Skeleton Outline for Midterm Paper

Of Cookies and Hobbyhorses:

Memory and Association in Literature

After a month of exploring the literary history of the mind, we’ve dived headfirst into some interesting literature, and some equally fascinating topics in cognitive science. Attention, distraction, memory, association, the physicality of thought and the location of the soul; all have been covered in blogs and three-hour class discussions that leave me wanting more. As fuel to the fire we’ve read some of history’s great authors: Descartes, Sterne, Swift, and Proust, to name but a few. These authors became our “case studies” for the scientific concepts mentioned above. The one topic that I have become personally attached to is that of memory and association, the connections the brain can make without the conscious knowledge of the mind associated with it. When memory and association are brought up in the context of literature, one’s mind naturally jumps to Marcel Proust and his work In Search of Lost Time, where the author sets his story against the canvas of his memory, rebuilding a world for himself as he lies bedridden in his apartment. Proust’s famous trains of associations have been analyzed for almost one hundred years (the book was first published in French in 1913), but I propose that this authorial device began one hundred and fifty years earlier with Laurence Sterne’s novel Tristram Shandy. Sterne uses his narration style, his characters, and structural and typographical devices to paint an interesting and challenging portrait of association in the brain.

The most obvious reference to association in the mind in Sterne’s work is the style of narration itself.

Though most neurotypical brains function in very much the same way, no two individual minds follow the same paths of association.

In addition to the narration style, Laurence Sterne also applies the concept of association to his characters.

It is what Sterne does with these associations and devices that really interesting, though.
Proust used his reminiscences to build a world and contemplate the nature of the mind, while Sterne bypasses navel-gazing in favor of humor and satire. Through his chapters and volumes, as well as his typographical idiosyncrasies, he lampoons the nature of the novel at its most basic level. By writing Tristram Shandy as if it is being told aloud, or transcribed directly from thought to page, Sterne keeps his reader guessing, thrown about on a spinning carnival teacup-ride of disorienting associations. And what do we have to cling to throughout this madness but the hope that the main plot will finally progress, that Sterne has a final destination in mind. And in the end, even this meager hope is torn away, as the whole novel is revealed to be a cock-and-bull story told by Uncle Toby to the rest of the family. The connections between Tristram Shandy and the structure of the mind highlight the ridiculous, complicated nature of human consciousness, and showcase how far we are from truly understanding another person’s way of thinking.

How does your Thought Garden Grow?

Flowers, unlike the faces of human beings, appear to be the perfect size for imagining.

~Elaine Scarry, Reading by the Book

          This week I find myself with another reading I can relate to on a deeply personal level.  I grew up around plants my entire life, it's something that comes from being the granddaughter of a farmer and the daughter of a farm girl.  For many years I started my favorite annuals from seed on my windowsill: leggy, lacy bachelor's buttons; nasturtiums with their shield-like leaves and Nickelodeon-splat oranges; and most dear to me, the many-colored pompoms of zinnias, "Last Train to Lilliput" dwarf variety.  On certain summer days my mother would take my sister and I to the Michigan State University 4H Children's garden, which was my own equivalent of Narnia or the magical world of your choice.  Everything was beautiful and colorful, meant to be explored and enjoyed by people of my own age and height.  One bed in particular was a rotating "theme garden," that on one visit was a "wizard garden" devoted to plants with connections to Harry Potter and magic.  I planted my own version the next year, complete with a painted stake to label it.  It was my own place in the beds around our house and I felt proud of it.

          Years later with the wizard garden mostly left to attend to itself, the flowers around my house and around my life still thrive.  One of my biggest reservations about my family potentially moving to Minnesota was the thought of what would happen to the garden after we left. (We're not moving any more, thank goodness!)  We have a "green and white" shade garden on the east side of the house, complete with a Spartan helmet weathervane.  My beer-brewing dad grows hops on the trellis in the back garden, forming a gateway to the tomatoes, herbs, and zucchini we plant every summer to become caprese salad, chili sauce, and bread.  Three different varieties of lavender grow outside the front door, and my mother and I filled five-gallon buckets from my grandfather's peony bushes for my graduation party.

          All this means it makes beautiful sense to me that "flowers are the perfect size for imagining."  Flowers are small enough to be held in the hand but large enough to take up our whole attention when we so wish.  There are worlds of color and texture in a blossom, and the entire plant kingdom is so full of variety.  Reading this chapter, I couldn't help but try the thought experiments it suggests, imagining tiny horses and trees in my little finger or my forehead.  The wonderful thing about flowers and the imagination is that they can fit anywhere in the body you choose to imagine them, from a single lilac flower on the nail of your pinky finger to a stem of foxglove or delphinium as long as your arm.  Lose yourself in a flower and it can become a world, just as a book can.  Look close enough and think big enough, and the details can expand into amazing gradations of abstraction, like the famous works of Georgia O'Keefe. 

          The particular describability and imaginability of flowers makes them, I think, a perfect center for the focus and reverie of the mind we've talked about earlier in this class.  Scarry herself points out that poets often use flowers as springboards into more difficult imagery, as Proust used his madeleine to delve further into memory.  From botanical fireworks to mental gymnastics, how does your thought garden grow?

Books, Glorious Books

"[R]eading makes a full man, conversation a ready man, and writing an exact man."

~Sir Francis Bacon

How beautiful to a genuine lover of reading are the sullied leaves, and worn out appearance, nay, the very odour (beyond Russia), if we would not forget kind feelings in fastidiousness, of an old "Circulating Library" Tom Jones, or Vicar of Wakefield! How they speak of the thousand thumbs, that have turned over their pages with delight! -- of the lone sempstress, whom they may have cheered (milliner, or harder-working mantuamaker) after her long day's needle-toil, running far into midnight, when she has snatched an hour, ill spared from sleep, to steep her cares, as in some Lethean cup, in spelling out their enchanting contents! Who would have them a whit less soiled? What better condition could we desire to see them in?         
 ~Lamb, "Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading"

         For the first time in this class, I find myself wholly supportive of one of our writers.  My feelings about books and reading much resemble those of Charles Lamb.  Books can be friends, companions, escapes, immersive worlds.  Different kinds of books are suitable for different times and situations:  glancing over the newspaper as you eat breakfast, or losing yourself in a novel on a dreary November day.  But the real connection came as he began to talk about bindings and the outward state of books.  I believe, like Lamb, that worn and tattered books show that they have been loved, while pristine gold-leaf edges and immaculate leather covers only serve to intimidate and discourage the eager touch of the reader.  Many of the books I have personally known and loved show such signs of devotion and treasured schlepping.  The spine of my copy of The Westing Game is broken in multiple places from fevered re-readings and lunchtime proppings-open.  My sister's Goblet of Fire has a cover reconstructed and retained via Scotch tape.  Both of our copies of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix bear punch stains from my grandparents' fiftieth wedding anniversary party.  Les Miserables has Dutch lavender and a French rose pressed within the pages from a three-week bus trip.  And one of my all-time favorites, Sharon Creech's Chasing Redbird, will always show the rippled-page battle scars of being rescued from the lake one summer.  The states of these volumes and all the rest of my favorites bear witness to the love I have for them, joy not of Lamb's "thousand thumbs", but of two thumbs a thousand times over.  Books leave their marks on us, and we on them.  They give us new ideas and in turn store the memories of each reading.
          At the very beginning of his essay, Lamb quotes a contemporary of his and mentions an acquaintance who has left off all reading in hopes of being more "original," not digesting the "forced product of another man's brain."  My mind immediately leapt to Walter Shandy and his dictum that all of a man's reasoning must be his own.  Lamb, however, delights in this feature of books.  To read is the one of the only ways to know what another person's thought process is like.  I, like Lamb, "love to lose myself in other men's minds."  Reading not only gives you insight with regard to the mind of a character, but to the author as well.  In reading someone's writing, you can gain an insider knowledge of how their mind works, of what they value and esteem.  No other technology or form of entertainment yet conceived allows a person to peer so deeply into the consciousness of another.  And now it's time to change topics before I become paranoid about what my writing style says about me.          
          Samuel Johnson, from whose essay comes the above Bacon quote, also makes reference to the popular eighteenth-century notion that libraries were filled with so much "useless lumber," and also refutes this view.  He uses Bacon as a springboard to launch into a discussion of what makes a balanced wise man.  Johnson focuses on three main actions that should be practiced in equal measures: reading, writing, and conversation.  Reading exposes a person to new ideas and different points of view, conversation allows a person to explore these ideas and perpectives, reason about them, and draw conclusions, and in writing these new conclusions and reasonings are recorded for later knowledge-seekers to discover.  Keeping these three in balance prevents intellectual stagnation and promotes progress: if a scholar is engaged in each in turn, he cannot help but learn and grow.  Advice on the academic profession that still rings true today.  I wonder how many modern researchers and professors still practice Bacon's model, whether consciously or not.