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.