Laurence Sterne’s The Sentimental Journey

The Art and Uses of Sentiment

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 author’s 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);

• Sterne’s defense: The Sermons of Yorick (1760, 1766) & A Sentimental Journey (1768) offer an apology for the coherence of Sterne’s 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

Sterne and Sentiment: “Dear sensibility! Source inexhausted of all that’s precious in our joys, or

costly in our sorrows. …great SENSORIUM…” (98)

1. Suffering and sentiment: Richardson’s 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: 1. Puritans versus the Latitudinarian Anglican Divines (John

Tillotson, Isaac Barrow, Robert South, Richard Bentley, Samuel Clarke)

2. Hobbes versus Shaftsbury, Francis Hutchinson, David Hume, Adam Smith

3. Sterne versus enthusiasm of the Methodists 4. 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

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 God’s grace

2. Man’s 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 man’s 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

The eccentric narrative form of A Sentimental Journey

• Not 3rd person narrator of Haywood’s Fantomina • Not the naïve 1st person narrative (+ editor) of Pamela’s

letter-journals – though it sometimes mimes the ‘writing to the moment’ to create an illusion of presentness

• Not the 3rd person narrator of Fielding’s Joseph Andrews: artful, concealing, ironically voiced; however, it has some of the arch urbanity of the gentleman-narrator

• Sterne’s 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)

Formal traits of the book and novel

1. First edition layout: 1. Subscription list2. Displaced preface3. Individual scenes are fragmented into multiple chapters

2. The supple multi-voiced narrative style interweaves: description, quoted speech, internal soliloquy

3. 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

4. Effect: a novel that is a private performance, in informal conversational style, for the reader

The Textual and Oral Performance of Yorick and Father LorenzoThe Monk. Calais. (I: 8-17)

Reading the style of the encounter of Yorick and the Monk

1. Basic stages of the 1st encounter with the Monk: 1. Monk’s appeal and Yorick’s decision 2. Yorick’s harsh denial/ Monk’s silence 3. Yorick’s self-reflection and self reproach

2. Questions: 1. What is the effect of the division into separate chapters?2. What justifies Yorick’s change of heart? 3. How do you interpret Yorick’s fast-changing temper? 4. How does Mme de L*** later mediate a reconciliation of

the two men?5. What is the role for objects? (snuff boxes) How do they

conduct sentiment? 6. How would you describe Yorick’s character? His style?

What is the relationship

between

Yorick’s 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?

Volume 1

1. The Monk. Calais.2. The Preface 3. Mme de L*** (return of

Monk) 4. La Fleur, the dead ass and its

owner’s story5. The Letter. Amiens6. The Pulse (of the ‘beautiful’

Grisset). Paris. 7. The Opera: officer & the

Dwarf

Volume 2

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.

Some of the Occasional Encounters of The Sentimental Journey

Maria and Yorick

Nancy Armstrong and the novel:Desire 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

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 system’s exclusion of the individual through a critique of the system3: the individual is assimilated into the social system on the basis of freely engaged contract4: the society has been expanded, improved and changed 5: this same dynamic unfolds quite differently in 3 epochs (18th century, Victorian period, modern period)