Proust’s Madeleine refers to a monument that resonates with many readers, a fan’s favorite in his writings. A madeleine is a kind of small French cake, usually with ribbed lines across it. Proust recalls eating one and being reminded of something. Sitting and pondering, reaching deep into his mind for the remembrance, as he continued sniffing and tasting the little cake. Finally, all at once in a great flash, the taste and smell involuntarily and instantaneously drew him back to his grandmother’s house when he was ten, recalling eating one of them.
He recounts this experience, not with the flavor of a “triggered memory,” but as actually being there again, being transported completely, in his senses, to that experience. It is as if for a brief moment, he’d traveled through time. He was the ten year old boy, in his grandmother’s house. One can use the phrase, “ma madeleine de Proust” to refer to the trigger of such an experience. As far as I can tell, to be properly referred to as “Une Madeleine de Proust“, an experience must be a) involuntary and b) drag one into a past experience.
In a similar manner, I notice that little feelings sometimes allow us to gauge where we now are, and to compare the present moment to the past. Not in as grand a fashion as a person’s Madeleine de Proust in the sense that most people will make that reference, but in the way that we relate to people, places, and objects. Perhaps a person gives one a familiar feeling, and a sense of ease… maybe that person carries a similar scent, or way of walking and speaking, or a similar set of tension and ease as a former lover, or an old friend. In other words, in a small way, that arrangement of movements and scents and words will transport us kinesthetically, to a past experience. Thus is it “une petite madeline de Proust.”
However, I would argue that it can happen without people being aware of it. It is simply that they will have a good familiar feeling. I often think that in this way people go on seeking to repeat the same set of experiences again and again, but not really noticing how it happens. I have come to suspect that much of our moral imagination is formed of such links to our past. That a house can be built, and a life can be lived within that house, consisting of things that one has chosen for the kinesthetic reality they create for that person, the lovely little things they constantly drag from one’s long lost years. But it is merely a house of cakes, “une maison des petites madeleines.”
Isn’t it true that a new person one meets, or a new place one visits, if utterly alien, will be far more challenging than the “instant ease” we judge things by as being “good?” It is as if “instant ease” or “a sense of initial familiarity” were a sign from God that we’ve found a person or place we belong with right now. It is only a small leap from one’s feeling of ease and rightness to one’s sense of what is “right” and “wrong.” This is the reason I have said that the “moral imagination” is linked to the “house of cakes” I have described. Perhaps it is only a sign that we’ve found une petite madeleine and some feature of that person or place has simply drawn us back to a time when we felt comfortable or happy or else the petite madeleine simply refers to something we like about ourselves.
I write all this from the perspective of a traveler. I have lived 8800 miles from where I was born for around two years. Long enough for it to feel like “home.” I have also felt love for places spread across Europe and the U.S. Moreover, some types of people are incredibly easy for me to get along with. The Irish are known for being friendly. The Taiwanese are very helpful and usually try very hard to impress foreigners. The provincial French are easygoing, laid back little people, among whom I could easily unwind many years. I can ultimately interact with all these people with similar rules of politeness to what I would use at my parent’s church, and expect similar responses.
Another example: I know well the scent of autumn, and it is striking because it blurs my reality by being the same scent in Atlanta and in Taipei. The familiarity the scent creates, here by the Taiwan Straight, on this rogue island off the coast of an ancient empire, takes me to any number of times I’ve walked through my grandparents’ field, or the forests of North GA mountains, or sat on the porch of the house I grew up in. It creates that reality around me. Smells are so powerful this way.
However, at a documentary film festival, I recently watched a film that stunned me: “Let’s Be Together.” The film depicted a Danish boy who was a serious cross-dresser. He identified himself as a boy, and seemed to enjoy being a boy, and he later admitted that he liked boys, and man-oh-man he liked to rock some fancy 6″ heels. Such queer material was not what was stunning, indeed it is a bit old hat for me. But the culture in which it appeared was utterly alien to my senses.
The Danes he lived with weren’t too bothered by his behavior. One must bear in mind, Denmark is a country where, if he was transgendered, he could probably start taking hormones around age 13 or 14, probably have surgery after 18. Also this country is one where a bunch of hippies once took over a military base in the 1970s. Instead of the government either shooting or arresting all the hippies, they just let them keep the installation and run it as an independent government within the city of Copenhagen. This prefecture still exists and is called “Christiania.” In other words, the Danes are coming from a radically different place than what I’m used to. Any country I have lived in generally views transgendered as some sort of disease and would have arrested those hippies forthwith, not given them their own independent government!
The boy’s father was Brazilian. I was amazed at the way he spoke to his son. He was emotionally transparent. Initially I thought he was being overly angry as he seemed to be reacting intensely. Also, the father was a masculine guy and most masculine fathers get threatened by the first show of femininity in their sons — or so I have seen in cultures I know. But this guy was different. In his honesty and transparency he revealed that his concern was that the boy would alienate himself from society and therefore face physical danger and fail to find love.
The father (apparently a clothier) was fine with making a dress for his son so the boy could be Cleopatra at his 15th birthday party. As his expert hands sewed on sequins, the dad shared stories with his son about how he was lost and confused at 15; but he found a man he fell in love with and had a sexual relationship with, who helped him find his way. This is all very interesting because the father also had a wife at the time of the movie. But he told his child about gay loves and straight loves. And concluded the long conversation with the words, “this is all I want for you, for you to find this happiness that was so important for me.”
What?! I cannot imagine such a conversation between a father and a son in my culture. This was a conversation in which the boy was viewed with respect as a person with some right to privacy and choosing his own way. The father brought concerns only to help the boy find all the best in life — not blushing at any aspect of sexuality or discovery. And the father shared his own very personal experiences, with frankness and emotional honesty throughout! Mon Dieu!
Back to the Danes: The boy’s stepfather took him fishing, and treated him perfectly well. He didn’t even seem phased by the fact that the kid had taken to such extreme behavior (though he refused to spend 200 USD on a pair of sunglasses). The stepfather and the mom only seemed to care that her son might be hurt (physically) by some ignorant kids. Moreover, the way the family interacted just had a tone to it which was completely different than what I have known. Their formalities and informalities, their tension and ease, were in places that did not resemble any family I have ever seen in my life.
The strange thing is that the Danish family and the Brazilian family initially gave me a very dark feeling. I felt uncomfortable, and I put up a kind of moral judgement about them. After a little while, I noticed that this sense of “evil” was because their ways of doing things were putting me in a kinesthetic feeling I only knew as “evil.” But once I set that aside, and watched them…. I realized that nothing they did could be called “evil” in the sense that if they, or even all the world, acted that way it would bring any harm to people, either in their bodies or their souls. It was simply an “evil” by my own tribe, the one I have left, and perhaps the one whose soil I stand on now.
But that sense of evil, what is it? It is just a trip into another place, another time, something dredging the depths of my brain and dragging me back to my childhood where I see my father’s lips recoiling into a grimace when certain things come to pass. Or hurling me headlong into my grandmother’s house, where I see her self-righteous smile as she pronounces God’s judgement on certain “wickedness.” Or my mother’s tightening jaw as she sees a thing, and wonders how she’ll speak of it to me, because “God says that’s wrong.” In other words, whether I have been aware of this or not, many of my moral feelings just come back to my own “Petites Madelienes des Proust.” And it was only in opening myself up to something difficult, where I wanted to put up barriers and judgments, that I was able to see that kind of morality for the tribal superstition that it is.
