Infinite Jest: Interpretation in Sterne's A Sentimental Journey

Abstract

STERNE9S A Sentimental Journey, through its ambiguous rhetoric, subversions of literary convention, and its complicated narrative technique, has provoked widely divergent readings by its critics. Gardner Stout has called it triumph of communication between his own [Yorick's] and foreign sensibilities, in traveling through France and Italy, and in traveling with the reader, and sees Yorick as persuading us that the benefits of travel derive from carrying on a sentimental commerce in the benevolent affections with our fellowmen and from participating in all the joys of a beneficent universe.' John Dussinger, in direct contrast, asserts that Yorick's happiest moments and main security are in the awareness that discourse is finally a solipsistic game of language and gesture; whatever happens on his journey does not really happen to him.2 The contradiction between these two accounts centers on the nature of the communication that is occurring in and through the novel, both between the narrator and the other characters, and between the narrator and the reader. My own contention is that neither Stout's analysis nor Dussinger's is wholly unjustified, that the former is accurate with regard to Sterne's purpose in the novel, while the latter more adequately characterizes his means. Their positions mark the epistemological and psychological poles of what Coleridge (speaking on Steme) defined in moral terms as certain oscillation in the individual's own mind between the remaining good