Memory
The role of memory is central to the Marcel Proust (French: À la recherche du temps perdu) novel, introduced with the famous madeleine episode in the first section of the novel and in the last volume, Time Regained, a flashback similar to that caused by the madeleine is the beginning of the resolution of the story. Throughout the work many similar instances of involuntary memory, triggered by sensory experiences such as sights, sounds and smells conjure important memories for the narrator and sometimes return attention to an earlier episode of the novel. Although Proust wrote contemporaneously with Sigmund Freud, with there being many points of similarity between their thought on the structures and mechanisms of the human mind, neither author read the other.[5]
The madeleine episode reads:
No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. 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 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 me. … Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? … And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea.
Gilles Deleuze believed that the focus of Proust was not only memory and the past but the narrator’s learning the use of “signs” to understand and communicate ultimate reality, thereby becoming an artist.[6] While Proust was bitterly aware of the experience of loss and exclusion—loss of loved ones, loss of affection, friendship and innocent joy, which are dramatized in the novel through recurrent jealousy, betrayal and the death of loved ones—his response to this, formulated after he had discovered Ruskin, was that the work of art can recapture the lost and thus save it from destruction, at least in our minds.[citation needed] Art triumphs over the destructive power of time. This element of his artistic thought is clearly inherited from romantic platonism, but Proust crosses it with a new intensity in describing jealousy, desire and self-doubt. (Note the last quatrain of Baudelaire’s poem “Une Charogne”: “Then, O my beauty! say to the worms who will / Devour you with kisses, / That I have kept the form and the divine essence / Of my decomposed love!”).[citation needed]
My novel “Wrathful Empathies, The 2nd Raid on Harpers Ferry uses narrative story telling to reverse the destructive power of time. The character of Los is desperate for a second chance to recapture his lost love Enith (some word play here). He will go to the ultimate extreme to do so. Similar to Proust’s story (most assuredly not as well), I explore the sensation of searching through the past. Unlike him, I describe what a second chance to go back in time and recapture it might look like. Actually, I go a step further in my story telling to say that it is never too late to change the outcome of events. What is time? I believe it can be manipulated. I created the Golden Path to allow just such time travel. All the other hiking trails are metaphors for this ability. Think about it. When you hike through nature, give up almost all of your possessions, and live outside society, this becomes a form of time travel. Soon enough, you freely disassociate from the normal patterns of life. A minute becomes an hour, an hour and day and a night an eternity.
Was I successful? Only time will tell. Warning to time travelers: The past might not have been what you thought it was. Exploring the mechanics of this attempt is one of the major themes of my trilogy.