Sterne's Strange Adventure
SIR,—In his review of M. Henri Fluchere's book on Laurence Sterne, Mr. Tony Tanner makes a con- troversial point. He says that Sterne is less popular in England than elsewhere, because 'the English . . . tend to prefer novels in which the relationship between the author, his subject, and his language is firm, clear and unproblematical. . . . The impor- tant problems are out there in the world, not in the mind actually experiencing the world and trying to formulate it.'
Is this really so? At any rate, the genius of the English language runs counter to the attitude which Mr. Tanner imputes to the English.
When I first experienced the full impact of English, a quarter of a century ago, I was struck by its subjective quality. Seen against my linguistic background of Russian, German and French, my English friends appeared to me either reluctant to make, or incapable of making, any objective state- ments about the world. Nearly all their affirmative remarks were weakened or qualified by such clauses as 'I believe,' I think. 'I wonder,' it seems to me that,' etc. Facts seemed to dissolve and to be replaced by perceptions and emotive responses. The English sentence, am afraid, your aunt is dead,' cannot be translated into any of the three languages I know.
Is this unique feature of English due to the under- lying philosophical solipsism ('how can I know what is happening in the so-called objective world? All I can know is what I feel')? Or to a profound in- tellectual humility ('Who am I to state categori- cally what really happens? I may be mistaken')? Or to a deeply ingrained egocentrism (after all, English is the only language in which the first person singular personal pronoun, I, is spelled with a capi- tal letter)?
I don't know. But, whatever its ultimate cause, the specific atmosphere of spoken (and written) English conveys that very complex relationship between the speaker (and writer) and the world which Mr. Tanner denies to his fellow-countrymen. After all, Locke, Berkeley, Sterne, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf wrote in English and could not have existed as writers outside the English linguistic ambience.
VICTOR S. FRANK
26 Hillgate Place, London, W8
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