"An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses": Proust dips a madeleine in his tea and a whole town comes back
The madeleine episode from Swann's Way, in C. K. Scott Moncrieff's 1922 English, with a close read of the grammar that lets the memory arrive on its own.
Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time runs to seven volumes and about 1.25 million words, much of it spent on a narrator's slow attempt to recover his own past 1. The passage below is where the attempt overtakes him. The narrator is grown and living in Paris, with almost nothing left of the country childhood he calls Combray, when a mouthful of tea with a crumb of cake in it floods him with a pleasure he cannot explain. Within a few pages that taste brings the whole town back to him — the house, the streets, the garden, the church — and he sees that the memory he had been chasing with his intelligence had been sitting in a teacup the whole time.
The scene closes the first section of Swann's Way, the novel's opening volume. Du côté de chez Swann was published in Paris in 1913, after three publishers had turned it down; at the Nouvelle Revue Française, André Gide read the manuscript, noticed a few slips of syntax, and rejected it, and Proust paid for the printing himself 1. Combray is his name for Illiers, the village where he spent childhood holidays and which took the name Illiers-Combray in 1971 2. The English words below are C. K. Scott Moncrieff's translation, published in 1922; Moncrieff took his title, Remembrance of Things Past, from Shakespeare's Sonnet 30 — "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought / I summon up remembrance of things past" — while Proust's French, À la recherche du temps perdu, says "the search for lost time" 3. The passage is quoted from that 1922 translation as transcribed at Project Gutenberg 4.
Passage
And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die.Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, save what was comprised in the theatre and the drama of my going to bed there, had any existence for me, when one day in winter, as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called 'petites madeleines,' which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim's shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. 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. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?
— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way (Du côté de chez Swann, Paris: Grasset, 1913), "Combray", translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Remembrance of Things Past, volume one (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1922) 4. Quoted as printed, with the transcription's double hyphens set here as em dashes.
Gloss
- petites madeleines — small sponge cakes from Commercy and Liverdun, in the Lorraine region of northeastern France, baked in shell-shaped moulds that give them a ridged scallop pattern on one side and a hump on the other 5. Madeleines were a common French tea-table cake by the end of the nineteenth century, which is why the narrator's mother can send out for a plate of them.
- "the fluted scallop of a pilgrim's shell" — the scallop is the badge of the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, in Spain, where the apostle James is said to be buried, and one legend of the madeleine ties its shell shape to little cakes offered to pilgrims crossing Lorraine on that road 5. Proust's French names the object more precisely: la valve rainurée d'une coquille de Saint-Jacques, the grooved half of a St James's shell 6. Moncrieff kept the pilgrimage in his English and left the saint out.
- "mediocre, accidental, mortal" — the French is médiocre, contingent, mortel 6. Contingent belongs to philosophy: a contingent thing is one that might never have existed, because nothing required it. Moncrieff's "accidental" carries part of that sense, and the sentence's point is that the taste lifts the narrator out of exactly this condition — the feeling of being a thing that merely happens to be here.
Close read
Watch where the passage puts its acting. The paragraph before the scene states the rule plainly: the past is hidden in some material object, and it depends on chance whether we ever come upon it. The scene then performs that rule in its grammar. When the tea reaches the narrator's mouth, the sentence that reports it hands the role of subject to something other than him: a shudder ran through my whole body; An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses; the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me. In each of these, the narrator sits in the object or the dative slot. The shudder runs through him, the pleasure invades him, life grows indifferent to him. He is the place where the events happen.
The verbs he does control are the small ones: I declined at first, changed my mind, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea. He can decide to drink the tea. What the tea will do to him is settled elsewhere. Proust sets the two levels side by side, so a reader feels the distance between a man lifting a spoon and the arrival that no effort of his produced.
The passage's other move is the ladder of questions at the end. One long question comes first — Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? — and then three short ones: Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it? The three are the interrogative form of helplessness, and their last two verbs, seize and define, are the instruments of the intelligence, the faculty the opening paragraph has already ruled out. The questions show the mind reaching for its own method at the moment the passage has shown that method coming up empty.
This is how Proust makes involuntary memory feel involuntary on the page. The narrator never announces that he is remembering; the sensation arrives while he is busy with his tea, and the prose holds him in the position of a man being visited. Pages later the memory does surface, and the sentence that reports it begins, flatly, "And suddenly the memory returns." By then the grammar has been telling the reader for several paragraphs that the past is the actor and the man who wants it is the one acted on.
Why it still matters
A cake and a cup of tea are now the commonest shorthand in English for a memory that arrives through the senses. "Proustian" means this episode, and the madeleine became a byword because Proust described an experience readers recognized and had no name for 5. The term he coined for it, involuntary memory, is the one psychology later took over for its own research. Proust ranked the two kinds of memory against each other: the involuntary kind carries what he called the essence of the past, and the voluntary kind, the memories a person assembles by effort, misses it 7.
The scale of the book makes an argument out of a mouthful. The narrator spends seven volumes and more than a million words circling what the tea handed him in a moment 1. What the whole enterprise turns on is a man alone with a spoon and a cup of tea.
The novel's own history runs against the scene's promise. Three publishers refused the manuscript, and the author paid to have it printed; a century later it holds the record for the longest novel, and Edmund White, writing on its centenary, called it the most respected novel of the twentieth century 1. For English readers the point of entry has been Moncrieff's 1922 translation, the one quoted above, which has carried the madeleine across the language for a hundred years 3.
Reflection
Think of a taste, a smell, or a scrap of music that returns a place you had given up trying to picture. When it arrives, does the place come back whole, or in pieces? And what does the way it arrives tell you about which parts of your past you have actually kept?
References
- 1Wikipedia: In Search of Lost Time
en.wikipedia.org
- 2Wikipedia: Marcel Proust
en.wikipedia.org
- 3Wikipedia: C. K. Scott Moncrieff
en.wikipedia.org
- 4Project Gutenberg: Swann's Way, by Marcel Proust
gutenberg.org
- 5Wikipedia: Madeleine (cake)
en.wikipedia.org
- 6Wikisource (French): Du côté de chez Swann, "Combray"
fr.wikisource.org
- 7Wikipedia: Involuntary memory
en.wikipedia.org
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