Works of Laurence Sterne

Sterne’s novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman was published in nine slim volumes (released in five installments) from 1759 to 1767. In it the narrator, Tristram, sets out to do the impossible—to tell the story of his life. He begins with the story of his conception—an innocent remark of his mother upsetting his father’s concentration and causing poor Tristram to be conceived a weakling. To understand that, Tristram must then explain John Locke’s principle of the association of ideas. This, in turn, embroils him in a discussion of his parents’ marriage contract, his Uncle Toby, Parson Yorick, the midwife, and Dr. Slop. Tristram has so much to tell that he does not get himself born until the third volume. Finally, reality dawns upon Tristram: it takes more time to tell the story of his life than it does to live it; he can never catch himself.

At one level Tristram Shandy is a satire upon intellectual pride. Walter Shandy thinks he can beget and rear the perfect child, yet Tristram is misconceived, misbaptized, miseducated, and circumcised by a falling window sash. He grows to manhood an impotent weakling whose only hope of transcending death is to tell the story of himself and his family. Finally, Tristram turns to the sweet, funny story of his Uncle Toby’s amours with the Widow Wadman, concluding the novel at a point in time years before Tristram was born.

A hilarious, often ribald novel, Tristram Shandy nevertheless makes a serious comment on the isolation of people from each other caused by the inadequacies of language, and it describes the breaking-through of isolation by impulsive gestures of sympathy and love. A second great theme of the novel is that of time—the discrepancy between clock time and time as something that is sensed, the impinging of the past upon the present, the awareness that a joyous life inexorably leads to death. Modern commentators regard Tristram Shandy as the ancestor of psychological and stream-of-consciousness fiction.

Sterne’s second and last novel, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, by Mr. Yorick, is the story of Yorick’s travels through France; Sterne did not live to complete the part on Italy. He called it a “sentimental” journey because the point of travel was not to see sights or visit art collections, but to make meaningful contact with people. Yorick succeeds, but in every adventure, his ego or inappropriate desires and impulses get in the way of “sentimental commerce.” The result is a lighthearted comedy of moral sentiments. A Sentimental Journey was translated into many languages, but the translations tended to lose the comedy and emphasize the sentiments. Abroad Sterne became the “high priest of sentimentalism,” and as such had a profound impact upon continental letters in the second half of the 18th century.