Temporal Fluidity and Disease-Time in Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Meg Jianing Zhang
G
iven this paper’s interest in temporal fluidity, it only makes sense to begin at the end. In the last episode of Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, Parson Yorick finds himself in a matter of great delicacy. En route to Lyons, the peripatetic philosopher stops at a “little decent kind of an inn by the road side” (ASJ OUP 101). Eager to tuck in to his “supper,” a “good fire,” and his “bed-chamber,” Yorick is dismayed to learn he will have to share his lodgings with a prudish Lady from Piedmont and her servant girl (101). The room itself consists of “two good beds…and a closet within the room which held another” (101). Tension arises when Yorick and the Lady must decide who is sleeping where, and of course, how they will uphold their good manners. During their meal, they draft up the following treaty: the right side of the bed-chamber, its cot closest to the fire, is naturally entrusted to the Madame. The canopy of her bed, transparent and flimsy, will be doctored with corking pins to preserve her modesty through the night. Monsieur Yorick is delegated to the other side of the room. He must sleep in his clothes, and not say a word besides his prayers after the candles are blown out. The lady’s fille de chambre is stuck with the “damp cold closet” (102). As soon as they are enacted, these well-intentioned settlements promptly fall by the wayside. First, the sonic barrier is ruined by Yorick’s loud “ejaculation,” “O my God!” (104) after hours of tossing and turning, unable to sleep in his uncomfortable outerwear. Then the curtains, the physical boundary between the Madame and Monsieur, are torn asunder by the Lady, who is reasonably disrupted by Yorick’s verbal eruption. The twenty-year-old fille de chambre, in what can only be described as a Hail Mary effort at preserving decorum, creeps between Yorick and her mistress, and inserts her body as a partition. As the maid positions herself accordingly, Yorick reaches out, stretching his hand forward to reassure the Lady of his decency, when: “I caught hold of the Fille de Chambre’s” (104). This is how Sterne’s final novel ends – not with a bang, or even a whimper. Unlike his nine-volume Tristram Shandy, whose plot seemingly goes on and on, and whose protagonist tells and re-tells the farcical trials and tribulations of his family, A Sentimental Journey ends after two volumes in medias res. Readers are not even privy to one of Sterne’s celebrated long dashes. The text’s conclusion, if such a word can be used in this case, seems empty, absent, and definitively indeterminate. That is, until one considers the actual final words of A Sentimental Journey. Sterne’s unfinished novel ends not with the words, “Fille de Chambre’s,” but rather with the proclamation: “END OF VOL. II” (104). Stitching these phrases together presents readers with a radically different ending, one
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