Laurence Sterne was born in Ireland in 1713 and died in London in 1768. He started writing literature relatively late in life, beginning his masterpiece, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman in 1759 and completing it in 1767. From 1762 to 1767, for serious health reasons, he lived in France and Italy with his wife and daughter, an experience which led to A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768), a work which was admired and translated into Italian by Ugo Foscolo. The title of Tristram Shandy introduces it as a serious autobiography, but the book quickly turns into a parody of the then fashionable autobiographical genre (along with the epistolary novel): the protagonist whose life and opinions are recounted is born only half-way through the book, and at the end he is still a child. The work is also a parody of the novel genre itself, and its mechanisms of fiction and illusion. It is thus a kind of “anti-novel”, in which what should be the focus and attraction becomes secondary and of little interest, and in which the story is continuously disrupted by the author’s digressions and reflections in dialogue with the reader. The technique of digression is also one of the most widely used narrative processes in the Promessi Sposi. This temporary straying from the main plot is used in connection with the stories of Gertrude the nun of Monza, Father Cristoforo and Cardinal Borromeo. In Fermo e Lucia, the digressions related to the nun and Count del Sagrato (the future Innominato) were almost short novels within the novel. Another typically Sternian feature is the frequently ironic tone with which Manzoni maintains a constant conversation with readers throughout his novel, inviting them to reflect on the story and its narrative mechanisms, and even to doubt what they have been told. In the first draft of his novel, this “digressive” approach was more marked, but more discreet and measured in the definitive version.
Laurence Sterne
