A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy by Laurence Sterne (review)

To mark the 250-year anniversary of the publication of A Sentimental Journey (and of its author's death), the Laurence Sterne Trust, based at Shandy Hall, commissioned a new illustrated edition of Sterne's novel, taking as its copy text the first edition. The Trust's choice of illustrator revitalized the longstanding relationship that graphic satirist Martin Rowson has had with Sterne's work. His graphic novel of Tristram Shandy, published to acclaim in 1996, presented its reader-viewers with a complex web of intertextual and artistic allusions, mirroring Sterne's metafictive enterprise.

Mr. Rowson's visual interpretation of A Sentimental Journey presents himself as collaborating with its author, and he devises an engaging visual metanarrative that both collaborates with, and runs as subtext to, Sterne's text. It is a commentary on the elusive ambiguity of the author's style, an ironic engagement with the slippery complexities of the sentimental mode that provides the novel's ostensible core; as such, it both colludes with and comically critiques Sterne and his narrator.

In doing this, Mr. Rowson both follows and departs from established traditions of illustrating Sterne. Journey has enjoyed a rich tradition of visual interpretation since its first publication: key scenes and characters—such as the Monk at Calais and Maria at Moulines—encountered repeated representation in book illustrations, paintings, prints, and images depicted on objects (such as Wedgwood Jasperware). These visual interpretations of Sterne's text came to form a "text" of their own. They often reproduced the design of earlier images associated with details from the novel. Collectively they present a visual corpus of responses to Journey, but also to the contexts shaping the immediate moment of their own appearance; they often reflect the artistic and literary sensibilities, fashions, and critical tastes of their day.

In many respects, Journey's illustrations further promoted the reading of Sterne's text as a primer for sensibility. The sympathetic engagement between Yorick and Maria, for example, suggests the bond forged by fellow feeling, while images of Maria in isolation, such as Angelica Kauffman's widely reproduced painting, indicate the solipsism of intense sensibility, as W. B. Gerard has argued. By contrast, other artists—such as Richard Newton and Thomas Rowlandson—inflected a comic dynamic in their interpretation of Sterne's text that better reflects the humor embedded even in moments of heightened feeling. The bawdry often associated with that humor finds its place in these visual representations too, including eroticized depictions of ambiguously provocative episodes such as "The Temptation." Mr. Rowson's illustrated Journey thus sits in a continuous line of illustrations that use the text as a source of visually pleasing scenes to provide a decorative function, but that also comment on and further illuminate some of its more obscure passages.

Mr. Rowson both reformulates existing visual reference-points—beyond Sternean illustrations—to develop new schema with which to frame the interpretative layers accumulated within the novel's scenes. "The Monk. Calais," for instance, presents Yorick's arrival in the city by parodying Hogarth's "The Gate of Calais," in which the artist introduces a narrator who resembles Sterne's own distinctive, if caricatured physiognomy, and the Franciscan who stimulates Yorick's meanness and guilty sympathy in equal measure, against the backdrop of a visually familiar setting. The monk and Yorick reappear a few pages later, this time in a double portrait depicting the famed moment at which they exchange snuff-boxes as tokens of sympathetic connection. Mr. Rowson's monk is not, as Yorick would have it, "one of those heads, which Guido has often painted," but a podgy head atop a bulbous body, in stark contrast to the tall, thin, and spare figure often used to represent the monk, although he does own the "blush" that Yorick observes at the moment of exchange.

Mr. Rowson references and creatively interprets the text in depicting another key scene, in which Yorick...