The structure of recollection, borne by smell and taste

Upon taking a spoonful of his Mother’s freshly brewed tea, in which he has soaked a morsel of petite madeleine cake, the narrator of Swann’s Way recounts1:

No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, 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 – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself.

He struggles to identify this unremembered state, when …

I feel something start within me, something that leaves its resting-place and attempts to rise, something that has been embedded like an anchor at a great depth; I do not know yet what it is, but I can feel it mounting slowly; I can measure the resistance, I can hear the echo of great spaces traversed.

Undoubtedly what is thus palpitating in the depths of my being must be the image, the visual memory which, being linked to that taste, has tried to follow it into my conscious mind. But its struggles are too far off, too much confused; scarcely can I perceive the colourless reflection in which are blended the uncapturable whirling medley of radiant hues, and I cannot distinguish its form, cannot invite it, as the one possible interpreter, to translate to me the evidence of its contemporary, its inseparable paramour, the taste of cake soaked in tea; cannot ask it to inform me what special circumstance is in question, of what period in my past life.

Will it ultimately reach the clear surface of my consciousness, this memory, this old, dead moment which the magnetism of an identical moment has travelled so far to importune, to disturb, to raise up out of the very depths of my being? I cannot tell. Now that I feel nothing, it has stopped, has perhaps gone down again into its darkness, from which who can say whether it will ever rise?

His natural laziness urges him to leave the thing alone.

And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before church-time), when I went to say good day to her in her bedroom, my aunt Leonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or of lime-flower tea.

The narrator reflects:

But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

In The Book of Disquiet, set in early-20ᵗʰ century Lisbon, bookkeeper’s assistant Bernardo Soares ruminates on the evocations of smell2:

Smell is a strange kind of sight. It evokes sentimental landscapes from a mere sketch in the subconscious. I’ve felt this many times. I walk down a street. I see nothing, or rather, looking at everything, I see as everyone sees. I know I’m walking down a street and don’t know that it exists with sides made of different houses built by humans. I walk down a street. From a bakery comes a smell of bread that nauseates me with its sweetness, and my childhood rises up from a distant neighbourhood, and another bakery appears to me from the fairyland that is all that has died in us. I walk down a street. Suddenly it smells of the fruit on the stand of the little grocery, and my short time in the country – I no longer know when or where – has trees in the distance and peace in my heart, indisputably of a child.

• Marcel Proust (1919) Du côté de chez Swann. Gallimard, Paris, pp. 65-68, Volume 1 of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. Published in English as Swann’s Way, Volume 1 of In Search of Lost Time. The quoted excerpts are from the translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, pp. 42-45.
• Fernando Pessoa (lived 1883-1935, posthumously published in 1986) Livro do Desassossego pp. 363-364. Published in English as The Book of Disquiet. The quoted passage adapts translations from Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa (Serpent’s Tail, 1991, p. 105) and by Richard Zenith (Penguin, pp. 233-234).

C.P. Doncaster, Timeline of the Human Condition, star index