look back in wonder: review by Craig Raine in The Guardian, Saturday 5 January 2008
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What is the nature of memory? And can it be captured in literature? Craig Raine considers the most successful attempts at doing so, from Wordsworth‘s ‘spots of time’ to Proust’s tea-soaked madeleine.
In A la recherche du temps perdu, Proust says many acute things about memory – about physical memory in the body, for instance, in Du cote de chez Swann . One thinks of Robert Frost‘s “After Apple-Picking”: “My instep arch not only keeps the ache, / It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.”
Proust is good, too, on memory’s inaccuracy and its arbitrariness. Think of Albertine’s wandering beauty spot in A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs or Marcel’s observation in Le temps retrouve one forgets the duel one nearly fought but remembers the yellow gaiters one’s opponent wore as a child in the Champs-Elysees. A strikingly dramatic but implausible illustration, this, where sartorial details, revers and darts and flares, are given a Wodehousian precedence over world events. Less good, though, than Henry V’s prediction that soldiers at Agincourt will remember their part in the battle “with advantages”.
I prefer, too, TS Eliot‘s more sober sense of arbitrariness in the “Conclusion” to The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism:
Why, for all of us, out of all we have heard, seen, felt, in a lifetime, do certain images recur, charged with emotion, rather than others? The song of one bird, the leap of one fish, at a particular place and time, the scent of one flower, an old woman on a German mountain path, six ruffians seen through an open window playing cards at night at a small French railway junction, where there was a water-mill: such memories may have symbolic value, but of what we cannot tell, for they come to represent the depths of feeling into which we cannot peer.
They are, then, these memories, super-charged with sensation. Can we describe this sensation – of significance, of occluded feeling? Can we say what it means?
Proust is interested in the particular sensation that accompanies remembering. The tea-soaked madeleine loses its force when it is repeatedly tasted. Tom Stoppard recorded something similar in the first issue of Talk magazine when he wrote “On Turning Out to be Jewish” (September 1999). He meets in Czechoslovakia a woman whose cut has been stitched decades before by Dr Straussler, the father he never knew: “Zaria holds out her hand, which still shows the mark. I touch it. In that moment I am surprised by grief, a small catching-up of all the grief I owe. I have nothing that came from my father, nothing he owned or touched, but here is his trace, a small scar.” A moving moment. But Stoppard has recorded unsentimentally that its power to move diminishes every time he tells the story.
Is the sensation simply nostalgia – like the nostalgic regret of Nicholas Bulstrode in Middlemarch for the time when he was an effective methodist preacher in Islington’s Upper Row with an ambition to be a missionary? Or is it something more profound – like Proust’s meditation, in A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, on his Aunt Leonie’s sofa in the brothel? On that same sofa, Marcel has first experienced love with a girl cousin. Proust gives us a stereoscopic irony as the seedy and the pre-sexual amalgamate. There seems to be a hidden message in the coincidence. Is the coincidence merely a coincidence? Or has the coincidence been arranged? Elements of this supernatural innuendo emerge repeatedly in Nabokov’s Speak, Memory . General Kuropatkin is showing the young Nabokov tricks with matches on a sofa, when he is summoned away: “the loose matches jumping up on the divan as his weight left it.” Fifteen years later, the disguised, fugitive general asks Nabokov’s father for a light … Nabokov says the true purpose of autobiography is “the following of such thematic designs through one’s life”.
In Book II of The Prelude, Wordsworth writes about significant yet insignificant memories as “spots of time”:
There are in our existence spots of time
Which with distinct pre-eminence retain
A vivifying Virtue, whence, depress’d
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,
In trivial occupations, and the round
Of ordinary intercourse, our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repair’d …
This is not so much an explanation as a statement of intrigued bafflement: “the hiding places of my power / Seem open; I approach and then they close.” And the example that Wordsworth gives is interestingly drab. It has a few meagre components – a “naked Pool, / The Beacon on the lonely Eminence, / The Woman and her garments vex’d and toss’d” – and its power is largely retrospective. It is “in truth, / An ordinary sight”. Looked back on, though, the dreariness becomes a “visionary dreariness” that Wordsworth would need colours and words unknown to man to paint. The discrepancy here, in Eliot, and in Proust, is between the original experience and that experience when it is hallowed by remembrance.
The effect is something like cropping in photography. At the beginning of The Waves, Virginia Woolf gives us the childhood memories of Rhoda, Louis, Bernard, Susan and Neville as highlights, ordinary epiphanies: Mrs Constable pulling up her black stockings; a flash of birds like a handful of broadcast seed; bubbles forming a silver chain at the bottom of a saucepan; air warping over a chimney; light going blue in the morning window. These mnemonic pungencies are different from the bildungsroman of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as that novel gets into its stride. They resemble rather the unforgettable anthology of snapshots Joyce gives us at the novel’s beginning – a snatch of baby-talk; the sensation of wetting the bed; covering and uncovering your ears at refectory. Or Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, when Augie is a kind of ship-board unofficial counsellor, the recipient of emotional swarf: “Now this girl, who was a cripple in one leg, she worked in the paint lab of the stove factory”; “He was a Rumania-box type of swindler, where you put in a buck and it comes out a fiver”. Cropped for charisma.
Of course, memory itself is naturally cropped, as Stendhal records in Chapter 13 of Vie de Henry Brulard, where he notes that some memories are undated, vivid as fragmented frescoes, but surrounded by the blank brickwork of oblivion. Actually, anything fragmented, as the romantics knew from Percy’s Reliques, is granted a penumbra of suggestion that we mistake and read as vividness of outline.
Memories are more effective than memoirs. Isolation counts for more than continuity. The Paris of Hemingway’s memoir A Moveable Feast (1964) is less vivid than the same material telescoped in the earlier “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1961).
This is A Moveable Feast:
All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with first cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops to the white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationery and the newspaper shops, the midwife – second class – and the hotel where Verlaine had died, where I had a room on the top floor where I worked.
It isn’t just the clumsiness of the triple “where”. It’s the automatic, sentimental cliche that poisons A Moveable Feast – the flyblown yellowed poster, the unknown girl at the cafe “with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin, and her hair was black as a crow’s wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek”. Nostalgia, as Kundera redefines it in Ignorance, is “the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return”. In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway fails to return to his past, he is exiled from his memories, because his prose is writing itself and he is having a hard time keeping up.
In “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, on the other hand, the detail is seen and hand-picked:
There never was another part of Paris that he loved like that, the sprawling trees, the old white plastered houses painted brown below, the long green of the autobus in that round square, the purple flower dye upon the paving, the sudden drop down the hill of the rue Cardinal Lemoine to the River, and the other way the narrow crowded world of the rue Mouffetard. The street that ran up toward the Pantheon and the other that he always took with the bicycle, the only asphalted street in all that quarter, smooth under the tyres, with the high narrow houses and the cheap tall hotel where Paul Verlaine had died.
By 1964, Hemingway has forgotten the flower dye and the round square. His memory fails. So his memories fail.
Nostalgia, of course, has a meaning less connected with suffering and more with emotional indulgence. As in, “they wallowed in nostalgia”. Here the territory is thick with shared memories, with mnemonic solidarity. For example, Ursula in Women in Love remembers “the servant Tilly, who used to give her bread and butter sprinkled with brown sugar”. In one of Edna O’Brien’s novels, the heroine sits on the step of the back door, eating sugar on bread.
In Le temps retrouve, Marcel floats a theory of involuntary memory which he opposes to the willed act of memory. The theory is founded on three rapidly consecutive examples less famous than the madeleine in Du cote de chez Swann
Two uneven paving stones outside the Princesse de Guermantes’s mansion recall two particular paving stones in the baptistry of San Marco in Venice. The ” ting” of a teaspoon against a plate recalls the noise of a railway man’s hammer testing the wheels of the Paris train as it stood outside a wood – when Marcel (20 pages earlier) reflected on his lack of talent for literature, a verdict based on his apparent indifference to nature. “I am in the midst of nature. Well, it is with indifference, with boredom that my eyes register the line which separates your radiant foreheads from your shadowy trunks.” Now the formerly tedious scene dazes Marcel with its previously unmentioned specifics – opening a bottle of beer, hearing the tapped wheels. The experience is experienced with its accessories. And, lastly, the texture of a napkin brings back the very texture of Marcel’s bathing towel at Balbec. The napkin contains the towel, which contains an ocean green and blue as a peacock’s tail – the ocean since involuntary memory never recalls the indefinite article.
Involuntary memory, in this account, restores reality in its entirety, and is therefore a form of resurrection. It is, further, a kind of “immortality”. Marcel, accordingly, feels joy that makes death a matter of indifference to him. His faith in his literary talent is restored by the intensity with which he recalls these essentially banal experiences.
The idea is shared, or perhaps borrowed, by Nabokov, a much greater writer, in Speak, Memory:
I see again my class-room, the blue roses of the wall-paper, the open window. Its reflection fills the oval mirror above the leathern couch where my uncle sits, gloating over a tattered book. A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.
In Nabokov’s account, memory is complete, beyond process, exempt from change. The reasoning here is coherent.
Proust’s exposition of “fragments of existence withdrawn from Time” is somewhat muzzy by comparison:
The truth surely was that the being within me which had enjoyed these impressions had enjoyed them because they had in them something that was common to a day long past and to the present, because in some way they were extra-temporal, and this being made its appearance only when, through one of these identifications of the present with the past, it was likely to find itself in the one and only medium in which it could exist and enjoy the essence of things, that is to say: outside time.
In any case, Proust’s laborious explanation is partial. He has not elucidated the mechanism of memory properly. The mystery that needs explanation is why the recalled experience should bring such acute pleasure when the actual, original experience was “tedious”, and therefore unapprehended.
Proust’s “answer” is that we experience intimations of immortality. It is possible, though, that we simply enjoy the act of remembrance – and that this requires no explanation. It is a fact, the way we are, part of any human being’s hard-wiring.
On the other hand, the pleasure is extraordinary. It is comparable to “the constant readiness to discern the halo round the frying pan or the likeness between a weeping-willow and a Skye terrier”. That simile from Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is a clue to the true nature of memory’s mechanism.
Memory is like metaphor in its operations. Memory is sexual in its operations. In English we speak of “coming” when we speak of orgasm. “I’m coming” means that the sexual partner is arriving at the predestined place, the site of pleasure. The journey can be long or short but the elusive destination is known in advance.
The words Marcel uses to describe the pleasure that accompanies his three involuntary memories are “a shudder of happiness” (” avec un tel fremissement de bonheur “). Not that this is explicitly or exclusively sexual. The word fremissement can be applied to fear, anger, as well as pleasure. It is, too, according to my Petit Robert, a light ( leger ) sensation, rather than Eliot’s “blood shaking the heart”. The other word Marcel uses is une joie . In French, another word for joy, jouissance, is also the word for coming, for plaisir sexuel . Jouissance seems less pedestrian than “coming”. But having an orgasm – or orgasme – is parvenir a la jouissance . And parvenir means to arrive at a predetermined point.
In English we use the French word “parvenue” to suggest someone who is socially ambitious, someone who has only recently achieved social prominence, social heights – an assiduous social corkscrew, someone who isn’t a someone, but someone who is a nobody. “One of the low on whom assurance sits / As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.”
Our other word, also French, for such a person is an arriviste – someone who has just arrived at the desired destination.
I suggest that the pleasure, the joy really experienced by Marcel, and by the rest of us, is bound up with the sensation of imminence, suspense and arrival – common to sex and simile.
The pleasure experienced by Marcel is primarily the actual act of remembrance, and only secondarily in the recovered detail of what is remembered. In each of these three involuntary memories, Marcel experiences a delay. The paving stones are like … what? The teaspoon is like … what? The texture of the napkin is exactly like … what? Marcel claims the recall is instant, but it isn’t. As he tests the uneven paving stones, he has to repeat the initial movement exactly:
Every time that I merely repeated this physical movement, I achieved nothing; but if I succeeded, forgetting the Guermantes party, in recapturing what I had felt when I first placed my feet on the ground in this way, again the dazzling and indistinct vision fluttered near me, as to say: “Seize me as I pass if you can, and try to solve the riddle of happiness I set you.”
The pleasure of memory is the pleasure we experience when we read a good simile – the pleasure of difference between the two things being compared, the pleasure we take in the justice of the comparison and the sensation of comprehension. Every good simile is a kind of riddle: X is like Y. Why is X like Y? The mind sifts the evidence for and against, seeking the evidence for. Marcel solves the riddle of what the paving stones remind him of. He arrives at a solution, he comes to the destination, to the only conclusion retrospectively possible.
At its most banal, this process is what Bloom experiences in the “Lestrygonians” episode of Ulysses when he tries to remember a name across 20 or so pages. Finally, it comes to him: “Pen. Pen. Penrose.” The itch is scratched. The search has come to a conclusion.
At its most complex, it is Molly’s recollection at the end of Ulysses of losing her virginity to Bloom on Howth Head. Whereas in Proust, the present provokes a specific memory of the past, Molly’s memory of Howth is underlaid with an earlier memory, and, surrendering to Bloom, she surrenders also to an earlier lover:
yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another …
Molly’s first proper kiss and her first full act of intercourse are conflated. Lieutenant Jack or Joe or Harry Mulvey (Molly can’t remember his Christian name) is twinned with Leopold Bloom. Memory as multiple orgasm, so to speak.
Nabokov began Speak, Memory with a phrase that was later lifted by Samuel Beckett and vulgarised in Waiting for Godot : “The cradle rocks above the abyss.” (In Beckett, “we give birth astride the grave”. Twice.) The word “remember” is itself an implicit rejoinder to death. Its etymology counters dismemberment. It is very rare therefore to encounter a flat rejection of memory such as Ursula Brangwen’s in Women in Love
She wanted to have no past. She wanted to have come down from the slopes of heaven to this place, with Birkin, not to have rolled out of the murk of her childhood and her upbringing, slowly, all soiled. She felt that memory was a dirty trick played upon her. What was this decree that she should ‘remember’! Why not a bath of pure oblivion, a new birth, without any recollection or blemish of past life.
Of course, Lawrence had a low opinion of Proust: “too much jelly-water: I can’t read him.” As did Evelyn Waugh, who wrote to Nancy Mitford (March 16 1948):
I am reading Proust for the first time – in English of course – and am surprised to find him a mental defective. No one warned me of that. He has absolutely no sense of time. He can’t remember anyone’s age. In the same summer as Gilberte gives him a marble & Francoise takes him to a public lavatory in the Champs-Elysees, Bloch takes him to a brothel.
Nor was Joyce keen to be matched against Proust. On October 24 1920, Joyce wrote to Frank Budgen:
I observe a furtive attempt to run a certain M Marcel Proust of here against the signatory of this letter. I have read some pages of his. I cannot see any special talent but I am a bad critic.
On the whole, though, Proust’s influence makes itself felt wherever memory is important.
In spite of his confession in 1948 that he hadn’t read A la recherche, Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945) is clearly influenced by an idea of Proust’s novel. Not only is there a reference to Charlus – the toady don Mr Samgrass spends “a cosy afternoon with the incomparable Charlus” – but there are several uncharacteristic extended metaphors stretching for a paragraph at a time. Uncharacteristic of Waugh – and though a famously Proustian trope, one less frequent, it is my impression, in the later volumes of A la recherche, where the sentences themselves are pithier, more Waugh-like. And Charles Ryder, Waugh’s narrator, encapsulates his theme at the beginning of Book 3: “My theme is memory … These memories, which are my life – for we possess nothing certainly except the past – were always with me. Like the pigeons of St Mark’s …” An extended metaphor ensues. Is it a coincidence or a Freudian slip that the pigeons are situated in San Marco, a locus central to Le temps retrouve
I should say, too, that Virginia Woolf’s The Years – with its time range from 1880 to 1937, its repeated motifs, its chronological gaps during which characters alter dramatically – was an attempt to emulate Proust in English. Delia’s party at the end of The Years gathers all the narrative’s aged sur- vivors in one place, just as Proust assembles his survivors at the Princesse de Guermantes’s, where their aged appearances are ironically and famously described as fancy dress – an extended conceit that begins brilliantly but soon shows signs of strain, like a man with asthma holding his breath.
Of course, Virginia Woolf idolised Proust: on May 6 1922 she wrote to Roger Fry:
Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly get out a sentence. Oh if I could write like that! I cry. And at the moment such is the astonishing vibration and saturation and intensification he procures – theres [sic] something sexual in it – that I feel I can write like that and seize my pen and then I can’t write like that. Scarcely anyone so stimulates the nerves of language in me: it becomes an obsession. But I must return to Swann.
Fulsome praise, though in October she is still on volume one. Three years later, on February 9 1925, Woolf tells Margaret Llewelyn Davies that she’s only read three volumes. No obstacle to her claim on April 21 1927 to her sister Vanessa that Proust is “far the greatest novelist”.
She seems, however, never to have actually finished reading A la recherche . In a 1928 newspaper piece, “Preferences”, she writes: “I have also bought and propose to read should my life last long enough the final volumes of Proust’s masterpiece.” ( Le temps retrouve was published in 1927.) On April 27 1934, she tells Ethel Smyth she’s reading Sodom et Gomorrhe . And on May 21 1934, again to Ethel Smyth: “I cant [sic] write myself within its arc; that’s true; for years I’ve put off finishing it.”
And yet in April, May, June of 1929, her three-part essay “Phases of Fiction” claims that Proustian psychology is an advance on Henry James, while adding the qualification that the “expansion of sympathy” is almost self-defeating. Everything in Proust, however trivial, provokes an extended meditation. “Proust is determined to bring before the reader every piece of evidence upon which any state of mind is founded.” The risk is that the commentary is surplus to requirements, that there is no hierarchy of importance – that the footnotes bury the trickle of text, as it were. “We lose the sense of outline.”
How do we account for Woolf’s high opinion of Proust if it is so precariously founded? It is partially explained by this hyperventilating assessment to Fry on October 3 1922:
One has to put the book down with a gasp. The pleasure becomes physical – like sun and wine and grapes and perfect serenity and intense vitality combined. Far otherwise is it with Ulysses : to which I bind myself like a martyr to a stake, and have thank God, now finished – My martyrdom is over. I hope to sell it for pounds 4.10.
For Virginia Woolf, Proust was a way of putting her rival Joyce in his place – and a way, too, of acceding easily to the preferential judgments of homosexual Bloomsbury.
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