Aposiopesis and After

Tobias Smollett. The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves . Robert Folkenflik and Barbara Laning Fitzpatrick, eds. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002). Pp. liv + 314. $50.00.

Laurence Sterne. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy and Continuation of the Bramine's Journal . Melvyn New and W. G. Day, eds. Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, Vol VI (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002). Pp. lxxii + 568. $65.00.

Jean Viviès. English Travel Narratives in the Eighteenth Century: Exploring Genres . Claire Davison, trans. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). Pp. 134. $64.95.

Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy contains what are arguably the most celebrated opening and ending declarations of any eighteenth-century literary masterpiece in English. As everybody—or at least everybody who reads this journal—will know, the book commences with an oblique flourish:

—They order, said I, this matter better in France—

Sterne's bravura is to thrust us into the intimacy of mid-conversation where, a little off balance, we gain entry without time or even capacity to attune our ears to the thread of what has come before. Who are "they"? Which "matter" do they order "better in France"? Better than whom? And can "order" mean "command," "devise," "send for," or what? As conversation ensues, the arterial link is the perpetually cut thread—with which the work had begun—the so-called Shandean dash. More than fifty years ago, in introducing his selection of Sterne's works, Douglas Grant cleverly summarized the Shandean dash as "a simple mark [that] suggests all those conversational subtleties which are far beyond the reach of printed words (e.g. the pause to emphasize a point, or to insinuate; a sudden change in tone; nod, wink, grimace, shrug, and hundred other slight movements which accompany and trick out speech); it is the very breath—the intimacy—of his style." Willingly or otherwise, adds Grant, "we are [made] the victims of a tête-à-tête." Like Coleridge's Wedding Guest, we are obliged to listen to the narrator's story to the very end. Except here, there is no end and very little story.

Despite providing a prolific commentary, when Gardner D. Stout, Jr. edited what its dust jacket proclaimed as "the first full, scholarly edition of A Sentimental Journey" in 1967, he chose—perhaps wisely—to remain silent on this opening line. In 2002, Melvyn New and W. G. Day, the editors of the Florida edition, assail us with virtually a full page of exposition, quoting the views and counter-views of sundry critical luminaries who have added to the exegesis of Sterne's initial flourish since Stout. Alas, New and Day's conclusion that "perhaps the last word on the opening should be Michael Seidel's" that any reader trying to gauge "Sterne's precise narrative angle . . . has indeed come in too late," leaves us barely more enlightened than before (230). A critical edition is as much a reflection of the age that produced it as of the era of its author, and the degree of annotation in the Florida text provides a veritable Scriblerian barometer of the state of health of eighteenth-century studies today.

In the introduction to the Florida edition, New and Day follow Stout in recognizing that A Sentimental Journey was composed "in reaction to the voice of disgruntlement and discontent" heard in Tobias Smollett's Travels through France and Italy, published two years earlier in 1766 (1). The ill-tempered Smollett, it will be recalled, was famously (if unfairly) characterized in A Sentimental Journey as "the learned SMELFUNGUS", the embodiment of the worst kind of traveler, and here in a single sentence, Jean Viviès in his engaging study of English Travel Narratives in the Eighteenth Century, contributes a very convincing explanation of Sterne's "opening gambit," which he sees as going in the opposite direction to Smollett. It is, he states, "at heart a symmetrical statement, that of an anti-Smelfungus who will...