these
two pages hints at the experimentalist streak in Sterne; he uses them to suggest meanings
beyond that which the linear nature of the text can allow, expressing the limitations of the
narrative itself. In Sterne’s typical self-consciousness however, even these emblems are found
to be inarticulate; he mocks the reader with these words:
Read, read, read, read, my unlearned reader! read, - … for without much reading, by
which your reverence knows, I mean much knowledge, you will no more be able to
penetrate the moral of the next marbled page (motly emblem of my work!) than the
world with all its sagacity has been able to unraval the many opinions, transactions and
truths which still lie mystically hid under the dark veil of the black one.
Indeed, neither Sterne nor the printer had absolute control over the marbling process, and so
each copy was unique; the reader would never be able to “penetrate the moral” of it.
The closeness between Tristram’s consciousness and the book’s genesis – as it evolves
before our very eyes – places a strong emphasis on the presentness of the narrative, whilst
simultaneously, he tries to recover a sense of the past which is imbued with a sense of death.
His decision to reconstruct his past in order to comprehend his present state of disastrous
failures – as he owns “a thousand weaknesses of body and mind” – suggests that we must
attempt to view time as a continuous concept, which has implications going back and forth.
This is intensely innovative, because what Sterne is attempting is to present the reader with a
Zimmermann, The Boundaries of Fiction
Zimmermann, The Boundaries of Fiction
4 Zimmermann, The Boundaries of Fiction
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Charlotte Bloomfield
Trinity Term 2nd Week
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constant view of both past and present at the same time, whilst he is very much aware of the
subjectivity of such a feat, being as it is so rooted in the consciousness of Tristram.
This has implications for the idea of power and authorial control within the text itself. The fact
that the narrative is exclusively either a monologue or dialogue between narrator and reader
means that any truth offered to us is based inherently in Tristram’s nature, and elicited only by
interrogation and interpretation. In view of the subject-matter of Tristram Shandy an omniscient
narrator is out of the question; the self-related narratorial perspective allows Sterne to express
at least some quantity of the unfathomableness of subjectivity. Sterne uses this point of view to
articulate precisely what is defined by the idea of a first-person narrator, specifically the very
immediacy of experience. Tristram is able to say, “write as I will, and rush as I may into the
middle of things, as Horace advises, - I shall never overtake myself”. The very elusiveness of
human life is produced by what Tristram says while writing about it; it is central to Sterne’s point
that Tristram can never – and should never – be able to catch himself up and reach the finish,
because there is no finish:
I am this month one whole year older than I was this time twelvemonth; and having got,
as you perceive, almost into the middle of my fourth volume – and no farther than to
my first day’s life – ‘tis demonstrative that I have three hundred and sixty-four days
more life to write just now, than when I first set out; so that instead of advancing, as a
common writer, in my work with what I have been doing at it – on the contrary, I am
just thrown so many volumes back … I should just live 364 times faster than I should
write – It must follow, an’ please your Worships, that the more I write, the more I shall
have to write.
Bakhtin wrote in his essay “Discourse in the novel” (The Dialogic Imagination) that the dialogue
in Tristram Shandy is “the creation of self-consciousness through the use of reported speech
that represents discourse to the public sphere in writing”. For Bender in Imagining the
Penitentiary, language and thought are freed from the necessity of communication and become
pure expressivity. Thus, if the very writing is absolute expression, this form has certain
repercussions for the content of the book. Ernest N. Ditworth writes in The Unsentimental
Journey of Laurence Sterne that “to Sterne everything is words, the immaterial substance out
of which appear the clothes, the rattle, and the handspring of a jester.” It may seem at times
that the very point of Tristram Shandy is the writing of words, and it certainly appears that
Tristram is going to write his life, even if it takes up his whole life. He will, it seems, never be
able to recover any sense of self-fulfilment because in writing from the truest sense of the firstperson narrative perspective, he is overtaken by the disjunction that derives from the inherent
inability of ever being able to bridge the gap between his “I” – his own self – and the rest of the
world. He chases after his own life, and even says, “I begin with writing the first sentence – and
trusting to Almighty God for the second”. Tristram is forced to remain in the midst of things, in
order to express life itself, rather than having a stance outside it, and narrating what had
become of life; “Since he cannot tell the story of his own life, Tristram has to seek success
elsewhere”5.
If the text is unadulterated subjective opinion, what does this say about the theme of
sentiment? The genius of Sterne was to realize the inherent suspicious nature of a sentimental
novel, and write Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey with this in mind. Sterne’s claim
that the stories are full of meaning is based upon the idea that they are deeply personal and
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Wolfgang Iser, Tristram Shandy
Charlotte Bloomfield
Trinity Term 2nd Week
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subjective; their self-expression stands “in eccentricity for general humanity”6. The author is
very aware of any sentimental moments, and aware that they present occasions for delightful
self-expression, whilst exposing this sentimentality as constructed and self-indulgent. Ann
Jessie Van Sant argues in Eighteenth Century Sensibility and the Novel that Sterne’s
sentimental episodes are fundamentally parodic because of the delicacy of feeling insisted
upon by the author: “The miniaturization that arises from microsensation is not only refining but
reductive … it simultaneously heightens and trivializes the experience”. At one instance in A
Sentimental Journey, Yorick muses on the deeply serious issue of the Bastille – the very
symbol of French absolutism – and yet he manages to reduce it by the force of his sentiment to
a near narcissistic moment of contemplation:
Beshrew the sombre pencil! said I vauntingly – … The mind sits terrified at the objects
she has magnified herself, and blackened: reduce them to their proper size and hue
she overlooks them – ‘Tis true, said I, correcting the proposition – the Bastile is not an
evil place to be despised – but strip to of its towers – fill up the fosse – unbarricade the
doors – call it simply a confinement and suppose ‘tis some tyrant of a distemper – and
not of a man which holds you in it – the evil half vanishes, and you bear the other half
without complaint.
In The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature, Felicity Nussbaum and
Laura Brown even suggest that Sterne is fundamentally unsentimental, saying that he writes
“sentimentality as performance”. It is because of Sterne’s highly experimental form and
structure that this is allowed to happen, rather than the reader being presented with purely –
and unambiguously – sentimental writing. The fantasies experienced by Yorick in A
Sentimental Journey regarding the starling that desires to be free, and his vision of the prisoner
are consequences of his need to dramatize knowledge as experience rather than contemplate
the reality of history from a reasoned and dispassionate perspective; but the sentiment of these
episodes is seemingly negated by the self-aware nature of the following instalment of the
passport saga, where a comic mis-identification of Yorick as Hamlet’s court jester by Comte de
Bissy leads to his obtaining the required passport. John Bender points out that Yorick’s prison
fantasy leads to “the opposite of incarceration: his new passport grants total liberty because of
a mistake about his identity”. Yorick is never quite serious; he is extremely self-conscious of the
sense of the ridiculous, and of the constructed nature of deep feeling. Tristram Shandy is
almost sui generis; the solipsistic nature of such an autobiographical text underlines its
character as a parody of a novel of sentiment, and a satire on the “possibilities of heroic moral
striving and self-understanding … it both ridicules and ratifies the individual eccentricities that it
articulates”7.
Sterne’s writing is fundamentally innovative and experimental. The self-conscious and selfaware nature of his narrative stance possesses an implicit questioning of its own position as a
text; the swirling discourses pull us backwards and forwards as we are swept along by the
creation of human consciousness in a parody of what sentiment means to human feeling.
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John Richetti, The English Novel in History 1700-1780
John Richetti, The English Novel in History 1700-1780