Julian Barnes' Last Book

 From Departure(s): A Novel

Marcel finds that when he tries to remember Combray, only the frustrating norms of memory apply: he sees it as no more than ‘a luminous panel, sharply defined against a vague and shadowy background’. And he sees the same scenes again and again. This, he realises, is because they are prompted by ‘voluntary memory, the memory of the intellect’, and since ‘the pictures which that kind of memory shows us preserve nothing of the past itself’, he no longer has any interest in trying to ‘ponder over this residue of Combray. To me it was in reality all dead.’ But then a wonderful thing happens. One day, many years later, low in spirits, he returns home, and his adored mother, seeing that he is cold, offers him some tea, ‘a thing I did not ordinarily take’. Further, she sends out for a petite madeleine. He dips a morsel of cake into the tea and raises it to his lips in a spoon; as he tastes it, an exquisite pleasure runs through him. It is beyond gustatory; it is soul-changing. His daily mood–‘mediocre, contingent, mortal’ – vanishes, and he accesses, with an ‘all-powerful joy’, some essence of himself. And Combray? Not so fast. He takes a second mouthful, in which he finds nothing more than with the first; then a third, in which he finds less. ‘It is time to stop: the potion is losing its magic.’ He considers this for a while, then makes a final attempt to force himself back into that joyful moment when he had taken his first morsel of tea-soaked cake. Whereupon something rises up inside of him, dragged from the depths of his self, ‘mounting slowly’ with ‘the echo of great spaces traversed’. Something seems about to appear, then slips back into the abyss. He tries ten times to pull whatever it is from wherever it was. ‘And suddenly the memory revealed itself.’ This is not ‘the voluntary memory, the memory of the intellect’, but something deeper and more distant. It is not the sight of the madeleine that has triggered it – he has seen thousands of such cakes in the intervening years – but something more primitive and essential: ‘taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring’. And so he finds himself back once again in Combray, visiting his Aunt Léonie on a Sunday morning, when she would dip a little piece of madeleine in her lime tea and feed it to him. Memories now unfold before him just as, in the traditional Japanese pastime, torn pieces of paper placed in water unfold into flowers. Combray and all its forgotten parts are restored to him in their original colours and forms. He remembers how ‘the good folk of the village and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, towns and gardens alike, from my cup of tea’. A few notes on this. First, Proust distinguishes ‘voluntary memory, the memory of the intellect’ from involuntary memory, which allows access to something deeper and more essential. Yet as he describes it, the process most definitely involves the will – Marcel tries ten times to drag those deep-sunk memories out of himself. It may be involuntary to begin with (the unexpected tea/madeleine combination) but it seems to involve a large measure of the voluntary – choosing to follow that smell and taste, straining on the hawser of memory. Secondly, when he succeeds in recovering his fullest memories of Combray, it turns out that, as described, they don’t seem qualitatively different from those achieved by the banal and limited voluntary memory: ‘the good folk of the village and their little dwellings’, and so on. What Marcel tells us he now sees, or re-sees, is more comprehensive than what his voluntary memory has previously revealed. But is there more ‘essence’ and ‘reality’ to it? Not to this reader. Perhaps my scepticism comes from the fact that I’ve never had such a transcendental memory; I’ve subsisted on the hard rusks of voluntary memory. I asked a few close friends, and they hadn’t had a Proustian unfolding either. I suspect that nowadays those keen to access what has been long forgotten might try either psychotherapy or some mind-altering drug like LSD to open the doors of memory and perception. Would I do that myself? Probably not. But then I have never found myself, as Marcel was, frustrated by the limits of the intellect’s memory; and I doubt that if I could reaccess Acton W3 in the late 1940s and early 50s, all would open like a Japanese flower in water, reminding me of forgotten things and forgotten happiness. Nor can I guess what sudden olfactory key might work on me: certainly not a fortuitous morsel of soggy cake. More likely the smell of the glue and varnish I used when constructing model aircraft, or the aroma of frying bacon, or that of a damp golden retriever.