The Goodnight Kiss and Involuntary Memory in Proust's Remembrance of Things Past

Every reader of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past remembers the famous passage in which the taste of the madeleine, a little cake dipped in tea, provides the key to recalling the past. The amnesia surrounding the narrator's past, particularly his childhood years, is overcome by this fortuitous discovery of “involuntary memory.” Unbidden, the past seems to reside in the sensory stimuli prompted by a cup of tea rather than in the conscious effort of recalling the past. Proust's revolutionary idea of a kind of unconscious memory suggests comparisons with Freud's method of free association, which similarly aims at the relinquishing of voluntary control by the subject over his thoughts. Despite the obvious parallels, there is no evidence of Freud's influence on Proust. A recent summary of psychoanalytic criticism of Proust concludes that “Proust's thinking often touches Freud's without ever quite coinciding with it or demonstrably deriving from it” (Cocking, 1982, p. 194). The origin of involuntary memory must be sought, rather, in the narrative itself, in the precise circumstances of its discovery by Marcel, Proust's narrator.1

Proust tells us in the “Overture” to Swann's Way, at the beginning of Remembrance of Things Past, that from the time of the scene of the goodnight kiss, when Marcel was about seven years old, his childhood unhappiness was no longer regarded as his own fault.2 Rather, Marcel's parents, by allowing his mother to spend the night in his room, confessed that they regarded him as incurable, as suffering from some ailment not under his voluntary control. This intensely experienced, dramatically described scene is the only vivid memory the narrator retains as he looks back over his life. It is almost as if the very intensity of the experience causes all else to be lost to memory.