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.