<i>The Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne</i> (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne Elizabeth Kraft The Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne, ed. Thomas Keymer, Cambridge: Cambridge, 2009. Pp. xvi + 203. $28.99. This collection of essays on Sterne, part of the distinguished Cambridge Companion series, is notable for three things. First, as Mr. Keymer points out, it is (to date) the only volume of essays to treat the entire scope of Sterne's career as a writer. Second, in addition to the current state of scholarship on Sterne, the essays suggest directions for future work. Finally, the wit and verve of the essays make the collection enjoyable as well as instructive. The volume begins, appropriately, with a review of Sterne's life and works. Ian Campbell Ross emphasizes the "ludic self-fashioning" that characterized Sterne's literary career. Much of the author's success, Mr. Ross argues, lay in his ability to appeal to the tastes of a volatile market. By "playing one role off against the other" (Yorick, Tristram, and Lorry Slim), Sterne was able to appeal to both "moralists" and "novel readers" alike. Mr. Ross occasionally presents speculative observations as fact. How do we know, for example, that "Sterne showed scant enthusiasm for the parish round"? There may be no record of his enthusiasm, but does that necessarily imply that he did not engage in his duties with some avidity? On other speculative matters, Mr. Ross is more judicious; for [End Page 47] example, he notes the "contemporary scandal" that blamed Elizabeth Sterne's mental breakdown on her husband's lack of fidelity "may not be without foundation." Mr. Ross makes it clear that the relationship between fact and fiction poses particular challenges for biographers of Sterne: "By the end of his life, Sterne had become an expert at fictionalizing his own biography, and at using autobiographical experiences as the basis of his fiction." The next five essays treat Sterne's works in chronological order—Marcus Walsh covering the pre-Tristram satires of A Political Romance and A Rabelaisian Fragment, Judith Hawley and Robert Folkenflik discussing Tristram Shandy as the work relates to the satiric and the novelistic traditions respectively, Tim Parnell writing on The Sermons of Mr. Yorick, and Thomas Keymer addressing A Sentimental Journey. In A Political Romance's dismissal of what Mr. Walsh amusingly refers to as "a storm in an ecclesiastical teapot," Sterne first evidences the philosophical stance he seems to have been born to elaborate: a resistance to "the systematizing of knowledge" that coexists with—indeed is founded on—a firm belief in incontrovertible Truth, that is, the truth of Anglican Christianity. For Sterne, as for other skeptical religious thinkers of his time (and other times, for that matter), there is nothing at all paradoxical in holding, as Mr. Walsh puts it, "the value of true interpretation while leaving it still beyond reach." Indeed, Ms. Hawley notes in Shandy a similar stance toward Enlightenment knowledge. Intellectual systems are objects of satire for Sterne, but they are also unavoidable habits of mind, and sometimes they touch on certain truths, if not the Truth. Sterne ridicules intellectual gravity, for example, without denying that gravity as a physical force exists. By demonstrating Sterne's engagement with the thinkers of his own time as well as those of the past, Ms. Hawley's reading offers a refinement on D. W. Jefferson's highly regarded essay on Sterne and the tradition of Medieval and Renaissance scholasticism ("Tristram Shandy and the Tradition of Learned Wit," EIC, 1, 1951). Ms. Hawley's insistence that Shandy engages with the new as well as the old is reinforced by Robert Folkenflik's essay on the work's relationship to other narratives of its time. We have long debated the topic of whether or not Shandy is a novel. Mr. Folkenflik demonstrates clearly that Sterne's work participates in the genre of "comic romance" and, therefore, presumably, is as much a "novel" as Tom Jones or The Adventures of Roderick Random. Shandy existed in an environment of "anxious and defensive experimentalism," Mr. Folkenflik asserts, not only with regard to the comic romance, but in relation to other genres (like autobiography) as well. Mr. Folkenflik would encourage more depth...