Proust's Nostalgia and the Emotion of Memory

“An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, 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 on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savors, could not, indeed, be of the same nature.” – Marcel Proust, “The Cookie” from In Search of Lost Time (p. 1)

“This is the irony of Proustian nostalgia: it remembers things as being far better than they actually were. But Proust, at least, was acutely aware of his own fraudulence. He knew that the Combray he yearned for was not the Combray that was. (As Proust put it, “The only paradise is paradise lost.”) This wasn’t his fault: there simply is no way to describe the past without lying. Our memories are not like fiction. They are fiction.” – Jonah Lerer, “Proust: The Method of Memory” from Proust Was a Neuroscientist (p. 88)

     Proust does a lot of soul searching in the above passage, but there is one thing he does not explore: specifically, “why this memory made me so happy” (Proust 3). It is certainly a question worth asking.

     As Lerer observes, much of the narrator’s nostalgia in this passage—like all nostalgia—bears a rosy tint. The ordinary of the past has, with time, become extraordinary, bringing with its recollection a rush of emotions that Proust describes in great detail as an “exquisite pleasure” similar to that from that highest of all emotions, love.

     Most notably, the emotion occurs before Proust has even made the mental connection to his childhood. The “all-powerful joy” overwhelms him before he consciously understands why. By the time he acknowledges it, the narrator’s tense has already faded to past perfect: the pleasure “had invaded” his senses. (Proust later makes an interesting shift to present tense to evoke the experience of attempting to recapture the initial emotion.) From this immediacy, we must understand that the phenomenon here does not derive from a conscious reflection on a fond memory, but rather from the very act of remembering. It is sudden and automatic.

     I recall reading a paper last year describing the experiences of subjects who had undergone a last-resort brain stimulation experiment to alleviate seizure symptoms. Electrical implants were installed in various areas of the brain, and the participants were given a controller that allowed them to actively stimulate each one independently, at will. Most of the results were unsurprising: a man discovered that stimulating one region brought on the feeling of approaching orgasm, and he found himself pressing the button in vain attempts to achieve climax. One response, however, was remarkable in its specificity and emotional context: by stimulating a single region, one subject was able to evoke the feeling of being about to remember something, and he too tried in vain to cross the threshold and “remember” what was on the other side.

     The notion that accessing a memory should be accompanied by positive emotion seems reasonable. Thinking on an evolutionary level, it would have been advantageous for our ancestors to exercise their memories when given the opportunity. If memories exist as shifts in the strength of synapses, actively engaging these connections and reforging them from time to time could prevent much chance of fading or decay. As Lerer notes, “Memory [is] a ceaseless process, not a repository of inert information” (Lerer 85). Social memory seems especially tied to emotion; one must only consider an embarrassing moment from one’s past to observe the rush of embarrassment that returns in its wake. We do not want to repeat our mistakes.

     Nostalgia, however, appears to lie in a slightly different class. There can be little advantage for Proust in painting his past with more generous strokes; if anything, this only creates the regret of what he might have called a “paradise lost.” In the excerpted passage above, he says that the feeling causes the “vicissitudes of life” to become “indifferent,” and “its disasters innocuous.” Rather than an acuteness designed for effective learning, Proust’s nostalgia seems to dull his sensibilities. Where could this have come from?—“Whence could it have come to me?” Does nostalgia serve a purpose beyond flexing the memory muscle? Or is it a glimpse into something like the human soul, something “isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin”?

     I wish I had an answer.

Attention and Distraction: It's All in the Emphasis

“Pillsbury agreed with Titchener, indicating, ‘The essence of attention as a conscious process is an increase in the clearness on one idea or a group of ideas at the expense of others.’ Researchers at the beginning of the 20^th century debated how this increased clearness is obtained. Mach, Stumpf, and others favored the view that this increase in clearness was direct, whereas Wundt, Kulpe, and others held the view that the increase was accomplished indirectly by inhibiting the sensations that were not attended to. … The debate about whether attention increases the clearness of attended events or decreases the clearness of unattended events presaged the current argument in psychology regarding whether attending is accomplished primarily through excitatory or inhibitory mechanisms.” – Proctor and Johnson, “Historical Overview of Research on Attention” (p. 11-12)

“Trim ran down and brought up his master’s supper,—to no purpose:—Trim’s plan of operation ran so in my uncle Toby’s head, he could not taste it.—Trim, quoth my uncle Toby, get me to-bed;—‘twas all one.—Corporal Trim’s description had fired his imagination,—my uncle Toby could not shut his eyes.” – Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (p. 70)

     In Tristram Shandy, the narrator is a sort of maestro of distraction. The story rolls along one tangent after another, returning to core scenes only to depart again in an abrupt digression. However, Sterne manages to hold his reader’s attention through a deft use of suspense, both blunt and subtle: several times, usually at the end of chapters or volumes, he openly dares the reader to guess what happens next: “You may conjecture upon it, if you please,” he says at the end of Volume II, “but I tell you before-hand it will be in vain” (Sterne 111). More indirectly, his very style of alighting and departing from specific scenes generates a building suspense that draws focus to these scenes by the act of distracting the reader’s attention elsewhere. In this way, Sterne lends focus to his very disjointed novel.

     In the passage excerpted above, Sterne illustrates a conception of attention at the level of his characters. The scene preceding this passage is composed of constant distractions; it begins with Toby blushing “as red as scarlet” after hearing Trim voice his scheme of reconstructing Toby’s wartime maps on Toby’s own property. What follows is a series of interruptions in the conversation between the two. Each of the men becomes consumed by his own train of thought, unable to pay adequate attention to the other. While Sterne’s prose dodges back and forth between them, one can see through the jungle of punctuation that Toby and Trim themselves are singularly occupied.

     Proctor and Johnson’s review emphasizes the proposed theory that attention results from increased clearness of an idea at the expense of others, whether by an increase in clarity of the attended event or by suppression of superfluous stimuli. Sterne illustrates this notion here: Toby can neither taste his food nor fall asleep due to the diversion of his attention into this one idea. However, Sterne does not reveal the identity of Toby’s idea itself until the next paragraph. By creating suspense in the form of the protracted exchange between Toby and Trim, he places emphasis on the distracting effects of this idea. Paradoxically, the reason the idea is in fact so distracting as to blunt taste and prevent sleep, is because it so effectively holds Toby’s attention that he cannot direct his thoughts elsewhere. Sterne’s suspense in this scene comes to completion with the following passage:

“My uncle Toby had a little neat country-house of his own, in the village where my father’s estate lay at Shandy…so that as Trim uttered the words, “A rood and a half of ground to do what they would with:”—This identical bowling-green instantly presented itself, and became curiously painted, all at once, upon the retina of my uncle Toby’s fancy;—which was the physical cause of making him change colour, or at least, of heightening his blush” (Sterne 70).

     Unpacking this passage yields telling results: after revealing the details of the notion that has so engrossed Toby’s mind, Sterne supplies the concluding image of the blush, bringing the moment full circle. Much like the rest of the novel, in which Sterne bookends digressions or sub-stories between familiar images, he frames Toby’s bout of distraction with his blushing face, the outward expression of his inner condition.

     Furthermore, in a level of significance that I do not believe would have been available to Sterne himself but offers an interesting coincidence for us modern readers, the description of the retina mirrors the concept of clarity of one idea accompanied by the abstraction of others. As we know, the receptive fields of light-sensitive cells in the retina are composed of on- and off-centered cells. These receptive fields, like little bullseyes, respond to light in the center and darkness in the periphery—or vice versa—to emphasize contrast and enhance light-dark boundaries. This allows for clearer vision.

     Without such contrasts, there would be no such thing as focus. In order for one idea to be emphasized, others must be either de-emphasized (if we go with the inhibitory theory), or at least less emphasized (excitatory). It’s the same reason why summer feels so nice—if we didn’t know winter, summer wouldn’t be half so warm.

The Physicality of Thought: Electric Quackery and the Residence of the Soul

“Animal spirit refused to go quietly largely because there was, at the beginning of the long eighteenth century, no obvious successor and clearly some influence passed along the nerves, to and from the brain. However by the mid-eighteenth century, there was at last a contender which began to grow in popularity: electricity.” – C.U.M. Smith, “Brain and Mind in the ‘Long’ Eighteenth Century (p. 21)

“But the greatest curiosity, upon which the fate of the island depends, is a loadstone of prodigious size… By means of this loadstone, the island is made to rise and fall, and move from one place to another. For, with respect to that part of the earth over which the monarch presides, the stone is endued at one of its sides with an attractive power, and at the other with a repulsive. … But it must be observed, that this island cannot move beyond the extent of the dominions below.” – Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (Book III, Chapter III)

     In retrospect, it’s easy to laugh at the misdirected theories and experimentation pursued by scientists of the past, especially when the truth appears so obvious to us now. However, with regard to the study of electricity in the eighteenth century, no lens of hindsight was necessary for intellectuals to scoff at some of their peers. As Smith says, “The study of electricity in the mid-eighteenth century hovered between science, quackery and entertainment” (22). Men like Franz Mesmer were administering iron solutions and attaching magnets all over the bodies of patients in order to channel the flow of their magnetic aether. The archaic concept of animal spirit had not gone away, but had merely transformed to more closely resemble the modern discoveries.

     Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels bitingly satirizes the quackery of his contemporaries. When Gulliver visits the grand academy of Lagado, he witnesses filthy, unkempt researchers slaving on projects “for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers” and operations “to reduce human excrement to its original food” (Swift, Chapter V). At the same time, their neglected homes and farmland fall into ruin. These harebrained efforts, while exaggerated, do not stray too far from the practices going on in the academic community at Swift’s time. Gulliver’s Travels captures the culture of confusion, but at the same time as it derides the desperation of these pseudo-scientists, it owns the mystery and uncertainty at the core of the contemporary brain science.

     In the passage excerpted above, Gulliver describes the majestic mechanism behind Laputa, the floating island. The imagery associated with this island implicates it as a substitute for the human brain: it is “exactly circular,” composed of “the several minerals in their usual order, and over all is a coat of rich mould.” The rain that falls on the island is “conveyed in small rivulets toward the middle” (Swift, Chapter III). This description echoes the poetry of Keats, who relies on mountainous ridges and narrow streams to convey the creases and nerves of the brain. Also like Keats, Swift assigns a sentient being dominion over the natural landscape. Like Psyche in Keats’s “Ode to Psyche” or the charioteer in “On Sleep and Poetry,” the Laputian monarch claims the island as his “demesne.” Giving the brain—composed of mere animal, vegetable, and mineral elements—a distinctly personal protector implies subscription to the belief that brain and mind, or brain and soul, remain separate. The soul resides in the brain—indeed it is essentially trapped there, much as Gulliver informs his readers that the monarch cannot move the island beyond the bounds of his own kingdom—but the soul is personal, while the brain is just the wiring that allows it to communicate with the body and the outside world.

     The means of this communication in the eighteenth century remained opaquely obscure. Swift’s choice of an enormous magnet as the driving force behind Laputa anticipates the rise of electricity as the presumed neural fluid. Even Laurence Sterne, writing later in Tristram Shandy, mocks the pervasive application of electricity to psychological phenomena: “A man and his Hobby-Horse, tho’ I cannot say that they act and re-act exactly after the same manner in which the soul and body do upon each other: Yet doubtless there is a communication between them of some kind, and my opinion rather is, that there is something in it more of the manner of electrified bodies” (Sterne 55). Unlike the foolish scientists in Lagado, however, Swift does not hasten to experiment and explain. By choosing a suitably fantastical image for the brain—a floating island with almost magical magnetic properties—he eschews too much scientific speculation. He recalls in this image the romanticism of Keats’s poetry, in which lyricism and mystery fill in the gaps of understanding. It is fascinating to observe how prominent eighteenth-century scientists would frequently express their discoveries in verse, as if to counteract the chaos of the unknown, by giving it that quality of poetry which somehow makes the unknown beautiful.