A post by Sara Aronowitz

1. The Town

In The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, the narrator’s uncle Toby builds a model town. Not a model of any specific town, but one that would stand in for many towns in the process of (re)enacting battles. Uncle Toby provides two specifications for the town:

The one was, to have the town built exactly in the style of those of which it was most likely to be the representative:——with grated windows, and the gable ends of the houses, facing the streets, &c. &c.—as those in Ghent and Bruges, and the rest of the towns in Brabant and Flanders.

The other was, not to have the houses run up together, as the corporal proposed, but to have every house independent, to hook on, or off, so as to form into the plan of whatever town they pleased.

The model town succeeds:

——It answered prodigiously the next summer——the town was a perfect Proteus——It was Landen, and Trerebach, and Santvliet, and Drusen, and Hagenau,—and then it was Ostend and Menin, and Aeth and Dendermond.

Imagination sometimes seems like creation out of nothing that quickly slides back into nothing, a game that starts when I close my eyes and begin to imagine, and ends as soon as I stop thinking about it. But there is something else to it: the bits and pieces of our imaginings usually come from somewhere, and after they are put away, we bring them back again later. Sometimes, the town was Flanders and becomes Brabant, and sometimes we break apart Flanders and years later put another Flanders back together. And through the time in between, something survives.

2. A Theft

I read the beginning of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy in my high school library. I remember sitting on the vaguely patterned grey carpet in the far left corner. The library became the first world of the novel with metal bookshelves shifting into city walls and fluorescent shadows becoming roads. If we take this experience at face value, this construction is our first kind of imaginative repurposing: parts of a perceptual scene are used in the process of imagination. I call this repurposing because the new, imaginative use of the bookshelves and shadows reflects not just a new context for the imagery, but a new goal. In fact, had my perception of the bookshelves been biased or skewed as perception, it would have made no difference to the use of these bits of scenery in creating the world of Tristram Shandy -- that world might just as well have been made out of the parts of dreams and hallucinations.
I still have the book, because I stole it. As far as I remember, it was an Augustine’s pears situation.

When I read it now, I have the sense of returning to or reusing the old images from the library, rather than building an entirely new scene. The spatial layout of the imaginary world seems familiar, and even before I picked up the book, I could call to mind some of the locations of pivotal events, the faces of characters, and the structure of rooms. Even the flickering, unpleasant library lighting seems to still linger in the scenes.

This is a second kind of repurposing. Parts of the imaginary world from high school have traveled with me, and I now use them again. You might think this is not repurposing but reuse for the same purpose: creating the world of Tristram Shandy. But I am not so sure -- there is no common reason why Uncle Toby’s house then and now should look alike, at least not alike in the precise and invented way in which both have anachronistically flickering lighting. And when I approach the book now, it’s not with the aim of re-entering the world of the book I occupied then. Instead, like the model town, I have pulled out this relic again out of a kind of convenience.

What kind of convenience could this be? Is it the same in the first and second kinds of repurposing? And is there some further value in repurposing beyond just convenience?

3. Memory and Imagination

A recent trend in philosophy of memory considers memory to be closely related to imagining -- but more accurately, recollecting is hypothesized to be a form of imagining. Philosophers and psychologists in this line of work are comparing what I do when I sit here thinking about the high school library, and what I do when I sit here thinking about what would happen if my house didn’t have a roof. These are two episodes of occurrent thought.

But here I’ve been circling around a different link between memory and imagination. The story of how imagination works doesn’t start and end with the occurrent episode: instead, there are links between imagination over time, even over decades, that explain why my imagining the book now and in high school have common elements. This, of course, is a kind of memory. But I suspect it is a kind of imagination as well -- in other words, that imagination is not just something that occupies consciousness, a kind of accessible thought, but extends between these conscious episodes. Imagination might go on in the background, even when we’re not paying attention.

Peter Kivy (2006) drew attention to how books are not just experienced while we read them, but in the in-between times he calls the “gaps” and “afterlife” when we think through what happened and what it meant. For Kivy, these moments outside of reading are episodes of thought. On the other hand, the bits of imagination that can be found between readings, the ones I’ve been talking about, are not episodes of thought. But there is a similarity between his idea and mine -- in both cases, the experience of reading spread farther out, beyond the time spent in front of a book.

There’s one more complication in this story. Memory, as I and many others have argued, does not for the most part preserve experiences as they are, but molds and changes them over time. The town probably stays more or less the same in between pretend battles, but the structure in my imagination transforms. Perhaps a fireplace I saw in New Jersey once is in the corner of Tristram’s house, or the Corporal is wearing the face of my neighbor. While I have the sense of coming back to where I left off, what I find now in my imaginary world may be pervaded by things that have happened to me since, and things that I have learned -- though I could not say where and how.

4. A Question

The story of the town suggests that parts of our imagination travel with us over time, and that this repurposing is not merely a coincidence. We might ask how this works, or why we should do it, or what is at stake. But instead, I want to look at this question from the other side. Could it be that certain experiences are valuable because they are good for repurposing in imagination?

Imagine a person who experiences the world, uses those experiences to update their expectations and beliefs -- and stops there. For this person, experience is only used once, and then discarded. If we don’t work like this, if our experience survives and is reused over and over, then our experiences have another kind of value. Experiences can be more or less accurate, but also better or worse for repurposing. I suspect this way of looking at things can begin to uncover why we hold on to memories the way we do, and maybe even why we might be drawn to certain types of experience.

On the other hand, Uncle Toby and the Corporal end up destroying the town. If I could, I might start over from the ground up on Tristram Shandy too, if only to see how it would be different.

References:

Kivy, P. (2008). The performance of reading: an essay in the philosophy of literature. John Wiley & Sons.
Sterne, L. (1859). The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy. Derby & Jackson. Online at: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1079/1079-h/1079-h.htm