Laurence Sterne

1
Laurence Sternes The Sentimental Journey

• The Art and Uses of Sentiment

2
The authorial context of the novels

• Tristram Shandy (1759-1765) is read with
  avidity and it makes Laurence Sterne a
  celebrity
• The Critical Review excuses itself from
  summarizing a work, which seems to have been
  written without any plan, or any other design
  than that of shewing the authors wit, humor, and
  learning, in an unconnected effusion of
  sentiments and remarks, thrown out
  indiscriminately as they rose in his
  imagination. (1761 Nixon, 287)
• But the Monthly Review is surprised to see the
  novel turn over things holy, profane, clean,
  obscene, grave and light, without regard to time,
  place, thy own person, or the persons of thy
  Readers. (1761 Nixon, 286)
• Sternes defense The Sermons of Yorick (1760,
  1766) A Sentimental Journey (1768) offer an
  apology for the coherence of Sternes ethical
  stance
• Morality is articulated with the body set in
  motion and brought to tears upon its
  sentimental journey
• The body is reconciled feeling and bawdy comedy
  is softened to sexual innuendo

3
Sterne and Sentiment Dear sensibility! Source
inexhausted of all thats precious in our joys,
or costly in our sorrows. great SENSORIUM (98)

1. Suffering and sentiment Richardsons melodrama
   of virtue in distress is intended to mobilize
   the sympathy of the observer
2. Sensibility is both physiological and
   psychological it is the characteristic of the
   delicate and refined
3. Sensibility and practical human ethics
4. Puritans versus the Latitudinarian Anglican
   Divines (John Tillotson, Isaac Barrow, Robert
   South, Richard Bentley, Samuel Clarke)
5. Hobbes versus Shaftsbury, Francis Hutchinson,
   David Hume, Adam Smith
6. Sterne versus enthusiasm of the Methodists
7. The common sense of the Enlightenment about its
   own epoch that after the barbarisms of earlier
   ages there has been an increased refinement in
   human manners

4
Salient terms of a century long debate about
human nature(conducted in religious and
philosophical discourses)

1. Puritans we are sinners in the hands of an
   angry God ? our only reliance is upon Gods
   grace
2. Mans goal to be righteous in the eyes of a
   sovereign God
3. The Stoic subordination of feeling to reason
   means that we do not need to share the feelings
   of those we assist
4. Since, man is prideful and seeks his own interest
   at the expense of others, Hobbes calls for an all
   powerful ruler, who can regulate the actions of
   men with the universal passions of fear and
   desire

1. The universal goodness and benevolence of God
2. God enjoins us to an universal love the faculty
   of sympathy makes this possible
3. Benevolence toward others starts in a sensibility
   of their suffering and takes pleasure from the
   charity that relieves that suffering
4. Since mans heart is naturally good, it can feel
   sympathy with its fellow and experience the
   hedonism of doing good thus, the man of
   feeling receives pleasure in acts of charity

5
The eccentric narrative form of A Sentimental
Journey

• Not 3rd person narrator of Haywoods Fantomina
• Not the naïve 1st person narrative ( editor) of
  Pamelas letter-journals though it sometimes
  mimes the writing to the moment to create an
  illusion of presentness
• Not the 3rd person narrator of Fieldings Joseph
  Andrews artful, concealing, ironically voiced
  however, it has some of the arch urbanity of the
  gentleman-narrator
• Sternes Sentimental Journey 1st person
  narrative of the author who assumes the persona
  of Yorick
• What is the rhetoric of this narrative style?
  What does it allow Sterne to do? What does it
  allow readers to feel?
• How does this novel produce a sensitive record
  of sensation in and on the body (Kennedy, The
  Novel as Instrument, 452)

6
Formal traits of the book and novel

1. First edition layout
2. Subscription list
3. Displaced preface
4. Individual scenes are fragmented into multiple
   chapters
5. The supple multi-voiced narrative style
   interweaves description, quoted speech, internal
   soliloquy
6. The basic unit of narrative the encounter of
   Yorick and one or more persons in a particular
   place, often entailing an emotional fraught
   exchange of object
7. Effect a novel that is a private performance, in
   informal conversational style, for the reader

7
The Textual and Oral Performance of Yorick and
Father LorenzoThe Monk. Calais. (I 8-17)
8
Reading the style of the encounter of Yorick and
the Monk

• Basic stages of the 1st encounter with the Monk
• Monks appeal and Yoricks decision
• Yoricks harsh denial/ Monks silence
• Yoricks self-reflection and self reproach
• Questions
• What is the effect of the division into separate
  chapters?
• What justifies Yoricks change of heart?
• How do you interpret Yoricks fast-changing
  temper?
• How does Mme de L later mediate a
  reconciliation of the two men?
• What is the role for objects? (snuff boxes) How
  do they conduct sentiment?
• How would you describe Yoricks character? His
  style?

9
What is the relationship between Yoricks
character and exchange? What is the relationship
within each exchange, between people, places and
things? Do the the fleeting intensities of these
exchanges depend upon the absence of an
ideological architecture or guiding narrative
purpose?
Some of the Occasional Encounters of The
Sentimental Journey

• Volume 1

• Volume 2

1. The Monk. Calais.
2. The Preface
3. Mme de L (return of Monk)
4. La Fleur, the dead ass and its owners story
5. The Letter. Amiens
6. The Pulse (of the beautiful Grisset). Paris.
7. The Opera officer the Dwarf

1. The Fille de Chambre. Paris.
2. The Passport, the Starling, and the Bastille.
3. The Count de B, Shakespeare Yorick.
4. The Temptation. Paris. (return of the Fille de
   Chambre)
5. The Mystery. Paris. (of the successful beggar)
6. Maria. Moulines.
7. The Grace. (dancing)
8. The Case of Delicacy.

10
Maria and Yorick
11
Nancy Armstrong and the novelDesire and
Domestic Fiction A Political History of the Novel

• Marxism, the novel, and class
• Foucault and the centrality of (novel as)
  discourse
• Reading of Pamela
• Puritan conduct discourse positions the woman as
  domestic
• Pamela overcomes Mr. B through writing her mind,
  his reading makes her mind/self the object of his
  desire
• The domestic woman (of the novel), by
  prototyping the modern deep self, acquires power
  that changes culture

12
Armstrong The Fiction of Bourgeois Morality and
the Paradox of Individualism

• The Paradigmatic movement of the British novel
• 1 individual makes his/her appeal to bourgeois
  morality
• 2 protests the social systems exclusion of the
  individual through a critique of the system
• 3 the individual is assimilated into the social
  system on the basis of freely engaged contract
• 4 the society has been expanded, improved and
  changed
• 5 this same dynamic unfolds quite differently in
  3 epochs (18th century, Victorian period, modern
  period)