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By Root 1682 0

designed for a journey to nowhere. It encourages fantasy, not travel, and to climb aboard it is certainly to take a kind of sentimental journey. The rider of the hobbyhorse is in his own world, but the book Tristram Shandy is a hobbyhorse with a difference. In Tristram Shandy: The Games of Pleasure, Richard Lanham suggests that we should look at the novel as a form of play, like a child’s spinning round and round, involving the pleasure of loss of balance, dizziness (“we always feel the attack on our sense of gravity”). He would have us see the game as that form of solitaire that, as I have suggested, it in some ways is. Yet surely Sterne is teaching us how to ride along with Tristram, and this novel is a hobbyhorse built for two.24 The Yorick of A Sentimental Journey does not want to cultivate his own garden; his motto might be “Only connect,” and if nothing better offers, he will connect with the inanimate. The text that leads to this meditation is the result of the clock’s striking four and his realization that he has only been in Calais an hour: “What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of life by him who interests his heart in every thing …” (6:36). To see the process of human gesture bringing human time into existence, we need only turn to the episode of the Languedocian dance that is Tristram’s immediate example of turning a plain into a city: “——Tie me up this tress instantly, said Nannette, putting a piece of string into my hand——It taught me to forget I was a stranger——The whole knot fell down——We had been seven years acquainted” (VII, xliii, 430).

Something more than the slowing down of time has taken place. “Gesture,” as Martin Price claims, “combines formal clarity with suggestiveness” and “by its very muteness calls forth sympathetic imagination.”25 The passage from the Languedocian dance episode demonstrates the power of gesture operating upon the sympathetic imagination. A moment is sufficient to make Tristram and Nannette “seven years acquainted.” In A Sentimental Journey the solipsist begins in his désobligeant (an antisocial mode of transportation: a carriage that accommodates one), but through gesture his isolation is overcome. Yorick’s own analysis of the effects of gesture when he is with the beautiful Grisset emphasizes its superiority to language: “There are certain combined looks of simple subtlety——where whim, and sense, and seriousness, and nonsense, are so blended, that all the languages of Babel set loose together could not express them——they are communicated and caught so instantaneously, that you can scarce say which party is the infecter” (6:74). It is no accident that languages are associated here with the hubristic and impious endeavors of humanity and that gesture, despite the coquetry that often accompanies it, seems to be of an almost prelapsarian innocence.26 These moments are filled with the rich abundance of life and extend time.

In order to enjoy such life, despite Jenny’s gray hairs and Janatone’s changes, one must avoid the end as long as possible. The beginning, of course, plays its part in Sterne’s scheme. If we start with the homunculus—ab ovo, as Horace scornfully puts it—we may be some time in reaching our destined end, a suspicion confirmed by the birth of the hero in the third volume and Tristram’s delighted confession that the amount of life he lives between volumes will keep him from ever being able to finish the book. The attempt to keep off the end is responsible for Sterne’s conclusions in which nothing is concluded. The famous interpolated narrative of Le Fever flaunts Sterne’s endgame in its most blatant form: “Nature instantly ebb’d again,——the film returned to its place,——the pulse fluttered——stopp’d——went on——throb’d——stopp’d again——moved——stopp’d——shall I go on?——No” (VI, x, 341). Sterne intended to go on to write another two volumes of A Sentimental Journey, had he lived, but the conclusion we have fully carries out the spirit of his work. The conclusion, which to the shame of a number of modern editors does not appear in their