A Film Canon

If Tristram Shandy's authorial voice subordinated sympathetic to empirical immediacy - the writer, sitting alone in his room, sharing his mistakes and contingencies with the reader - A Sentimental Journey identifies travel literature as the genre in which this dissociation is best taken to its logical and comic conclusion. To this end, Sterne draws upon the travel narrative that constitutes Tristram Shandy's most contiguous, incongruous chapter, to explicate 'immediacy' as a highly associative, if not implicitly materialistic, succession of sensations, incapable of being arranged into anything more than the fragments that constitute this new narrative - or, rather, replace it, achieving the series of pure digressions that Tristram Shandy envisaged and, in the process, suggesting that travel literature is less indebted to the novel's rich genealogy of eccentric 'systems' as to the much wider, more amorphous, canon of half-baked thoughts - let alone provide any kind of sustained or insightful commentary upon people, places or customs, or the philosophical and political speculation that might be expected to result from them. By taking the sentimental traveller to this extremity, Sterne presents him as a figure whose sensations are so intense, atomised and narcissistic that he ultimately sees nothing, subsuming himself into his own armchair readership; a fusion of reader, writer and traveller that is beautifully encapsulated in the same mechanistic approach to the body that characterised Tristram Shandy, but with a heightened attention to the fingers that open the narrative with a direct message from the author, are used as synecdoches for all its major incidents, and culminate with a mistaken clasp in the dark that is sufficiently shocking for the writer to conclude mid-sentence - and, in its original incarnation, to lead the reader's own finger directly to the end-page. If Tristram Shandy was obsessed with the conventions of the page, A Sentimental Journey is obsessed with the conventions of the cover, in each case because they find themselves unable or unwilling to submit to, enjoy, or comprehend them.