Laurence Sterne

Marcus Walsh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317879138
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The eighteenth century was a period when the modern Novel emerged through the work of writers such as Laurence Sterne (1713-68), Richardson, Defoe, Fielding and Johnson. However, the writing of Sterne is recognised as influencing modern writing from Joyce and Woolf onwards more than any of the other eighteenth century novelists.In the last twenty years Sterne's work has become a focus for a flourishing body of work and significant debates in many new and developing areas of literary theory which include gender, sexuality, postmodernism, and deconstruction. Sterne's major novel 'Tristram Shandy' is regarded as deploying a range of 'post-modern literary devices' expected to be found in late twentieth century work rather than in work written in the 1700s.  This volume combines the most interesting and stimulating recent critical thinking about Sterne and represents recent theoretical and critical debates surrounding Sterne's writing.

PART ONE

Sociality and Sensibility

From their first appearance Sterne’s two fictions, Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey, have been perceived as having a close, and deeply problematic, relation to ‘sensibility’ and the ‘sentimental’. Readers in Sterne’s time regularly understood or estimated Sterne’s writing in relation to this influential contemporary cultural fashion, appreciating the fine strokes of human feeling apparent in Uncle Toby’s relation with Le Fever or Yorick’s with Maria, at the same time as they deplored the contamination of some of Sterne’s most pathetic scenes by earthier passions. Sensibility has been a rather less dominant theme in twentieth-century discussion of Sterne; many critics have credibly represented Sterne as a sceptical and satiric intelligence who never willingly or unironically embraced sensibility or sentiment. Some more recent commentators however have re-opened the issue of Sterne’s sensibility, moving beyond some of the too-readily homogenized outlines of an extended and diverse eighteenth-century cultural mode to concern themselves, in more precisely theorized or historically contextualized ways, with the presentation in Sterne’s novels of what he himself called (in A Sentimental Journey) the ‘progress of sociality’, the intimate specifics of human social interactions, linguistic and non-linguistic, in matters of the head, the heart and other parts of the Sternean anatomy. Notable among such critics are David Fairer, in his essay on ‘Sentimental Translation in Mackenzie and Sterne’ (1999), and John Mullan and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in the two essays included here.

Sedgwick and Mullan present a striking theoretical, and methodological, contrast. Sedgwick’s essay is concerned with an aspect of historical masculinity, ‘the changing meanings of the bonds between men’ – ‘homosocial’ bonds, as she calls them – and the articulation of those bonds ‘through various forms of the conquest and exchange of women’, in a Restoration comedy, William Wycherley’s The Country Wife, and in Sterne’s Sentimental Journey.¹ Sedgwick finds in The Country Wife an essentially ‘horizontal’ depiction of ‘a mainly aristocratic society’, emphasizing ‘heterosexual love chiefly as a strategy of male homosocial desire’ within a rather restricted class field. Here Sedgwick discusses (in the half of her essay not reprinted here) cuckoldry as an institution, the ‘rules’ of exchange within the symbolic sexual economy of aristocratic society, and the function of wit as a ‘mechanism for moving from an ostensible heterosexual object of desire to a true homosocial one’. In Sterne by contrast she finds a more ‘vertical’ narrative of class relations, belonging to a very different phase of English social history, making sense of the relation of the middle class, and ‘the “private” bourgeois family’, both to the aristocracy and to working people. The vertical operations of male bonding are illustrated particularly in Sedgwick’s examination of the relation of Yorick – parson, narrator, Sternean alter ego – to his French valet La Fleur and, more briefly, to the French aristocrats, and aristocratic and working women, whom Yorick meets in the course of his journey.

Sedgwick’s is one of the most explicitly theorized essays in this collection, evidently influenced by Foucault and Freud, and making use throughout of a paradigm, the ‘exchange of women’, taken from Lévi-Strauss. As such it exemplifies the tendency of theoretically determined writing to elide or blur the particularities of the texts it discusses. Certainly Sedgwick’s account of Sterne begs questions: who and what is the person referred to as ‘my gentleman’, in the quotation from A Sentimental Journey which is Sedgwick’s epigraph? can La Fleur be simply described as a ‘peasant’? Is Yorick a purely social or secular figure? does not the absence of family – and the way Yorick defines family in his meeting with Maria – have something to do with his status and perceived duty as a priest, and his conviction as a Christian? Is Yorick simply a ‘gentleman’? to describe him as representative, as ‘the leisured gentleman’, offers a less nuanced version of eighteenth-century class stratifications and varieties – and of Sterne/Yorick’s own place within them – than most commentators would now be happy to accept.

Above all, Sedgwick is resistant, even obtuse, to issues of irony and voice. This is, however, as she cheerfully acknowledges, deliberate, even inevitable, and amounts to an unwillingness to be seduced by the aesthetic pleasures, and wit, which are themselves, she argues, part of this novel’s ideology (as they are part of The Country Wife). This is an essay which exposes uncomfortable ideological assumptions, and asks disturbing and inescapable interpretative questions.

Mullan’s understanding and exposition of Sternean sensibility is by contrast more fully and subtly informed by the contexts of Sterne’s literary environment, and by his relation to eighteenth-century readers. Through the lengthy chapter from which the following extract is taken Mullan examines intertexts philosophical (Locke, Hume, Adam Smith), and aesthetic (Hogarth, Reynolds), and provides a careful account of reviews and pamphlet reactions to Sterne, for ‘if we are to recover Sterne’s “sentimentalism” we should look at the reception and circulation of his writings’. Mullan documents the extent to which Sterne’s contemporaries valued him for his pathos, and saw him as the originator of the late-century vogue for sentimental writing, while questioning the improprieties so inextricably entangled even in his most affecting passages. What troubled his critics however was, as Mullan shows, an essential part of Sterne’s purpose and method. The workings of both sentimentalism and suggestiveness ‘depended upon that relationship which Sterne elevated above any duty to literature or criticism – the relationship between a text and a private reader flattered to be segregated from “the herd of the world”’. ‘Sociality’ is a process of mutual understanding, by which we attempt to ‘translate’ the whole gestural as well as verbal language of our fellow men and women; but for Sterne this ‘progress of sociality’ stands above all for ‘the relationship between the narrator and those who read’, or rather a self-choosing subset of those who read. Social understanding is refined to ‘the pact between a knowing narrator and a knowing consumer of novels’. Sedgwick distrusts and deconstructs Sterne’s wit, understanding its function in the creation of a reading coterie, or defined and privileged social group; Mullan elaborates Sterne’s rhetorical privileging of readers who can think and, more especially, feel; readers who are ‘posited as the “few”, the exceptional…. To feel is to enter into a special relationship with a narrative – to be a special kind of reader.’

NOTE

1. Sedgwick pursues this theoretical approach more fully in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (Columbia University Press, New York: 1985). An important (if entirely bogus) theoretical contribution to the discussion of homosociality in relation to sentimentalism in the eighteenth-century novel was made by Manfred Mickelson, a (fictitious) young academic job applicant well-versed in theory, whose dossier includes this judgement: ‘literary sentimentalism -1 have in mind not only such major writers as Charlotte Lennox and Mrs Inchbald, but such male writers as Henry Mackenzie and Laurence Sterne – operates as a compensatory mechanism for the “violated” homosociality of the shipboard crew assaulted by pirates. Far from representing an empowering domesticity, as Nancy Armstrong and other leading eighteenth-century scholars have argued, literary sentimentalism demands to be viewed as the representational equivalent of “the lower deck in drag,” striving through a reassertion of “feminine” sensitivity to reassert the equilibrium of an “onshore” heterosexuality symbolically and practically suspended when the ship leaves shore with an all-male crew’ (http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/∼wcd/manfred2.htm).

CHAPTER ONE

‘Sexualism and the Citizen of the World: Wycherley, Sterne and Male Homosocial Desire’*

EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK

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

—You have been in France? said my gentleman, turning quick upon me with the most civil triumph in the world.

LAURENCE STERNE, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy

Surprisingly, when Laurence Sterne’s Yorick sets his head toward Dover, it is with no developed motive of connoisseurship or curiosity: the gentleman dandy ups with his portmanteau at the merest glance of ‘civil triumph’ from a male servant. Perhaps we are in the world of P. G. Wodehouse, with a gentleman’s gentleman who happens, like Jeeves, to be the embodiment of all the prescriptive and opportunistic shrewdness necessary to maintain his master’s innocent privileges – but it is impossible to tell; the servant utters his five words, glances his glance, and disappears from the novel. The prestige that has lent force to his misprision – or is it a sneer? – seems to belong not to a particular personality but to a position, a function (or lack of it), a bond between gentleman and gentleman’s gentleman that, throughout this novel, makes up in affective and class significance what it lacks in utilitarian sense. Yorick’s bond to another valet is the most sustained and one of the fondest in the novel; and, for most of the novel, the bond is articulated through various forms of the conquest and exchange of women.

In the discussion ahead, I will be using the ‘exchange of women’ paradigm taken from Claude Lévi-Strauss and, for example, Rene Girard and Gayle Rubin, to focus on the changing meanings of the bonds between men in a seventeenth-century play and an eighteenth-century novel.¹ These dis-cussions are part of a book-length study of what I am calling ‘male homosocial desire’ – the whole spectrum of bonds between men, including friendship, mentorship, rivalry, institutional subordination, homosexual genitality, and economic exchange – within which the various forms of the traffic in women take place.

the changing meanings of the bonds between men

What is most foreign to the twentieth-century American reader, in A Sentimental Journey, is the relatively crisp and differentiated treatment of class stratification. What is most familiar to us, and also newest in the period under discussion, is the automatic availability and salience, for the description of many different power transactions, of the image of the family – the family as psychoanalysis conceives it, comprising one parent of each gender and, as subject, a single, male child. I have chosen A Sentimental Journey as the end point of this discussion in order to emphasize the relative newness of this particular salience of the nuclear family, which we as post-Freudian readers take for granted, and in order to point to some of its political implications and groundings. The fantasy polarities of omnipotence and utter powerlessness, of castration and phallic entitlement, of maternal nurturance and deprivation form in A Sentimental Journey, as in more recent thought, the ground onto which other power transactions are mapped. As Michel Foucault suggests, the meaning of sexuality itself is new under this regime, as well…

Part of my contention in these readings will be that this modern narrative of the male homosocial subject was first and most influentially elaborated as part of a broad and very specific reading of class: that the crispness and breadth of class differentiation in Sterne is most important to the emerging family narrative. To say that this narrative has (or originally had) a strong, conscious content about class is not exactly to celebrate it, however. The class awareness, acute and crucial as it is, is not only bourgeois-centered but based on an aggressive pastoralization of working people and an expropriation of the aristocracy, too, for the cognitive needs of elements of the middle class. In short, the struggle to control the newly potent terms of the male homosocial spectrum depended on mobilizing a new narrative of the ‘private’, bourgeois family – a narrative that was socially powerful because it seemed itself able to make descriptive sense of relations across class.²

The Country Wife, on the other hand, is socially rather horizontal. It depicts a mainly aristocratic society, of which cuckoldry is the main social engine. ‘To cuckold’ is by definition a sexual act, performed on a man, by another man. Its central position means that the play emphasizes heterosexual love chiefly as a strategy of homosocial desire. In the title of a study of the play, David Vieth acutely calls it an ‘anatomy of masculinity’.³ Specifying further, I will discuss it as an analysis of several different paths by which men may attempt to arrive at satisfying relationships with other men …

What changes do we find in moving up a century to the more vertical but equally intense male homosocial bond between Yorick and his French valet La Fleur in A Sentimental Journey? The underlying terms of Yorick’s involvement with La Fleur are conventional in a way that the degree of his involvement is not. An unquestioning paternalism – an assumption that his own welfare is also La Fleur’s; that La Fleur’s urgent, personal desire to be of service both goes with the terms of employment and at the same time testifies to a special, personal rapport between them; that La Fleur’s cares and involvements can be nothing but a miniaturized, comic version of his own – lies behind the condescension of the recurrent epithets, ‘honest’ and ‘poor’ La Fleur. La Fleur, like all the peasants Yorick encounters across the Channel, is seen as childlike – unqualified for any serious work but ready for music, dance, and frolic at any hour of the day. Like the peasantry in general, La Fleur has a natural, untutored talent for music and a natural joyousness of temper. On the other hand, he must, like a child, be protected from worry.⁴ In short, La Fleur is ruefully acknowledged to be an encumbrance, though a cheering one – a child himself, in relation ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART ONE Sociality and Sensibility
• PART TWO Feminism/Gender/Sexualities
• PART THREE Sterne and the Body
• PART FOUR Sources, Imitation, Plagiarism
• PART FIVE Narrative and Form
• Notes on Authors
• Further Reading
• Index