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Forgetting the Madeleine: Proust and the Neurosciences
Patrick M. Bray1 The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA Corresponding author: Tel.:þ614-292-2650; Fax: 614-292-7403, e-mail address: [email protected]
1
Abstract Marcel Proust’s famous madeleine experience, in which a man recalls his past through intense concentration after he tastes a cake dipped in tea, has been dubbed the “Proust Phenomenon” by researchers in the neurosciences. The passage in Proust’s novel, however, has been systematically misread in the scientific literature due to the complexity and the ambiguity built into the text. A review of work by neuroscientists, popular science writers, and literature scholars suggests that the most productive interdisciplinary research occurs not where two disciplines converge (the madeleine as olfactory memory cue), but rather where they diverge (phenomenal description over quantitative analysis). This chapter argues that researchers in neuroscience and neuroaesthetics should forget the madeleine in Proust to investigate not only the other cognitive insights offered by Proust’s vast novel, In Search of Lost Time, but also the ways in which Proust’s novel seeks to bridge the distance between autobiographical experience and critical analysis.
Keywords Proust, memory, madeleine, neuroscience, interdisciplinarity
Marcel Proust’s monumental novel, A` la Recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), holds a preeminent place in modern literature, inspiring some of the greatest works from all schools of modern literary criticism.1 The scale of scholarship on Proust is daunting, exceeding that of any other French writer. According to Antoine Compagnon, more than 2000 books had already been published on Proust as 1 Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothe`que de la Ple´iade, 4 vols., 1987–89). Quotations from the Recherche are from this edition indicated by volume and page numbers. All translations are my own. The standard English translation remains In Search of Lost Time. Translated by C.K. Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright. New York: Modern Library, 1992, 6 volumes (Proust, 1987, 1992).
Progress in Brain Research, Volume 205, ISSN 0079-6123, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-444-63273-9.00003-4 © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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of 1992 (Compagnon, 1997, p. 3839). Despite, or rather because of the notorious difficulty of Proust’s prose style, In Search of Lost Time has entered the popular imagination as the quintessential mark of high culture, but always reduced to a single iconic image—the madeleine. The cultural prestige attached to Proust’s novel, its brilliant portrayal of memory, and the intricacy of its structure have all naturally drawn the attention of researchers in the neurosciences and neuroaesthetics. Proust’s novel, one of the greatest achievements of human consciousness, has much to offer a neuroscientific literary paradigm. But in order to do so, I will argue, researchers must forget the madeleine in order to move beyond the neat simplicity of the image. By reading the whole of Proust’s beguiling text, researchers will find models of combining phenomenal and physiological approaches to the workings of the brain, to shift focus onto, for example, the effects of personal narrative on memory, the way language shapes our perception, and the creative processes of writing and reading.
1 A TASTE OF THE MADELEINE One novel, one first-person narrator, seven volumes, sentences running over a page, and well over a million words in total. In Search of Lost Time demands an extraordinary level of attention and dedication, but rewards the patient reader with insights on memory, sexuality, art, politics, time, death, and the limits of knowledge. Written between 1909 and Proust’s death in 1922, the novel captures the passage from positivism and realism to modernist aesthetics and general relativity; as Antoine Compagnon has argued, Proust marks the turning point between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries (Compagnon, 1992). A clear understanding of the novel’s structure and narrative proves essential for explaining its relevance to the neurosciences. In Search of Lost Time begins with an anonymous narrator who recounts his difficulty falling asleep at night and the tricks that insomnia plays on his consciousness. Waking in the middle of the night in a dark room, the narrator cannot remember where he is and so forgets who he is. Only by patiently recalling all the bedrooms of the past, and all his past selves, can he deduce the present moment and regain the integrity of his identity. He then traces his insomnia back to his childhood and the summers he would spend with his extended family in the fictional village of Combray. The memories he recounts of Combray are charming but superficial, focusing on the goodnight kiss his mother gave him around the age of seven and the theatrics he would employ to bring his mother to his room. The middle-aged narrator fears that his past is limited to these overdetermined memories, rooted as they are in habit and neurotic repetition, until unexpectedly, a miracle occurs a few dozen pages into the narrative. As an adult, the narrator accepts from his mother a linden tea (tilleul) and a madeleine, a small cake in the shape of a seashell, which the narrator claims he has not eaten in a long time. Upon tasting the cake soaked in tea, he has a sudden feeling of joy and the jolt of a recollection. This “reminiscence” or involuntary memory (as later readers would call it though the term shows up only once in passing in the novel) leaves the narrator puzzled because he cannot identify from
1 A Taste of the Madeleine
where the sensation is coming. He tries more of the cake hoping to repeat the experience, but realizes that the memory is not “in” the cake, but within himself (memory, as Proust’s cousin and professor Henri Bergson wrote, is not localizable in matter, whether a cake or a brain).2 With an intense concentration (using his “intelligence” or voluntary memory), he manages to search within his past until he lights upon, or rather creates a link to a moment of the past when he had experienced that taste before. The common sensation of a current taste and a distant memory causes the past to come back to him in its entirety, “tout Combray et ses environs, tout cela qui prend forme et solidite´, est sorti, ville et jardins, de ma tasse de the´” (all Combray and its surroundings, all that which takes form and solidness, emerged, town and gardens, from my teacup) (I, 47). This most famous moment of modern French literature allows the narrator to remember in minute detail the lost world of his childhood and inspires, readers have presumed though the novel does not explicitly say, the writing of the rest of the episode of “Combray.” Yet the madeleine is not itself a revelation—if that were the case, the novel would be the most anticlimactic work ever written. Instead, the madeleine hints at the physiological, metaphysical, and especially aesthetic importance of an intense sensation of memory and seems designed to compel the narrator, and the reader, to discover its true meaning revealed at the end of the seven volumes, a few thousand pages later. After the madeleine episode and the “resurrection” of Combray, the first volume of the novel takes an unexpected turn in the section “Un Amour de Swann” (Swann in Love) by recounting over a few hundred pages the elaborate and frustrated courtship of the dandy Charles Swann with Odette de Cre´cy, a woman “qui n’e´tait pas [son] genre” (who was not [his] type) (I, 375). This third-person novel within the novel, set years before the narrator’s birth, foreshadows the narrator’s relationships with Gilberte Swann (Charles’ daughter) and his great love for Albertine (the subject of two of the volumes), suggesting that our destiny may already be inscribed in stories we have heard in our childhood. Yet the novel within the novel, despite setting up patterns of behavior for the narrator, fails to do the same for Swann himself, who inexplicably marries Odette sometime after the events of “Swann in Love.” By beginning his long novel with a juxtaposition of the very personal and nostalgic “Combray” and the third-person romantic novel “Swann in Love,” Proust prepares his reader to understand that our actions do not always conform to a believable narrative and that a person cycles through several identities in a single lifetime. For the rest of the novel, the narrator traces his own apprenticeship first as a child and then as a young adult as an aspiring writer and observer of high society.3 Marcel discovers the vicissitudes of love and jealousy, the different forms of snobbery, the
2
Suzanne Guerlac offers the most accessible analysis of Bergson’s philosophy in Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson (2006). She also draws a link between Proust’s notions of memory and Bergson’s (125) (Guerlac, 2006). 3 The eminent philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s seminal work on Proust, Proust et les signes, (1973) argues that the novel is not at all about, or at least not just about reminiscences and memory, but is rather a novel of apprenticeship as the narrator learns to decipher signs in his quest to become a writer (Deleuze, 1973).
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seeming omnipresence of homosexuality, the nature of art, the social realignment following the Dreyfus affair (Proust was himself very active in the defense of Dreyfus), and the physical and social devastation of World War I.4 While Proust wrote most of the first and last volumes before World War I, it is this vast middle portion of the novel that continued to grow until his death in 1922. With the narrative frame in place, the novel became infinitely expandable, encompassing all aspects of life and the unexpected turns of history. The last volume, Le Temps retrouve´ (Time Regained), finds the narrator despondent, passing several years away from society in a sanitarium, but after the war he agrees to attend a party given by the Princesse de Guermantes, where he sees again for the first time in years old acquaintances who bear on their aged faces the mark of time. Before the party begins, however, he has a series of five “moments bienheureux” (happy or felicitous moments) like the episode of the madeleine several thousand pages earlier: he trips on a stone and remembers Venice, he hears the sound of a spoon against the plate and remembers the sound of a hammer, he wipes a starched napkin across his mouth and remembers a trip to the seaside, he hears the sound of a water pipe and recalls seeing boats off the shore, and finally, he sees the cover of a George Sand novel and remembers when his mother read it to him as a child (an episode that likely triggers the reader’s own memory, as it was already narrated in the first dozen or so pages of the first volume).5 It is only then that he realizes the metaphysical truth of the madeleine: the experience of time itself, as it exists outside of chronology, is a transforming force that yet leaves something eternal, a hint of immortality. But this extra-temporal truth needs to be expressed and translated by art, by literature specifically. Literary metaphor captures the essence revealed by time in a process similar, according to the narrator, to the causal law in science.6 Those who only read the first few dozen pages to get to the madeleine fail to understand its aesthetic and philosophical significance. The novel ends with a reflection by the narrator of his fear that he will not finish his monumental work before he dies, and the reader is left wondering if the book the narrator is going to write is in fact the very book in the reader’s hands.
4
While it has become common place to call the narrator of the novel “Marcel,” he is only mentioned by name twice and then only hypothetically, leaving the reader to decide whether or not to give the narrator the name of the author. In no way, however, can the novel be considered an autobiography. 5 Shattuck (2000) provides a detailed account of all of the “moments bienheureux” in the text, counting eleven total episodes. Moreover, Shattuck uncovers a six-part pattern to the episodes: (1) Marcel is in a “dispirited state of mind,” (2) he experiences unexpectedly (what readers often term “involuntarily”) a physical sensation, (3) a feeling of joy out of proportion to the physical sensation, (4) the recognition of a past event (the memory itself), (5) a presentiment of the future, and (6) some result, such as his desire to write (257–264). 6 IV, 468. As Russell (1914) writes in Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy, “It is through history and testimony, together with causal laws, that we arrive at physical knowledge which is much more precise than anything inferable from the perceptions of one moment.” (130).
2 Interdisciplinary Proust
2 INTERDISCIPLINARY PROUST As we have seen, the madeleine melts into the long narrative arc of the novel. The vast scope of the work provides an internal tension, often within a single sentence, between an abundance of detail and the broader “message” of salvation through art. Recent work by several Proust scholars has sought to tease out these contradictions to show how the novel’s stylistic inventions have greater philosophical ramifications than Proust’s own somewhat dated “theories.”7 Philosophers such as Deleuze (1973) and Ricur (1984) have found inspiration for their work on time in Proust’s novel, but almost entirely ignore the madeleine scene. This tension between the author’s theories and his practice is not an accident but is at the heart of the work: before he began writing, Proust hesitated between the essay form and the novel form (“Notice” I, 1081). As a work of fiction, every utterance or theoretical assertion by the narrator, valid or questionable, is interwoven in a fiction. Every “theory” in this fiction serves a role in its narrative economy, by both representing a certain reality around the time of writing in the 1910s, and by creating its own language, a discourse of theoretical fiction. While any idea expressed in the novel may or may not be independently or scientifically valid, it exists first in the ambiguous form of literary language where words both refer to tangible objects such as madeleines but also are entirely invented. Most tellingly, in the first drafts of the novel, the madeleine itself was a humble piece of toast, then a cookie (biscotte) (Esquisse XIII, I, 695). It can be safely assumed that the physical sensation of tasting a madeleine in tea had no special meaning for Proust (and of course his narrator is only a fictional character, existing as ink on the page). But the text itself hints at the richness of meaning of the word “madeleine” and the form of the little cake itself. The religious connotations of the scallop shape (“Coquille Saint-Jacques” or Saint-James shell) and the name Madeleine (Mary Magdalene often being confused for a repentant prostitute as well as the subject of a popular expression “pleurer comme une madeleine”—“to cry one’s eyes out”) suggest to the narrator that the cake has a hard and “devout” exterior and a sensual interior (I, 46). Moreover, the “madeleine” is also a location and a “Place” or square: Proust lived for most of his childhood in an apartment at 9 boulevard Malesherbes very close to the Place de la Madeleine and its church. The word had special significance for Proust as a “place of memory,” even autobiographical memory, though the experience he describes is entirely fictional. Proust’s novel, occupying the space between fiction, philosophy, and autobiography, forces the reader to interpret the text in ways that reveal the complex relationship between language, memory, space, and identity.8 This web of invented memories, surprising literary images, and historical account approximates in 7
Notably Descombes (1992). In my book, The Novel Map (Bray, 2013), I argue that Proust’s novel structures its revelations about memory and identity through spatial configurations. The novel draws maps of “Swann’s Way” and “The Guermantes Way” that guide the narrator, only to be abandoned in the final volume. 8
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exaggerated textual form how consciousness perceives and constructs the world. As such, the novel contains within itself not only theories of memory and cognition, but fictional examples and counterexamples that unsettle hastily reductive abstractions. Interdisciplinary neuroscience accounts of Proust’s novel can be separated into three categories: neuroscientists (broadly defined) taking Proust’s ideas as a framing device for experiments, popular science writers who seek to explain general trends in thought to a wide public, and literary scholars who find new ways of reading Proust inspired by research in neuroscience. While all of these approaches converge on the image of the madeleine, the most interesting work so far has come from scholars who find in the gaps between disciplines a new way to read both the Proustian text as well as work in different neuroscientific disciplines. While this might seem to indicate that neuroscience has more to offer Proust than the converse, I would like to argue at the end of this chapter that Proust’s novel, in its inherently interdisciplinary structure, pushes the limits of disciplinary knowledge to create new cognitive structures.
3 NEUROSCIENCE CONFIRMS PROUST As early as at least 1970, claims have been made that progress in the neurosciences (whether neurosurgery, neurobiology, or clinical psychology) “confirms” Proust’s intuitions in his novel.9 While these claims are problematic given that they assume that only a certain notion of experimental science holds the possibility of confirming or disproving an idea, they are even more so given the fictional nature of Proust’s work, as we have shown. To find a “theory” in Proust requires an act of interpretive selection on the part of the reader, who necessarily chooses elements from the text that can be combined into a proposition, while ignoring the textual evidence that may challenge it. Consequently, neuroscientific research claiming to prove the scientific validity of Proust’s madeleine has been based largely on false assumptions about the literary work. Most articles only mention Proust in the title, the introduction, and perhaps the conclusion, describing a “Proustian hypothesis” or “phenomenon” before detailing their own experimental endeavor that usually proves Proust right. To take an emblematic example, in a much cited article, Herz and Schooler (2002) state: In Swann’s Way (Proust, 1928), the smell of a madeleine biscuit dipped in linden tea triggers intense joy and memory of the author’s childhood. This experience, often called the Proust phenomenon, is the basis for the hypothesis that odorevoked memories are more emotional than memories evoked by other stimuli. Currently, there is a descriptive and laboratory-based support for this proposition. (21)
9
Justin O’Brien’s brief note from 1970 in PMLA titled “Proust Confirmed by Neurosurgery” compares Proust’s discoveries of memory to the work from the 1950s of Dr. Wilder Penfield on electrical stimulation of the brain (O’Brien, 1970).
3 Neuroscience Confirms Proust
Herz and Schooler, based on physiological research, combine taste and smell into olfactory sensation, since the brain processes the two in the same manner (21-2), yet in the original passage, the narrator describes the sensation of his “palate” and the “taste” of the soaked cookie. By privileging physiology over phenomenology, Herz and Schooler second-guess Proust, insisting that the scientific account takes precedence over the narrative of the experience. Herz and Schooler then misrepresent the process of memory in the passage. Instead of the physical sensation producing a feeling of euphoria that subsequently encourages the narrator to search for the source of the memory, they claim that the “Proust phenomenon” is a heightened emotional state caused by a spontaneous olfactory memory. This is a near universal error in neuroscientific accounts of the madeleine passage that suggests that researchers have relied on secondhand interpretations of the passage and have not explored the broader work itself. According to Chu and Downes (2002), “The Proust phenomenon is an enduring piece of folk wisdom that asserts that odors are particularly powerful autobiographical memory cues” (511) (the idea that the effete author of one of the most difficult novels wrote “folk wisdom” is in itself quite amusing). Saive et al. (2013), as well as Gottfried et al. (2002) also take at face value the idea that the “Proust phenomenon” describes only emotional content related to odor memories. Schacter et al. (1998) claim that Proustian “involuntary remindings” are a commonplace experience that requires “no deliberate, effortful attempt to think back to the past” (1869). As we have seen, while most of the “moments bienheureux” are not caused by what Proust considered the dominant sense, vision, they are triggered by several other senses (taste, smell, hearing, and touch) and require an intense creative effort on the part of the narrator to recall the lost memory. Herz and Schooler acknowledge, however, that many participants in their experiment may have already been acquainted with Proust’s description of the madeleine, and so may have anticipated an emotional content with olfactory memories that could have skewed their research findings (29). Given the frequency of misinterpretations of the madeleine passage by highly educated scientists, it seems just as likely that, instead of Proust modifying our conception of sense perception, we read into Proust what we already think about memory. In an incisive article, Troscianko (2013) details the numerous errors about Proust contained in neuroscientific research and then goes on to describe how Proust’s madeleine passage contains elements of “folk psychology” and also “cognitive realism.” She argues that given the two conflicting models of memory in the passage, researchers and general readers always find what they look for: The most remarkable achievement of the madeleine episode is in allowing readers to read in it confirmation of their assumptions about memory – about flavour-cued memories being involuntary, instantaneous and rich in accurate detail; about remembering being only a search of preexisting contents rather than involving goal-orientated (re)creation – while simultaneously contradicting these assumptions. (452)
The ambiguity inscribed within the passage and the persistent tendency in even the most careful of readers to misremember the key elements of the “Proust
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phenomenon” expose not only the danger of confirmation bias in scientific research, but also how our memories, emotions, and convictions can be shaped by aesthetic and narrative forms in a text.
4 PROUST SELLS! While researchers in the neurosciences have borrowed from the cultural capital of Proust’s famous madeleine as a starting point for their own experimental research, popular writers have tried to capitalize on the twin prestige of science and Proust to sell books. Surprisingly, instead of contributing to a simplified notion of the “Proust phenomenon,” two popular science books have suggested interesting new neuroscientifically inspired readings of Proust. Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (2008) examines the complexity of the act of reading for the brain, both how reading itself has developed over thousands of years and how the brain adapts to learn new intellectual functions (Wolf, 2008). We were able to invent reading because of our advanced brains, but also our brains are dynamic because of reading: “Reading can be learned only because of the brain’s plastic design, and when reading takes place, that individual brain is forever changed, both physiologically and intellectually” (5). Her approach is to juxtapose a biological model and a “personalintellectual” model of the reading brain, using Proust (as complex writer and reader) and the squid (for its importance in early neurobiological research) as metaphors for the two cultures (5). Wolf focuses on a single passage taken from Proust’s obscure essay “Journe´es de lecture” (Proust, 1971) in which Proust defines reading as a solitary practice where the reader enters into a mysterious communication with other people in time and space. While Wolf’s book completely elides In Search of Lost Time, where scenes of reading are crucial to the development of the narrative and have been famously studied by de Man (1982), her work calls attention to the cognitive gymnastics needed to interpret Proust, how reading literature forces the brain to rearrange itself to new tasks. The most well-known work on Proust in recent years is Jonah Lehrer’s Proust was a Neuroscientist Lehrer (2008). Prominently displaying a madeleine on the cover of the reprint, the book sets out to show how artists first discovered truths now rediscovered by neuroscientists. That only one of the eight chapters, the central one, is devoted to Proust only highlights the cultural prestige of Proust; Lehrer did not call the book “Whitman Was a Neuroscientist” or “Stravinsky Was a Neuroscientist.” Lehrer’s description of Proust’s novel is uncommonly sophisticated (though he does fall into the common error of confusing the narrator with the author); he traces Proust’s intellectual context, defines the stakes of the novel, and gives a nuanced description of the madeleine passage that emphasizes the experience of self and memory over physiological considerations. Lehrer’s most compelling contribution, and his most controversial, was his assertion that Kausik Si’s work on binding proteins in memory (cytoplasmic polyadenylation element binding protein or CPEB)
5 Neuroaesthetics
could be linked to Proust’s notion of the persistence of memory that can then be reactivated randomly (92).10 Although the analogy might be stretched and the science may eventually be disproven, Lehrer’s intuition attempts to find neuroscientific research that engages with the conceptual meaning Proust himself gave to the “moment bienheureux.” Wolf’s argument (that reading, and especially reading Proust’s difficult sentences, changes the physiology of the brain) along with Lehrer’s argument (that paying attention to the phenomenal details in Proust’s account can serve as an intuition for the structures of the persistence of memory) allows us to reframe the interaction of literature and neuroscience beyond a conception of literature as folk wisdom and the neurosciences as experimental proof and let us glimpse the possibilities of conceiving how Proust’s work refashions the brain itself.
5 NEUROAESTHETICS With so much already written about Proust, several literary scholars have appealed to the neurosciences in order to breathe fresh air into the literary field and to lend legitimacy to the critical endeavor. As Margaret Gray (1992) writes in her chapter on “Memory, Neurology, and Narration” in her book Postmodern Proust: studying Proust in light of developments in neuroscience as “a sort of ‘poetics’ of perception . . . opens up the framework of literature” (72). One strategy used by literary researchers working in tandem with neuroscientists is to translate the experiences related in a literary text into the language of neurophysiology. This has the advantage of introducing a new discourse into the stifling jargon of literary theory. The danger, of course, is that scientific discourse becomes an unquestioned metaphor, used as a blunt instrument in existing critical debates by literary critics who might not fully understand the science.11 Shepherd-Barr (a professor of English) and Shepherd (a professor of neurobiology) (1998) provide a “textual analysis in neuroscientific terms” of the madeleine passage in which they describe the molecular structure of the various odors Proust’s narrator could have sensed as his neural receptors were activated by the tea and madeleine (49–51) (Shepherd-Barr and Shepherd, 1998). They then provide an account of contemporary research into olfaction that provides valuable context to Proust’s fictional experience, but in the end they repeat many of the same errors as other neuroscientists, discovering in their research, for instance, that Proust’s experience is not entirely involuntary, though this is evident in the text (55). 10
Lehrer cites the work of Si et al. (2003). To take one example, Jenson and Iacoboni (2011) argue that mirror neuron research suggests an ontological priority of mimesis, and thus poststructuralist suspicion of mimesis is unfounded. Yet an imperceptible physiological function exists on an entirely different ontological plane from a work of literature or philosophy. The fact that all humans have mirror neurons does not account for differences in representation between literary texts, or even between the act of recognizing a friend and of writing a realist novel. 11
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The most productive and in-depth research to date has come from Evelyne Ender, a literary scholar well versed in neuroscientific research. Her book Architexts of Memory (Ender, 2005a), which won the MLA’s Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literature in 2005, argues that literary texts serve as memory laboratories because memory itself has fictional and aesthetic elements. For Ender, Proust’s madeleine passage redefines what we think of as autobiographical memory since it combines psychological, physiological, and biochemical dimensions (30) and is, moreover, a “dynamic performance,” one where “memory occurs somewhere between body and mind” (31). Proust’s multilayered text gives a richer portrayal of memory than is currently available to empirical disciplines; Ender suggests that Proust’s literary metaphors can be used in the service of science precisely because they exceed phenomenologically what we can reproduce in a lab (44-5). Similarly, her work on de´ja` vu (or paramnesia) shows, through a reading of Proust and the nineteenth-century writer Ge´rard de Nerval, how literary descriptions of paramnesia “invite fruitful comparisons with current clinical and neurological models of consciousness that embrace the phenomenal aspects of their subject’s mental experiences” (Ender, 2005b, p. 586). What we learn from the comparison, she argues, is that humans can conceive of a measure of time completely different from that upon which our minds are regulated: “a time defined by its qualitative, phenomenal aspects and whose ultimate value lies in the freedom of aesthetic creation” (605). If our memories are partially structured by the stories we tell ourselves, our conscious and creative minds may be able to broaden our ability to remember the past. A translation of the “Proust phenomenon” into neuroscientific terms cannot account for Proust’s invention of language to describe the richness of his mnemonic discovery. What is needed, and what Ender has begun, is to find the ways that Proust’s text structures for his readers new ways of remembering, the writer’s work being as she calls it an “architext of memory.”
6 CONCLUSION In the madeleine passage, at the anxious interval between the narrator’s first taste of the tea-soaked madeleine and his recall of the lost memory of Combray, he explains the conundrum at the heart of the neurosciences: I put down my cup and turn inwards towards my own mind. It is up to it to find the truth. But how? Serious uncertainty, every time the mind feels overtaken by itself; when he, the researcher, is at once the obscure country he has to explore and where all of his baggage will be of no use. Search? Not only: create. (I, 45)12
12
“Je pose ma tasse et me tourne vers mon esprit. C’est a` lui de trouver la ve´rite´. Mais comment? Grave incertitude, toutes les fois que l’esprit se sent de´passe´ par lui-meˆme; quand lui, le chercheur, est tout ensemble le pays obscur ou` il doit chercher et ou` tout son bagage ne lui sera de rien. Chercher? pas seulement: cre´er.”
References
Proust’s famously long sentences suddenly become laconic as he describes how consciousness tries to apprehend itself, as if the metonymic machine that produced so much detail has broken down. The researcher who wants to understand the mind is lost in another country where his scientific “baggage” can only slow him down; looking at our own minds is an alienating experience that puts into question our critical certainties. While discoveries in neuroscience have made incredible progress since Proust’s time, the mind remains not only a largely unchartered territory, but perhaps reveals itself to be unmappable as it constantly expands and grows in complexity in direct proportion to the instruments we invent to understand it. Interdisciplinarity, its very name implying work between disciplines, functions on the play of converging and diverging areas of interest: when two or more disciplines converge on an object of interest, interdisciplinarity becomes possible, but where they diverge productively reveals the limits and blind spots of each discipline. Literary studies (a discipline devoted to thinking about literature, which in itself is a unique discipline) and neuroscience (to collapse the various disciplines that make up neuroscience) converge on the madeleine as an iconic image of memory. In this convergence, it is possible to assert that one or the other discipline “proves” or “disproves” the discovery of the other. By focusing on convergence (question of redundancy, efficiency, institutional hierarchy), the two disciplines are placed in competition, with either literature being held as a valuable precursor or neuroscience being seen as the only valid, because scientific, proof of human experience. But Proust never set out to find the precise biological and mechanical functions of the brain, and no matter how well scientific articles are written they hardly count as literature. Looking beyond the madeleine toward Proust’s novel as a whole, something that neuroaesthetics so far has avoided, raises useful questions about each discipline. How much is neuroscience a discourse (relying on linguistic paradigms that unconsciously determine the interpretation of quantifiable data)? What remains of Proust’s novel if we were to question the truth of his discoveries about memory (in other words, if neuroscience, in a new data-based turn, rejects Proust’s insights, what use would the novel be)? While both neuroscientists and Proust use our most powerful tool, the brain, to investigate itself, Proust combines an experiential account of remembering with the creative impulse to think of new forms of memory and cognition routed in art. The novel form, pushed to its limit, is Proust’s cutting-edge technology, his fMRI, yet his search transforms the mind itself. Neuroscience, by forgetting the narrow focus it has had so far on the madeleine, can take new inspiration from Proust’s unique inventions and begin to invent its own connections between the personal experience of memory and the tools used to observe the mind.
References Bray, P.M., 2013. The Novel Map: Space and Subjectivity in Nineteenth-Century French Fiction. Northwestern University Press, Evanston. Chu, S., Downes, J.J., 2002. Proust nose best: odors are better cues of autobiographical memory. Mem. Cognit. 30 (4), 511–518.
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Compagnon, A., 1992. Proust Between Two Centuries (R. Goodkin, Trans.). Columbia University Press, New York. Compagnon, A., 1997. La ‘Recherche du temps perdu’ de Marcel Proust. In: Nora, P. (Ed.), Lieux de Me´moire, vol. 3. Gallimard, Paris, pp. 3835–3869 (original work published 1992). de Man, P., 1982. Allegories of Reading. Yale University Press, New Haven. Deleuze, G., 1973. Proust et les signes. Presses Universitaires de France, Paris. Descombes, V., 1992. Proust: Philosophy of the Novel (C.C. Macksey, Trans.). Stanford University Press, Stanford. Ender, E., 2005a. Architexts of Memory. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. Ender, E., 2005b. “De´ja`-vu” or Memory-Science between Ge´rard de Nerval and Marcel Proust. Sci. Context 18 (4), 583–606. Gottfried, J.A., Deichmann, R., Winston, J.S., Dolan, R.J., 2002. Functional heterogeneity in human olfactory cortex: an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging study. J. Neurosci. 22 (24), 10819–10828. Gray, M., 1992. Postmodern Proust. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. Guerlac, S., 2006. Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson. Cornell University Press, Ithaca. Herz, S., Schooler, J.W., 2002. A naturalistic study of autobiographical memories evoked by olfactory and visual cues: testing the Proustian hypothesis. Am. J. Psychol. 115 (1), 21–32. Jenson, D., Iacoboni, M., 2011. Literary biomimesis: mirror neurons and the ontological priority of representation. Calif. Ital. Stud. 2 (1), 1–16. ismrg_cisj_8945. Retrieved from: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/3sc3j6dj. Lehrer, J., 2008. Proust was a Neuroscientist. Mariner Books, Boston and New York (original work published 2007). O’Brien, J., 1970. Proust confirmed by neurosurgery. PMLA 85 (2), 295–297. Proust, M., 1971. On Reading (W. Burford, Trans.). In: Autret, J. (Ed.), Macmillan, New York. ` la recherche du temps perdu. Bibliothe`que de la Ple´iade, vols. 1–4 Proust, M., 1987–89. A Gallimard, Paris. Proust, M., 1992. In Search of Lost Time, vols. 1–6 (Moncrieff, C.K. and Kilmartin, T. Trans., revised by Enright, D.J.). Modern Library, New York. Ricur, P., 1984–1988. Time and Narrative, vols. 1–3 (McLaughlin, K. and Pellauer, D., Trans). University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1984, 1985, 1988. Russell, B., 1914. Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy. George Allen & Unwin Ltd, London. Saive, A.-L., Ravel, N., The´venet, M., Royet, J.P., Plailly, J., 2013. A novel experimental approach to episodic memory in humans based on the privileged access of odors to memories. J. Neurosci. Methods 213, 22–31. Schacter, D.L., Buckner, R.L., Koutstaal, W., 1998. Memory, consciousness, and neuroimaging. Philos. Trans. Biol. Sci. 353 (1377), 1861–1878, The Conscious Brain: Abnormal and Normal. Shattuck, R., 2000. Proust’s Way. W.W. Norton and Company, New York. Shepherd-Barr, K., Shepherd, G., 1998. Madeleines and neuromodernism: reassessing mechanisms of autobiographical memory in Proust. A/B: Auto/Biogr. Stud. 13 (1), 39–60. Si, K., Lindquist, S., Kandel, E.R., 2003. A neuronal isoform of the Aplysia CPEB has prionlike properties. Cell 115, 879–891.
References
Troscianko, E.T., 2013. Cognitive realism and memory in Proust’s madeleine episode. Memory Studies 6 (4), 437–456. Published online before print January, 6 2013, http:// dx.doi.org/10.1177/1750698012468000. Wolf, M., 2008. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. Harper Perennial, New York.
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Forgetting the Madeleine: Proust and the Neurosciences
Patrick M. Bray1 The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA Corresponding author: Tel.:þ614-292-2650; Fax: 614-292-7403, e-mail address: [email protected]
1
Abstract Marcel Proust’s famous madeleine experience, in which a man recalls his past through intense concentration after he tastes a cake dipped in tea, has been dubbed the “Proust Phenomenon” by researchers in the neurosciences. The passage in Proust’s novel, however, has been systematically misread in the scientific literature due to the complexity and the ambiguity built into the text. A review of work by neuroscientists, popular science writers, and literature scholars suggests that the most productive interdisciplinary research occurs not where two disciplines converge (the madeleine as olfactory memory cue), but rather where they diverge (phenomenal description over quantitative analysis). This chapter argues that researchers in neuroscience and neuroaesthetics should forget the madeleine in Proust to investigate not only the other cognitive insights offered by Proust’s vast novel, In Search of Lost Time, but also the ways in which Proust’s novel seeks to bridge the distance between autobiographical experience and critical analysis.
Keywords Proust, memory, madeleine, neuroscience, interdisciplinarity
Marcel Proust’s monumental novel, A` la Recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), holds a preeminent place in modern literature, inspiring some of the greatest works from all schools of modern literary criticism.1 The scale of scholarship on Proust is daunting, exceeding that of any other French writer. According to Antoine Compagnon, more than 2000 books had already been published on Proust as 1 Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothe`que de la Ple´iade, 4 vols., 1987–89). Quotations from the Recherche are from this edition indicated by volume and page numbers. All translations are my own. The standard English translation remains In Search of Lost Time. Translated by C.K. Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright. New York: Modern Library, 1992, 6 volumes (Proust, 1987, 1992).
Progress in Brain Research, Volume 205, ISSN 0079-6123, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-444-63273-9.00003-4 © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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of 1992 (Compagnon, 1997, p. 3839). Despite, or rather because of the notorious difficulty of Proust’s prose style, In Search of Lost Time has entered the popular imagination as the quintessential mark of high culture, but always reduced to a single iconic image—the madeleine. The cultural prestige attached to Proust’s novel, its brilliant portrayal of memory, and the intricacy of its structure have all naturally drawn the attention of researchers in the neurosciences and neuroaesthetics. Proust’s novel, one of the greatest achievements of human consciousness, has much to offer a neuroscientific literary paradigm. But in order to do so, I will argue, researchers must forget the madeleine in order to move beyond the neat simplicity of the image. By reading the whole of Proust’s beguiling text, researchers will find models of combining phenomenal and physiological approaches to the workings of the brain, to shift focus onto, for example, the effects of personal narrative on memory, the way language shapes our perception, and the creative processes of writing and reading.
1 A TASTE OF THE MADELEINE One novel, one first-person narrator, seven volumes, sentences running over a page, and well over a million words in total. In Search of Lost Time demands an extraordinary level of attention and dedication, but rewards the patient reader with insights on memory, sexuality, art, politics, time, death, and the limits of knowledge. Written between 1909 and Proust’s death in 1922, the novel captures the passage from positivism and realism to modernist aesthetics and general relativity; as Antoine Compagnon has argued, Proust marks the turning point between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries (Compagnon, 1992). A clear understanding of the novel’s structure and narrative proves essential for explaining its relevance to the neurosciences. In Search of Lost Time begins with an anonymous narrator who recounts his difficulty falling asleep at night and the tricks that insomnia plays on his consciousness. Waking in the middle of the night in a dark room, the narrator cannot remember where he is and so forgets who he is. Only by patiently recalling all the bedrooms of the past, and all his past selves, can he deduce the present moment and regain the integrity of his identity. He then traces his insomnia back to his childhood and the summers he would spend with his extended family in the fictional village of Combray. The memories he recounts of Combray are charming but superficial, focusing on the goodnight kiss his mother gave him around the age of seven and the theatrics he would employ to bring his mother to his room. The middle-aged narrator fears that his past is limited to these overdetermined memories, rooted as they are in habit and neurotic repetition, until unexpectedly, a miracle occurs a few dozen pages into the narrative. As an adult, the narrator accepts from his mother a linden tea (tilleul) and a madeleine, a small cake in the shape of a seashell, which the narrator claims he has not eaten in a long time. Upon tasting the cake soaked in tea, he has a sudden feeling of joy and the jolt of a recollection. This “reminiscence” or involuntary memory (as later readers would call it though the term shows up only once in passing in the novel) leaves the narrator puzzled because he cannot identify from
1 A Taste of the Madeleine
where the sensation is coming. He tries more of the cake hoping to repeat the experience, but realizes that the memory is not “in” the cake, but within himself (memory, as Proust’s cousin and professor Henri Bergson wrote, is not localizable in matter, whether a cake or a brain).2 With an intense concentration (using his “intelligence” or voluntary memory), he manages to search within his past until he lights upon, or rather creates a link to a moment of the past when he had experienced that taste before. The common sensation of a current taste and a distant memory causes the past to come back to him in its entirety, “tout Combray et ses environs, tout cela qui prend forme et solidite´, est sorti, ville et jardins, de ma tasse de the´” (all Combray and its surroundings, all that which takes form and solidness, emerged, town and gardens, from my teacup) (I, 47). This most famous moment of modern French literature allows the narrator to remember in minute detail the lost world of his childhood and inspires, readers have presumed though the novel does not explicitly say, the writing of the rest of the episode of “Combray.” Yet the madeleine is not itself a revelation—if that were the case, the novel would be the most anticlimactic work ever written. Instead, the madeleine hints at the physiological, metaphysical, and especially aesthetic importance of an intense sensation of memory and seems designed to compel the narrator, and the reader, to discover its true meaning revealed at the end of the seven volumes, a few thousand pages later. After the madeleine episode and the “resurrection” of Combray, the first volume of the novel takes an unexpected turn in the section “Un Amour de Swann” (Swann in Love) by recounting over a few hundred pages the elaborate and frustrated courtship of the dandy Charles Swann with Odette de Cre´cy, a woman “qui n’e´tait pas [son] genre” (who was not [his] type) (I, 375). This third-person novel within the novel, set years before the narrator’s birth, foreshadows the narrator’s relationships with Gilberte Swann (Charles’ daughter) and his great love for Albertine (the subject of two of the volumes), suggesting that our destiny may already be inscribed in stories we have heard in our childhood. Yet the novel within the novel, despite setting up patterns of behavior for the narrator, fails to do the same for Swann himself, who inexplicably marries Odette sometime after the events of “Swann in Love.” By beginning his long novel with a juxtaposition of the very personal and nostalgic “Combray” and the third-person romantic novel “Swann in Love,” Proust prepares his reader to understand that our actions do not always conform to a believable narrative and that a person cycles through several identities in a single lifetime. For the rest of the novel, the narrator traces his own apprenticeship first as a child and then as a young adult as an aspiring writer and observer of high society.3 Marcel discovers the vicissitudes of love and jealousy, the different forms of snobbery, the
2
Suzanne Guerlac offers the most accessible analysis of Bergson’s philosophy in Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson (2006). She also draws a link between Proust’s notions of memory and Bergson’s (125) (Guerlac, 2006). 3 The eminent philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s seminal work on Proust, Proust et les signes, (1973) argues that the novel is not at all about, or at least not just about reminiscences and memory, but is rather a novel of apprenticeship as the narrator learns to decipher signs in his quest to become a writer (Deleuze, 1973).
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seeming omnipresence of homosexuality, the nature of art, the social realignment following the Dreyfus affair (Proust was himself very active in the defense of Dreyfus), and the physical and social devastation of World War I.4 While Proust wrote most of the first and last volumes before World War I, it is this vast middle portion of the novel that continued to grow until his death in 1922. With the narrative frame in place, the novel became infinitely expandable, encompassing all aspects of life and the unexpected turns of history. The last volume, Le Temps retrouve´ (Time Regained), finds the narrator despondent, passing several years away from society in a sanitarium, but after the war he agrees to attend a party given by the Princesse de Guermantes, where he sees again for the first time in years old acquaintances who bear on their aged faces the mark of time. Before the party begins, however, he has a series of five “moments bienheureux” (happy or felicitous moments) like the episode of the madeleine several thousand pages earlier: he trips on a stone and remembers Venice, he hears the sound of a spoon against the plate and remembers the sound of a hammer, he wipes a starched napkin across his mouth and remembers a trip to the seaside, he hears the sound of a water pipe and recalls seeing boats off the shore, and finally, he sees the cover of a George Sand novel and remembers when his mother read it to him as a child (an episode that likely triggers the reader’s own memory, as it was already narrated in the first dozen or so pages of the first volume).5 It is only then that he realizes the metaphysical truth of the madeleine: the experience of time itself, as it exists outside of chronology, is a transforming force that yet leaves something eternal, a hint of immortality. But this extra-temporal truth needs to be expressed and translated by art, by literature specifically. Literary metaphor captures the essence revealed by time in a process similar, according to the narrator, to the causal law in science.6 Those who only read the first few dozen pages to get to the madeleine fail to understand its aesthetic and philosophical significance. The novel ends with a reflection by the narrator of his fear that he will not finish his monumental work before he dies, and the reader is left wondering if the book the narrator is going to write is in fact the very book in the reader’s hands.
4
While it has become common place to call the narrator of the novel “Marcel,” he is only mentioned by name twice and then only hypothetically, leaving the reader to decide whether or not to give the narrator the name of the author. In no way, however, can the novel be considered an autobiography. 5 Shattuck (2000) provides a detailed account of all of the “moments bienheureux” in the text, counting eleven total episodes. Moreover, Shattuck uncovers a six-part pattern to the episodes: (1) Marcel is in a “dispirited state of mind,” (2) he experiences unexpectedly (what readers often term “involuntarily”) a physical sensation, (3) a feeling of joy out of proportion to the physical sensation, (4) the recognition of a past event (the memory itself), (5) a presentiment of the future, and (6) some result, such as his desire to write (257–264). 6 IV, 468. As Russell (1914) writes in Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy, “It is through history and testimony, together with causal laws, that we arrive at physical knowledge which is much more precise than anything inferable from the perceptions of one moment.” (130).
2 Interdisciplinary Proust
2 INTERDISCIPLINARY PROUST As we have seen, the madeleine melts into the long narrative arc of the novel. The vast scope of the work provides an internal tension, often within a single sentence, between an abundance of detail and the broader “message” of salvation through art. Recent work by several Proust scholars has sought to tease out these contradictions to show how the novel’s stylistic inventions have greater philosophical ramifications than Proust’s own somewhat dated “theories.”7 Philosophers such as Deleuze (1973) and Ricur (1984) have found inspiration for their work on time in Proust’s novel, but almost entirely ignore the madeleine scene. This tension between the author’s theories and his practice is not an accident but is at the heart of the work: before he began writing, Proust hesitated between the essay form and the novel form (“Notice” I, 1081). As a work of fiction, every utterance or theoretical assertion by the narrator, valid or questionable, is interwoven in a fiction. Every “theory” in this fiction serves a role in its narrative economy, by both representing a certain reality around the time of writing in the 1910s, and by creating its own language, a discourse of theoretical fiction. While any idea expressed in the novel may or may not be independently or scientifically valid, it exists first in the ambiguous form of literary language where words both refer to tangible objects such as madeleines but also are entirely invented. Most tellingly, in the first drafts of the novel, the madeleine itself was a humble piece of toast, then a cookie (biscotte) (Esquisse XIII, I, 695). It can be safely assumed that the physical sensation of tasting a madeleine in tea had no special meaning for Proust (and of course his narrator is only a fictional character, existing as ink on the page). But the text itself hints at the richness of meaning of the word “madeleine” and the form of the little cake itself. The religious connotations of the scallop shape (“Coquille Saint-Jacques” or Saint-James shell) and the name Madeleine (Mary Magdalene often being confused for a repentant prostitute as well as the subject of a popular expression “pleurer comme une madeleine”—“to cry one’s eyes out”) suggest to the narrator that the cake has a hard and “devout” exterior and a sensual interior (I, 46). Moreover, the “madeleine” is also a location and a “Place” or square: Proust lived for most of his childhood in an apartment at 9 boulevard Malesherbes very close to the Place de la Madeleine and its church. The word had special significance for Proust as a “place of memory,” even autobiographical memory, though the experience he describes is entirely fictional. Proust’s novel, occupying the space between fiction, philosophy, and autobiography, forces the reader to interpret the text in ways that reveal the complex relationship between language, memory, space, and identity.8 This web of invented memories, surprising literary images, and historical account approximates in 7
Notably Descombes (1992). In my book, The Novel Map (Bray, 2013), I argue that Proust’s novel structures its revelations about memory and identity through spatial configurations. The novel draws maps of “Swann’s Way” and “The Guermantes Way” that guide the narrator, only to be abandoned in the final volume. 8
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exaggerated textual form how consciousness perceives and constructs the world. As such, the novel contains within itself not only theories of memory and cognition, but fictional examples and counterexamples that unsettle hastily reductive abstractions. Interdisciplinary neuroscience accounts of Proust’s novel can be separated into three categories: neuroscientists (broadly defined) taking Proust’s ideas as a framing device for experiments, popular science writers who seek to explain general trends in thought to a wide public, and literary scholars who find new ways of reading Proust inspired by research in neuroscience. While all of these approaches converge on the image of the madeleine, the most interesting work so far has come from scholars who find in the gaps between disciplines a new way to read both the Proustian text as well as work in different neuroscientific disciplines. While this might seem to indicate that neuroscience has more to offer Proust than the converse, I would like to argue at the end of this chapter that Proust’s novel, in its inherently interdisciplinary structure, pushes the limits of disciplinary knowledge to create new cognitive structures.
3 NEUROSCIENCE CONFIRMS PROUST As early as at least 1970, claims have been made that progress in the neurosciences (whether neurosurgery, neurobiology, or clinical psychology) “confirms” Proust’s intuitions in his novel.9 While these claims are problematic given that they assume that only a certain notion of experimental science holds the possibility of confirming or disproving an idea, they are even more so given the fictional nature of Proust’s work, as we have shown. To find a “theory” in Proust requires an act of interpretive selection on the part of the reader, who necessarily chooses elements from the text that can be combined into a proposition, while ignoring the textual evidence that may challenge it. Consequently, neuroscientific research claiming to prove the scientific validity of Proust’s madeleine has been based largely on false assumptions about the literary work. Most articles only mention Proust in the title, the introduction, and perhaps the conclusion, describing a “Proustian hypothesis” or “phenomenon” before detailing their own experimental endeavor that usually proves Proust right. To take an emblematic example, in a much cited article, Herz and Schooler (2002) state: In Swann’s Way (Proust, 1928), the smell of a madeleine biscuit dipped in linden tea triggers intense joy and memory of the author’s childhood. This experience, often called the Proust phenomenon, is the basis for the hypothesis that odorevoked memories are more emotional than memories evoked by other stimuli. Currently, there is a descriptive and laboratory-based support for this proposition. (21)
9
Justin O’Brien’s brief note from 1970 in PMLA titled “Proust Confirmed by Neurosurgery” compares Proust’s discoveries of memory to the work from the 1950s of Dr. Wilder Penfield on electrical stimulation of the brain (O’Brien, 1970).
3 Neuroscience Confirms Proust
Herz and Schooler, based on physiological research, combine taste and smell into olfactory sensation, since the brain processes the two in the same manner (21-2), yet in the original passage, the narrator describes the sensation of his “palate” and the “taste” of the soaked cookie. By privileging physiology over phenomenology, Herz and Schooler second-guess Proust, insisting that the scientific account takes precedence over the narrative of the experience. Herz and Schooler then misrepresent the process of memory in the passage. Instead of the physical sensation producing a feeling of euphoria that subsequently encourages the narrator to search for the source of the memory, they claim that the “Proust phenomenon” is a heightened emotional state caused by a spontaneous olfactory memory. This is a near universal error in neuroscientific accounts of the madeleine passage that suggests that researchers have relied on secondhand interpretations of the passage and have not explored the broader work itself. According to Chu and Downes (2002), “The Proust phenomenon is an enduring piece of folk wisdom that asserts that odors are particularly powerful autobiographical memory cues” (511) (the idea that the effete author of one of the most difficult novels wrote “folk wisdom” is in itself quite amusing). Saive et al. (2013), as well as Gottfried et al. (2002) also take at face value the idea that the “Proust phenomenon” describes only emotional content related to odor memories. Schacter et al. (1998) claim that Proustian “involuntary remindings” are a commonplace experience that requires “no deliberate, effortful attempt to think back to the past” (1869). As we have seen, while most of the “moments bienheureux” are not caused by what Proust considered the dominant sense, vision, they are triggered by several other senses (taste, smell, hearing, and touch) and require an intense creative effort on the part of the narrator to recall the lost memory. Herz and Schooler acknowledge, however, that many participants in their experiment may have already been acquainted with Proust’s description of the madeleine, and so may have anticipated an emotional content with olfactory memories that could have skewed their research findings (29). Given the frequency of misinterpretations of the madeleine passage by highly educated scientists, it seems just as likely that, instead of Proust modifying our conception of sense perception, we read into Proust what we already think about memory. In an incisive article, Troscianko (2013) details the numerous errors about Proust contained in neuroscientific research and then goes on to describe how Proust’s madeleine passage contains elements of “folk psychology” and also “cognitive realism.” She argues that given the two conflicting models of memory in the passage, researchers and general readers always find what they look for: The most remarkable achievement of the madeleine episode is in allowing readers to read in it confirmation of their assumptions about memory – about flavour-cued memories being involuntary, instantaneous and rich in accurate detail; about remembering being only a search of preexisting contents rather than involving goal-orientated (re)creation – while simultaneously contradicting these assumptions. (452)
The ambiguity inscribed within the passage and the persistent tendency in even the most careful of readers to misremember the key elements of the “Proust
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phenomenon” expose not only the danger of confirmation bias in scientific research, but also how our memories, emotions, and convictions can be shaped by aesthetic and narrative forms in a text.
4 PROUST SELLS! While researchers in the neurosciences have borrowed from the cultural capital of Proust’s famous madeleine as a starting point for their own experimental research, popular writers have tried to capitalize on the twin prestige of science and Proust to sell books. Surprisingly, instead of contributing to a simplified notion of the “Proust phenomenon,” two popular science books have suggested interesting new neuroscientifically inspired readings of Proust. Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (2008) examines the complexity of the act of reading for the brain, both how reading itself has developed over thousands of years and how the brain adapts to learn new intellectual functions (Wolf, 2008). We were able to invent reading because of our advanced brains, but also our brains are dynamic because of reading: “Reading can be learned only because of the brain’s plastic design, and when reading takes place, that individual brain is forever changed, both physiologically and intellectually” (5). Her approach is to juxtapose a biological model and a “personalintellectual” model of the reading brain, using Proust (as complex writer and reader) and the squid (for its importance in early neurobiological research) as metaphors for the two cultures (5). Wolf focuses on a single passage taken from Proust’s obscure essay “Journe´es de lecture” (Proust, 1971) in which Proust defines reading as a solitary practice where the reader enters into a mysterious communication with other people in time and space. While Wolf’s book completely elides In Search of Lost Time, where scenes of reading are crucial to the development of the narrative and have been famously studied by de Man (1982), her work calls attention to the cognitive gymnastics needed to interpret Proust, how reading literature forces the brain to rearrange itself to new tasks. The most well-known work on Proust in recent years is Jonah Lehrer’s Proust was a Neuroscientist Lehrer (2008). Prominently displaying a madeleine on the cover of the reprint, the book sets out to show how artists first discovered truths now rediscovered by neuroscientists. That only one of the eight chapters, the central one, is devoted to Proust only highlights the cultural prestige of Proust; Lehrer did not call the book “Whitman Was a Neuroscientist” or “Stravinsky Was a Neuroscientist.” Lehrer’s description of Proust’s novel is uncommonly sophisticated (though he does fall into the common error of confusing the narrator with the author); he traces Proust’s intellectual context, defines the stakes of the novel, and gives a nuanced description of the madeleine passage that emphasizes the experience of self and memory over physiological considerations. Lehrer’s most compelling contribution, and his most controversial, was his assertion that Kausik Si’s work on binding proteins in memory (cytoplasmic polyadenylation element binding protein or CPEB)
5 Neuroaesthetics
could be linked to Proust’s notion of the persistence of memory that can then be reactivated randomly (92).10 Although the analogy might be stretched and the science may eventually be disproven, Lehrer’s intuition attempts to find neuroscientific research that engages with the conceptual meaning Proust himself gave to the “moment bienheureux.” Wolf’s argument (that reading, and especially reading Proust’s difficult sentences, changes the physiology of the brain) along with Lehrer’s argument (that paying attention to the phenomenal details in Proust’s account can serve as an intuition for the structures of the persistence of memory) allows us to reframe the interaction of literature and neuroscience beyond a conception of literature as folk wisdom and the neurosciences as experimental proof and let us glimpse the possibilities of conceiving how Proust’s work refashions the brain itself.
5 NEUROAESTHETICS With so much already written about Proust, several literary scholars have appealed to the neurosciences in order to breathe fresh air into the literary field and to lend legitimacy to the critical endeavor. As Margaret Gray (1992) writes in her chapter on “Memory, Neurology, and Narration” in her book Postmodern Proust: studying Proust in light of developments in neuroscience as “a sort of ‘poetics’ of perception . . . opens up the framework of literature” (72). One strategy used by literary researchers working in tandem with neuroscientists is to translate the experiences related in a literary text into the language of neurophysiology. This has the advantage of introducing a new discourse into the stifling jargon of literary theory. The danger, of course, is that scientific discourse becomes an unquestioned metaphor, used as a blunt instrument in existing critical debates by literary critics who might not fully understand the science.11 Shepherd-Barr (a professor of English) and Shepherd (a professor of neurobiology) (1998) provide a “textual analysis in neuroscientific terms” of the madeleine passage in which they describe the molecular structure of the various odors Proust’s narrator could have sensed as his neural receptors were activated by the tea and madeleine (49–51) (Shepherd-Barr and Shepherd, 1998). They then provide an account of contemporary research into olfaction that provides valuable context to Proust’s fictional experience, but in the end they repeat many of the same errors as other neuroscientists, discovering in their research, for instance, that Proust’s experience is not entirely involuntary, though this is evident in the text (55). 10
Lehrer cites the work of Si et al. (2003). To take one example, Jenson and Iacoboni (2011) argue that mirror neuron research suggests an ontological priority of mimesis, and thus poststructuralist suspicion of mimesis is unfounded. Yet an imperceptible physiological function exists on an entirely different ontological plane from a work of literature or philosophy. The fact that all humans have mirror neurons does not account for differences in representation between literary texts, or even between the act of recognizing a friend and of writing a realist novel. 11
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The most productive and in-depth research to date has come from Evelyne Ender, a literary scholar well versed in neuroscientific research. Her book Architexts of Memory (Ender, 2005a), which won the MLA’s Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literature in 2005, argues that literary texts serve as memory laboratories because memory itself has fictional and aesthetic elements. For Ender, Proust’s madeleine passage redefines what we think of as autobiographical memory since it combines psychological, physiological, and biochemical dimensions (30) and is, moreover, a “dynamic performance,” one where “memory occurs somewhere between body and mind” (31). Proust’s multilayered text gives a richer portrayal of memory than is currently available to empirical disciplines; Ender suggests that Proust’s literary metaphors can be used in the service of science precisely because they exceed phenomenologically what we can reproduce in a lab (44-5). Similarly, her work on de´ja` vu (or paramnesia) shows, through a reading of Proust and the nineteenth-century writer Ge´rard de Nerval, how literary descriptions of paramnesia “invite fruitful comparisons with current clinical and neurological models of consciousness that embrace the phenomenal aspects of their subject’s mental experiences” (Ender, 2005b, p. 586). What we learn from the comparison, she argues, is that humans can conceive of a measure of time completely different from that upon which our minds are regulated: “a time defined by its qualitative, phenomenal aspects and whose ultimate value lies in the freedom of aesthetic creation” (605). If our memories are partially structured by the stories we tell ourselves, our conscious and creative minds may be able to broaden our ability to remember the past. A translation of the “Proust phenomenon” into neuroscientific terms cannot account for Proust’s invention of language to describe the richness of his mnemonic discovery. What is needed, and what Ender has begun, is to find the ways that Proust’s text structures for his readers new ways of remembering, the writer’s work being as she calls it an “architext of memory.”
6 CONCLUSION In the madeleine passage, at the anxious interval between the narrator’s first taste of the tea-soaked madeleine and his recall of the lost memory of Combray, he explains the conundrum at the heart of the neurosciences: I put down my cup and turn inwards towards my own mind. It is up to it to find the truth. But how? Serious uncertainty, every time the mind feels overtaken by itself; when he, the researcher, is at once the obscure country he has to explore and where all of his baggage will be of no use. Search? Not only: create. (I, 45)12
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“Je pose ma tasse et me tourne vers mon esprit. C’est a` lui de trouver la ve´rite´. Mais comment? Grave incertitude, toutes les fois que l’esprit se sent de´passe´ par lui-meˆme; quand lui, le chercheur, est tout ensemble le pays obscur ou` il doit chercher et ou` tout son bagage ne lui sera de rien. Chercher? pas seulement: cre´er.”
References
Proust’s famously long sentences suddenly become laconic as he describes how consciousness tries to apprehend itself, as if the metonymic machine that produced so much detail has broken down. The researcher who wants to understand the mind is lost in another country where his scientific “baggage” can only slow him down; looking at our own minds is an alienating experience that puts into question our critical certainties. While discoveries in neuroscience have made incredible progress since Proust’s time, the mind remains not only a largely unchartered territory, but perhaps reveals itself to be unmappable as it constantly expands and grows in complexity in direct proportion to the instruments we invent to understand it. Interdisciplinarity, its very name implying work between disciplines, functions on the play of converging and diverging areas of interest: when two or more disciplines converge on an object of interest, interdisciplinarity becomes possible, but where they diverge productively reveals the limits and blind spots of each discipline. Literary studies (a discipline devoted to thinking about literature, which in itself is a unique discipline) and neuroscience (to collapse the various disciplines that make up neuroscience) converge on the madeleine as an iconic image of memory. In this convergence, it is possible to assert that one or the other discipline “proves” or “disproves” the discovery of the other. By focusing on convergence (question of redundancy, efficiency, institutional hierarchy), the two disciplines are placed in competition, with either literature being held as a valuable precursor or neuroscience being seen as the only valid, because scientific, proof of human experience. But Proust never set out to find the precise biological and mechanical functions of the brain, and no matter how well scientific articles are written they hardly count as literature. Looking beyond the madeleine toward Proust’s novel as a whole, something that neuroaesthetics so far has avoided, raises useful questions about each discipline. How much is neuroscience a discourse (relying on linguistic paradigms that unconsciously determine the interpretation of quantifiable data)? What remains of Proust’s novel if we were to question the truth of his discoveries about memory (in other words, if neuroscience, in a new data-based turn, rejects Proust’s insights, what use would the novel be)? While both neuroscientists and Proust use our most powerful tool, the brain, to investigate itself, Proust combines an experiential account of remembering with the creative impulse to think of new forms of memory and cognition routed in art. The novel form, pushed to its limit, is Proust’s cutting-edge technology, his fMRI, yet his search transforms the mind itself. Neuroscience, by forgetting the narrow focus it has had so far on the madeleine, can take new inspiration from Proust’s unique inventions and begin to invent its own connections between the personal experience of memory and the tools used to observe the mind.
References Bray, P.M., 2013. The Novel Map: Space and Subjectivity in Nineteenth-Century French Fiction. Northwestern University Press, Evanston. Chu, S., Downes, J.J., 2002. Proust nose best: odors are better cues of autobiographical memory. Mem. Cognit. 30 (4), 511–518.
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CHAPTER 3 Proust and the Neurosciences
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Troscianko, E.T., 2013. Cognitive realism and memory in Proust’s madeleine episode. Memory Studies 6 (4), 437–456. Published online before print January, 6 2013, http:// dx.doi.org/10.1177/1750698012468000. Wolf, M., 2008. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. Harper Perennial, New York.
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