‘The life of a Wit is a warfare upon earth’: Sterne, Joyce, and their Portraits of the Artist

Abstract

Acknowledging Peter de Voogd’s dual dedication to Sterne and Joyce and my own interest in Sterne and Modernism, this essay explores the portraits of Stephen Dedalus and Tristram Shandy as each develops the aesthetic values that will shape their artistic careers. While Stephen emerges from a Dublin in conflict over politics and religion, Tristram’s childhood is shaped by Walter’s opinions and arguments supporting them — and the result of human quarrelsomeness, enacted on Toby’s bowling green. Relevant to their artistic development are the sermons each author provides. Yorick’s ‘Abuses of Conscience’ sermon introduces to the reader the Christian worldview wherein Judgment and Truth matter, but the death of Yorick in the early pages frees Tristram into a world of directionless indeterminacy and the relativity of all values, the Shandy world. Father Arnall’s sermon, on the other hand, is so intent on colouring all human desire with the taint of hellfire (compare Ernulphus’s curse in Tristram) that it frees Stephen from the vocation, although, as will become apparent in Ulysses, his life as an artist is permanently marked, as is Modernism more generally, by his inability to free himself from the aesthetic values of Judgment and Truth, which continue to exert their domination as the qualities that distinguish meaningful artistic endeavour.