Abstract
The extent of Fielding’s influence on Sterne remains a matter of debate. Prominent Sterneans including John Traugott and Melvyn New have preferred to keep the term “novel” away from discussions of Tristram Shandy, to avoid suggesting a genealogy where Sterne saw none. More recently, Tom Keymer and Robert Folkenflik resituated Sterne within the discourse on the novel, without denying his affiliation with the secular and religious traditions stressed by Traugott and New.
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Notes
- 1.
See John Traugott, Tristram Shandy’s World: Sterne’s Philosophical Rhetoric (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1954), and Melvyn New, Tristram Shandy: A Book for Free Spirits (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994).
- 2.
Thomas Keymer, Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel (Oxford: OUP, 2002), and Robert Folkenflik, “Tristram Shandy and eighteenth-century narrative,” in The Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne (Cambridge: CUP, 2009). Other accounts of Sterne’s indebtedness to previous novelists include Wayne C. Booth’s groundbreaking “The Self-Conscious Narrator in Comic Fiction before Tristram Shandy,” PMLA 67, No. 2 (March 1952), 163–185, and Walter L. Reed’s An Exemplary History of the Novel: The Quixotic versus the Picaresque (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
- 3.
Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne. Vols. 1 & 2, The Text, ed. Melvyn New and Joan New (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1978, 1984), Book I, Chapter xxiii, p. 82. Further citations will be to this edition and will be registered parenthetically in the text.
- 4.
Ernest Tuveson, “Locke and Sterne,” in Reason and Imagination. Studies in the History of Ideas, 1600–1800, ed. J. A. Mazzeo (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), 258.
- 5.
Discussing the problems involved in the associationist reading would require more space than this chapter can afford. Essentially, the digressions in Tristram Shandy very seldom conform to Locke’s requirement that associationist transitions be conditioned by precedents; and while the digressions seem to conform to the fuller theories of association proposed by Hume and Hartley, such conformance may be just a by-product of the capaciousness of such theories, which seek to account for the relation of any two ideas in succession. Associationist readings include Francis Doherty, “Sterne and Hume: A Bicentenary Essay,” Essays and Studies: New Series 22 (1969), 71–87; Peter M. Briggs, “Locke’s ‘Essay’ and the Tentativeness of ‘Tristram Shandy,’” Studies in Philology, 82, No. 4 (Autumn, 1985); Chinmoy Banerjee, “Tristram Shandy and the Association of Ideas,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 15, No. 4 (Winter 1974); and, more recently, Peter R. Anstey, “The Experimental History of the Understanding from Locke to Sterne,” Eighteenth-Century Thought, 4 (2009). Critiques of the associationist reading include D.R. Elloway, “Locke’s Ideas in Tristram Shandy,” Essays in Criticism, 6 (1956), Arthur Cash, “The Lockean Psychology of Tristram Shandy,” ELH, 22, No. 2 (June 1955), and W.G. Day, “Tristram Shandy: Locke May Not Be the Key,” in Laurence Sterne: Riddles and Mysteries, ed. Valerie Grosvernor Myer (London: Vision, 1984).
- 6.
Sterne’s position, for Traugott, is that communication does not simply depend, as Locke had assumed, on the relationship between words and ideas, but also on a “context of human situations.” Tristram Shandy’s World, xv, 150.
- 7.
For readings that share thematic interests with Traugott’s, see Wolfgang Iser, Tristram Shandy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988) and Bernard Harrison, “The Defence of Wit: Sterne, Locke, and the Particular,” in Inconvenient Fictions. Literature and the Limits of Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 71–97. Michael DePorte reads the novel in the context of the eighteenth-century discourse on madness in Nightmares and Hobbyhorses. Swift, Sterne, and Augustan Ideas of Madness (San Marino: The Huntington Library), 1974. Readings that set Sterne in the context of skepticism include J.T. Parnell, “Swift, Sterne, and the Skeptical Tradition,” in Critical Essays on Laurence Sterne, ed. Melvyn New (New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1998), 14–158; Fred Parker, Scepticism and Literature. An Essay on Pope, Hume, Sterne, and Johnson (Oxford: OUP, 2003); and Christina Lupton, “Tristram Shandy, David Hume, and Epistemological Fiction,” Philosophy and Literature, 27, No. 1 (April 2003), 98–115.
- 8.
D.W. Jefferson, “Tristram Shandy and the Tradition of Learned Wit,” Essays in Criticism 1, No. 3 (1951), 225–248.
- 9.
For an insightful discussion of Tristram’s views on modern learning, see Judith Hawley, “Tristram Shandy, Wit, and Enlightenment Knowledge,” in The Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne (Cambridge: CUP, 2009), especially 34–5.
- 10.
Tristram generally uses the word “mystical” in a derogatory way. When Phutatorius concludes that Yorick threw a chestnut into his breeches out of dislike for one of his treatises, Tristram describes such interpretation as the “mystical meaning in Yorick’s prank” (384). Such an interpretation, Tristram goes on to note, “was as groundless as the dreams of philosophy” (385).
- 11.
See Sermon 18, “The Levite and the Concubine.” Sermons, 175.
- 12.
Donald R. Wehrs, “Sterne, Cervantes, Montaigne: Fideistic Skepticism and the Rhetoric of Desire.” Comparative Literature Studies, 25 (1988), 135.
- 13.
Laurence Sterne, “A Political Romance,” in The Miscellaneous Writings and Sterne’s Subscribers, an Identification List. The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne. Vol. 9, ed. Melvyn New and W.B. Gerard (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 2014), 116.
- 14.
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1969), 241.
- 15.
Sterne, Laurence, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy and Continuation of the Bramine’s Journal. The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, ed. Melvyn New and W. G. Day (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 2002), 249.
- 16.
Laurence Sterne, The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne. Vol. 4, The Sermons, ed. Melvyn New. Vol. 5, Notes to the Sermons, ed. Melvyn New (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 192, 193.
- 17.
Sterne declared his intention in a letter of July 23, 1766; Sancho’s letter is dated July 21 of the same year (Letters II, 502, 697).
- 18.
In fact, Sterne sees the ability for imaginative engagement not only as conducive to philanthropy, but as evidence of a philanthropic disposition: “I think there needs no stronger argument to prove how universally and deeply the seeds of this virtue of compassion are planted in the heart of man, than in the pleasure we take in such representations of it” (Sermons 28–9).
- 19.
Seeing the Journey as a hoax on readers, Rufus Putney notes that “in those letters where [Sterne] boasted of his feelings, he was Yoricking now as he had Shandyed before. Far from wantoning with his emotions, Sterne made fun of the man who did”—the “man” in question being both Yorick and the consenting reader. Rufus Putney, “The Evolution of A Sentimental Journey,” Philological Quarterly (January 1940), 368, 369. See also Ernest Nevin Dilworth, The Unsentimental Journey of Laurence Sterne (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1948).
- 20.
Thomas Keymer, “A Sentimental Journey and the failure of feeling,” in The Cambridge Companion on Laurence Sterne (Cambridge: CUP, 2009), 69.
- 21.
For Sterne’s refusal to categorically dissociate mind and body, see John A. Dussinger, “Yorick and the ‘Eternal Fountain of our Feelings,” in Psychology and Literature in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Christopher Fox (New York: AMS Press, 1987), 259–276; and Martin Battestin, “Sterne among the Philosophes: Body and Soul in A Sentimental Journey,” ECF, 7, No. 1 (1994).
- 22.
My reading goes against Arthur Cash’s argument that Sterne’s moral theory was based not on sentiment, but on the rationalism of the Cambridge Platonists. As Tim Parnell has shown, Sterne’s branch of Anglicanism also assigned an important moral role to the passions. See Arthur Cash, Sterne’s Comedy of Moral Sentiments: The Ethical Dimension of the Journey (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1966); and Tim Parnell, “A Story Painted to the Heart? Tristram Shandy and Sentimentalism Reconsidered,” The Shandean 9 (November 1997), 122–135.
- 23.
James Chandler, An Archeology of Sympathy. The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013), 160.
- 24.
Langer defines virtual experience as “a non-discursive form expressing a special sort of emotion or sensibility.” Feeling and Form (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), 228.
- 25.
Dorothy Walsh, Literature and Knowledge (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1969), 90–91.
- 26.
Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 88.
- 27.
Stanley Fish, “Will the Humanities Save Us?” The New York Times, January 6, 2008. The connection between readerly empathy and altruistic behavior was less wittily but more systematically criticized by Suzanne Keen in Empathy and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
- 28.
The Lounger, 20, June 18, 1785. Reproduced in Novel and Romance 1700–1800. A Documentary Record, ed. Ioan Williams (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970), 330.
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Maioli, R. (2016). Laurence Sterne and the Experience of Reading Fiction. In: Empiricism and the Early Theory of the Novel. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39859-4_6
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