What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [91]
Here is another remarkable thing about the madeleine episode: it is utterly devoid of sensory description. Across four pages of text, Proust, that “voluptuary of smell,” provides not a single adjective of smell or taste, not a word about the flavor of the cookie or tea. This is hard to square with his reputation as the sensual bard of scent. Outside of psychology, in fact, the experts are more impressed with his visual imagery. The literary scholar Roger Shattuck, for example, thinks that Proust’s dominant mode of description is visual. Shattuck took a close look at the eruptions of involuntary memory that Proust called reminiscences or resurrections (moments bienheureux). Of eleven examples in the entire novel, only two are triggered by smell, the madeleine incident being one of them.
Victor Graham is another scholar who finds that Proust’s sensory imagery is largely visual. Graham indexed all 4,578 sensory impressions in the novel and found that 62 percent were visual. Smell and taste together accounted for less than 1 percent. This seems shockingly low, but it is on a par with other writers. In 1898 an obsessive psychologist named Mary Grace Caldwell tabulated every sensory adjective in the poetry of Shelley and Keats. She found that visual descriptors predominated: 79.9 percent for Shelley, 73.7 percent for Keats. Smell barely registered: 1.8 percent for Shelley and 2.7 percent for Keats.
Despite his reputation, Diane Ackerman’s “great blazer of scent trails” was no more nasal than the next guy; nor did he write about smells very well. As Graham pointed out, Proust liked involuntary memories because they called forth “a flood of visual images” and emotions, but the flood contained very little aroma. Proust’s trademark as a writer was to observe the recovery of a memory in excruciating detail, though after 3,000 pages it’s not clear whether Marcel even liked the taste of madeleines. He was more interested in the process of introspection than in the smells it dredged up.
If Proust’s reputation for psychological accuracy is questionable, what about the common assumption that he was the first author to recognize a powerful link between scent and memory? The record is clear, and it does not favor Proust. In American literature the memory-evoking power of smell was a commonplace observation long before Swann’s Way. Sixty-nine years earlier, for example, Edgar Allan Poe wrote, “I believe that odors have an altogether idiosyncratic force, in affecting us through association; a force differing essentially from that of objects addressing the touch, the taste, the sight, or the hearing.”
In 1851 Nathaniel Hawthorne expressed the same idea in The House of the Seven Gables: “‘Ah!—let me see!—let me hold it!’ cried the guest, eagerly seizing the flower, which by the spell peculiar to remembered odors, brought innumerable associations along with the fragrance it exhaled.”
In 1858 Oliver Wendell Holmes called attention to odor memory in his collection of essays The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table: “Memory, imagination, old sentiments and associations, are more readily reached through the sense of SMELL than by almost any other channel.” Holmes illustrated his observation with an example from his own life. It’s a sensory rhapsody of childhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts, sometime before 1825:
Ah me! what strains and strophes of unwritten verse pulsate through my soul when I open a certain closet in the ancient house where I was born! On its shelves used to lie bundles of sweet-marjoram and pennyroyal and lavender and mint and catnip; there