The introduction (by Tim Parnell) strikes me as oddly nervous in presenting Sterne’s work to contemporary readers, insisting on “our modern sense of the incompatibility of satire and sentiment,” and fearing that “modern readers are likely to discover bathos and mawkishness in the representations of tearful familial affection or pathetic spectacles of virtue that are common currency in … mid-eighteenth-century fiction.”
I read A Sentimental Journey in an excellent 2003 Oxford World’s Classics edition, which presents the work with other, related writings by Sterne. Yorick / Sterne is exquisitely and intrinsically unreliable: a wonderfully slippery fictional construct. Travel literature traditionally relies on the reliability of the narrator as witness. This complicated and ambiguous first-person / third-person narrator plays a huge role in the success of the narrative. He narrates the tale of his travels in the person of “Mr Yorick”-on the one hand, a transparent alter ego (Sterne had published his own sermons as The Sermons of Mr Yorick), yet, on the other, a reference back to the parson character in his breakthrough work, Tristram Shandy (1759-67). The book was Sterne’s last, published less than a month before his death from tuberculosis in 1768, and it draws on a journey he himself made through France and Italy in 1762, in search for a climate that would benefit his health. It’s salutary, as always, to remember quite how postmodern premodern literature can be. I hadn’t read any Sterne for years, but revisiting A Sentimental Journey reminded me of how hilarious he is, and how sophisticated and experimental.
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