GHINDEANU ELENA-SIDONIA 1 FACULTATEA DE LITERE,SEC IA ROMN -ENGLEZ ,ANUL I

THE ANTI-NOVEL - LAURENCE STERNE (1713 - 1768)

Laurence Sterne (17131768) was an eccentric clergyman whose fictions were almost entirely atypical of the Age of Reason in which he wrote. Having lived in relative obscurity, Sterne became a celebrity upon the protracted publication of his magnum opus, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (nine volumes, 17601767). Although written at a time when the novel was a comparatively new genre, the work anticipates many recent developments and is now regarded as the first antinovel, violating all the accepted narrative modes, notions of logic, form, and, above all, decorum. Capitalizing on the fact that the novel is experienced by the reader as a printed artifact, Sterne played all manner of formal and typographical jokes with his readers, even including blank chapters, misplaced prefaces, nonsensical squiggles, and doodles. He particularly relished using puns and suggesting taboo words, with mock politeness disguising them with obvious euphemistic devices like dashes and asterisks, or substituting their equivalents in a foreign language, especially French. Thus in Tristram Shandy (Book VII, chapters 20-25) he contrives a hilariously improper situation where two French nuns have to utter the taboo words bouger (bugger) and fouter (fuck). The ingenious way that they (and Sterne) solve this problem of decorum is covered in the entry for abbreviations. Laurence Sterne uses in writing his novels a partucular tecnique, which consists in adding old elements, like the picaresque form, to new ones, like the association of ideas and a new concept of time. The former was introduced by Cervantes but within a chronological sequence of hours and days. Instead Sterne considers time as a continuos flowing not divided into hours or days, but ruled by each individual consciousness. In other words he anticipated the future theory of Bergson called 'la dure', according to which the mind has it own time and space different from the external one. Therefore what is important is no more a chronological sequence of adventures and events, but the psychology and feelings of the characters. . He seems not to give importance to what he is writing and lets his thoughts wander at large. But what makes Sterne great is the subtle humour, the irony and the smile which emerge from his es. He gives the reader a picture of what man can be when he is free from conventions and can give vent to his instincts, sentiments and feelings.

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Sterne also creates various confusions arising from bawdy or naughty puns. One such pair surrounds the senses of mount and ass , which are jumbled up in Book VIII, chapters 31-32, leading to this exchange: Well! Dear brother Toby, said my father. And how goes it with your Asse? My Ae, quoth my uncle Toby, is much better. At the time there was an embarrassing phonetic proximity between the words ass and arse , since both the Earl of Rochester and Jonathan Swift had already rhymed asses with passes . Sterne underscores the semantic difference by the use of dashes. Superficially Sterne is making the commonplace point that trivial frustrations provoke immoderately serious oaths. But he develops the absurd proposal of graded oaths in a bizarre and virtually blasphemous fashion by modifying a form of excommunication of the church of Rome, complete with the original Latin formula on the left-hand page and English translation on the right. Although the situation is clearly farcical, the vehement comprehensiveness of the ecclesiastical malediction (from the top of his head to the sole of his foot) is terrifying: May he be cursed in his reins [kidneys], and his groin (God in heaven forbid! quoth my Uncle Toby) in his thighs, in his genitals (my father shook his head), and in his hips, and in his knees, his legs and feet and toenails! Sterne uses the first person narrator, through which he describes what the characters feel and think according to the working of their mind. That is why great attention was paid to what Sterne called the character's 'hobbyhorses' or idiosyncrasies, that are obsessions and passions, such as Mr. Shandy's interest in names or Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim's interest in strategy, logistics and fortifications. Its syntax, its physical organization, its graphological aspect are characterised by an extreme eccentricity: the length of chapters varies from a few lines to several es; the punctuation mostly consists of dashes; there are blank es, black es, asterisks and even drawings. Time has a multeplicity of levels: the chronologicol time of events, the narrators time and the readers time. Another feature of the novel is the overt presence of the narratee who is often implicated by the narrator with his direct appeals such as the reader,you. Curiously, the novel was enormously successful, but contemporary authorities were sharply divided in their estimates. Dr. Johnson condemned it in 1776 as eccentric and shallow, prophesying that nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last (in conversation with James Boswell, in Howes, ed., 219). Yet the great French encyclopedist Diderot relished the works paradoxical qualities: This book so mad, so wise, so gay, is the English

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Rabelais; it is a universal satire (Howes, ed., 385). After a lull, Sternes popularity has undergone a major resurgence in recent decades, especially after the great Russian formalist critic Viktor Shlovsky argued in 1921 that " Tristram Shandy is the most typical novel of world literature" (in Traugott, ed., 1968, 89). Sternes other major work, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy , with similar eccentricities, followed in 1768, the last year of his life. When La Fleur, a Frenchman, is thrown from his horse, the narrator comments that although he availed himself but of two different terms of exclamation in this encounternamely Diable! [Devil!] and Peste! [Plague!], there are nevertheless three, in the French language; like the positive, comparative and superlative, one or other of which will serve for every unexpected throw of the dice in life. (The Bidet) Sterne teases the reader by not revealing the third word, saying: you may imagine, if you please with what word he closed the whole affair. Later, riding in the coach of Madame de Rambouilet, the most correct of women desired me to pull the cord. I asked her if she wanted anything Rien que pisser [Just to piss] she said. With mock politeness, Sterne comments: Grieve not, gentle traveller, to let Madame de Rambouilet p-ss on (The Rose). Like Tristram Shandy , the novel ends abruptly, in a compromising bedroom situation at night with a tantalizing, probably euphemized obscenity: so that when I stretched out my hand, I caught hold of the fille-de-chambres?. Everyone is left in the dark. Sternes playing with the taboos of his age, when full printed forms were impolite, has caused endless controversy. He flirted with the taboos, as he reputedly did with many women, but he never broke them, as Jonathan Swift did. Nevertheless, as the anthology Sterne: The Critical Heritage shows, he was consistently criticized in his own time and later for writing bawdy compositions to inflame with lust, and debauch and corrupt our youth of both sexes (in Howes, ed., 183). Modern scholars remain unresolved over the question of whether, like Franois Rabelais before him, Sterne was mocking bourgeois hypocrisy in a robust and healthy fashion, or was more psychologically involved and guilty of using exhibitionism and innuendo to take malicious joy in throwing back upon the readers dirty mind and lubricious imagination the responsibility for the smuttiness (Mayoux, in Traugott, ed., 108-9).

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