Robert Chibka, Boston College
I am almost afraid, said the princess, to begin a journey of which I cannot perceive an end.
—Rasselas
I walked forth without any determination where to go—I shall consider of that, said I, as I walk along.
—A Sentimental Journey
As one who teaches both fiction writing and 18th-century British novels and whose own writing is correspondingly two-headed, I have occasionally fantasized about producing a quasi-critical biofic on a self-contained odd couple named Rasselas Shandy, offsprung in 1759[1] from the impossible pairing of a corpulent lexicographer and a pencil-thin minister, a pious talker and an impious preacher, a scrofulous bundle of nerves and a consumptive bundle of verves—and a couple of as lively wits as you’d care, Madam, to meet. My mongrel text has proved no less impossible than its mongrel character—it remains a paragraphical shard—but I wonder what, other than distraction from my real work or wishing to work differently, that persistent, if wispy, bagatelle of a notion was about. It would, presumably, be some sort of Jekyll/Hyde struggle, not between good and evil but between comic and tragic sensibilities, or in terms perhaps synonymous in these cases, fictophilia and fictophobia. “Why don’t you, Shandy, pick on someone your own size, you nine-volume bully you?” a Rasselasian might justly ask. The present argument answers that complaint by pairing Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas instead with Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (both, in the modern paperback editions I’ll cite, weighing in around 100 pages: featherweights, as 18th-century fictions go)—not that I claim the bout’s anything other than rigged; the fix is in, in comedy’s favor, and you’ll see I even let Shandy into the ring once in a while, tag-team fashion. I’ll never write “The Odd Ventures of Rasselas Shandy,” and that’s just as well; but the critical oddity you read now inhabits some of that fictional oddity’s territory, and will, I hope, while discharging the urge to trap Johnson and Sterne in one body, expose its source: a wish to promote a fight between the comic fictophile’s and the tragic fictophobe’s different stances toward movement, change, finality: in short, toward time.
My texts, then, are one book legendarily written in a hurry to cover Dr. Johnson’s mother’s funeral expenses and another never-more-than-half-written not only in the valley, but beneath the very shadow of Sterne’s death. The brief candle, the walking shadow, cast the latticed chiaroscuro of both Rasselas and A Sentimental Journey. But these two distant-cousin mutations of the fashionable travelogue template could scarcely deal with intimations of mortality more differently: while Johnson searches for a marmoreal fixity unattainable in any temporal realm, Sterne, wittingly moribund, seeks a nervous, pulsating reassurance that fixity hasn’t yet set, like rigor mortis, in.
You recognize “And Italy” in my title as recognizing the missing member in Parson Yorick’s titular itinerary, the second projected leg of Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, mentally mapped, textually absent. That phantom limb, “and Italy,” memorializes a gap between conception and capability: Sterne wrote, on his real-life travels in 1766, that he hoped “to have added at least ten years to my life by this journey to Italy” (Letters 267); two years later the first (= last) two slim volumes of his Journey appeared, and ere a little month had passed he was dead. Sterne is so much the genius of the pentiment, the change-on-the-fly that doesn’t expunge evidence of itself, that when I first read it, I thought “and Italy” just another of his brilliant jokes about unfinishability[2]. Sterne’s prior, more famous narrator travels because “Death himself knocked at my door . . . [but] I have forty volumes to write, and forty thousand things to say and do, which no body in the world will say and do for me, . . . had I not better, [he asks his friend] Eugenius, fly for my life? . . . I will lead him a dance he little thinks of” (Tristram Shandy 7.1.335, 336). Like American senior citizens flocking to the Southwest for their health, Tristram takes off for France, and the epigraph to his seventh Volume, which is devoted to documenting (and escaping from by immersing in) his mad flight from Death, says it is “not a digression (or excursion), but is itself the work” (7.335 n.1). His journey works very differently than Yorick’s whimsical tourist excursion, undertaken to avoid nothing more lethal than embarrassment. Caught by his man-servant in complacent posturing, pretending to a knowledge he lacks (“——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” (A Sentimental Journey [ASJ] 3)), Yorick impulsively crosses the Channel—without noticing England and France are at war—to save not his life, but face. He mentions a passing anecdote or two from his Italian leg, so we know that he reaches Italy, but his narrative never will.
Yorick’s incomplete Journey, like Sterne’s, is pursued under the sign of Death, or rather, of Death-defiance. His focus on the ephemeral, the quirky and temporary and ineffable, is something he shares with Tristram, who takes time in his frantic French flight to contrast Janatone, the innkeeper’s daughter in Montreuil, with standard guidebook information; as for “the length, breadth, and perpendicular height of the great parish church, . . . your worships and reverences, may all measure them at your leisures——but he who measures thee, Janatone, must do it now——thou carriest the principles of change within thy frame” (7.9.343). The principles of change are what handsome young women and skeletal older men (and the narratives that purport to represent both) have in common. The Sentimental Journey interests us in tensions between peculiarity and commonality, the spectrum that stretches from individually idiosyncratic to typically French or English to universally human. Those tensions and that spectrum, I think, viewed in the context of temporal mutability, may define something that matters about the novel.[3]
I’ve been known to teach Rasselas in an 18th-century-novel survey course, between fat Mr. Jones and fat Mr. Shandy, for ways it resists and critiques the novelistic. It has more in common with Sterne’s fiction than a “conclusion, in which nothing is concluded” (Rasselas 149): both obsess over human minds’ wishful ways of dealing with temporality. While Sterne’s characters are distractable by bodies, texts, events, places, though, the time-bound mind, anywhere/nowhere on Earth, is Rasselas’s sole object of scrutiny.
I’ve rarely disagreed with a sentence in The New Yorker more strenuously than with this one, by Adam Gopnik: “Johnson . . . thought that writing was serious as conversation is serious, an occasion for wit and argument, not as sex and sermons are serious, a repository of fears and hungers” (95-6). Adam Gopnik knows a lot more than I, but, I’m sorry, has he read Rasselas? Its characters do little but fear, hunger, and talk about fear and hunger. The book fears what it hungers for, hungers for what it fears. It’s uninterested in the bodily vehicles of these metaphors: it’s a meditation on mind, wishing for a story untethered from wishing, reflecting desperately on the sense of an ending that both enables and demands narrative, hard-driven by Johnson’s distrust of fiction-making and fiction-crediting faculties. Sterne, on the contrary, celebrates and survives on those time-and-timeless-Truth-confounding faculties, on slippage and sidelongitude. Both fictophobe and fictophile are enthralled with minds constantly led astray. For Johnson, that’s our doom; for Sterne, our saving grace.
We encounter Prince Rasselas in the Happy Valley, a royal nursery where all needs but the need to have unmet needs are met. Rasselas yearns for novelty, trouble, change: for, in short, something more existentially dissatisfying but more narratively satisfying than “Once upon a time they lived happily ever after.” The sameness of Happy Valley life, “one day and one hour exactly like another” (45), is intolerable. After years of deciding to decide, he sets out for a world of pleasure, danger, insecurity; sets out with sister Nekayah and her servant Pekuah to make empirical study the basis for his “choice of life” and solve the essential problem of human desire. Those jejune characters are hardly more than an audience, though, for the wisdom of their Johnsonian guide, the philosopher-poet Imlac.
Measure Rasselas’s antinovelism[4] by what theorists as distant as Northrop Frye and Nancy Armstrong have identified as the genre’s primary mechanism. Frye, in 1957, called “interest in ideas and theoretical statements . . . alien to the genius of the novel proper, where the technical problem is to dissolve all theory into personal relationships” (308). Armstrong argued, in Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987), that novels dissolve politics into psychology, translating public concerns to domestic narratives that, in turn, construct ideologies. Rasselas minimizes this translation into the personal-looking that would make ax-grinding appear otherwise; it seeks distilled essences. The narrative uses its young characters’ yearning for contingency and variety as a means to find contingency and variety’s opposites. What Imlac’s poet “is to exhibit in his portraits of nature” must be not only universal, but simple and unnuanced, “alike obvious to vigilance and carelessness” (62)—I’m glad he’s not teaching my freshmen! What Imlac would eliminate, Yorick maximizes; though he ultimately seeks commonalities (hearts and souls that vibrate in harmony), he thrives on quirks and puzzles, vigilantly hunting for personalities and explanations that the “carelessness” of standard travelers could never notice: the unintuitable, irreproducible, the eccentric and noninterchangeable.
Johnson’s characters are virtually interchangeable, their voices homogenized so as not to violate his ideas and arguments. Settings matter only symbolically; events incite philosophizing, not consequences. Imagine what Henry Fielding might do with downtown Cairo, Ann Radcliffe with catacombs, Samuel Richardson or Frances Burney with a two-boy-two-girl traveling party? A subtractive exercise in terms of authorial resources no less than characters’ vocational choice, Rasselas is purged of particulars that might divert attention from a thesis. Despite a veneer of cultural difference (hardly full-fledged Orientalism), it insists on universality; if “Human life is every where a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed” (65, emphasis added), there are no differences worth disambiguating between the Happy Valley whose sameness drives Rasselas away and the four dozen others listed on Wikipedia, as of April Fools’ Day, 2014, in Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Kenya, New Zealand, the UK, the US, and Vietnam.
Differences are trivial not just “every where” but “always”: “the province of poetry is to describe Nature and Passion, which are always the same” (60). If Persian assemblies “afforded [Imlac] daily opportunities of remarking characters and manners, and of tracing human nature through all its variations” (59-60), such variations aren’t delineated for us. Tulip streaks aren’t just unnumbered but nonexistent in Rasselas, which aspires no less in practice than in theory toward that “which will always be the same” (62). But sameness is the Happy Valley disease the journey sets out to cure (or at least treat). Unchanging sameness, in Abissinia or in a story set there, is a plague; fiction need not travel, as both of my texts purport to do; but, novelistic or not, it must move. A universalizing vision obviates the grounds for exploration; nothing’s new under the Imlackian sun.
Johnson’s Ecclesiastes-like meaning-structure, from not-this-not-that-no-nothing-on-earth to yes-of-course-in-heaven, is nakedly willful. The second (may I say less novelistic? certainly less dramatic, more sermonizing) half of Richardson’s Clarissa is likewise a chastening, a weaning: there, from sociable worldly attachments; here, from solitary imagining. First and foremost, Rasselas is fiction about the danger of fiction. In this, too, it’s like Clarissa, which mortifies in its heroine not so much sexual desire as literary delight.
Imlac and his charges deal with no material want, no violence to speak of (Pekuah’s swashbuckling kidnapper proves just another philosopher), no tempests, turmoils, terrain, or tummy-aches, no temptations save conclusion-jumping. But mental and moral dangers are ubiquitous. Rambler #4, Johnson’s manifesto on the novel, sees writing and reading both as macerated in anxious peril: “If the world be promiscuously described, I cannot see . . . why it may not be as safe to turn the eye immediately upon mankind, as upon a mirror which shows all that presents itself without discrimination” (Johnson, ed. Bronson 70, emphasis added). Proper fiction is safer than standing on a street corner not because a bus might hit you on that street corner, but because your mind is so fragile: “The purpose of these writings is surely not only to show mankind, but to provide that they may be seen hereafter with less hazard” (70 emphasis added). Looking at life is dangerous enough; unfortified, “the young, the ignorant, and the idle” can’t resist seduction by story, which “take[s] possession of the memory by a kind of violence, and produce[s] effects almost without the intervention of the will” (69). Passive, permeable, we’re defenseless against libraries. Ergo, Johnson plumps for paragons: Pamela, Clarissa, not Joseph, not Tom.
Yet Rasselas is an unrelenting exercise in disillusionment about character (about what makes characters of which Johnson approves, in Richardson, different from those he condemns, in Fielding or Sterne). Like Richardson and Clarissa, Johnson and Imlac believe literary pleasure is fraught with danger, and want it tempered temporarily with exemplary virtues (even though, in Rasselas’s insistence that we do not differ, virtue and vice can scarcely appear), and eventually, displaced from the temporal realm.
Imlac, who entered Happy Valley hoping for a “farewell to hope and fear” (67), says,
no mind is much employed upon the present: recollection and anticipation fill up almost all our moments. Our passions are joy and grief, love and hatred, hope and fear. Of joy and grief the past is the object, and the future of hope and fear; even love and hatred respect the past, for the cause must have been before the effect. (104)
“Living-in-the-now” is no preferable alternative; present-fixation is a cerebral vacancy associated in Rasselas with foolish harem girls (91, 124). Temporal motility in mind or text (which appears in Sterne as a salvation from bodily inevitabilities) is in Johnson our universal birth defect: “Perhaps, if we speak with rigorous exactness, no human mind is in its right state” (135). We can’t attend to the present without going stupid or contextualize it without going crazy, and that sad state of affairs is fiction’s fault.
In the brilliant “Dangerous Prevalence of Imagination” chapter, Rasselas’s own “choice of life” plot goes psycho. Imlac explains the etiology of delusion as a logical extension of our natural tendencies: a madman begins by
indulge[ing] the power of fiction, and send[ing] imagination out upon the wing . . . then expatiates in boundless futurity, and culls from all imaginable conditions that which for the present moment he should most desire . . . The mind dances from scene to scene . . . and feasts on the luscious falsehood whenever she is offended with the bitterness of truth. (133-34)
Fiction is the foe at the crux of this fiction; the Johnsonian mind’s strength, its striving need to know, is also its downfall. Like Rambler #4, Imlac fears seduction; the mind, a “she” whose possessor is a “he,” “feasts on the luscious falsehood” like apple-gorging Eve. If baseline human nature is a self-service deli, author-serpents exacerbate the danger by offering yet more wicked snacks. Pasteboard characters, scrim-like settings, plotless adventures, stilted voices, aren’t products of ineptitude but Johnsonian strategies to keep the core madness of fictioneering at arm’s length, to replace the feast of luscious falsehoods with an ascetic spread. The poisonous suspension of disbelief called, in this climactic chapter, “expatiat[ing] in boundless futurity” is translated, at the book’s anticlimax, into its own antidote: an approved version of “boundless futurity.”
You’re familiar with Johnson’s one-two-punch future-past-tense dismissal of Sterne: “Nothing odd will do long. ‘Tristram Shandy’ did not last” (Boswell 696)? That post-mortem was delivered (a bit prematurely) on Thursday, March 21, 1776. But is it not—how shall I say?—odd when a book begins by admonishing those who “listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope, who expect . . . that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow” (39), culminates 90 aphoristic pages later in a devastating exposé of any hope for a future that will solve the problem of temporality as incorrigibly insane, and ten pages later posits just such a hope as a certainty: “In the state of future perfection, to which we all aspire,” says Imlac, “there will be pleasure without danger, and security without restraint” (145)?
Boswell wrote of Rasselas: “Johnson meant, by shewing the unsatisfactory nature of things temporal, to direct the hope of man to things eternal” (qtd. Walker 35). The quest after a “choice of life” proves a puerile formulation for unsettled relations between the inescapable and the unknowable, and the puny aptitude-test-career-search the kids think they’re pursuing is eclipsed by the Biggest Future Imaginable (more precisely, for human minds, unimaginable). Radical disillusionment prompting a leap of faith is not an unusual plot shape (or “argument”); but usually the problem to be solved by such faith is not the very tendency to hold such faith. Is a wistful fixation on boundless futurity, defined as quintessential human madness, differentiable from Imlac’s expectation of immortality? Neither character nor narrator connects his “state of future perfection” with the constellation of fear, hope, imagination, and desire that has been deemed the peculiar and universal disorder of human minds.
Does this conviction of a postmortem epilogue to resolve mental life’s insoluble plot clinch the point Imlac has made throughout, or flinch from its implications as the intellectual ascetic goes on the ultimate binge, feasting on lusciousness he can’t imagine false? Imlac’s convincing skepticism toward his species’s ways of being convinced doesn’t extend to his own convictions. I would suppose Johnson was deftly exposing Imlac’s blind spot if I didn’t know he shared it.
Even pleasure will be redeemed: “In the state of future perfection, to which we all aspire, there will be pleasure without danger, and security without restraint.” Does Imlac imagine the state of future perfection that supplies the deficiencies of the present day will include, or bar, the pleasures of imagination, of luscious falsehood? His cautious verb is aspire, but his future tense will be is as confident as Johnson’s past tense about Shandy’s demise. His protegé’s verb is know: “How gloomy would be these mansions of the dead,” says Rasselas, “to him who did not know that he shall never die; that what now acts shall continue its agency, and what now thinks shall think on for ever” (149, emphasis added). Think, young prince: Wasn’t the unreliable way that particular thinking thing thinks it knows things the thing that made life so unsatisfactory in the first place?
If “The Dangerous Prevalence of Imagination” is a strikingly effective climax, with something of the power of Jonathan Swift’s amazing “Digression on Madness” in The Tale of a Tub, Imlac’s subsequent lecture on the soul’s immateriality is a sad anticlimax. The pseudo-empirical quest turns out to have been all about a priori faith, yet Imlac clings to the philosopher’s cloak of Reason; asked whether matter mightn’t contain unknown qualities to explain consciousness, he opines, “he that can set hypothetical possibility against acknowledged certainty, is not to be admitted among reasonable beings . . . If that which is known may be overruled by that which is unknown, no being, not omniscient, can arrive at certainty” (147). Indeed. But why isn’t this objection to the notion of sentient matter an objection equally to his “state of future perfection”? Only, I spoilsportingly assert, because he so desires the latter. But isn’t that desire the selfsame never-in-one’s-right-mind tendency he chastised? As epistemological critique gives way to pious romance, sardonic echoes reverberate through the catacombs, but I’ve brought all the irony with me; Johnson doesn’t want to hear it.
Afterlife is precisely, in Johnson’s terms, the death of fiction. Pleasure without danger is available only when the perilous probationary prologue called life and the stories that mimic it—repositories of our fears and hungers—are no more.
Johnson can afford a “conclusion, in which nothing is concluded” because the only conclusion that matters to him is beyond the scope of the work it undergirds—or of any narrative. The time-bound mind is set up as a stranglingly tight knot that Johnson cuts rather than unties by deferring to an imponderable time-after-time, when minds, whatever they may be, can’t be what they are now. Stumbling over temporality with minds framed for eternity, “no human mind is in its right state” till time is no more. But in their right state, “think[ing] on for ever,” will they know only a vapid, vacuous harem-girl present? Are sameness and change never again to be at odds? Will the need for novelty, so underscored here, be satisfied or eliminated? Eternity can’t be like Happy Valley, where only those “to whom it was new . . . desired that it might be perpetual” (40, emphasis added), or Heaven would soon become Hell.
In “The conclusion, in which nothing is concluded,” nothing is not resolved. Pekuah expects a nunnery to provide “some invariable state” (149); maybe we can’t blame her for that, since Gothic fiction won’t be invented for another few years, but honestly, has she learned nothing about sublunary life? Her hope is as silly as that of Rasselas, who “could never set the limits of his dominion” (150). Imlac and the Astronomer’s choosing-not-to-choose may seem less so, but human minds that “aspire” to “perfection” aren’t capable of being “driven along the stream of life without directing their course to any particular port” (150). The illusion of directionlessness is undone two sentences later: “They deliberated a while what was to be done, and resolved, when the inundation should cease, to return to Abissinia” (150, emphasis added). So much for not-choosing. The final sentence of Rasselas, like the final sentence of Defoe’s Moll Flanders,[5] does wild things with the verb resolve: here, it’s a past-tense prediction of future behavior, neither confirmed nor denied by the fiction it inconclusively concludes.
Johnson’s fears and hungers drive his work away from the illusion of “presence” that the most compelling fictions of its time fostered, through something more lit-critical than novelistic toward an orthodox but unexamined version of boundless futurity. Johnson deferred his dénouement way beyond the long run to the infinite run, where (I use that term because there can be no more “when”) Someone Else, he had to believe, would solve the problem he’d so effectively delineated.
Sterne isn’t that Someone Else, but he sure has an interestingly different way of treating the disease. Antipodal to Johnson’s project of “shewing the unsatisfactory nature of things temporal,” Sterne wrote of his Sentimental Journey: “my design in it was to teach us to love the world and our fellow creatures better than we do” (Journey xv). How different from Imlac’s unimaginable “state of future perfection” is Yorick’s climactic vision of “Religion mixing in” the homely quotidian post-prandial folk dance of a farm family whose patriarch believes “that a cheerful and contented mind was the best sort of thanks to heaven that an illiterate peasant could pay— ——Or a learned prelate either,” agrees Yorick (120), who prides himself on his humility. It is, as so many episodes are, a recognition of his own mental and emotional fallibility; he writes, he writes, “to give an account of” “the weaknesses of my heart” (16), not only erotic égarements de coeur, of which there are plenty, but spiritual ungenerosities; again and again, the “passion[s]” he calls in himself “dirty” (e.g. 22) aren’t sexual, but selfish: pinched-hearted, closed-minded, untrusting, us-&-themist. Characters aren’t interchangeable here, but intertwinable—to some extent through language, but more fully via nervous systems, cardiopulmonary rhythms, bodily fluids. Like Johnsonians, Yorick has “an imagination which is eternally misleading me” (120); but for him, that’s a plus.
Translation is the book’s master trope because it figures a quintessentially Sternean need to leapfrog over dualisms that trouble us at home as much as abroad. As Yorick records small linguistic hurdles and broader cultural creeks-to-ford, examples of French exceptionalism, ways language or gender functions differently there, we see that foreignness matters in Sterne because it exposes what’s the case everywhere: in Tristram Shandy, a brace of Yorkshire brothers who’ve known one another all their lives carry the Mark not of Cain, but of Babel. (Rasselas, au contraire, is like Star Trek: everyone speaks everyone’s language without a trace of an accent because there are more sizzling fish to fry than such pedestrian questions as how in [or out of] the world we can ever manage to grasp one another’s meanings [or ends] through so volatile and fallible a medium as words.) Yorick’s Franciful adventures carry into visibility the constant desire in Sterne to be intimate with the gapped strangeness of here and now, to feel the heartbeat in the hand you’re holding (and the synchronized beat of the hand it holds, which is, surprisingly, yours). The here and now, which Imlac finds always only representative and from which Tristram Shandy, knowingly on his last legs, needed to escape, is Yorick’s laboratory-playground, always noninterchangeable, never irremediably threatening.
Characters in A Sentimental Journey are webbed in a tracery of nerves, veins, arteries; the narrative maps erratic pulses and impulses (and the affective immaterialities these indicate), as opposed to the stability Johnson’s characters covet. Sterne’s narrators, in rather different ways, strive to undo the darker sense of fated mortality by capturing, in the arabesques of syntax and the jitters of narrative movement, the feel of a functioning nervous system, the ragged-edged electricity of organic life that not only counterweights the serene blissiness Yorick finds in harmonizing his sensorium with that of another, but also proves he’s alive and kicking, subject to the particularities and chancinesses that Imlac and Rasselas could (by which I mean couldn’t) care less about. Johnson’s yearning for that which is both immutably fixed and “alike obvious to vigilance and carelessness” finds its contrary in Sterne’s treasuring of mental-emotional-spiritual movement and those Virginia-Woolfy moments: evanescent, opalescent, effervescent, micro-faceted with a snowflaky no-two-alikeness, ephemeral as traces of disintegrating particle paths that indicate to high-power physicists evidence of something unseeable, contrails we see when the plane’s long gone. Rather than multiply anachronistic analogies, let me quote some of Sterne’s own (this is Tristram):
Time wastes too fast: every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity Life follows my pen; the days and hours of it, more precious, my dear Jenny! than the rubies about thy neck, are flying over our heads like light clouds on a windy day, never to return more—everything presses on—whilst thou art twisting that lock,—see! it grows grey; and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, and every absence which follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are shortly to make.——
—Heaven have mercy upon us both! (9.8.430)
If Johnson’s sentences are heavy bronze bells reverberating hefty thoughts over gloomy distances long after striking, Sterne’s play oboe arabesques (with, on the most sober topics, as here, a poignant ‘cello continuo), then dance away sprightly to prove they still can.[6] This isn’t merely a matter of temperament; it’s an understanding of how things mean, an understanding that requires attention to the yearning prompted by a random fragment of writing on a scrap of paper under a butter pat: “the difficulty of understanding it increased but the desire” (Journey 102). Yorick works from breakfast to 9 PM at translating that fragment, which involves a notary who, trying to save his own hat from “unpremeditable puffs” (103) on a windy Parisian bridge, knocks off a sentry’s; the fragment describes and incites a Rube-Goldbergian daisy chain of self-reproducing narrative desire that connects the notary, “inflamed with a desire to begin” (104) transcribing the life history of a dying man, with Yorick—who ends the story of the fragment by asking his servant, “And where is the rest of it, La Fleur?” (104)—and, of course, ourselves.
While Johnson and Imlac ponder and pronounce about time, hoping to pin it down, Sterne and Yorick juggle with it. Yorick’s “Preface in the Desobligeant” (9-13), inserted into his text as he narrates its scene of writing, offers a classically Sternean moment of self-conscious boundary-bafflement, confounding our sense of temporal orientation and showing that narratives are set in minds as much as in parlors towns or countries: “—Where then, my dear countrymen, are you going—,“ he writes (apparently aloud) in the last sentence of his Preface, as he’s interrupted by fellow Brits: “—We are only looking at this chaise, said they . . . We were wondering . . . what could occasion its motion.— —’Twas the agitation, said I coolly, of writing a preface” (13). If this chaise is a-rockin’, don’t come a-knockin’, they used to say in the ‘60s (the 1760s, apparently, as well as the 1960s); in a Desobligeant, so named because it can accommodate but a single passenger, writing is an auto-erotic speech act (“It would have been better, said I, in a Vis a vis” (13)). What’s erotic about it, though, isn’t only its titillating suggestivities, but its yearning to connect, the never-complete union, communion, with others that it promises and frustrates. In this book, Sterne’s more delicate, sly, PG-rated titillations (filtered through a performative emotionalism much discussed for its cultural and political aspects in recent decades) adumbrate a wish to undo boundaries beyond those of diegetic and extradiegetic. Sterne’s mirrors-within-mirrors respond to the same set of fears and hungers, the same temporality-mortality problem, whose Imlackian solution I ungenerously attacked a few pages ago. Consider, in this regard, what Yorick does with two French demoiselles Tristram Shandy encountered before him: Janatone, the innkeeper’s daughter in Montreuil, and Maria of Moulins, from Volume IX of Tristram Shandy.
Janatone, you recall from my fourth paragraph as well as Tristram’s seventh Volume, is a touchstone for a kind of carpe diem: an accomplished flirt who vitalizes his narrative, as opposed to the church dimensions his travel-guide-dulled readership expect: “he who measures thee, Janatone, must do it now——thou carriest the principles of change within thy frame; and considering the chances of a transitory life, I would not answer for thee a moment” (7.9.343). Tristram flirts with describing her “with as determin’d a pencil, as if I had her in the wettest drapery” (7.9.343), but scampers away from actual depiction, merely suggesting her suggestive figure (and that his readers go ogle the time-stamped original). Yorick doesn’t report encountering Janatone in the flesh, so we can’t gauge the truth of any of Tristram’s predictions—“e’er twice twelve months are pass’d and gone, thou mayest grow out like a pumkin and lose thy shapes——or thou mayest go off like a flower, and lose thy beauty——nay, thou mayest go off like a hussy——and lose thyself” (7.9.343)—but readers recall their naughty suggestivities to inform Yorick’s discussion with her father over whether a foreigner giving his daughter an ecu is occasion for Tant pis or Tant mieux, and Yorick proceeds to exemplify in other regards these “two . . . great hinges in French conversation” (30). Sterne can afford to clean up his act with regard to Janatone, because his prior book taught you to BYO double entendre. This moment in the Journey, we might say, is not set in Montreuil so much as in our memory of Tristram’s apostrophe to Janatone.
That phenomenon is more explicitly and radically so regarding Maria of Moulins. Tristram’s life-threatening illness is the backdrop for the temporal juggling act that introduces her into Volume IX. He recalls her to memory in a state of ill health—“I lost some fourscore ounces of blood this week in a most uncritical fever which attacked me at the beginning of this chapter” (9.24.443)—but in “the most perfect state of bounty and good will,” as he flashes back to the trip to France he recounted two Volumes earlier (two years, in readers’ time), during which trip he had been flashing back to the “choicest morsel of [his] whole story” (4.32.237), which he’s now, finally, about to recount: “For my uncle Toby’s amours running all the way in my head, they had the same effect upon me as if they had been my own” (9.24.444). Tristram’s depiction of his encounter with Maria, a mere page and a half or so, became an instant locus classicus for the fiction of sensibility and other sentimental arts. Maria, the poor melancholic who lost her wits when forbidden to marry by “the intrigues of the curate of the parish” (9.24.445), sits with her goat by a river piping “the sweetest notes I ever heard . . . the evening service to the Virgin” (9.24.444, 445); she’s a pitiable living symbol not only of sentiment, but of the tension between a religion that thwarts and one that consoles. The heart-rending question of whether she might regain sanity is the same question that, applied to an astronomer with delusions of omnipotence, prompted the “Dangerous Prevalence of Imagination” lecture in Rasselas. His mind, stratospheric with fictivity, made him the model for the madness that threatens us all. Maria, in contrast, is the victim of lousy ministry. Mutely looking from goat to Tristram, she gives him “the humblest conviction of what a Beast man is” (9.24.445)—is here meaning can be (in contrast to the universalizing Johnsonian notion that we are simply what we are). Her wordless music tells a “tale of woe” (9.24.446) that needs no translation, and that, like the memory of Uncle Toby’s amours, keeps “the kindliest harmony vibrating within” (9.24.444), making Tristram happy with himself and the entire world: “——What an excellent inn at Moulins!” (9.24.446), the episode concludes. The virgin Maria does for Tristram what she hopes the Virgin Mary will do for her. The politics of such homeopathic pathos may look very different to us than to Sterne’s contemporaries, but this is one aspect of Tristram’s sentimentality—we call it the blues: an alchemy of someone’s deep pain into someone else’s deep pleasure—that, with coaxing from hooked readers, Sterne put center-stage in Yorick’s Journey.
Yorick, disgusted with his success at flattering his way around Parisian society—“a most vile prostitution of myself” (112)—seeks Nature as an antidote to Art, a classic gesture of the pastoral literature that generated Maria in the first place. On his way out of France, Yorick detours to visit Maria, whose goat deserted her and whose father died to make her a yet more pitiable creature. Maria of Moulines (yes, oddly, the two books spell the town name differently) is, for Yorick as well as for Sterne’s fans, an intertextual tourist destination. (So much for artless Nature! That pastoral rests on a foundation of lies about relations between Nature and Art is one thing about which Sam Johnson and I agree.) To read Janatone right, we had to know (not Nature, but) Sterne’s other novel; to visit Maria, Yorick needs to know it. He emphasizes having read about her in Tristram’s most recent (and, as it happened, final) Volume: he first mentions her as “the poor Maria my friend, Mr. Shandy, met with near Moulines. The story he had told of that disorder’d maid affect’d me not a little in the reading” (113). The parson diverts himself to seek her out, “going, I own, like the Knight of the Woeful Countenance, in quest of melancholy adventures—but I know not how it is, I am never so perfectly conscious of the existence of a soul within me, as when I am entangled in them” (113). In Sterne, the affective effects of Quixotic narrative are “evidence” enough to sustain religious belief. The sentimental tableau of Maria-in-person, a spectacle of woe, is again a proof of that immaterial essence of humanity: after mingling his tears with Maria’s for a sentence, “I felt such undescribable emotions within me, as I am sure could not be accounted for from any combinations of matter and motion. I am positive I have a soul; nor can all the books with which materialists have pester’d the world ever convince me of the contrary” (114). This anti-materialist “proof” is no more convincing to those who don’t already agree than Johnson’s argument was, but far more interesting and effective in narrative terms. “I ask’d her if she remember’d a pale thin person of a man who had sat down twixt her and her goat about two years before” (115). She does; her goat stole his handkerchief (a mishap Tristram never reported), which she’s kept laundered and ready to return ever since. Yorick sees its monogram S. She is, in Yorick’s figure, a “shorn lamb” (115); he imagines taking her home with him, weeping at the eloquence of his own oration: “Nature melted within me, as I uttered this” (115); she offers to wash his tear-drenched hanky in the stream, dry it in her bosom: “And is your heart still so warm, Maria?” (116), he asks, prompting a relapse by touching “upon the string on which hung all her sorrows” (116); she plays the service to the Virgin upon her pipe, restoring her equanimity; what disorders her mind and what re-orders it are both figured as musical vibrations, as is human sympathy. Per usual, we can misread his vibrations as erotic (“of the first order of fine forms,” she has about her “all the heart wishes, or the eye looks for in a woman” (116)); but he sublimates eros into agape; if they could both get over attachments to unattainable lovers, she “should lay in my bosom, and be unto me as a daughter” (116).
I haven’t yet said, though of course you know, what makes Yorick’s treacly proof of soul more interesting than Imlac’s dust-dry one.
Yorick himself vibrates, drifts, dissolves, reconfigures like the wordplay that (in Shandy more than in the Journey) he loves. As minister, he’s always a stand-in, not only in twisted literary ways for Sterne, but professionally (as was his creator) for the Creator; prior to that, he’s the namesake of a Shakespearean prop (and, punningly, of Sterne’s home county); he’s never either fully or merely himself, and his status as traveler in the Journey underscores that aspect of Yorickism: a non-selfsameness, an incorrigible displacedness, unplantedness.[7] His death is memorably memorialized by a black page—a double-sided black sheet, really—early in Tristram Shandy (1.12.23-24); every time he returns in later episodes, it’s a bit of a narrative resurrection (not just a memorial disinterment like that of his ancestor’s cranium in Act V). When he shows up to narrate the Journey, published a year after the ninth and final Volume of the novel that made him its emblem of mortality in Volume I, it’s half a miracle. Yorick, his acolyte-in-laughter Tristram informed us, died in 1748. When Yorick announces he’s made a pilgrimage to a figure he read about in a Volume that begins by announcing it’s being written “this 12th day of August, 1766” (9.1.423), Sterne positions his most sentimental tableau in the midst of a mind-warping exercise in timelime smithereening.
Cervantes showed there are less grave ways to be driven mad by fiction than that of Johnson’s grandeur-deluded Astronomer. And there are more kinds of afterlife than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Imlac. The Journey’s Yorick decidedly is and definitively isn’t the Yorick of Tristram Shandy. The effect is even weirder than (if not so hilarious as) that of Don Quixote running across folks in Part II who’ve read Part I; nobody said in Part I that he’d died a couple of decades ago. If it’s quite impossible for Yorick to have read Tristram, it’s almost as unlikely to think any significant fraction of Yorick’s readers would not have read Tristram. “I have followed many a man thro’ France,” says Death, “but never at this mettlesome rate” (7.42.375); this time, the pace doesn’t matter, as he’s stalking a ghost! Sterne’s most lachrymose scene is trebly set: in Moulines, in the reader’s memory of Volume IX, and in the reader’s forgetting of Volume I’s unforgettable black page.[8] Does the Journey contradict the earlier novel? Sure, if earnest bone-picking is your pleasure; but contradict is a hard-edged word. Would reanimate be better?
Tristram, as Maria looks at her goat, then him, then her goat, asks, “——Well, Maria, . . .——What resemblance do you find?” (9.24.445). Feeling bad about making “an unseasonable pleasantry in the venerable presence of Misery,” he swears he will “never attempt again to commit mirth with any man, woman, or child . . . As to writing nonsense to them,” he continues, “I believe there was a reserve” (9.24.445-46).
No matter how serious he waxes, Sterne always keeps a fingers-crossed reserve for the nonsense we can’t or won’t stop committing; Johnson, never. You can tell I heartily prefer the frivolous-frolicking fictophile to the fate-fearing fictophobe. But my my, such beautifully divergent ways of getting to world-without-end, both stretching for the Italy we never reach.
Coda: Lately
Most of my fiction writing students have never, alas, heard of Laurence Sterne; they think of Samuel Johnson, if at all, approximately the way I did at their age, as a freakishly macrocephalic icon of an age called Reason, inventor of Lit Crit and periodic-sentence addict, not as one of literary history’s most fascinating neurotics. Is my perception accurate, that recent cohorts of fictioneer-wannabes, even the quite wonderfully talented, thoughtful, and accomplished ones, have more trouble than you’d expect (more trouble, that is, than their precursors) managing temporality on the page, even on the level of verb tenses: seeing that pasts and presents aren’t interchangeable, that pasts prior to other pasts need to be perfect? Well, we do live in a time not terribly concerned, in some ways, with time. The culture around us has been developing habits of imprecision and obliviousness about it. I don’t know how much of the problem I perceive in my students (assuming it’s not just a product of my grumpy nostalgia, having achieved curmudgeon status) is attributable to, say, a sportscasting ethos where “If he catches that ball, this game is over” means “Had he caught that ball, this game would have been over” or to local TV news that retains the label “Breaking” for stories broken days ago and house styles that throw out tense baby with auxiliary verb bathwater, resulting in a noncommittal, if breathless, ongoing participiality (“Meteorologists warning of gale-force winds squirming, as deflated hunkerers watch storm fizzling offshore”; “The President in Washington today proclaiming Americans deserve access to health care, opponents making their disagreement known”). What changes social media or other constantly-re-updating web venues may wreak in brains is beyond my area of expertise. But my students’ difficulty with tracking time (with seeing why caring about doing so might matter) has been bringing home to me, in fiction workshops as well as literature classes, how thoroughly narrative (written or otherwise, but written concerns me most) is always time-incited and time-structured, which is to say always to no inconsequential extent (if not always so self-evidently as are Rasselas and A Sentimental Journey) about time. Time is to novels, and to shorter stories too, what oxygen, or maybe even what dimensional reality, is to us. Every fiction is itself a changing thing concerned at its heart with change, a mental and a pentimental journey.
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