Sterne among the Philosophes: Body and Soul in A Sentimental Journey

Sterne among the Philosophes: Body and Soul in A Sentimental Journey Martin C. Battestin To borrow Dr Johnson's epithet, Laurence Sterne, no less than his masterpiece, was decidedly an "odd" case.1 On the one hand, Tristram Shandy (1759-67) is a funny book—the most inventively impudent work of bawdy wit in the language. Yet it is the first novel in English seriously to explore the disturbing implications of the new empiricist philosophies of Locke and Hartley and Hume—a narrative that, both in the absurdities of its formlessness and in the solipsism and impotence of its characters, seems profoundly modern.2 Leo Spitzer once remarked that the middle decades of the eighteenth century comprised "the great caesura" in the history of Western thought3—the moment when a harmonious tradition of classical and Christian thought that began with Pythagoras came to an end and the Modern age began: the age that has discarded belief in spiritual realities and providential order in favour 1 James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill and L.F. Powell, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), 2:449. 2 For the argument that Tristram Shandy, formally and thematically, is the first "modem" work in English literature, see Martin C. Battestin, The Providence of Wit: Aspects ofForm in Augustan Literature and the Arts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 241-69. 3 Leo Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas ofWorld Harmony: Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word "Stimmung, " ed. Anna Granville Hatcher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963), p. 76. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 7, Number 1, October 1994 18 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION of materialism, subjectivism, and (with respect to the polity) egalitarianism . Sterne would have appreciated the aptness of Spitzer's metaphor: the evidence of his novels, Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey (1768), suggests that, more than any other of his literary contemporaries, he had pondered the meaning and the consequences of the new philosophy , and that, more than most others, he was aware of the "caesuras" in the lines of our life, the constant interruption of our felicities. "Pray, my dear, quoth my mother, have you notforgot to wind up the clock?"4 A "hétéroclite ... creature in all his declensions," as Tristram says of Yorick (p. 27), Sterne in his own life acted out the contradiction of indecent foolery and troubled contemplation of our mortality that characterizes his greatest work. He was Tristram, shandying it away with cap and bells astride his hobby horse; and he was Yorick, the thoughtful priest whose memorial in that novel is solid blackness filling the page to the very margins. Yorick, of course, takes his name from the king's dead jester in Hamlet, whose grinning skull, tossed up by the gravediggers , moves Shakespeare's hero to meditate on our mortality. Thoughts of mortality would have occupied Sterne ever since that morning when, as a student at Jesus College, Cambridge, he woke to find the bedclothes soaked with blood from his hemorrhaging lungs. In Tristram Shandy the winding down of clocks and the threat of closure are evils to be avoided at all costs. But in 1767, as he began A Sentimental Journey—his last work and one he hoped would be, indeed, his "Work ofRedemption"5— Sterne resurrected Yorick, whom he had buried in Tristram Shandy, and sent him to France on a journey his author had taken more than once in the vain hope of recovering his health. There Yorick would try to puzzle out the question of who—or what—he is: is he a man whose sympathetic feelings prove he has a soul worth saving, as Sterne's favourite Latitudinarian divines, Tillotson and Clarke, had argued in refuting Hobbes? Or was he merely a sophisticated piece of machinery controlled by his appetites and reducible at last to dust, as the philosophes so eloquently reasoned, who befriended Sterne in the salons of Paris and whose cleverness he admired? For Sterne, as he wrote this work in the last few months of his life, it was a question of no small moment. 4 Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman: The Text, ed. Melvyn New and Joan New...