A few dozen pages into Swann’s Way, after Proust has finished documenting his insomnia in clinical detail, the narrator dips a little cookie into a cup of lime-flower tea. Everybody knows what happens next: it’s one of the most famous literary scenes of all time, in which Marcel recovers his lost memories of childhood in Combray.
“No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory; it was me. I had ceased to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize it and apprehend it?
I drank a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the first, then a third, which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is losing its magic. It is plain that the truth I am seeking lies not in the cup but in myself.”
These gorgeous paragraphs capture the essence of Proust’s art, the truth wafting up, like steam, from a limpid cup of tea and some errant cookie crumbs. While the scene has turned the madeleine into a modern culinary fad – if it weren’t for Proust, Starbucks wouldn’t be selling chocolate dipped madeleines by the cash register – the passage really isn’t about the cookie. Rather, the madeleine is merely a convenient excuse for Proust to explore his favorite subject: himself.
And so begins an epic and slightly self-indulgent search through Marcel’s own memories, which lasts for several thousand pages and covers an astonishing range of topics, including the importance of jealousy, the epistemology of time and the funky smell of urine after eating asparagus. Of course, the sheer ambition of the novel makes the trigger for The Search even more peculiar. Why start with a cookie and a cup of tea? Wouldn’t it have been more fitting to begin with something a bit more grandiose, such as the fleeting sight of a long lost love or a famous oil painting?
Proust, of course, had his reasons for starting with some crumbs of flour, sugar and butter. There is nothing accidental or haphazard about the madeleine. To understand why, let’s take a closer look at Proust’s description of how the madeleine elicited his memory:
“When from a long distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.”
Embedded in these ornate subclauses are some prophetic insights into how our brain works. In 1911, the year Proust began writing his novel, anatomists had no idea how our senses connected inside the skull – the brain was three pounds of mysterious mush. One of Proust’s deep insights, however, was that our senses of smell and taste bear a unique burden of memory. That’s why he makes it clear that just looking at the seashell shaped cookie, which he’d glimpsed countless times in patisserie windows, brought back nothing; Combray remained lost. In fact, Proust even goes so far as to blame his sense of sight for obscuring his childhood memories in the first place. “Perhaps because I had so often seen such madelines without tasting them,” Proust writes, “that their image had disassociated itself from those Combray days.” Luckily for literature, Proust decided to put the cookie in his mouth. As he writes, it was “by taste and smell alone” that his childhood memories came flooding back.
Modern neuroscience now knows that Proust was right. Rachel Herz, a psychologist at Brown, has shown—in a science paper wittily entitled “Testing the Proustian Hypothesis”—that our sense of smell and taste are uniquely sentimental. This is because smell and taste are the only senses that connect directly to the hippocampus, the center of the brain’s long-term memory. All our other senses (sight, touch and hearing) are first processed somewhere else,. As a result, these senses are much less efficient at summoning up our past.
But this anatomy doesn’t simply explain how Proust was able to remember Combray in the first place. It also helps explain why his memories gushed forth in such an incomprehensible jumble. While some of Proust’s ensuing mental associations are logical – it makes sense, for example, that taste of the madeline would lead to the memory of Combray – others feel oddly random. Why does the cookie also bring to his mind “the game wherein the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little pieces of paper”? But this inchoate linkage is also a defining feature of memories triggered by smells and tastes. Because these memories tap directly into the hippocampus – they aren’t filtered first – they give us a rare glimpse of our hard drive in its raw state, before we’ve had a chance to repress embarrassing details or polish the narrative. A sentimental smell or taste, then, is like a great pscyhoanalyst, effortlessly peeling back the layers of the past.
In contrast, memories that come from our other senses – such as looking at a childhood photograph – tend to inspire stories that are more coherent and causal, so that we understand why we are suddenly thinking about Combray. There is no surprise, no serendipity. We know where the memory has come from.
What’s the problem with this? The reason Proust liked to be surprised by his remembrances, and thus the reason he was so often inspired by cookies and the smell of his post-asparagus pee, is that he believed such surprising epiphanies were more reliable. One of the paradoxes of The Search for Lost Time is that, for a book all about one man’s memory, it’s surprisingly skeptical of memory. Just before Marcel takes a sip of his lime-flower tea, he issues a bleak warning to his reader: “It is a labor in vain to attempt to recapture memory: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile…” Why does Proust think our past is so elusive? Why is the act of remembering a “labor in vain”?
These questions cut to the core of Proust’s theory of memory. Simply put, he believed that our recollections were phony. Although they felt real, they were actually elaborate fabrications. Take the madeline. Proust realized that the moment we finish eating the cookie, leaving behind a collection of crumbs on a porcelain plate, we begin warping our memory of the cookie to fit our personal narrative. We bend the facts to suit our story, as “our intelligence reworks the experience.” Proust warns us to treat the reality of our memory carefully, and with a degree of skepticism.
Even within the text itself, the Proustian narrator is constantly altering his remembered descriptions of things and people, particularly his lover Albertine. Over the course of the novel, Albertine’s beauty mark migrates from her chin to her lip to a bit of cheekbone just below her eye. In any other novel, such sloppiness would be considered a mistake. But in the Search, the instability and inaccuracy of our memory is the moral. Proust wants us to know that we will never know where Albertine’s beauty mark really is. “I am obliged to depict errors,” Proust wrote in a letter to Jacques Riviere, “without feeling compelled to say that I consider them to be errors.” Because every memory is full of errors, there’s no need to keep track.
What does this have to do with food? Proust’s insight was that the act of remembering changes a memory, that to tell a nostalgic story was to alter the story you were trying to tell. (There’s been some new scientific evidence suggesting that Proust, once again, was right. This is now known as “memory reconsolidation,” or what Freud called retroactivity .) The corollary is that the most honest memories are those you think you’ve forgotten, since they haven’t been corrupted by the remembering process. In other words, because Proust hadn’t told the story of Combray countless times to his friends, because he hadn’t rehearsed the sentimental scenes in his head, the memory still existed in a pure and honest state. This is why Proust was so obsessed with it.
But here’s the catch: such surprising memories are most likely to come from a childhood dessert, or a whiff of your aunt’s perfume, or the taste of an heirloom tomato. Every smell is like a mental worm hole, able to effortlessly transport us through time, back to another time.