Laurence Sterne
1713–1768 · England
“I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me.”
Peak-work percentile in the canon.
The lineage through Laurence Sterne
Drew From(3)
who shaped Laurence Sterne
- Tristram Shandy's digressive, bawdy, encyclopedic riot is pure Rabelais — Sterne called him his favorite author and meant it as a pedigree
- Sterne even wrote a "Rabelaisian Fragment" as a dry run before this book; the comic DNA carried straight over
- Walter Shandy's warning not to "look into Rabelais" is Sterne pointing at the very well he drank from — read Gargantua and Pantagruel and you'll know exactly what kind of madness he inherited
via Don Quixote
- The "Cervantick" humor Sterne advertised is Cervantes' — read Don Quixote and you'll catch the in-jokes, the Rosinante and Knight-of-the-Woeful-Countenance references scattered through Tristram Shandy
- Uncle Toby is Sterne's Quixote: the same lovable monomania, the same hobby-horse logic
- Tristram's habit of talking back to his own book begins in Don Quixote Part 2, where Cervantes first taught a novel to know it was a novel
- Tristram Shandy sits squarely in the satiric line of Swift, alongside Rabelais and Cervantes — Gulliver's Travels had made learned-wit comedy the English standard
- Read Swift first for the satirical tradition Sterne inherited, then watch him push it to the edge of the form
Inspired(1)
who Laurence Sterne shaped
via War and Peace
- Tolstoy named Sterne among the writers who most strongly impressed him early on, and translated A Sentimental Journey as a young man
- Sterne's narrator who can't stop interrupting himself — looping back, philosophizing, refusing to just tell the story — is the seed of the great digressive engine in War and Peace
- The shape goes forward: those author-intruding swerves become Tolstoy's long excursions on history and free will
Famous Quotes
“I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, had minded what they were about when they begot me.”
“Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine;—they are the life, the soul of reading;—take them out of this book for instance,—you might as well take the book along with them.”
“Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine — they are the life, the soul of reading.”
“Go,—says he, lifting up the sash... go, poor devil, get thee gone, why should I hurt thee?—This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me.”
About Laurence Sterne
Anglo-Irish novelist and Anglican clergyman, author of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, one of the most inventive novels ever written. Its digressions, blank pages, and typographic experiments anticipate modernism by 150 years. He was also a witty conversationalist and popular figure in London and Parisian literary circles.