What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [92]
Holmes was a practicing physician as well as a writer. From his medical training he was well aware of the neuroanatomical basis of odor perception, and he had the Autocrat himself discuss it:
There may be a physical reason for the strange connection between the sense of smell and the mind. The olfactory nerve—so my friend, the Professor, tells me—is the only one directly connected with the hemispheres of the brain, the parts in which, as we have every reason to believe, the intellectual processes are performed. To speak more truly, the olfactory “nerve” is not a nerve at all, he says, but a part of the brain, in intimate connection with its anterior lobes.
The Professor contrasts this with the wiring of the gustatory system to explain why smell has a powerful link to memory but taste does not. Holmes’s understanding of brain function is correct and modern—and it was written fifty-five years before Swann’s Way.
While Proust was working on his novel, other writers were exploring the smell-memory connection. In 1903 the American physician Louise Fiske Bryson wrote, in Harper’s Bazaar, “An odor, a perfume, will serve to recall bright scenes of other days with a vividness that is almost a miracle.” In 1908 The Spectator published the essay “Scent and Memory,” which used the image of a magic-carpet ride to describe how a sudden scent makes “miles of distance and decades of years vanish.” Five years later Proust likened smell memory to being magically transported by a genie from the Arabian Nights.
Ellen Burns Sherman’s thoroughly psychological account of odor memory was published in 1910, three years before Swann’s Way. She described how an emotional moment woven into a man’s memory along with the scent of his lover’s perfume is brought to mind decades later when he catches “an infinitesimal whiff of the fragrance.” Sherman says the former scene appears instantaneously, as if with “the turn of an electrical switch.” In 1913 the American popular science writer Ellwood Hendrick, writing in The Atlantic Monthly, said, “These flashes of memory aided by smell are wonderful. Through smell we achieve a sense of the past.”
Clearly, the subject of scent and recovered memory was very much in the air during the first years of the twentieth century. Proust shared this fascination and gave it his characteristic introspective literary treatment. For anyone not wearing Proust goggles, however, he was obviously not the first author to anticipate the discoveries of modern neuroscience.
HOW SECURE IS Proust’s reputation as an olfactory innovator, if all these Yankees were saying the same thing years earlier? Perhaps he was the first French author to capture the phenomenon? Ah, mais non. The French author Louis-François Ramond de Carbonnières (1755–1827) was well known in Proust’s day. In his most famous work, Travels in the Pyrenees, he described his descent from a mountaintop glacier on the border between France and Spain. He became intoxicated with the rustic smells of newly mown hay and flowering linden trees. As night fell, he tried to account for “the sweet and voluptuous sensation” that came upon him with such involuntary insistence. “There is something mysterious in odors which powerfully awaken the remembrance of the past…. The odor of a violetrestores to the soul enjoyments of many springtimes.” This has a Proustian ring to it, and for good reason. As the historian and critic Charles Rosen points out, “The coincidence is not fortuitous: Proust knew this page of Ramond.” It was anthologized in French high school textbooks until very late in the nineteenth century.
Contemporary French psychology is another possible source of Proustian