Sterne's Mummies: Fraudulent Trade In "The Prodigal Son" Sermon

The Ægyptian Mummies, which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummie is become Merchandise.

—Sir Thomas Browne

Most of the critical attention given to Laurence Sterne's sermon on the prodigal son has been directed to "the rather abrupt transition midway in this sermon" from a traditional application of the parable to Sterne's critique of the fashionable Grand Tour.¹ Ryan J. Stark, however, has found other implications in a passage earlier in the sermon that contains, he argues, a rather Shandean double entendre.² Without rejecting Stark's reading, I would like to suggest that this passage shows Sterne imaginatively embellishing the biblical story in a way hitherto undetected.³

Such embellishment is invited, Sterne suggests, by the relative sparseness of the narrative in Luke 15:11–32, especially the section dealing with the young man's adventures in a far country. Luke's description lacks specifics about the younger son's behavior beyond that he "there wasted his substance with riotous living," to the extent that in want he "joined himself to a citizen of that country; and he sent him into his fields to feed swine" (Luke 15:13–15). The parable, Sterne writes, "is given us to enlarge upon, and turn to the best moral account we can," which he does, first of all, in speculating how the father must have attempted to dissuade his son from leaving in the first place: "The account is short: the interesting and pathetic passages with which such a transaction would be necessarily connected, are left to be supplied by the heart:——the story is silent——but nature is not:——much kind advice, and many a tender expostulation would fall from the father's lips, no doubt, upon this occasion" (4:186). Sterne imagines the father warning about "the many snares and temptations … the pleasures which would sollicit him … the seductions of women,——their charms——their poisons" (4:187), all traditional elements of "riotous living." But the second major instance of Sterne's imaginative embellishment is far different.

The occasion is the return of the son, again tersely related in Luke: "And the son said unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son" (Luke 15:21), a pithy generalization repeated twice in scripture. Sterne, on the other hand, directs our attention to what might have been the specifics of the son's narration of his folly, emphasizing the son's quandary ("Alas! How shall he tell his story?") and mentioning the conspicuous wealth of the Persian courts. Sterne concludes with the paragraph that interested Stark:

How shall the youth make his father comprehend, that he was cheated at Damascus by one of the best men in the world;—that he had lent a part of his substance to a friend at Nineveh, who had fled off with it to the Ganges;—that a whore of Babylon had swallowed his best pearl, and anointed the whole city with his balm of Gilead;—that he had been sold by a man of honour for twenty shekels of silver, to a worker in graven images;——that the images he had purchased had profited him nothing;—that they could not be transported across the wilderness, and had been burnt with fire at Shusan;——that the apes and peacocks, which he had sent for from Tharsis, lay dead upon his hands; and that the mummies had not been dead long enough, which had been brought him out of Egypt:——that all had gone wrong since the day he forsook his father's house.

(4:189)

As Melvyn New explains, "Sterne's catalogue is drawn from various biblical hints and phrases" (5:226), a technique that adds difficulty to interpretation. But without imposing an organic unity on the passage, it is possible to make a few suggestions.

Sterne has packed, perhaps even over-packed, images and allusions here. Thus Ryan Stark finds in the pearl-swallowing a double reference: first to the practice from ancient times through the Renaissance of aristocrats swallowing pearls...