Hilarion’s Asse: Laurence Sterne and Humour ed. by Anne Bandry-Scubbi and Peter de Voogd (review)

If Sterne’s humor is frequently acknowledged in pedestrian teaching practices, it has not received as much attention in the sprawling field of Sterne criticism. Or such is the claim of the editors of Hilarion’s Asse: “Although the humour of Sterne’s fictions is often acknowledged, it has become more of a background issue than a focus in its own right,” write Ms. Bandry-Scubbi and Mr. de Voogd. “[I]t is not easy to find scholarly articles that suggest that their authors laughed as they wrote.”

Published on the occasion of the tercentenary of Sterne’s birth, Hilarion’s Asse is more a celebration of the author’s sense of humor in all its guises than a collection of new research. Indeed, there have been many scholarly works that have attended to Sterne’s comic vision, such as John M. Stedmond’s The Comic Art of Laurence Sterne, Stuart Tave’s study of comic theory The Amiable Humorist, or Malcolm Bradbury’s essay “The Comic Novel in Sterne and Fielding” in the Winged Skull. The editors contend that “the present volume celebrates the tercentenary of Sterne’s birth by revisiting the way that Shandeism ‘makes the wheel of life run long and cheerfully round’ from an early twenty-first-century perspective,” but it is unclear what is being revisited or what remains particularly early twenty-first century about the selected essays. More helpful is their suggestion that the collection has been influenced by Thomas Keymer’s Sterne, the Moderns and the Novel, which claims that the two most notorious strands of Sterne criticism—Renaissance and Scriblerian satire and postmodern meta-fiction—might be reconciled.

While it cannot be claimed that there are dominant approaches to humor in Sterne criticism, the essays in this collection are similarly divided between critics interested in examining modern theories of humor in conjunction with Sterne, whether to see if he anticipates or anthropomorphically undermines them, and those who want to offer historically rich accounts of a shift in humor’s effect in his writing. Despite this one obvious division, the collection would benefit from a preliminary gloss on humor and the ways in which it is, or is not, separate from cognates such as comedy, satire, laughter, and wit. (Marc Martinez’s essay nicely sums up the problem of distinction vis-à-vis a quotation from Louis Cazamian: “humor is losing its individuality by an extension of its range, in which its proper features are debased and blurred.”) I suspect the editors have deliberately used a thin organizing rationale to accommodate a wide variety of perspectives on humor.

Madeleine Descargues-Grant’s essay reads Tristram Shandy as a comedy of errors, an interpretation that puts Sterne in the same camp as Shakespeare (here she is at odds with James Wood and other modern critics who see Sterne as a satirist). Sterne, she argues, organizes his writing within a “delicious mixture,” a vision of the world in the hands of God, where man cannot be his own judge. This thesis rustles against the next essay by Anne Dromart, which argues that motion—the ability of the narrator to control time—is the technique behind Sterne’s humor: “[Sterne’s] humour stems in great part from the fact that he manages to be absent while being the narrating voice. …” But like Ms. Descargues-Grant, who engages primarily with Wood, Ms. Dromart looks to modern theories of humor, namely Attardo’s modern linguistic theory, to explain the humor effect in Sterne’s writing.

With Alexis Tadié’s article, the collection moves from modern theories of humor to debates about laughter contemporary to Sterne, and from the intellectual apparatus of humor to its physiological effects. “It is,” claims Mr. Tadié, “the physiological experience of laughter that outlines the friendship between Tristram and reader.” Mr. Tadié’s is one of the more historically involved essays, outlining, as has often...