English philology faculty

2. The contrast of town and village life in Laurence Sterne’s novels.
The works of Laurence Sterne are few in comparison to other eighteenth-century authors of comparable stature.Sterne's early works were letters; he had two sermons published (in 1747 and 1750), and tried his hand at satire He was involved in, and wrote about, local politics in 1742. His major publication prior to Tristram Shandy was the satire A Political Romance (1759), aimed at conflicts of interest within York Minster. A posthumously published piece on the art of preaching, A Fragment in the Manner of Rabelais, appears to have been written in 1759. Rabelais was by far Sterne's favourite author, and in his correspondence he made clear that he considered himself as Rabelais' successor in humour writing, distancing himself from Jonathan Swift.
Sterne's novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman sold widely in England and throughout Europe. Translations of the work began to appear in all the major European languages almost upon its publication, and Sterne influenced European writers as diverse as Denis Diderot and the German Romanticists. His work had also noticeable influence over Brazilian author Machado de Assis, who made use of the digressive technique in the novel The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas.English writer and literary critic Samuel Johnson's verdict in 1776 was that "Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last." This is strikingly different from the views of European critics of the day, who praised Sterne and Tristram Shandy as innovative and superior. Voltaire called it "clearly superior to Rabelais", and later Goethe praised Sterne as "the most beautiful spirit that ever lived". Swedish translator Johan Rundahl described Sterne as an arch-sentimentalist. The title page to volume one includes a short Greek epigraph, which in English reads: "Not things, but opinions about things, trouble men." Before the novel properly begins, Sterne also offers a dedication to Lord William Pitt. He urges Pitt to retreat with the book from the cares of statecraft. The novel itself starts with the narration, by Tristram, of his own conception. It proceeds mostly by what Sterne calls "progressive digressions" so that we do not reach Tristram's birth before the third volume. The novel is rich in characters and humour, and the influences of Rabelais and Miguel de Cervantes are present throughout. The novel ends after 9 volumes, published over a decade, but without anything that might be considered a traditional conclusion. Sterne inserts sermons, essays and legal documents into the pages of his novel; and he explores the limits of typography and print design by including marbled pages and an entirely black page within the narrative.[52] Many of the innovations that Sterne introduced, adaptations in form that were an exploration of what constitu es the novel, were highly influential to Modernist writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, and more contemporary writers such as Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace. Italo Calvino referred to Tristram Shandy as the "undoubted progenitor of all avant-garde novels of our century". The Russian Formalist writer Viktor Shklovsky regarded Tristram Shandy as the archetypal, quintessential novel, "the most typical novel of world literature."The great aim of Sterne was to give as true a picture as possible of real human beings as they are in themselves, not as they imagine themselves to be, nor as others judge them to be by their actions and outward behavior alone. This meant the shifting of emphasis from the external to the internal event, from the patterned plot artificially conceived and imposed on the characters, to the free evocation of the fluid, ever-changing process of being. It also brought him face to face with the problem of the limitations of language to convey all this; he had to investigate the ways by which a sequential medium could be manipulated to express simultaneity and the flow of human consciousness.Though the idea of trying to indicate the inner as distinct from the outer man reached the fullest expression in Sterne, it was of course far from new in fiction, as, in their way, the "romans de longue haleine" and the novels of Richardson had shown. The claims of the two diametrically opposed schools of writing were put very clearly and forcefully, both in practice and theory. The followers of the French anti-Romance realists sided with the view of Fielding that: It is two hours and ten minutes—and no more—cried my father looking at his watch, since Dr. Slop and Obadiah arrived,—and I know not how it happens, brother Toby—but to my imagination it seems almost an age.… Though my father said, "he knew not how it happened,"—yet he knew very well how it happened;—and at the instance he spoke it, was pre-determined in his mind to give my Uncle Toby a clear account of the matter by a metaphysical dissertation upon the subject of duration and its simple modes, in order to show my Uncle Toby by what mechanism and mensurations in the brain it came to pass, that the rapid succession of their ideas, and the eternal scampering of the discourse from one thing to another, since Dr. Slop had come into the room, had lengthened out so short a period to so inconceivable an extent.—"I know not how it happens—cried my father,—but it seems an age."—'Tis owing entirely, quoth my Uncle Toby, to the succession of our ideas. [Walter Shandy continues a little later]: To understand what time is aright, without which we never can comprehend infinity, insomuch as one is a portion of the other—we ought seriously to sit down and consider what idea it is we have of duration, so as to give a satisfactory account how we came by it.—What is that to anybody? quoth my Uncle Toby. For if you will turn your eyes inwards upon your mind, continued my father, and observe attentively, you will perceive, brother, that whilst you and I are talking together, and thinking, and smoking our pipes, or whilst we receive successively ideas in our minds; we know that we do exist, and so estimate the existence, or the continuation of the existence of ourselves, or anything else, commensurate to the succession of any ideas in our minds, or any such other thing coexisting with our thinking—and so according to that preconceived—You puzzle me to death, cried my Uncle Toby.—'Tis owing to this, replied my father, that in our computations of time, we are so used to minutes, hours, weeks, and months—and of clocks (I wish there was not a clock in the kingdom) to measure out their several portions to us, and to those who belong to us—that 'twill be well, if in time to come, the succession of our ideas will be of any use or service to us at all. Now, whether we observe it or no, continued my father, in every sound man's head there is a regular succession of ideas of one sort or other, which follow each other in train.
Just as the comments of Tristram are not extraneous to the book and are not therefore to be taken as from an intrusive author, the short stories inset into the novel are not of the excrescent kind such as mar, technically speaking, the form of so many earlier and later novels. The tale of Le Fever or Trim's unfinished story of the King of Bohemia are part of the fabric of the main narrative into which they are inserted. Their removal would leave an irreplaceable gap in the structure. They throw light, and are indeed the best comment on the character of Trim and Uncle Toby; even Slawkenbergius's tale of the noses has the effect of strengthening the impression of Walter Shandy's intellectual foibles, and confirming a central double entendre. These tales offer interesting examples of the technique of "Chinese boxes." Sterne writes a book about Tristram Shandy writing his life in which he, in the year 1760, relates how Trim in 1723 tells the story of Le Fever's death in 1706; or how Walter Shandy translated for the benefit of his brother the work of Slawkenbergius on noses in the course of which there is given the story of Julia and Diego. One is reminded of Gide writing a novel, Les Faux-Monnayeurs, about a novelist, Edouard, who is writing a novel called Les Faux-Monnayeurs about a novelist who is writing a novel the title of which, mercifully, we are not given, but which perhaps we can guess. Sterne was one of the earliest writers to realize that literature is one of the time arts, and is therefore limited by the very nature of its medium, language. The writing of a novel involves, in consequence, a number of temporal factors and conventions which can be exploited in various ways. Little wonder that Diderot, whose article on "Composition" for the Encyclopedie furnished many of the ideas of Lessing's "Laocoön," was so deeply impressed and influenced by Sterne; little wonder that Lessing himself, the critic who first adequately analyzed the essential differences between the space and time arts, proclaimed that he would have given ten years of his own life to prolong Steme's by one. Mrs. Montague wrote that Sterne "really believes his book to be the finest thing the age has produced." He was perhaps not so far out in his belief. Not till modern times do we find so intelligent an attempt to consider the aesthetic and philosophic implications of the novel. Not till Gide and Proust and James and Joyce and Virginia Woolf is there any comparable picture in fiction of the process of living, of life caught in the very act of being. Sterne, moreover, paralleled this with his picture of himself in the process of creating his book. There is in Tristram Shandy a threefold development: the characters as they evolve; the author as he works out his conception; and the reader whom Sterne is educating to understand fiction aright.