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Of Madeleines, Monuments and Memoir
A man at a party praised my husband for his goal to read all three volumes of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past — a literary tome, which “[in]several thousand pages, retraces the course of [Proust’s] adolescence and adulthood, democratically dividing his experiences among the narrator and a sprawling cast of characters,” according to Amazon.com.
“Remembrance of Things Past is a monument of literature,” the party guest said. His comment inspired me to think of French cookies.
Unlike my tenacious husband, most of us have not read Proust, though his madeleine cookies (actually, sponge cake) are cited by a legion of literary types. I include myself in the group that cites Proust without having read his factional ruminative account of meals and musings, childhood memories and wisdom. My resistance to Proust is a pity, since Remembrance contains plums for teaching memoir such as this — ”Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”
The challenge of telling the truth of the past (and it’s all past) is a topic we discuss in workshops. What we remember is unlikely to be an exact replica of the experience. The stories we tell emerge from reconstructing and reflecting upon scenes in memory. And I like the idea of finding a food that evokes memory. Might we conjure a monument of memory by…
