What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [90]
—HENRY ADAMS, The Education of Henry Adams:
An Autobiography (1918)
WHO HAS NOT ENCOUNTERED A LONG-FORGOTTEN odor that brings to mind suddenly, and with great clarity, a moment from the past? It leaves one marveling at the potency—and persistence—of smell memory. It’s an experience people are eager to share with me. A compilation of their stories would make a great autobiography of the nation’s collective nose. The American essayist Ellen Burns Sherman had a similar idea: “Were they all collected in a volume, what a golden treasury of poetry and romance would be the thousand records, grave, sweet and tender, which are evoked from every one’s past by the swift coupling line of olfactory association.”
Conventional wisdom credits the French novelist Marcel Proust with the first literary description of the link between smell and memory. His well-known account appears in the opening pages of his multivolume novel Remembrance of Things Past (1913), when the scent of a madeleine dipped in tea awakens childhood memories for the narrator, Marcel. A madeleine is a scallop-shaped sponge cookie—a bite-sized Hostess Twinkie without the filling, and without much flavor. That Proust constructed a 3,000-page story around it is, by itself, one measure of his literary genius.
The madeleine episode has become a cultural touchstone for the smell-memory experience. The poet Diane Ackerman calls him “that voluptuary of smell” and a “great blazer of scent trails through the wilderness of luxury and memory.” The psychologist Rachel Herz claims, “Proust may have been prescient in noting the relationship between olfaction and the phenomenological experience of reliving emotions of the past.” The science essayist Jonah Lehrer believes Proust revealed “basic truths” about memory, specifically that it “has a unique relationship” with the sense of smell. Lehrer credits the novelist with arriving at these truths before scientists did; in fact, he says “Proust was a neuroscientist.”
Psychologists have made Proust their mascot for smell memory. Psychology journals are full of brand-conscious titles like “Proust nose best: Odors are better cues of autobiographical memory” and “Odors and the remembrance of things past.” One has to admire how thoroughly Proust cornered this market—no other novelist has a branch of science named after him. Skepticism being one of the chief values of science, this sort of cheerleading makes one wonder whether Proust’s insights justify the hero worship. Was he really the first writer to note a link between smell and memory? Did he really foreshadow modern neuroscience? To find the answers, we need to look more closely at Proust’s original account.
THE ICONIC MADELEINE passage was published in 1913 in Swann’s Way, the first installment of Remembrance of Things Past. A grown Marcel is served tea and a madeleine by his mother. When he lifts a spoonful of tea and cookie to his lips, he shudders and feels an “all-powerful joy”: “An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin.” Marcel is overwhelmed by a nonspecific sense of familiarity. The smell and taste of the madeleine have something to do with it, but are not enough to evoke a specific memory. Marcel struggles to pinpoint the source of his déjà-smell. He tastes the madeleine again, plugs his ears, and tries to relive the initial experience. Finally, after two pages of strenuous effort, it comes back to him. When he was a child, his aunt Léonie would give him, on Sunday mornings, a piece of madeleine dipped in her tea.
Proust’s struggle with the soggy madeleine is distinctly not the way most people experience odor-evoked memory. For most of us, these recollections spring to mind easily. We experience Sherman’s