PROUSTEAN MEMORY
This seven-year adventure/struggle/ordeal (call it what you will) with Marcel Proust’s great work is finally drawing to a close. Once again I have the task of presenting a paper – this time a biographical study of the author. But since this ground has been thoroughly covered by other members in prior years – and since I’m sure you don’t want to hear it repeated – I have decided, with your acquiescence, to spend my allotted time on one of the main and one of the unique themes of the seven-volume novel.
That theme is involuntary memory – a conception of human memory in which sensual stimulus triggers recollections without conscious effort. It is the binary opposite of voluntary memory, the deliberate effort to recall the past. Marcel Proust coined the term and it is sometimes referred to as “Proustean Memory”.
Proust contrasts involuntary memory with voluntary memory. The latter designates memories retrieved by “intelligence”, that is memories produced when we put conscious effort into remembering events, people and places. Proust’s narrator laments that voluntary memories are inevitably partial, and do not bear the “essence” of the past. Involuntary memories, on the other hand, function similarly to the phenomenon known as déjà vu: they possess a vivid and plenary sensory immediacy that seems to obliterate the passage of time between the original event and the re-experience.
In the opening pages the principle becomes clear to the narrator that the past which seems lost because it is time-elapsed, is in fact, not lost. It is within us, and ready, under the appropriate circumstances and the appropriate stimuli to return as the present. In each of us the past is something permanent and unchangeable. Time is constantly destroying the present. But memory is able to restore the past, because it is unaffected by time.
Proust explains early in his novel that there are for him two ways in particular by which the past can be recalled. The first, on which he will rely a great deal, and which he acknowledges to be, of the two, less sure and less sound, is the willful memory of the intelligence. La mémoire volontaire, as he calls it, seems to be the rationalistic, the deductive method which is based on documents, testimonials, and ratiocination. When Marcel evokes a typical summer evening at Combray, when the family spends the last hours of daylight in the garden, we have a good example of willful memory. Habitual acts are easy to recall: his grandmother’s walk among the flowers (even when it rains); the ringing of the gate bell which invariably announces the arrival of Swann, a neighbor never accompanied by his wife; the gratuitous speculation as to who is at the gate, although everyone knows it is Swann; the boy’s nightly departure from the family circle when he goes upstairs to his room; and his waiting there, ready for bed, for his mother’s good night kiss.
Then, after describing the evening scenes at Combray, the narrator evokes one in particular: the traumatic evening that marked an important change in his life and which will be recalled at intervals throughout the narrative. It was an evening when Swann dined with Marcel’s family, and his mother had said she would not be free to kiss him good night. Unable to accept this privation, the boy, almost ill with grief, sends a message by the housekeeper to his mother at table. But she refuses to come. He waits until he hears Swann leave the house, and then he posts himself at the top of the stairway, to catch his mother’s attention. Unexpectedly, his father, who is generally quite severe, takes pity on the child and suggests to his wife that she spend the night with the boy to console him. In this way, and at this particular moment, the familiar rules of family discipline are broken. The mother gives Marcel a birthday present, anticipating his birthday: a copy of a novel by George Sand, which his grandmother had chosen for him, and from which his mother now reads to him. In thus winning far more attention and affection than he had hoped, he worries that he will never again know such contentment.
This famous scene was to be understood later by Marcel as the first incident in which the family indulged his excessive nervousness and tenseness. The incident signals the decline of his health and will power, and sets him aside as someone to whom the normal rules of conduct could not apply. On that night when his mother read to him from the novel the will of his parents weakened.
The narrator, in the ensuing theoretical discussion, indicates the limitations of voluntary memory. He realizes that this kind of memory is able to recall only a small part of his past, and he asks whether all the rest of Combray has been forgotten. The answer again is no. Another kind of memory – involuntary – is able to evoke the real past. But the operation of this kind of memory depends on chance. To illustrate, the narrator now relates the episode of the madeleine cake. Once when dipping a madeleine into a cup of tea, he remembers his Aunt Leonie at Combray who used to give him a madeleine and a cup of linden tea. Through the sensation of taste, he recalls, without effort, a similar experience, and the complete picture of the past returns to him: his aunt, his room in her house, the garden, the town, the square where the church is, the streets and the paths. All of Combray, in fact, as if by magic, came out of his cup of tea.
Another example is the incident that occurs in the middle of Sodom and Gomorrah. Marcel has returned to Balbec and hopes to meet up with a chambermaid who Legrandin has informed him is a young lady of easy virtue. Proust enters his hotel room and bends down to take off his boots. On touching the first button of the first shoe, he is shaken by sobs, and tears stream from his eyes. He sees, bending over him, when once before he was tired at Balbec, the attentive sweet face of his grandmother. The past returns to him, involuntarily, and he experiences the full grief over his grandmother that he had not felt at the time of her death. He remembers all the details of her kindness, and he soon learns how she concealed her illness from him, how, when Saint-Loup photographed her, she used a wide-brimmed hat to shade the signs of suffering on her face. He remembers his grandmother of the Champs-Élysées, as well as of Balbec, his grandmother in the train who was upset when he drank some cognac, his grandmother of Combray. These associations crowd in his mind, more clearly delineated than before.
This experience of memory, this total recall brought about by a fortuitous sensation, is allied for Proust with “the intermittences of the heart.” During the usual course of the hours and the days, the total soul of a human being is “fictional” because its contents, its memories, are inaccessible. However, what Proust calls the spirituality of the body is at every moment enclosed within it, perpetually within our possession. A fortuitous sensation may bring back a part of the past and reveal its meaning. This is what happens to Marcel when he begins to unbutton his shoe. He relives the past with his grandmother, and understands it fully for the first time, and is strengthened by this reanimation in him of the virtues of Combray. It is precisely these virtues and the stable unwavering love of his grandmother that comprise a marked contrast to the new Balbec.
The intermittences of the heart, with which the novel henceforth becomes increasingly concerned, are what controls the accumulation of our memories. Proust believes that this accumulation is at all times present within us, but not always accessible to our conscious mind.
Thus a sensation in the present is able to recall not only a similar sensation of the past, but all the elements attached to it. The past returns, as it were, with a completeness that cannot be recalled with voluntary memory. The sensation and the sentiment accompanying it are extraordinary. For Marcel, the entire experience is strongly mystical because it is the return of a past he thought dead. He is momentarily released from the truncated vision of things which time gives, and a great happiness pervades his being.
In a sense, Proust has conquered eternity. If such an experience can be translated into art, the past will be preserved against the erosion of time. Recollected experiences, even the most sacred, are dominated by time and change. Destined to fall into the void of oblivion, they nevertheless belong to the world of “becoming.”
Other writers had addressed the subject of memory. But Proust is unique because his novel is based first, on the search for what falls out of our day-to-day living and how to recapture it, and then on the discovery of the crucial significance of the accidental but transforming instant – the epiphany – when the past suddenly comes back to mind. Breaking through traditional linear narrative, these moments permit him to situate the entire process of recollection in its proper dimension, relying not only on the microscopic view but on the telescopic also. Their combination in his work is unique.
In the late 19th Century, partly as a result of Darwin’s discoveries, both philosophers and scientists began to revisit the Cartesian theory of dualism. Are the mind and body two distinct entities or is the mind just something that the brain does? As they tried to analyze mental function memory became a subject of interest. Henri Bergson (1859-1941) a French philosopher and a cousin of Proust was a major figure in these studies. He and Proust were friends, Marcel attended his lectures and some say Bergson appears in the novel as Bergotte. The idea of memory presupposes the idea of time but Bergson denied the usual concept of present time claiming we were always living in the past, always making the past the present.
William James (1842-1910), the brother of Henry, was the leading American theorist. He was both Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Psychology at Harvard. To him we owe the concepts of short-term memory and long-term memory. Short-term memory lasts only a few minutes, the usual example being the memory you have of a telephone number when you look it up in a directory. After a few minutes the memory is gone and if you need the number the next day you have to look it up again. Long-term memories are all the rest, they last indefinitely although they diminish over time. Freud argued that some long-term memories are repressed and can only be revived by psychoanalysis.
Memories are further classified as declarative which are those of persons or events that we can verbalize and non-declarative which are the memories that we have that are embodied in skills and habits, like walking or driving a car. These memories are typically utilized automatically, without conscious thought. Both types can further be analyzed from the viewpoint of memory storage and retrieval.
In the past several decades great strides have been made in the study of memory. Much of the impetus for this work comes from the growing problem of Alzheimer’s disease. This neurodegenerative condition is thought to afflict about 10% of people over the age of 65 and about 40% of those over the age of 85. Instead of the introspective guesses of Proust’s era, the disciplines of molecular biology and cognitive neuroscience are engaged in this research. Mental activity is being studied at the cellular and genetic levels with the aid of CT and MRI scanning devices.
Proust’s exposition of the concept of involuntary memory was a distinguishing mark of his literary style. It explains how the narrator can remember incidental minor details of conversations and events that occurred decades before he set out to write them down. It is great art but it is not science. Cognitive Psychology has ignored his theory largely because it is neither testable nor falsifiable. Memories are idiosyncratic and so are the triggers of memories. There is no way one can look into another’s mind and check out either one. There is no way a test can be set up to attempt to duplicate such personal phenomena. While Proustean Memory does not meet the criteria of science it does meet the standard of literary genius. Proust’s concept of involuntary memory is integral to the scheme of his novel and without it Remembrance of Things Past could not have been written.
Source: http://thenovelclub.org/papers/proust7-1006.doc
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