A Sentimental Journey and Other Writings

by Laurence Sterne

Book Overview

'Love is nothing without feeling. And feeling is still less without love.'

Celebrated in its own day as the progenitor of 'a school of sentimental writers', A Sentimental Journey (1768) has outlasted its many imitators because of the humour and mischievous eroticism that inform Mr Yorick's travels. Setting out to journey to France and Italy he gets little further than Lyons but finds much to appreciate, in contrast to contemporary...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0199537186
• ISBN13: 9780199537181
• Release Date: December 2008
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.53 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.0" x 7.7"

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THE GREATGRANDFATHER OF JAMES JOYCE ULYSSES

a similar seemingly pointless but profoundly significant AND FUNNY epic delivered under the guise of a trivial travelogue, written by a fellow Irishman. Nice to know Joyce read his Sterne as well as his daily newspaper while traveling in Trieste. This parody must be read and enjoyed on its own terms. Recent academic commentaries are helpful in understanding, a fact which does not detract from this work.

IN PRAISE OF DIGRESSION

The reader who expects Sterne's "Sentimental Journey" to provide something of an ordered travelogue will be disappointed. It is a seemingly artless web of loosely connnected episodes, anecdotes, impressions, musings. There is no structured narrative - one digression leads to another; some are amusing, some are absurd, some are thoughtful, but all of them are entertaining. My current rereading of the "Journey" was itself a digression. I had been watching a movie version of "Mansfield Park" that diverged significantly from Jane Austen's novel. In one scene (which is not in the novel) Henry Crawford tries to win Fanny Price's approval by reading her a passage from the "Sentimental Journey". (It is the scene with the caged starling calling "I can't get out - I can't get out" - a very poignant and appropriate selection, in my view). So you see - I had to reread both "Mansfield Park" and the "Journey" to fully appreciate the connection; and I don't regret it. The narrator of the "Journey" is Parson Yorick, a character introduced in Sterne's "Tristram Shandy", who owes as much to Shakespeare's jester as to Cervantes' Don Quixote. As he tells it, the journey came about in a haphazard manner. He had forgotten that England was at war with France and that he would need a passport. This leads to all sorts of complications and adventures, but in the end everything turns out just fine. His encounters with beggars and princes, innkeepers and shopkeepers are amusing and often revealing. The many temptations put in his way by mysterious ladies and obliging filles de chambre temporarily distract him from his purpose - but what is his purpose? The journey itself is the object of his quest. Some of his observations are rather sobering; e.g.,he concludes that we advance in life not by the favors we bestow but by the favors we receive, and that the surest way to success is through shameless flattery. Every politician knows that - but are the rest of us ready to admit it? There is a streak of cynicism running through Sterne's lightheartedness. Even the story of the starling, which supposedly teaches the narrator the value of freedom, ends on a note of bitter irony: the bird is passed fondly from hand to hand, but no one sets it free. As Sterne weaves into his tale characters and episodes from "Tristram Shandy", another digression is looming ahead: now we simply have to reread "Tristram Shandy"!

A great supplement for fans of Sterne

Most readers are familiar with Sterne for his more famous Tristram Shandy. This volume contains some of his other works. Personally, I found Tristram to be of a much higher caliber, mainly because it is a complete epic which covers so many of Sterne's theories and rantings. So, if you're encountering Sterne for the first time, go to Tristram. For fans wanting some more writings, this is a good collection.The first section is A Sentimental Journey. We already have a part of a travelogue of Tristram in his self-titled work. In this one, it is the marvellous personage Yorick that undergoes the journey through Italy and France. The book in in the form of a ranty journal that supposedly draws from Sterne's own travels. He intended to publish 4 volumes but wrote 2 before other pursuits and eventually death caught up with him. In the work, his sentimentalism relaly comes through as he goes through various amusing incidents, tragic stories and semi-amorous adventures. All this is done with a certain dignity. The 2nd volume ends in a scene of planned abruption which I found amusing enough to justify the rest of the book.I didn't read the next two pieces, the first one because I didn't want to pry into his private life and the second because it was hard to follow the context. The pieces are Journal to Eliza - a personal correspondence, and A Political Romance - his first published work which is a satire on a scandal which, with the proper background should be interesting.The last section is a selection from the Sermons of Yorick, where the eccentric Shandean minister makes another appearance providing Sterne with an opportunity to make theological statements. These were very interesting, giving light to another side of Sterne. They are all based on a single biblical verse and explore its themes in termes of human experience.The only possible inconvenience is that like many modern publications, this has endnotes rather than footnotes and because contextual explanations are necessary, you have to flip back and forth. Otherwise, a great insight into the writer and person behind Tristram.

A Strange, But Very Human Little Novel

Laurence Sterne's 1768 novel, "A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy," is a strange and largely plotless book - less the recounting of a journey than of Parson Yorick's ramblings. Following the wildly successfuly, and no less diffuse "Tristram Shandy," Sterne crafts a much smaller, but no less intense work, recounting the misadventures of Parson Yorick, himself a character in the earlier novel. Labelling himself a 'sentimental traveler,' Yorick's account of his travels is not descriptive, but emotive, revealing his conflicted, if warm-hearted psychology.The novel begins abruptly in the middle of a conversation between Yorick and his servant over a French policy in the eighteenth century of seizing the property of a foreigner who dies in France. Eager to discover the truth of the matter, Yorick impulsively throws a few shirts in a bag and before the next day ends, lands in Calais, France. Upon his arrival, his initial purpose, like many which he determines on in the course of the book, is forgotten, as his mind drifts from topic to topic as things and people happen to cross his sight. What remains of the novel are a series of pathetic and amorous adventures, in which Yorick's senses of morality, propriety, and common sense are brought into constant conflict with his impetuous nature and good humored guile. Sterne is too intelligent and expert a writer to allow sentiment, what we might call sappy nonsense, to rule the day in his novel, and the scrapes Yorick get himself into are as much a critique of pure sentiment as an exploration of the uses and practicality of human sympathy. Sterne is playing with a recent tradition of moral philosophy, including the likes of such authors as Shaftesbury and Adam Smith, the latter of whose "Theory of Moral Sentiments" (1759) was at the forefront of popularizing and pragmatizing fellow-feeling. Sterne uses the excitable and impulsive Yorick to play with these ideas, along with those of his acquaintance, David Hume, whose notions of moral aesthetics marked a radical departure from the aforementioned predecessors. Out of all of these high flown philosophical traditions, Sterne fashions a witty and clever series of scenarios - from eating with peasants, bantering with a monk, flirting with a married woman while her husband indifferently watches, and nearly getting thrown in the Bastille - all display a very human look at the world.Encounters between Yorick and various classes and characters in France illustrate the distance between theory and practice in terms of implementing any kind of systematic philosophy - even, and especially for a man of the cloth, like our protagonist. Yorick means well most of the time, which makes his faults and foibles all the more endearing and amusing. By his own admission, Yorick is constantly falling in love, perhaps to give his bachelor life some sense of chivalric purpose, but when he starts falling in love with every chamber-maid and noblewoman in France, we beg