ABSTRACT
From Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire and its many successor projects across the European and American continents to Raphael Samuel’s (2012) ‘theaters of memory’, the literature on memory intimates that remembering is entangled with things. This entanglement of memory with materiality can be illustrated by the souvenir that people buy as a memento on their travels; objects we keep so that they will remind us of a particular time, place, or situation we wish to remember. Built so as to make people remember, monuments and memorials further exemplify the interrelation of memory and materiality. Plaques commemorating writers and artists, statues of kings and politicians are a case in point. Perhaps the most famous literary example of this entanglement is the episode in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, when, dipping a ‘little madeleine’ cake in a cup of linden tea, Marcel unexpectedly remembers similar crumbs of the little madeleine which his aunt Léonie used to give him on Sunday mornings at Combray. ‘The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it’, Marcel observes (Proust, 1956, p. 57). But once he has recognized the taste of the madeleine soaked in linden tea, the memory of the old gray house in which his aunt used to live emerged before him, and with the house the town, indeed the
whole of Combray and its surroundings, ‘like the scenery of a theatre’ (58), inaugurating the narrative of his ‘remembrance of things past’, as Proust’s novel is called in English. ‘The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect’ (p. 54).
