Sentiment, Morality and Language : Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey

Abstract

Sentiment, Morality and Language : Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey In this essay, I examine the ways Sterne explores the entangled issues of sentiment, morality, and language in A Sentimental Journey. For this, I first probe the accounts of sympathy in the eighteenth century (Rousseau and Adam Smith) and the twentieth century (Derrida and Paul de Man). All of these thinkers noted the double nature of sympathy as a moral sentiment, or the theatricality and moral potentiality of sympathy. Then I probe how Sterne foregrounds the issues of the theatricality of sympathy and also what Derrida calls “the economy of pity” in his sentimental novel by reading the episodes of Yorick’s encounter with Maria and also Yorick’s imagination of the captives of the Bastille. Sterne also questions the supposedly close tie between sympathetic feelings and benevolent actions. The episode of the Monk, a symbolic starting point of Yorick’s sentimental journey, problematizes the status of sympathy as a moral sentiment that leads to benevolent actions; it affirms and doubts at once Levinas’s ethics of face. Furthermore, Sterne explores the representability of sentiment in language, or the possibility of a sympathetic community of the author and the reader through a linguistic construct. On the one hand, he invites the reader to sympathize with him (his text), or to read his linguistic face. On the other hand, he keeps the reader from identifying with him (his text), implementing the economy of sympathy through numerous devices like a misplaced preface, fragmentary structure of the narrative, or an ambiguous beginning and ending.