Published only a few weeks before Laurence Sterne’s death, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy by Mr. Yorick featured a parson character made famous in Sterne’s first novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, the title later shortened through familiarity to simply Tristram Shandy. Although Sterne did not complete A Sentimental Journey, and Yorick spent most of his time in France, it became popular due to some extent to the author’s close identification with his character. Sterne based Yorick’s experiences on his own, including much detail from his travels. More to the point, he had to some extent traded personas with his fictional character, referring to himself as Yorick and Tristram and inserting one of his own sermons into Tristram Shandy for Yorick’s delivery before his congregation.
The conflation of character with author proved so successful that Yorick’s actions in Tristram Shandy elicited anger against Sterne himself. One critic expressed outrage, as Parson Yorick’s wearing of a harlequin coat to deliver a sermon amounted to Sterne’s satirizing the Anglican Church and his own pledge of sobriety in all actions as a church representative. Sterne must have delighted in resurrecting his alter ego to wander through France and Italy.
Later critics question much of Yorick’s behavior in A Sentimental Journey as to its motivation. He supposedly acted as suggested by the novel’s title in treating those he met along his journey with sentiment or sympathy. As Paul Goring explains, the term “sentiment” had multiple meanings in Sterne’s era, its first recorded use seen in a letter written by Lady Bradshaight to Samuel Richardson in 1749. She asked the famous novelist what he believed to be the meaning of the fashionable term, often overheard in conversation. Generally, it represented an idea expressed with some emotion, but it also related to the intellectual idea of sympathy, as in Adam Smith’s expression in Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), when he argued that society could not engage in proper conduct without exercising sympathy for all its members. Richardson had used the approach to strong effect, eliciting sympathy for the protagonist of his novel Pamela (1740) by arousing reader emotion through overuse of hyperbole and repetition.
The Sentimental Novel gained immediate popularity, its formulaic nature prompting satire and parody on the part of artists who declared it opportunistic fiction. However, Sterne’s use of the term was based on its original sense as the capacity of human nature to feel sympathy toward others, prompting actions that would help relieve their suffering. Thus, his obvious use of irony in undercutting Yorick’s so-called selflessness has caused critics, particularly psychoanalytic critics, to question whether Sterne was conscious of Yorick’s egoism and even what might have been seen as repressed hostility.
For example, the chapter “Montriul” concludes with Yorick meeting a group of unfortunates he determines to help. He decides at first to present each one with a single sou, a French coin of low value, an insulting amount in exchange for the travails of the individuals; one traveler had lost a hand in war, while one woman suffered a dislocated hip. In addition, he repeatedly calls attention to his own sacrifice in a patronizing tone, writing, “I gave one simply pour l’amour de Dieu” (for the love of God), and in the next chapter refers to his acts as “little matters.” When he later donates to a young girl and describes his reaction to her expressions of gratitude by stating, “It was a small tribute… which I could not avoid paying to virtue,” Yorick seems to refer to his own virtue. His penchant for placing monetary value on human suffering also suggests a worldly nature, and Yorick seems obsessed with commodifying human experience. This may be a conscious effort on Sterne’s part, representing his sly attitude toward his subject and readers.
Yorick is, after all, a creation of Shakespeare, based on the skull discovered in Hamlet, a fact of which readers are reminded by Monsieur Le Count de B****. While Yorick the narrator takes some pains to separate himself in the minds of his characters and readers from the original Yorick, he clearly lacks humility in laying claim to the greatest writer in the English language as his father creator. On the other hand, his self-consciousness may reflect Sterne’s determination to satirize the popular genre of travel literature, specifically that of Tobias Smollett; he clearly suggests Smollett’s title, Travels through France and Italy, with his own. Sterne judged most examples of the genre as dull and boring in their generalized descriptions of geography and the practices of local inhabitants. Thus, he focuses on individual characters during his travels, in order to add interest and color, and emphasizes Yorick’s reactions to those characters to set his work apart.
Based on Sterne’s general attitudes toward life and his other writings, A Sentimental Journey offers a fitting finale to his work. Regardless of his motives and sincerity, he shapes a humorous, witty tale supported by the truths of his own experience that continues to be enjoyed as a subject of study. Yorick best expresses Sterne’s ability when he comments on the joy of reading Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, allowing his comment to represent the universal effect of all fine literature: “Sweet pliability of man’s spirit, that can at once surrender itself to illusions, which cheat expectation and sorrow of their weary moments.”
Bibliography
Battestin, Martin C. “A Sentimental Journey and the Syntax of Things.” Augustan Worlds: Essays in Honour of A. R. Humphreys. Edited by J. C. Hilson, M. M. B. Jones, and J. R. Watson. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1978, 223–29.
Goring, Paul. Introduction to A Sentimental Journey, by Laurence Sterne. New York: Penguin, 2001, xi–xxxii.
Loveridge, Mark. Laurence Sterne and the Argument About Design. London: Macmillan, 1982.
Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis
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