ABSTRACT
It is extraordinary what sound, touch, taste, smell, or just the look of some-thing will do to you, how it will affect you, where it will take you. In Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (1913-27), it is famously the taste of a madeleine – a small, shell-shaped cake – that returns the narrator to his childhood in Combray, while in Speak, Memory (1966), Vladimir Nabokov obsessively evokes the sights and sounds that return him to the Russia from which in 1919 he was exiled by the Bolshevik Revolution. These writers are taken out of their bodies by their bodies, but taken out of their bodies in a way that is intimately attuned to sensation. In that sense, they never leave their bodies: memory itself, like consciousness, thought and imagination, is embodied.
