Laurence sterne (1713-1768)

Sterne is the strangest and the most variably judged of the 18th century novelists. He was born in Clonmel, Ireland, into the family of an officer. Most of his early childhood was spent in poverty, moving with the regiment about England and Ireland. Later Sterne spoke lovingly of the infants who were born and died during their “melancholy” wanderings, and he expressed his affection for soldiers in the portraits of the gentle Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim in Tristram Shandy.

At the age of 10 he was sent to school and later attended Jesus College, Cambridge, at an allowance from a cousin and a scholarship founded by his uncle, Archbishop Sterne, once the master of the college. After graduating Sterne took holy orders more for economic than for religious reasons and became first a vicar of Sutton-on-the-Forest and later a canon of York. At first he was helped by another uncle, Jaques Sterne, archdeacon of Cleveland. In 1741-42 he wrote political articles supporting the administration of Sir Robert Walpole for a newspaper founded by his uncle, but soon withdrew from politics in disgust. His uncle became his archenemy, thwarting his advancement wherever possible. In 1741 Sterne married Elizabeth Lumley and they had one child, Lydia.

Externally his life was typical of the moderately successful clergy. His sermons at York Ministry were very popular, until tuberculosis injured his voice in 1762. For diversion he painted, fiddled, and read, especially his “dear Rablais and dearest Cervantes”. An amusing companion, he socialized with the gentry and sometimes attended a club of sportsmen and amateur writers, the Demoniacs. In 1759 to support his dean in a church squabble, Sterne wrote A Political Romance, a Swiftian satire upon dignitaries of the spiritual courts. At the demand of embarrassed churchmen the book was burnt. Thus, Sterne lost his chances for clerical advancement but discovered his literary talent. Turning over his parishes to a curate, he began working on Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent (1759-67). An initial version, probably sharply satirical, was rejected by Robert Dodsley, the London printer, just when Sterne’s personal life was upset: his mother and uncle both died, his wife had a nervous breakdown and threatened suicide. Sterne continued his comic novel but every sentence, he said, was “written under the greatest heaviness of heart”. In this mood, he softened the satire and told the reader about Tristram’s opinions, his eccentric family, and ill-fated childhood with a sympathetic humour, sometimes hilarious, sometimes sweetly melancholic – a comedy skirting tragedy.

The optimistic assertions of the earlier philosophers of the Enlightenment had been that man’s reason was all-powerful, and putting its theories into practice was enough to ensure rational purposeful existence for one and all. Sterne and some other later 18th century writers could no longer set much store by their predecessors’ faith in Reason. They opposed the doctrine of Reason to the divine rights of Sentiment. They thought that the heart alone could not go wrong. Freedom for them meant first freedom of feeling, more essential than liberty of thought. While Sterne laughs at the odd experience which is human life, he sympathizes with mankind, afflicted and suffering. The sentiment often seems excessive, for even a fly in Uncle Toby’s plate must be considered as a subject for compassion. To this indulgence in sentiment the name “sentimental” was attached. The term was used by Sterne himself in his Sentimental Journey (1761).

Tristram Shandy is a novel without predecessors, the product of an original mind and immediately popular. It asserts the supremacy of ungovernable sentiment and is at complete variance with all rational laws of writing: there is hardly any plot, the action develops inconsistently. This novel - or 'anti-novel' as some critics prefer to call it - is divided up into nine volumes. It is narrated in the first person singular by Tristram Shandy himself. The frontispiece to the novel reveals its purported content: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, and yet the reader soon realizes that there is very little conventional detail regarding the life of Tristram. The narrator does not get round to describing his actual birth until the third volume, and Tristram disappears three volumes later at the age of five, only to appear later in the next novel as a mature gentleman on tour in France. It is not exactly a conventional Bildungsroman, but that was hardly the author's intention.

What the reader does get during the course of this rather bizarre and ostensibly haphazard narration is a series of lovingly described portraits of the now legendary figures who have had some sort of bearing or influence on Tristram's life. There is his hopelessly eccentric father, Walter Shandy, his mother, his overly sentimental Uncle Toby (and his dedicated servant, Corporal Trim), Parson Yorick and Widow Wadman.

Tristram's comic and gently satirical narrative blends the idiosyncratic with the sentimental to build up a gallery of some of the finest and most memorable character portrayals available in the English language: Walter Shandy of Shandy Hall, peevish but frank and generous, full of paradoxical notions, which he defends with great show of learning; “my Uncle Toby,” wounded in the groin at the siege of Namur, whose hobby-horse is strategy and fortifications, which he studies by means of miniature scarps, ravelins, and bastions on his bowling-green, a man “of unparalleled modesty” and amiability; Corporal Trim, his servant, wounded in the knee at Landen, devoted to his master and sharing his enthusiasm for the military art, voluble but respectful. This lack of practical sense on the part of his main characters is meant by Sterne as a challenge to the age of calculation and business. Such episodes also reveal a depth of feeling and psychological understanding uncommon for literature of the period. Pastor Yorick, whose story is told in a digression in the description of Tristram’s birth, is the best known of Sterne’s heroes. Many of his features are autobiographical and are also reproduced in Sentimental Journey, the story of Yorick’s travels through France. Pastor Yorick is naïve and kind-hearted, his honestly is his only fault. He judges people independent of their social status – a notion typical of the Age of the Enlightenment. His speech is simple and unaffected. The book which is chiefly occupied with exposing the author’s own personality, presents very few incidents. The first three volumes are concerned, amid many digressions, with the circumstances attending the hero’s birth; after which the author writes his preface. Volume IV begins with the story of Slawkenbergins, the author of a treatise on noses; followed by the naming of the infant Tristram by mistake for Trismegistus. VolumeV contains the notable discourse of Corporal Trim on morality. Volume VI includes the dialogue between Mr. and Mrs. Shandy on the breeching of Tristram. Volumes VII and VIII abandon the narrative to give an account of the author’s travels in France and the story of the king of Bohemia. Volume IX is concerned mainly with the love-affair of Uncle Toby and the widow Wadman.

In its apparent lack of plot, unconventional mode of narration and implicit questioning of the accepted notion that the novel was in some way an accurate representation of a commonly shared and recognizable reality, Sterne's novel represented a new departure in fiction. Sterne suggested that human nature and the workings of the individual mind can never be fully known. Any notions that literature is in some way representative of an ordered and knowable reality are totally unfounded. Sterne was much indebted to the philosopher John Locke for his ideas concerning the workings of the individual mind. In Volume 1 of the novel, Tristram makes explicit reference to the psychological theories of the 'sagacious' Locke regarding the “association of ideas” - whereby the individual is said to associate one thing or event with another, even if there is no apparent logical connection between the first thing and the second. Sterne was indeed convinced that the mind's workings are essentially irrational, and that individual mental behaviour is in some measure eccentric, or at least idiosyncratic. Tristram's narrative is itself a never-ending process of associations and digressions. As he observes in Chapter XX of Volume I, “Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; - they are the life, the soul of reading; - take them out of this book for instance, -you might as well take the book along with them; -one cold eternal winter would reign in every page of it”. His narrative provides the most graphic illustration of Sterne’s convictions regarding the disordered workings of the human mind, and at the same time is a reminder of the difficulties associated with understanding and representing the workings of inner consciousness.

The question of chronology was of equal concern to the author: in line with Locke once again, Sterne held that the individual’s experience of duration has little to do with the clock, since it is much more closely bound up with individual consciousness and the succession of ideas in our minds. In contrast to conventional notions of temporal reality, the individual mind constructs its own values of time. Tristram moves freely from present to past and back again in a process which is never ending and which, by its very existence, calls into question the validity of the more straightforward, chronological sequencing of events.

With reference to Horace in Volume 1 Tristram states that “in writing what I have set about, I shall confine myself neither to his rules, nor to any man's rules that ever lived”. His narrative, as he openly admits, refuses to follow “a tolerable straight line” and the reader is drawn inside a capricious mind whose seemingly disorganized rambling strikes us as irresistibly authentic in its lack of chronology and complex web of memories, asides, spontaneous sidetracking and digressions. The digressions outnumber the narrative pieces, the preface appears in the third volume after chapter XX, chapters varying in length from single sentences to paragraphs are interspersed with whole sections written in French and Latin. Some pages are marbled, some completely blacked out and others left blank: in the case of the latter, the reader is actually asked by Tristram to fill in the page with his own personal vision of what Widow Wadman looks like - an early example of the reader being required to collaborate actively in the construction of the text. Conventional punctuation blends with an elaborate use of asterisks (*) and dashes (-), while the speech marks usually adopted by authors to report dialogue are totally abandoned. Where the word is considered inadequate as a means of rendering ideas, Tristram intervenes with personalized squiggles and hand drawings. Nowhere are the limits of the written word challenged more strongly than in the last volume, where Corporal Trim's flourish of a stick is rendered visible on the page through the use of an uneven vertical line.