7—
Proust's Brain

Memory has thus three different aspects: memory when it remembers things, imagination when it alters or imitates them, and invention when it gives them a new turn or puts them into proper arrangement and relationship. For these reasons the theological poets called Memory the mother of the Muses.
—Vico, The New Science

Julian the Apostate, the Roman Emperor who returned the gods to the temples of the Mediterranean for a time, used to refer to the Christian churches as "charnel houses." He was referring not only to the obsessive topic of Christian art, the corpse of Christ, but also to the custom of placing the altarstone of every new church above the relic of a saint or martyr. The metacarpal or femur of a martyr, resting beneath the church built in his name, joined stone, mortar, and marble to the metaphysical seat of grace, which is God. In this way, the site where a priest's words are bound with the will of God is consecrated because, in part, it conceals a knucklebone or a thighbone.

Such was the model for the museums, archives, and crypts which were constructed during the Romantic Age and after to conserve, examine, and sometimes display the organs of great artists. The heart of Chopin was deposited at the Church of the Holy Cross in Warsaw; the brain of Whitman was entrusted to the American Anthropometric Association for measurement and description (where it was destroyed when a laboratory workman dropped it on the floor). Both the followers of Christ and the aesthetic faithful supposed that grace and genius were

matters related to bones and organs, that culture and formaldehyde equally preserved the legacy of extraordinary people. By preserving such useless remains, it was thought that one could stay in touch with more than the spiritual and artistic legacies of saints and artists: it was as if they could be made to witness their own apotheosis.

The corpus of an artist thus included not only the poems he had written, the letters his correspondents had kept, and various personal items (a guitar, an umbrella, a waistcoat), it could include an organ emblematic of his genius. The heart of Chopin testifies to the passion of the Preludes, the brain of Whitman substantiates his identity with the cosmos. Well into the twentieth century, at his own request, respectable institutions competed for Einstein's brain, as if the organ itself contained some clues to the origin of the theory of relativity. It was in this tradition that the surgeon who operated on Italo Calvino after his fatal cerebral hemorrhage observed that he had never seen a brain of such "delicacy and complexity."^[1]

Despite their different intellectual and spiritual assumptions, the Church and Science acted upon an ancient, magical belief that possessing a part could give one control over or knowledge of the whole. Sir James Frazer called such thinking and practices "contagious magic," because both presume that things which have once been in contact always remain somehow related or aligned.^[2] If I possess one of your hairs, I may be able to give you a headache; if I possess a saint's fingerbone, I may have access to his grace; and if I have Chopin's heart or Whitman's brain, I may be in "touch" with their genius. This is the fetishistic logic shared by primitives, Christians, aesthetes, and scientists.

Of course, scientists argue that their interests in the brains of exceptional people are not metaphysical but firmly based in the observation of physical detail. Perhaps, after all, there was something particular about the brain of Einstein that made him more likely to understand that time was a fiction relative to a particular planet moving at a steady velocity without reference to other planets and velocities. Perhaps the brain of Walt Whitman could give scientists some preliminary idea of a corre-

spondence between qualities such as originality, cosmic consciousness, literary genius, and the size and features of the brain. In the same spirit, Calvino's surgeon may have assumed that there was a correspondence between the delicacy and complexity of the writer's brain and the same qualities in his writing. The surgeon must have felt the attraction of finding a symmetry between physical and spiritual facts. Such thinking supposes that there is a relationship between the organ which "thinks" and the texts which preserve those thoughts, but which only hands can write. Still, one cannot imagine an archive preserving the hand which wrote the complex and delicate lines of Invisible Cities : it would be too trivial a thing. But one wonders why.

Perhaps it is because many of the physical facts prized by modern culture are more like emblems of our values rather than simply evidence for their validity. Some facts are more significant than others, and these facts become emblems, symbols, and fetishes justified by virtue of their "factual" nature. We know that a brain is an organ weighing roughly three pounds and that it resembles the pale fruit of a large nut. It is certainly not the same as the mind, but it seems the best evidence we have for thinking that it is more than an abstraction for a reciprocal relationship between parts and wholes of the universe. The brain has consequently supplanted the mind and the soul as the most significant emblem of our own identity, the organic fact which seems to come closest to containing the irreducible evidence of our inmost nature. In fact, two of the more potent of contemporary emblems, the brain and the computer, are called into service to define one another. It is often not entirely clear which lends the greater prestige to the other.

According to Plato, our minds have only dim memories of the transcendental realm from which they derive the ideas of Truth, Beauty, Justice, and Love. Our minds require an education, a drawing outward that is primarily an act of remembrance. By dialectic, an ignorant slave boy could be made to remember geometry, not to learn it.

For these reason, Plato was dead set against representations without an essential purpose: painting, writing, and acting

were permissible only if they illustrated or facilitated the remembrance of the Ideas. In the Phaedrus , Socrates tells the tale of how the Egyptian god Thoth proudly brought his latest invention, writing, to the Pharaoh and was surprised to find condemnation when he had expected praise. According to the Pharaoh, writing would not facilitate "memory," but "recollection," an entirely different faculty. Trusting outward marks, the student would lose his own powers of memory and come to trust a simulation of wisdom, poetry, and analysis. Instead of fostering remembrance, the Pharaoh told Thoth, he would foster amnesia, for people would learn only the semblances of truth and not truth itself. Plato and the Pharaoh of the fable both condemn writing as the first violent dislocation of humanity from itself. The invention of writing, as well as all subsequent technologies of representation and communication, mark man's fall into simulated existence, and forever after he will seek to become an adequate version of what he sees in images. Writing, phonography, cinema, radio, and television all give an apparent "reality" by copying and re-presenting our ordinary sense perceptions. By presenting the symptoms of reality, these simulations are accepted as real. By adapting ourselves to them, we become the shadows of shadows, an even more pitiable condition than the shades of Achilles and Agamemnon who exist as memories of their eventful lives. People become images of other images, the shades of other shades: this is Plato's prescient condemnation of postmodern existence.

The graphic culture inspired by these inventions has made "natural" the idea that the brain preserves memory in the fashion of a writing tablet, a phonographic disc, a magnetic tape, a photographic record, or a highly developed computer. As fanciful or misleading as these metaphors are, one assumption outweighs them all in significance: our "selves," our "personalities," our "subjectivity" is but the image, projection, or simulation of the brain. Whatever the model, the assumption has been that the brain must preserve its knowledge of the past as a book preserves words: intellectual, emotional, and sensuous details are like so much neural script which becomes

"activated" or "present" through an act of attention we have difficulty imagining, much less explaining. According to such thinking, then, memories belong to us, the way our eyes, our ears, and our tongues do. At the same time, it would be difficult to deny that we belong to our memories, habits, and prejudices.

In order to see how the brain is, however, a metaphorical explanation and substantiation of our supposedly unique identity as human beings, we might begin with something much simpler than considering the nature or meaning of remembering, thinking, or feeling. Simply consider the actions involved in the apparently passive act of "looking at" a tree—a laurel, for example.

Start by recalling that "seeing" is a particular faculty of our own. The tree does not see; it inhabits a world of heat and cold, qualities which we can identify with light and darkness, proximity and distance from the sun. For the laurel, wet and cold seasons are followed by dry and hot seasons, in an endless cycle. The tree "sees" only by eating the light which our eyes receive, focus, and pass on to our brains. The tree does not need to see; it requires only that the light strikes its leaves and initiates the chemical process called photosynthesis.

Like the tree, the eye cannot see. It is simply a ball containing a lense, aqueous humor, a retina, and the optic nerve which carries a "message" to the brain. Although it cannot see, the eye can receive, focus, and invert reflections of the lit world onto the retina. There the image is coded as an electrical impulse and is introduced into the neural system. We can follow the light in our mind's eye through the pupil, the humor, the retina, the optic nerve, and into the visual cortex of the brain. But we can never, never imagine, intuit, or see the moment or the place or the circumstances when electricity becomes sight. To do so would require that we posit some other seer of the seen, and so on in an infinite regress of seers and seens or scenes.

We can see instead that a series of transformations link the sun, the tree, the atmosphere, the eyes, the brain, and a man or a woman to the world. It is impossible to say that we see "with" our brain, although it is clear that we cannot see with-

out it. The brain may simulate an image which "it" sees, but is no longer looking "at" anything other than itself. Thus the blind tree is dematerialized by the light and reimagined as a brain would imagine it. If we want to know what happens "inside" our brain, we have only to look at the tree. If we want to see the tree, we have to allow our brains to simulate it for us. We may imagine, then, that we look out at the world, but it would be equally true to say that the world looks into us—in order to be seen.

We can see this circular process in the myth of Apollo and Daphne.^[3] The young god, associated with both the sun and music, has fallen in love with this beautiful nymph. He pursues her at the speed of light, so to speak, but she manages to elude him because she has called on her father to preserve her virginity. The river-god Peneus spares the young god's prey, just as his hands are burning her thighs. In those fleeting moments she is metamorphosed into a laurel tree: her feet creep into the soil, her breasts and slender waist knot into bark, her straining arms and head yearn recklessly for the sky, her hair flutters like leaves in the light.

This is a photosynthesis by which the tree lives on the praise of her suitor and the suitor lives on the elusiveness of his desire. Ernst Cassirer notes the persistence of this myth within the Greek word for light (phos ) folded into "Phoebus Apollo," the god whose "light" is in eternal pursuit of the laurel leaf.^[4]

In this typically Western parable of perception and desire, the suitor is tragically denied the object of his passion. The logic of Ovid's poem is simple: desire thrives on loss, but out of this loss, the world becomes an image of human desire. Ovid's Mediterranean scenes are filled with flowers, trees, birds, and geologic formations which record the thwarted passions of human beings who sought to join themselves with their desires. To look at these scenes through Ovid and the literature which he inspired is to recognize our own situation. Like an Ovidian lover, we want to seize and possess a certain scene in a certain cast of light, while knowing the futility of our desire. What we are implicitly recognizing is not the impermanence of the light but our own insubstantiality: we see ourselves fading like light from the scene.

In the Kena Upanishad , a disciple asks his guru, "At whose behest does the mind think? Who bids the body live? Who makes the tongue speak? Who is that effulgent Being that directs the eye to form and color and ear to sound?"^[5] In other words, who is it that sees what the "brain" re-presents, hears what the "brain" repeats, smells what the "brain" relays? It is a difficult question to answer because it forces us to realize, if we are to answer it forthrightly, that "we" cannot be the answer which is sought—if by the "self" we mean an intrinsic and isolated entity inside our bodies looking out at the world.

The guru answers: "Brahman (the World-Self) is the ear of the ear, mind of the mind, speech of speech. He is also breath of the breath, and eye of the eye. Having given up the false identification of the Self with the senses and the mind, and knowing the Self to be Brahman, the wise, on departing this life, become immortal." He becomes immortal, meaning he renounces and realizes the partiality of his own sense of identity. When the self becomes the Self, it is evident that there could be no seer of the seen, no hearer of the heard, no smeller of the smelt, no thinker of the thought, unless the two are indeed One. And if we have difficulty imagining the final seer of what is seen, perhaps that is because "he" is not necessary, not real, and simply an inference required by our dualistic approach to the world.

The brain appears then to be the best evidence for the assumption that "there is," or that "we have" an ego. But research into the brain reveals that such requirements of common sense are not easily satisfied. For the brain to serve as an "origin" for thoughts, emotions, and finally the self, it would have to be a single, integrated entity, with no parts inessential to these functions and principles. Anatomy, however, describes various parts of the brain without indicating its center, the point from which and toward which knowledge and will move—the brain of the brain. Surprisingly adaptable, the brain can manage to sustain its activities after massive and apparently fatal injuries.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s the psychologist Karl Lashley attempted to locate memory traces by a process of elimination.^[6] Destroying a portion of a rat's brain and then testing

its abilities to recall and repeat certain patterns of behavior, he hoped to determine a correspondence between brain tissue and memory. In other words, he tried to establish the point of contact between the physical realm of the brain and the metaphysical realm of the mind. But despite having destroyed as much as eighty percent of the brain, he could not produce any appreciable failure of "memory." The memory traces or "engrams" thus could not be pinpointed. Since there was obviously no point-for-point relationship between the brain and "its" memories, he finally postulated that memories were distributed throughout the brain. In other words, if the brain contained memories at all, they could not be sensibly modeled on writing in the ordinary sense.

It might be profitable to consider memories from the point of view of the world which is itself remembered. If the Kena Upanishad is right in denying the mind of the mind, and the seer of the seen, perhaps we could consider memories in terms of what is remembered instead of how it is remembered and in what form it is preserved. But unless we credit the occult notion of something like an Akashic Record, which preserves everything that has ever taken place, we must conclude that our memories do not reside in any particular place. Perhaps they do not need to be re-presented to be re-membered. If we consider our own experiences, we might recognize the degree to which "our own" memories are distributed across the face of the world. If we stay in Los Angeles and try to remember the sights and smells of Pittsburgh, we will have only a limited success. But if we fly to Pittsburgh and walk the streets, much more than the immediate sensory stimulus will be recovered. More and more of "our" memories will come back, as if memories themselves have memories, and those memories have memories as well, and so on indefinitely. Without the brain, we imagine, our memories might recede into the texture of reality: cities, houses, trees, smells, tastes, and shades of light would absorb our past, and with it our innermost "self." The brain alone would appear to substantiate what the Upanishads consider the pernicious illusion of a separate ego. Neurological investigations into the preservation of memory thus also call

into question the possibility of intellectually maintaining the idea of a "self."

Even writing, which has inspired most thinking about memory formation, may not really preserve memories in any coherent sense. As much as Marcel Proust put into his novels, no one is in a position to determine in what sense they constitute an imaginative transformation of his memories. If memory, as Marcel (the putative narrator and hero of the novels) often supposes, is an imaginative faculty, then it is quite possible that fiction is the most responsible way to preserve it, just as writing one's "memoirs" would be the most misleading. In either case, the reader can scarcely be expected to keep his mind on "what he is reading," since he cannot be certain what the substance of written words are. Instead, he becomes increasingly absorbed in a narrative concerning characters, such as Monsieur Swann and his daughter Gilberte, who are based on characters of Proust's own acquaintance. But these fictional characters not only reflect and distort characters Proust knew, they also describe characters that we know. Reading of Marcel's mother recalls our own mother; Gilberte recalls a childhood infatuation (since "forgotten"); M. Swann recalls a mysterious and worldly friend of the family. Proust recalls and recreates characters, but we read their details as reflections of our own memories. Things which we have forgotten (the sound of a bell, the muffled conversation of adults heard from one's darkened room) come to light because, in effect, Proust has remembered them for us.

When the middle-aged Marcel dips his madeleine in tea and tastes it, he opens an apparently direct passage to his childhood in Combray. Out of this passage comes A la recherche du temps perdu and out of Proust's work has come a series of parallel universes for his many committed readers in French and other languages. Not that the whole of this work of some one and a quarter million words is a directly sensual influx of involuntary memory. But it is by virtue of this experience that Marcel discovers his vocation, which is to demonstrate that, as Kant argued, Time and Space are but artificial, porous constructions of consciousness:

And as in the game wherein the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little pieces of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch and twist and take on colour and distinctive shape, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies of the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.^[7]

Involuntary memory and the Japanese game both work by unfolding (or ex-plaining) the "contents" of a folded or compressed element. As the madeleine is dipped in tea, so is the paper immersed in water: Marcel is similarly dipped into a sensory fluid by which he expands and unfolds the whole of his memories. The image of folding and unfolding unfolds other images of the same, and each would appear to unfold others. In a similar way the brain is supposed to infold memories within its convoluted hemispheres, and preserve them until such time as they are properly stimulated. The neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield discovered that, by touching certain points of the exposed brain of a waking patient, he could evoke specific memories which were then experienced with complete sensual detail. A young woman reported during this procedure, once a particular electrode had fired, "Yes, I heard voices down along the river somewhere—a man's voice and a woman's voice calling. . . . I think I saw the river."^[8] Memory is the result, then, of the meeting of elements long separated: tea and madeleine, paper and water, specific neurons and electricity. Their meeting unfolds a vivid representation of what was always immanent, but inaccessible.

Penfield's ability to recreate memories would appear to refute Lashley's claim that memories cannot be strictly associated with a single point in the cerebral cortex. Although he rightly took credit for stimulating one vivid scene by stimulating one precise point on the brain, Penfield and his colleague Herbert Jasper made no such claims:

It is obvious that there is, beneath the electrode, a recording mechanism, for memories of events. But the mechanism seems

to have recorded much more than the simple event. When activated, it may produce the emotions which attended the original experience. . . . It seems obvious that such duplicating recording patterns can only be performed in the cerebral cortex after there has been complete co-ordination or integration of all the nerve impulses that passed through both hemispheres—that is to say, all the nerve impulses that are associated with or result from the experience. It seems to be the integrated whole that is recorded.^[9]

In other words, when we speak of preserving "one" memory, much more, necessarily, is involved. One could say that the whole of one's "emotional" life is encoded in every "memory," because without such a coding such emotions could not become accessible. Penfield's physiology confirms at the physical level Freud's notion that all human actions, and the emotions which are indissociable from them, rise out of an unconscious nexus of associations.

Our ordinary notion of specific memories is not supported by such a neurological description. Trying to locate a single memory would be like trying to take the stain out of a sweater by pulling at the offending threads: the point dissolves into a tangle. And if the single memory is an illusory entity, woven as it is within, and implying as it does, the whole of one's past (which is to say everything in one's mind), then the same might be said of the brain as well. For the brain is no less woven into the circuitry of nerves, the circulation of the blood, and the unceasing stimulus of the world. Sir Charles Sherrington compared the human brain to "an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern, though never an abiding one. . . . It is as if the Milky Way entered upon some cosmic dance."^[10]

Proust's novels dramatize these principles by showing how the sum of a man's life can be extrapolated from the taste of tea and madeleine, even when the past would appear completely lost to memory and interest:

When from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstan-

tial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.^[11]

Taste and smell, Proust claims, combine fragility and permanence, just as souls, said to be immaterial and eternal, do. But what are taste and smell if not the ghosts of "our" experiences which haunt the world, not us. We require the taste and the smell of tea, a certain pastry, a specific street, or a forgotten toy to "recollect" ourselves. This means, then, to gather up, to recollect elements of ourselves that have been scattered across the world, and have taken residence in more or less insensate things. It was this recognition that led ancient peoples to speak of metamorphoses, the genius of a place (genius loci ), and the transmigration of souls.

Proust follows in this tradition by expressing an unrequited desire for the world that we find in Ovid's tale of Apollo and Daphne. After Marcel discovers Albertine in the "little band" of girl bicyclists at the seaside, he uses a metaphor that recalls an Ovidian metamorphosis:

at the far end of the esplanade, along which they projected a striking patch of color, I saw five or six young girls as different in appearance and manner from all the people one was accustomed to see at Balbec as would have been a flock of gulls arriving from God knows where and performing with measured tread upon the sands—the dawdlers flapping wings to catch up with the rest—a parade the purpose of which seems as obscure to the human bathers whom they do not appear to see as it is clearly determined in their own birdish minds.^[12]

In subsequent passages, the girls are compared to "statues exposed to the sunlight on a Grecian shore" as well as bands of, respectively, "Hellenic virgins," "Dianas," and "nymphs." Marcel can see things which matter to him only through a series of metaphoric and mythological elaborations. The effect is to make the girls, and Albertine in particular, into the focus of his extensive desire, the center of gravity toward which mythology, art, and history are drawn. These three spheres of

aesthetic experience coincide in Marcel's perception of the little band, because they can be read as if they were features of the Mediterranean seascapes which Ovid describes.

In The Metamorphoses we read how Ino and the Theban women when fleeing from the mad Athamas cast themselves into the sea. Seeing this, Venus beseeches Neptune to preserve them and her wish is granted: some become sea birds and others become stony features in the Mediterranean shoreline. It is this myth and this seascape that Marcel sees in the girl cyclists playing on the seacoast of Normandy. Experience itself becomes a form of memory.

On the other hand, memory can be the most direct kind of experience. During another vacation at Balbec, Marcel is suddenly overtaken by the apparent presence of his recently deceased grandmother. While bending down to take off his boots, he is "filled with an unknown, a divine presence" and is "shaken with sobs." Until this moment, Marcel explains, he had yet to experience the reality of her death because he had yet to remember her being alive and completely well. Out of this paradoxical experience, Marcel derives certain conclusions concerning the nature and "location" of memory:

At any given moment, our total soul has only a more or less fictitious value, in spite of the rich inventory of its assets, for now some, now others are unrealisable, whether they are real riches or those of the imagination. . . . For with the perturbations of memory are linked the intermittencies of the heart. It is, no doubt, the existence of our body, which we may compare to a vase enclosing our spiritual nature, that induces us to suppose that all our inner wealth, our past joys, all our sorrows, are perpetually in our possession. Perhaps it is equally inexact to suppose that they escape or return. In any case if they remain within us, for most of the time it is in an unknown region where they are of no use to us, and where even the most ordinary are crowded out by memories of a different kind, which preclude any simultaneous occurrence of them in our consciousness.^[13]

Our bodies give us a fictitious sense of spiritual integrity and isolation, in other words. From our bodies we derive the idea that our selves, our memories, our minds must be distinct and isolated. But this image of the body as a distinct and self-

contained form is an illusory one. Since the body can see for miles, imagine and calculate the future, re-experience the past, breathe air, thrive on plants and animals, how could one suppose that it is distinct and isolated from all of these sources of its life. In this same way, the image of the soul, the self, and the self-possessed memory is an illusory one, modeled on the figure of this isolated body.

Frustrated by the scientific orthodoxy which claimed that all mental and emotional phenomena must be explained by the fundamental, physical composition of the body and brain, a number of established scientists in the 1970s began to rethink the basically reductive, Newtonian premises of neuroscience. Roger Sperry of the California Institute of Technology, reviewing these developments in the August, 1988, issue of American Psychologist , writes, "over the last 15 years, changes in the foundational concepts of psychology instituted by the new cognitive or mentalist paradigm have radically reformed scientific descriptions of human nature and the conscious self. The resultant views today are less atomistic, less mechanistic, and more mentalistic, contextual, subjectivist, and humanistic." The fundamental breakthrough registered by this trend in neuroscience is the recognition that mental activities cannot be understood strictly from the microstructure of the brain: "The supervenient control exerted by the higher over lower level properties of a system, referred to also as 'macro', 'molar', or 'emergent' determinism, operates concurrently with the 'micro' control from below upward. Mental states, as emergent properties of brain activity, thus exert downward control over their constituent neuronal events." Sperry concludes that this "new outlook puts subjective mental forces near the top of the brain's causal control hierarchy and gives them primacy in determining what a person is and does."^[14]

Extending the scope of this critique of purely "physical" determinism, Karl Pribram, a neuropsychologist at Stanford University, and David Bohm, a physicist at London University, have proposed a theory that would account for the relationship between the supposedly discrete realms of bodies and minds, matter and consciousness, the world and memory. According

to Pribram and Bohm, both the brain and the universe might well be organized according to the same logic of the folding and unfolding of wholes and particulars. Just as a holographic, three-dimensional image is constructed in such a way that each of its parts contains an image of the whole, so the brain could be said to electrically infold the whole within each of its parts. Bohm has postulated that the universe is itself organized according to the same principle: the explicit or unfolded universe is structured by an "implicate order," an infolded unity, which means that each "part" of the universe "contains" the whole. The brain and the universe may be structured according to the same holographic logic. Pribram explains the consequences of such thinking this way:

At the moment this order appears so indistinguishable from the mental operations by which we operate on that universe that we must conclude either that our science is a huge mirage, a construct of the emergence of our convoluted brains, or that indeed, as proclaimed by all the great religous convictions, a unity characterizes this emergent [consciousness] and the basic order of the universe.^[15]

Soon after she has become his captive, Marcel finds Albertine sleeping and discovers something of this implicit order:

By shutting her eyes, by losing consciousness, Albertine had stripped off, one after another, the different human personalities with which she had deceived me ever since the day when I had first made her acquaintance. She was animated now only by the unconscious life of plants, of trees, a life more different from my own, more alien, and yet one that belonged more to me. . . . I had the impression of possessing her entirely which I never had when she was awake.^[16]

There may be some wisdom after all in Marcel's infatuation with the banal Albertine, the girl cyclist in whom he sees the mythologies, the unthinkable future, and the somnolent powers of the natural world. Like those early Christians who preserved relics in hopes of substantiating spirit, or those romantic scientists who examined the brains of Byron, Whitman, and Einstein in order to see the organic basis of their genius, or

these distinguished scientists who argue that the world is enfolded in each of its "parts," Marcel hopes that the particular body of Albertine is in fact everything she has come to represent for him. For this to be true, however, she must remain the unknown girl by the seashore, be found asleep, or be remembered after she has left him, and died. The art of memory in Proust's novels is not, then, simply a nostalgic recreation of the past, predicated upon the principle that we love only that which is distant or absent. Memory is shown to be the particular and inevitable infolding within the world of which we are both a conscious and material part. This infolding sometimes manifests itself as a distance from others, and even from ourselves. But this distance is the very condition of our relationship with the world, which often appears to be the bitterest alienation and isolation: a brain, a mind, alone in a material world of unthinking and unfeeling process. And we remain, strangely enough, an aspect of this unfeeling and unthinking process until we recognize that the self is not the mental aura of a single body and a single brain. This is what the loss and recovery of Time signifies in Proust and what he has to teach us.