Tristram Shandy and John Locke

Question: Does Tristram Shandy’s overall narration agree with Locke’s description of how ideas are associated?

Quote 1: “Some of our ideas have a natural correspondence and connexion one with another: it is the office and excellency of our reason to trace these, and hold them together in that union and correspondence which is founded in their peculiar beings. Besides this, there is another connexion of ideas wholly owing to chance or custom. Ideas that in themselves are not all of kin, come to be so united in some men's minds, that it is very hard to separate them; they always keep in company, and the one no sooner at any time comes into the understanding, but its associate appears with it; and if they are more than two which are thus united, the whole gang, always inseparable, show themselves together.” (Locke)

Quote 2: “For if you will turn your eyes inwards upon your mind, continued my father, and observe attentively, you will perceive, brother, that whilst you and I are talking together, and thinking, and smoking our pipes, or whilst we receive successively ideas in our minds, we know that we do exist, and so we estimate the existence, or the continuation of the existence of ourselves, or any thing else, commensurate to the succession of any ideas in our minds, the duration of ourselves, or any such other thing co-existing with our thinking…” (Sterne)

 In John Locke’s Of the Association of Ideas Locke describes in detail the different ways that ideas can be tied to one another and engrained or lost in one’s memory. The association of ideas can occur either via “a natural correspondence and connexion one with another” or they can be a “connexion of ideas wholly owing to chance or custom” (Locke). Both of these ways for ideas to be associated make sense since similar ideas will naturally bring about one another and things such as mnemonics can be very dissimilar to their targeted meaning yet bring about of flood of ideas. Tristram Shandy’s narration is essentially a stream of consciousness (/unconsciousness? considering he has not been born throughout part of the novel) that digresses due to similar and dissimilar associations of his ideas. Last week we described Tristram as a narrator as extraordinarily distracted, which could still be argued, but after reading Locke’s piece for this week I can also see how it could be argued that Tristram Shandy has a unique association of ideas that do not necessarily have to relate in the reader’s mind or with the order in which they happened, but can still make complete sense to himself (the one actually experiencing the stream of thought). Tristram frequently breaks the third wall and acknowledges the reader and his digressions showing that he understands how his narration may not make sense to his audience. If Tristram were truly just distracted he would not have the same cognitive awareness of the un-relatedness of his ideas. I found the second quote to be an interesting commentary on how ideas are associated with time, not necessarily in a chronological sense, but as a way to recognize one’s existence: “so we estimate the existence, or the continuation of the existence of ourselves, or any thing else, commensurate to the succession of any ideas in our minds, the duration of ourselves, or any such other thing co-existing with our thinking” (Sterne). Tristram’s digressions and ideas typically occur out of order or in a nonsensical fashion. This further emphasizes that ideas are related more so by how one associates them and the similar meanings one derives from them, versus how we would place their occurrence on a timeline.