"Alas, poor YORICK!": The "Black Page"

in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.

Reproduced from Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67), in The Works of Laurence Sterne. In Ten Volumes Complete. (London, 1793) 56-57.

Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-1767) made extensive use of special typographical features and engravings particularly specified by the author (as typographical features in eighteenth-century works frequently were not); his idiosyncratic employment of dashes, unusual marks of punctuation, and specially-designed plates seems to have been intended to fulfil a number of purposes. In addition to contributing the novel's contemporary repute as an "odd" or "eccentric" work, these features also tended, by their very oddity, to foreground the artificiality of Sterne's chosen medium. The use of such visual features to communicate what cannot, apparently, be expressed through conventional literary language, is another means by which Sterne highlights the inadequacy of the "novel" as a representation of "real" life. Much of the "oddity" and humour of Tristram Shandy derives from moments such as these, when Tristram playfully parodies, violates, or explores the conventional forms of the novel.

Yorick's death scene here is important in the context both of this novel, and of the development of the form itself, for other reasons as well. Within the context of Tristram Shandy itself, the scene establishes the death of one of the more visible and important characters in the novel within the first 70 or so pages of first volume; it can do so, in part, because Tristram Shandy features a sliding and irregular narrative that skips, sometimes with bewildering speed, back and forth through time.

Part of the point — and poignancy — of Yorick's death resides in the autobiographical link between Sterne's character and himself. Although Sterne is frequently identified with Tristram himself, he is also, in many ways, Yorick; indeed, Sterne's own sermons were published as The Sermons of Yorick. Like Yorick, too, Sterne's progress in the Church had been badly damaged by a highly political conflict of the sort described here, early in his career. Sterne's imagining here of his own "death" is not just a case of excessive morbidity: Sterne suffered from pulmonary tuberculosis (as does Tristram), and, while he remained optimistic always in his continual struggle with the disease, he knew that he would one day, and sooner rather than later, succumb to it.

Although it may now seem occasionally melodramatic in its description of Yorick's end, the death scene here was much admired by contemporary readers, and it stands as a relatively early example of the kind of "sentimental" narrative that was to become very much the vogue later in the century. (It is worth notiing, however, that there is a certain strain of irony and even humour in Sterne's scene). Such scenes were designed to evoke strong emotional reactions in the readers, who would, by this means, form an empathetic bond with the character who had raised these emotions. The desired end of these emotions was — as is nearly always the case with eighteenth-century literature — moral: empathy through emotion, it was thought, would help "train" the readers' emotions to "feel" the distresses of others, making them, in the process, more compassionate and morally involved. In practice, and as later critics of sentimentalism tended to note, however, "sentiment" became an end in itself, and the "enjoyment" of intense emotional reaction frequently shaded into voyeurism or a kind of emotional masturbation.

This, in fact, is one of the points that Sterne makes in his last novel, A Sentimental Journey, which features Yorick as its narrator and main protagonist. Although Yorick is unquestionably a sympathetic character, and his sentimental attachments are an expression of his fundamentally moral character, he is not infrequently seen pursuing "feeling" as though it were a commodity to be collected and enjoyed, rather than an impulse to be acted upon in a moral manner. Significantly, Yorick's own death scene in Tristram Shandy would have had a marked "sentimental" impact upon readings of A Sentimental Journey; it would, one imagines, be almost impossible for contemporaries to have read this last work without being affected by the awareness that they had already "witnessed" the affecting death of Yorick himself some 10 years earlier. To this may be added the effect produced by the knowledge that Sterne himself had died just prior to the publication of A Sentimental Journey.

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