3 .
THE IMPORTANCE OF
MADELEINES —
REMEMBERING

SHE [HIS MOTHER] sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called ‘petites madeleines,’ which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim’s shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestions 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 had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. Whence could it have come to me, this immortal joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended these savors, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come from? What did it signify? How could I seize upon it and define it?

Marcel Proust

Ah,Marcel Proust’s passage on the humble madeleines, one of the most famous in all of literature! But why? Doesn’t it simply describe the taste of a little cake dunked in tea? Why is it so significant?

Well, it does begin a stream of memory which, a million or so words later, became one of literature’s most intricate and significant works, Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). A powerful little cake indeed. But for the purposes of the memoirist, it also contains a number of revelations about the nature and function of memory.

A sense of self is largely made up of memory. Without memory of events, relationships or knowledge, it would seem impossible to construct a sense of self and certainly impossible to write more than a few disjointed words. Understanding memory goes to the heart of who we are as human beings.

Memory is, always and everywhere, not just one of the memoir writer’s subjects but also her means of working. Whether you are writing about your long ago childhood in a Yorkshire village, your career in Melbourne or New York, or the recent two years you struggled with your daughter’s anorexia, you still need fresh and direct access to memory — not always as easy as it sounds. Often the mind will go blank when asked to remember a general period of life — for example, if I ask you to tell me about your schooldays, you will mostly likely say they were either good or bad — no detail springs immediately to mind. For direct access to memory,we need to look more closely at Proust’s ‘madeleines’ passage. It reveals the significance of ‘original’ memory, its connection to the senses, its pleasure and pain, its central role in constructing a sense of self and, by implication, its crucial importance for writing.

Original and remembered memory

From observation and listening to others, it seems to me that we have two ways of experiencing memory: ‘remembered’ memory and ‘original’ memory. ‘Remembered’ memory is the most common experience; it’s your daily recall of events of the immediate or faraway past which you either entertain in your mind or retell to others. This is the extracted idea of the memory; it is able to be sustained over time and can be quite clear, but there is a sense in which you are separate from the replayed memories. In fact, you feel you are ‘watching’ such memories,much as you watch a film. I can, for example, remember living in Paris for a year, the apartment I lived in, the streets I walked, the boulangerie on the corner diagonally opposite my building. As I recall these images, I am ‘watching’ a sustained and quite detailed memory.

‘Original’ memory comes more rarely and is, as Proust suggests, the product of a sensory stimulus of some kind. Hot tea and cake.A smell or taste or other sensory experience suddenly and powerfully brings the experience to mind.‘Original’ memory is so strong and vivid that, for an instant, you relive the experience. Standing in Aunt’s bedroom eating cake. This kind of memory cannot be sustained — Proust goes on to say that even retasting the madeleine and tea in the following moments does not give the same intense experience as the first taste. But it is very ‘life-like’, felt in the body as much as the mind — you are not so much ‘watching’ it, as immersed in it.

Just as significantly for the writer, ‘original’ memory can also be the first thread of a network of connected and detailed memories. For example, on a particular day last winter in Sydney, the combination of cold, rainy air and traffic smells suddenly created in me a distinct feeling of crossing the street in my old quartier in Paris. Not only did it feel as if the moment was happening again, but a series of memories rapidly unfolded of walking across the cobblestones towards the Pompidou Centre, of waiting in a café for my French teacher, and of the way I felt totally incapable of ever uttering a coherent French sentence!

Depending on the actual event being remembered, both kinds of memory can be intensely pleasurable, or painful, but in either case they create the sensation of being a continuous self,a sense of being a particular person. Both kinds of memory are necessary for the writer,but ‘original’memory is especially important because of its ‘life-likeness’, because it is a ‘close-up’ of life rather than an overview or ‘long shot’, and because of its potential to unlock a whole series of memories providing both a rich flow and a connecting thread.

It might be helpful to look at how memory works, how it constructs your ‘self ’, how it is triggered by sensory input, and how to use this knowledge to begin and continue your memoir.

Memory, science and writing

Reading memoirs and working with many writing students has led me to observe that all memories, whatever their nature, are stored with some kind of sense memory. Recent research on the nature of the mind and on memory has shown that there is indeed a strong link between the senses and memory. According to research using ‘functional magnetic resonance imaging’ (fMRI), whenever you have a sensory input, the amygdala — the part of the brain that determines the appropriate emotional response — ‘lights up’. In other words, the connection between the senses and emotions is ‘hard-wired’ into the brain. As well, sensory memory appears to be spread across the brain, different sense memories being stored in different places — for example, the smell of the sea in one place, the sound of waves in another. What it means is that you only need one sensory aspect of the memory to be activated for all the rest to come flooding back. Some researchers call this the ‘Proustian phenomenon’. It is the key to the memory-based approach to writing memoir rather than the topic-based approach.

Some texts on autobiography advise making lists of the various topics, with suggested lists of questions or topic headings such as ‘parents’,‘schooldays’, ‘holidays’. To me, this approach to writing is like colouring by numbers — you get the job done, but everyone’s picture and story looks similar. Although the particular memories are different, they all have a similar flatness. This is because ‘topics’ are the result of logical organisation; they come from and are stored in the organising areas of the brain. If you start writing from a topic, then you are going into the rational, ordering network of the brain, which works by exclusion, by saying ‘these things go in this list and not in that one’. It is a reasonable network, very useful for building bridges, organising an office and writing academic essays.

I believe it is important to write not from topics, but from individual memory. Memories are aroused and connect to one another not by orderly logical progression but, as we have seen, by a complex linking of senses and emotions across the brain. Memories connect via imagery, metaphor and metonymy — all poetic associations, which is why I believe everyone’s memory is a poet.The smell of nutmeg might connect you not to other spices, as the logical side of the brain would have it, but to your father and the Golden Key café in a small country town where, for the first time, you tasted a malted milk with nutmeg sprinkled on top. (Experience and science both show that the sense of smell is the most powerful stimulus to memory. Research demonstrates that memories related to odours are both more emotional and more detailed.) Memory and creativity work in the same way, by inclusion, by saying ‘all these things are infinitely connected!’ If you start writing from a particular memory, it will give direct entry to the creative network of the brain. It is an associative network, very useful for painting a picture, solving a problem, or writing a memoir.

A quick refresher on metaphor and metonymy
Metaphor: a figure of speech where one thing is likened
to another, for example, my child grows in the cave within
me, where the womb is imagined as a cave.
Metonymy: a figure of speech where the part suggests the
whole, for example, the hand that rocks the cradle, where
‘hand’ suggests the idea of ‘mother’.

Writing via a particular memory will yield vividness of detail, originality, richness of flow, and even a structure.

‘Original’ memory is stored in such vivid detail that once you have the memory, all you need do is to write down the details. You don’t have to ‘think’ of the lively details — they are there in the memory. It also means the details will be original and specific to you, to your individual experience of being, and not general memories of the times.

The network of associations between memories means that pulling out one memory and writing it down will inevitably pull out a whole connected chain of memories. Rather than being stuck on what to write next, you will find a rich flow, even an overwhelming flood, of memories demanding to be written!

Most intriguing of all, if you follow the seemingly chaotic patterns of memory, you will find a structure emerging. This is because of the poetic nature of memory connections — patterns form without your conscious direction. For further discussion of this idea, see chapter 6,‘Finding Form’.

Finding madeleines

The vital question is how to access both ‘remembered’ memory and ‘original’ memory whenever you need to. You cannot wait around hoping someone will offer you a madeleine. Besides, madeleines might not do a thing for you!

It is necessary to find your own ‘madeleine’ to have a way in to the labyrinth of memory. You can then begin to unlock some of the complex patterns stored inside.

Look to your sense memories first. Notice when a particular smell or sound arouses a sensation in you — follow the sensations that sweep through you and see where they lead. Notice all five senses — sight is often the only sense people think of using in their writing. Especially remember touch, the most intimate of all, but often the most neglected in memoir. The texture of skin, of cloth, of tree bark, of a car seat, is also part of the texture of experience. Make lists of various precise sense memories. Look also to mementos you have kept — the name itself indicates their purpose. Take the time to listen to the details these emblems of memory may be able to tell you.

Everyone clearly has different ‘madeleines’, different keys which will unlock the flood of memory. Shirley Hazzard, author of the memoir Greene on Capri, speaking at a literary evening at the Village Voice bookshop in Paris, said that for her the key was light. She had a strong memory for different kinds of light in association with people and places and she only needed to see that light again for the memories to flow. Even as she spoke, her voice took on that quality which indicates a deep pleasure in memory, a pleasure Proust called ‘reverie’, a bright and dreamy experience which, he said,was his favourite emotional state and the one he believed all good writing ought to induce.

READING

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

by Jean-Dominique Bauby

The Sausage

After every day’s session on the vertical board, a stretcherbearer wheels me from the rehabilitation room and parks me next to my bed, where I wait for the nurse’s aides to swing me back between the sheets. And every day, since by now it is noon, the same stretcher-bearer wishes me a resolutely cheerful ‘Bon appetit!’, his way of saying ‘See you tomorrow’. And of course, to wish me a hearty appetite is about the same as saying ‘Merry Christmas’ on 15 August or ‘Goodnight’ in broad daylight. In the last eight months I have swallowed nothing save a few drops of lemon-flavoured water and one half-teaspoon of yoghurt which gurgled noisily down my windpipe. The feeding test — as they grandly called this banquet — was not a success. But no cause for alarm: I haven’t starved. By means of a tube threaded into my stomach, two or three bags of brownish fluid provide my daily calorific needs. For pleasure, I have to turn to the vivid memory of tastes and smells, an inexhaustible reservoir of sensations. Once I was a master of recycling leftovers. Now I cultivate the art of simmering memories. You can sit down to table at any hour, with no fuss or ceremony. If it’s a restaurant, no need to book. If I do the cooking, it is always a success. The bourguignon is tender, the boeuf en gelée translucent, the apricot pie possesses just the requisite tartness. Depending on my mood, I treat myself to a dozen snails, a plate of Alsatian sausage with sauerkraut, a bottle of late-vintage golden Gewurztraminer, or else I savour a simple softboiled egg with fingers of toast and lightly salted butter. What a banquet! The yolk flows warmly over my palate and down my throat. And indigestion is never a problem. Naturally I use the finest ingredients: the freshest vegetables, fish straight from the water, the most delicately marbled meat. Everything must be done right. Just to make sure, a friend sent me the recipe for authentic homemade sausages, andouillettes de Troyes, with three different kinds of meat braided in strips. Moreover, I scrupulously observe the rhythm of the seasons. Just now I am cooling my tastebuds with melon and red fruit. I leave oysters and game for the autumn — should I feel like eating them, for I am becoming careful, even ascetic in matters of diet. At the outset of my protracted fast, deprivation sent me constantly to my imaginary larder. I was gluttonous. But today I could almost be content with a good old proletarian hard sausage trussed in netting and hanging permanently from the ceiling in some corner of my head. A knobbly Lyons rosette, for example, very dry and coarsely chopped. Every slice melts a little on your tongue before you start chewing it to extract all its flavour. The origin of my addiction to sausage goes back forty years. Although still at an age for sweets, I already preferred delicatessen meats, and my maternal grandfather’s nurse noticed that whenever I visited the gloomy apartment on the Boulevard Raspail I would ask her in a beguiling lisp for a sausage. Skilled at indulging the desires of children and the elderly, she eventually pulled off a double coup, by giving me sausage and marrying my grandfather just before he died. My joy at receiving such a gift was in direct proportion to the annoyance these unexpected nuptials caused my family. I have only the vaguest picture of my grandfather: supine and stern-faced in the gloom, resembling Victor Hugo’s portrait on the old five-hundred-franc notes in use at that time. I have a much clearer memory of the sausage lying incongruously among my Dinky toys and children’s books.

I fear I will never eat a better sausage.

Bauby evokes a quintessentially French memory of the sensual delight of food. In the direst circumstances, deprived of movement and even the ability to eat, he creates for himself — and for us — the nourishment and pleasure of food. Read The Diving Bell and the Butterfly for its extraordinary awareness of the detail of life. It is perhaps worth knowing that, letter by letter, Bauby blinked this memoir (each blink like the jerky movement of a butterfly, hence the title) to his assistant after he was paralysed by a stroke.

WRITING EXERCISES

1.The senses

For each part of this exercise, when a particular memory comes up, start writing. Follow the memory wherever it goes, whatever it connects to. Keep writing until the associations run out.

Smell: Go to your kitchen cupboard, refrigerator, bathroom shelves, grocery shop, deli, garage, wherever, and collect together any jars, tubes, tins, containing anything from spices to sump oil,which relate to the time or place of your memoir.
Put them on your desk, shut your eyes and then open the containers one by one and smell the contents. Select one that feels as if it has a strong association for you and concentrate on it. Don’t try to remember, just concentrate on the smell. When a particular memory comes up, start writing.

Taste: Make a similar, but edible, collection. You might even cook some of the food from the time or place you are writing about. Notice the smells but also taste the food. When a particular memory comes up, start writing.

Sound: Find recordings of music. If it is music from your childhood or teenage years you may need to go to a speciality shop or search on the internet. If music was not part of your experience of the time, make a list of other sounds that were part of your experience and try to find those sounds — doors slamming, churchbells ringing, magpies carolling, brakes squealing. When a specific memory comes forward, start writing.

Touch:Make a collection of items to touch — silk, glass, sand, chenille. Touch your own skin — I find touching my cheekbones always brings back the memory of cupping my children’s faces when they were babies. As before, when a specific memory comes forward, start writing.

Sight: The best sight stimulus is to visit actual sights, or to look at objects connected to the time and place you want to write about. If that is not possible, and often it is not, try to make a collection of photographs.When a specific memory comes forward, start writing.

2. Remembered senses

While the sensory experience is important, if it is difficult to gather the elements, or you don’t have the time, you can write a list of sensory experiences — of smells, tastes, sounds, touches and sights. Of course, this way you are going in via the ‘organising’ side of your brain, but there are ways of finding a side door into the creative network of memory. The list must be very precise — don’t write the smell of roses, but the smell of the red rose just inside my grandmother’s front gate; not the taste of popcorn but the taste of the warm popcorn I ate the first time I went to the cinema with a boy; not spices, but the bowls of cinnamon and cardamom in the souk in Marrakech. Then select one of the sense memories and concentrate on it and see whether other connected sense memories come back. For example, the taste of popcorn at the cinema may bring back the feel of your legs on the leather seats, the sweaty palm of the boy holding your hand, the sound of the woman behind you rustling her packet of crisps. At any point, start writing, following the memory wherever it goes. Perhaps it will leap forward to other cinemas, other boys — it doesn’t matter, simply follow it.

3. Hands

Call to mind hands you have noticed. They could be your grandmother’s, your son’s, your own hands. If you are not someone who especially notices hands, then use something else — eyes, smiles, gestures. Focus on one memory and try to evoke the whole complex set of associations these hands (or other physical feature) have for you. This is not an exercise in description — description for its own sake can be boring — but simply a way to find the sensory key to an emotional connection and thereby access the original memories.

4. Rooms

Take a pencil and paper and draw, in as much detail as you can, a room in which you have spent time. It can be a childhood bedroom, a backpacker dormitory in Barcelona, a university lecture hall, a doctor’s waiting room, a bathroom in Paris, the kitchen at your father’s house, a barn full of machinery — any kind of room. Drawing it will help bring back specific details, such as the feather pattern on the carpet in your childhood bedroom. Take only a few minutes, and then start writing. Again, this is not meant to be an exercise in description, but a way in to the creative network of memory. If it proves fruitful for you, it is an exercise you can keep using over and over to generate new material.