{"id":13121,"date":"2022-07-11T06:32:35","date_gmt":"2022-07-11T06:32:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.booksofall.com\/ja\/?post_type=product&p=13121"},"modified":"2022-07-11T06:39:08","modified_gmt":"2022-07-11T06:39:08","slug":"alas-poor-yorick-the-death-and-life-of-laurence-sterne","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/www.booksofall.com\/ja\/alas-poor-yorick-the-death-and-life-of-laurence-sterne\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cAlas, Poor YORICK!\u201d The Death and Life of Laurence Sterne"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the 250th anniversary of Laurence Sterne’s death, Ian Campbell Ross looks at the engagement with mortality so important to the novelist’s groundbreaking work.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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T<\/span>his year brings two notable anniversaries in the life of the Reverend Laurence Sterne, author of\u00a0The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman<\/em>. Two hundred fifty years ago, on February 27, 1768, he published\u00a0A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. By Mr. Yorick<\/a><\/em>. Fewer than three weeks later, on March 18, aged just fifty-four, he died.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Few writers have passed their entire literary career so knowingly in the shadow of death as had Sterne. In the work of still fewer, least of all eighteenth-century comic novelists, does death appear so prominently or so pervasively. In the first of\u00a0Tristram Shandy<\/em>\u2019s nine volumes, published in five instalments between 1759 and 1767, Parson Yorick, a fictionalised self-portrait of the author, dies. Three words are inscribed upon the plain marble slab that marks his grave, serving \u2014 as passers-by observe it \u2014 as both epitaph and elegy: \u201cAlas, poor YORICK!\u201d In Sterne\u2019s novel, these all-too-familiar words face a wholly unfamiliar black leaf: a gesture towards the impenetrability of death that anticipates the many ingenuities that mark out\u00a0Tristram Shandy<\/em>\u00a0as one of the most typographically original of all novels.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Tristram Shandy<\/em><\/a>\u00a0is a comic fiction but there was little humorous about Sterne\u2019s own relationship to death. As a boy, he experienced the death of four of his young siblings before he was himself eight. Having left Ireland for school in Yorkshire at the age of nine, he never again saw his much-loved soldier father, who died when Sterne was seventeen. Within a couple of years, when he was a student at Jesus College, Cambridge<\/a>, Sterne experienced the first symptoms of the consumption \u2014 pulmonary tuberculosis \u2014 that would haunt him for the remainder of his life. Much later, when travelling abroad for his health, he vividly recalled the very moment: \u201cI had the same accident I had at Cambridge, of breaking a vessel in my lungs. It happen\u2019d in the night, and I bled the bed full\u201d.1<\/a><\/sup> Small wonder, perhaps, that Sterne\u2019s comic masterpiece is punctuated by the deaths of the fiction\u2019s most loved characters. By the end of Volume IX, not only Yorick but Tristram\u2019s brother Bobby, his mother Elizabeth, and even that favourite of Victorian readers, uncle Toby, have all died, along with the courageous soldier, Le Fever, the account of whose death, excerpted from the novel\u2019s sixth volume, was for long regarded as one of Sterne\u2019s most sublimely touching achievements.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Despite constant bodily frailty, Sterne fought long and hard against his mortal illness, continuing all the while to develop the fiction that brought him European-wide fame. Volume VII of\u00a0Tristram Shandy<\/em>\u00a0opens with the hero\u2019s memorable flight from death:<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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NO\u2014\u2014I think, I said, I would write two volumes every year, provided the vile cough which then tormented me, and which to this hour I dread worse than the devil, would but give me leave . .<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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NOW as for my spirits, little have I to lay to their charge . . . in no one moment of my existence . . . have ye once deserted me . . . and when DEATH himself knocked at my door\u2014\u2014ye bad him come again; and in so gay a tone of careless indifference, did ye do it, that he doubted of his commission\u2014\u2014<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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\u201c\u2014\u2014There must certainly be some mistaken in this matter,\u201d quoth he.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Sterne\u2019s first stay abroad for the sake of his health, made possible by the financial success of\u00a0Tristram Shandy<\/em>, took him to France, where he stayed from January 1762 to May 1764. After a lengthy visit to Paris, where he enjoyed once more the social and literary acclaim that he had known in London, he headed south, spending time in Montpellier, and in Toulouse, where he passed the winter of 1763\u20134. It was this stay that provided Sterne with the material he fictionalised in Tristram\u2019s account of his own flight from death, determined to gallop<\/p>\n

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without looking once behind me to the banks of the Garonne; and if I hear him clattering at my heels\u2014\u2014I\u2019ll scamper away to mount Vesuvius\u2014\u2014from thence to Joppa, and from Joppa to the world\u2019s end, where, if he follows me, I pray God he may break his neck\u2014\u2014.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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The attempt to outrun death led to an improvement in his health that scarcely outlasted his return home. Very soon, he reported that he was “bleeding to death at York, of a small vessel in my lungs\u2014\u2014the duce take these bellows of mine”.<\/p>\n

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Sterne\u2019s second attempt to prolong his life by avoiding the rigours of an English winter took him to France from the autumn of 1765 to the early summer of the following year. It was this visit that furnished further experience of continental travel that he would make the basis of Yorick\u2019s narrative in\u00a0A Sentimental Journey<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The fact of the author\u2019s death so soon after that work was published gives the very title of A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy an added poignancy. As far as the reader is concerned, Yorick \u2014 one of the two characters of his own creation, along with Tristram Shandy, that Sterne chose to impersonate in the years of his fame \u2014 gets no farther than a \u201clittle decent kind of an inn by the road side\u201d on the French side of the Alps, ready to make an ascent he will never commence.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"