Edward A. Bloom

Hostage to Fortune: Time, Chance, and Laurence Sterne

Less than ten years after Sterne published the ninth and final volume of his novel, Samuel Johnson asserted, Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.1 The judgment doubtless seems as odd to us today as the novel did to him and his contemporaries. But let others grasp the nettles of Johnsons displeasure and reexamine the grounds of his critical assumptions. As for Sternes eccentricities, these will no longer be troublesome as such to generations of readers brought up on interiorized explorations by modern novelists. Tristram Shandy continues to encourage analytical study because of its structural and esthetic inventiveness.2 The novel as Sterne conceived it set new directions, probing ways in which conscious and subconscious time contribute to an understanding of human nature, and of ways also in which life is shaped by chance. Tristram himself, the engaging hero manque, stumbles through days and nights in an unpatterned movement of transverse zigzaggery.3 As the central figure of this autobiography, he is vulnerable to countless accidents, interruptions, and digressions; moreover, everyone whose life touches upon his appears to be at risk. The span from birth to death creates an illusion of disorientation as the prevailing reality. Existence, never quite in focus, appears to be made up of uncontrolled events and meetings within a nonsequential time frame. As the narrator sets forth a rationale for his storytelling scheme: Could a historiographer drive on his history, as a muleteer drives on his mule,-straight forward . . . he might venture to foretell you to an hour when he should get to his journeys end;-but the thing is, morally speaking, impossible: For, if he is a man of the least spirit, he will have fifty

The Piozzi Letters: Correspondence of Hester Lynch Piozzi, 1784-1821 (Formerly Mrs. Thrale). Vol. 4. 1805-1810

The letters in this volume record the last years of Mrs. Piozzis life. Her correspondence from 1817 to 1821 reads like extensions of her private journals and may be seen as affirmation of hope and ambition as well as decelarations of frustration, grief, anger, and self-pity.