robert frost

Moraru Teodora-Bianca

IIIrd year, German-English gr. I.

The Psychological Origins and the Effects of the Hobbyhorse in Laurence Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy”

Defying Dr. Samuel Johnson’s statement that “Nothing odd will do long”, Laurence Sterne’s eccentric masterpiece, “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman”, an extended act of meditation upon story-telling based on John Locke’s philosophical theory of the association of ideas, became a notable forerunner of the modern English novel, celebrating the infinite possibilities of the art of fiction.

Undoubtedly, one of the most crucial philosophical literary works of the 18th century was John Locke’s “Essay Concerning Human Understanding”, which had a tremendous influence on the writers of his time and also on the worldwide approach to terms such as “the nature of thought” and “human consciousness”. In his “Essay”, Locke stated important theories about the sequence of ideas and their interrelation, which profoundly influenced Sterne and became the basis of much of the seemingly arbitrary structure of his comic metanovel, “Tristram Shandy”.

Sterne adopted in particular two of Locke’s concepts. First, the association of ideas, by which certain ideas, either by accident or because they have some particular significance, become so closely linked in a man’s mind that he cannot think of any of them without inevitably calling up all the others as well, in the same order in which he had prieviously experienced them. Secondly, the train of ideas, which is a more general concept of the mind as being constantly in motion, with the result that one idea automatically suggests another in some way similar to it, which in turn leads on to something else. Sterne uses this latter concept as an explanation for much of the seemingly eccentric behaviour of his characters and as a basis for many of the dazzling transitions of time and space which take place in the novel.

John Locke considered the ideas as being the fundamental building blocks of all human thought, also stating the fact that “all our knowledge and ideas arise from experience” and that there are no innate ideas. He viewed the human mind as a “tabula rasa”, a “white paper, void of all characters, without any Ideas”. This empty room of the mind is gradually furnished with ideas of two sorts: first we obtain ideas of things we suppose to exist outside us in the physical world by sensation, and secondly we come to ideas of our own mental operations by reflection.