The Odd Couple

Laurence Sterne’s borrowings from John Norris of Bemerton, overlooked by previous scholars, establish this Anglican Neoplatonist (1657–1711) as one of Sterne’s most important sources. The borrowings establish key elements of the text (e.g., explicating the “riddles and mysteries” passage made much of by modern critics), and Norris’s opposition to John Locke opens to Sterne studies the distinct possibility that epistemological approaches to his writings take us in the wrong direction. Sterne’s texts, in fact, respond to an ontological approach better than the excessive attention given to Sterne’s commonplace allusions to Locke. Norris’s presence in both Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey makes evident that Sterne never abandoned his religious faith in eighteenth-century Anglicanism or his pastoral role when he turned to fiction in the last decade of his life.