Tristram Shandy: A Sentimental Journey Riding a Hobbyhorse

This paper reads Tristram Shandy around the issue of hobbyhorse, Sterne's main contribution to novelistic techniques as well as his insightful understanding of the modern condition. First, Sterne represents his characters according to the principle of hobbyhorse, declaring "I will draw my uncle Toby's character from his HOBBY-HORSE." Gradually distancing himself from the Juvenalian satiric mode as well as Henry Fielding's grand narrative and Samuel Richardson's psychological realism, as is seen in the early episode of Yorick's death, Sterne suggests that the best way to represent his characters lies in describing their hobbyhorses. Sterne's foregrounding of hobbyhorse is linked with his embrace of madness as part of the modern identity. He accepts that hobbyhorse-riding, a quirky and mad habit of mind or behavior, is indispensable for some people, like Uncle Toby, to survive and get along with their otherwise unbearable lives. Uncle Toby's hobbyhorse of waging mock battles in the bowling green saves him from the perplexing real world of language and sexuality, while the fictionality of his hobbyhorsical world is exposed by Widow Wadman. Since a hobbyhorse is by definition a world of private pleasure and eccentricity, sentimentalism comes along to bridge the two virtually incommensurable hobbyhorsical world in place of linguistic communication. Yet if Tristram Shandy fully stages sentimentalism, a cardinal part of hobbyhorse riding, it also offers an awareness of it, which is a significant development in the cult of sentimentalism in the eighteenth century. Tristram Shandy performs a version of sentimental journey where each character rides his hobbyhorse and the reader is invited to ride his/her own hobbyhorse.