| Sterne Laurence
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 | Biography
Sterne's Tristram Shandy is an unusual work by the literary standards of any period, but it stands out particularly in the century that saw the birth and early development of the realistic novel. While such novels as Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, Samuel Richardson's Pamela, and Henry Fielding's Tom Jones display their author's attempts to make prose fiction a means for depicting contemporary life, Tristram Shandy demonstrated aspirations of an entirely different kind. Its characters, although profoundly human, are also profoundly odd and do not have the significant connections with their society held by characters in the great realistic novels of the time. Tristram Shandy's style is one of cultivated spontaneity and unpredictability, a series of digressions rather than the progressive movement of events common in the works of Steme's contemporaries. Perhaps most conspicuously, its narrator is concerned with relating his "Life and Opinions" instead of the more typical "Life and Adventures" of the eighteenth-century Bildungsroman, making the novel a largely plotless discourse on an encyclopedic array of subjects. The opinions expounded in the novel, aside from the manic commentary of Tristram himself, are those of the principal characters, especially the narrator's father, Walter Shandy. In the world of Tristram Shandy, human life is marked by the obsessive pursuit of some dominant preoccupation, which the narrator terms a "hobby horse." For Walter Shandy, his obsession in the constant weaving of elaborate and absurd theories, the random development of which reflect Sterne's interest in John Locke's writings on the association of ideas. For the narrator's uncle Toby, whom critics have often viewed as one of the most vivid and admirable characters in literature, the imaginary reliving of his battle experiences is his hobby horse. The narrator's own mania consists most obviously of the comic spirit that he introduces into his description of even the most depressing aspects of his world, such as the death of the character Le Fever. Sterne's other major work, A Sentimental Journey, is important as a nonfictional memoir that conveys much the same sensibility as the fictional Tristram Shandy. An account of Steme's travels in France and Italy, this memoir has as its central concern the subjective side of the author's experiences rather than the traditional objective rendering of people and places. In fact, in A Sentimental Journey, Sterne pays minute and self-conscious attention to his own feelings, and frequently shows himself as a manipulator of situations purely for the sake of experiencing the resulting emotion. In one of the more famous instances of this behavior, Sterne resists his lust for a chambermaid and thereby discovers the pleasures of passion restrained. Another episode, "The Dead Ass," has frequently been singled out for the intensity of emotion Sterne exhibits for the death of an animal. Steme's preoccupation with feelings, especially those of tender pathos, led to his establishing the word "sentiment" as it is understood today, imbuing the word with heightened, somewhat artificial emotion when it previously had denoted "thought" and "moral reflection." |
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