The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Sterne is a rare bird, a bit gamy, and not to everyone's appetite. You may find yourself one of the many, including the most cultivated minds, who simply do not read Sterne with pleasure. But the Lifetime Reading Plan cannot well omit his book. It is original in two senses: Though indebted to Cervantes [38], Rabelais [35], and Swift [52], there is nothing quite like it; and it is the origin, or at least the foreshadowing, of much great modern fiction.

Sterne was himself something of an original. Born of an unsuccessful English army officer and an Irish mother, he was, following an irregular childhood, educated at Cambridge. He took holy orders, though of neither holiness nor orderliness did he ever possess a scrap. Family connections helped him to obtain a series of livings in Yorkshire. He settled down to the light duties of a typical worldly eighteenth-century parson, punctuated by "small, quiet attentions" to various ladies; a sen­timental romance, recorded in his Letters of Yorick to Eliza; health-seeking trips to France and Italy, one of which pro- duced his odd little travei book, A Sentimental Journey; and his death of pleurisy at fifty-five. His externai life has no distinc- tion. Everything that matters in it is to be found in Tristram Shandy, whose first two volumes burst upon a delighted (and also shocked) world in 1760.

If you can take Tristram Shandy at ali, the first thing you will notice is that very little happens in it. Not till the fourth of its nine books does its hero even manage to get himself born. It seems one vast digression, pointed up by blank pages, whim- sical punctuation, and a dozen other typographical tricks. Second, you will note that it is a weirdly disguised story about sexuality; in a sense it is one long smoking-room yarn. Sterne^ interest in sex is not frank and vigorous, like Fieldings [55]. It is subtle, suggestive, enormously sophisticated, and some have called it sniggering. Certainly it is sly. Third, you will find a quality more highly prized by Sterne^ generation than by ours. They called it sensibility or sentiment. To us it sounds like sen- timentality, the exhibition of an emotion in excess of that nor- mally required by a given situation.

Though Tristram Shandy seems a completely whimsical book, it is actually one of the few great novйis written in accord with a psychological theory. Sterne was much influenced by John Locke's [49] An Essay Concerning Human Understanding with its doctrine of reason and knowledge as derived from sen- sory experience. Tristram Shandy dramatizes this theory, and in the course of the dramatization creates half a dozen living char­acters: My Uncle Toby, Mr. and Mrs. Shandy, Parson Yorick, Dr. Stop, the Widow Wadman.

Tristram Shandy, unlike most novйis, is not about things that happen. As its full title, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, suggests, it is about thought, about the inner lives of its characters. It is a true psychological novel, perhaps the first. Hence its rejection of straight-line chronology, as well as its odd punctuation, which mirrors the wayward, associative, crisscross- ing paths of our minds and memories. Thus it anticipates Joyce [110], Proust [105], Mann [107], and the modern psychological novel in general, with its flashbacks, abrupt transitions, zigzags, and serious attempts to reflect the pressures of the unconscious.

Sterne is more than a genius of the odd. He is the most modern, technically creative novelist produced by his century. If Tristram Shandy seems strange, it is not merely because Sterne is an eccentric, though he is and glories in so being. It is because the book is actually nearer to the realities of mental life than a conventional novel is. And that is something that takes getting used to, because we so rarely stop to look at our- selves in the acts of thinking, feeling, and remembering. Some awareness of ali this may help you to enjoy Sterne^ strange masterpiece.

C.F.

59

JAMES BOSWELL

1740-1795

The Life of Samuel Johnson

If Rousseau^ was the first modern autobiography [57], BoswelPs may claim to be the first modern biography. His Life is the best in the language, perhaps the best in any language. It was published seven years after the death of its subject, in 1791. Ever since, Samuel Johnson has been the most inti- mately known figure in English literature. But he is more than a literary character. Many who have never read a line of his essays or his Lives of the Poets or his grave, rather impressive poetry nevertheless claim him as a familiar friend. He will never cease to be quoted, often by people innocent of the source of the quotation.