Between Errancy and Stasis: Tristram Shandy and the Discourse of Travel

Alexandru Dragoş Ivana (University of Bucharest, Romania) [BIO]

Email: dragosivana@yahoo.com

 

ABSTRACT:

Perfectly fitting into the model inaugurated by Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy offers new 18th-century insights into the syntax of travel revealed by the character’s mind and not by physical institutions of the road, such as the inn. Tristram’s travel is a product of his imagination, except his real journey through France in volume VII. As a static individual, he involves the reader, his real companion, in the imaginative errancy unfolded as long as he writes his ‘Life and Opinions’. The present paper aims at underlining two forms of errancy, physical and imaginative, rendered by Laurence Sterne in a figurative language that establishes, unlike all previous picaresque novels, a different journey topos or ‘syntax of the road’ (cf. William McMorran), this time rhetorically translated as travelogue, whose purpose is to educate the reader, not the character. Furthermore, emphasis will be laid on Tristram’s inability to preserve a linear narrative described by the lines in volume VI, thus escaping the strict topographical space of Shandy Hall.