Past Tension
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday April 2, 2005
A pinch of parmesan, a whiff of dust, an ache for a little cake - we each have our own remembrance of things Proust.
If you haven't read Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu... well, if you haven't read it, you have my complete sympathy, actually. It's not as though I've read it. And you might be pleased to know that, if you are sans French, there's now another excuse for not having read it. It comes in the form of a new translation. The recently published English version is the work of several hands, whereas the earlier one was the work of a single pair of hands revised subsequently by another translator and then, a few years later, by another. As far as I'm concerned, this means there are now four translations, so the new excuse for not having read Proust is that you can't make up your mind which one to read. (I might not do recipes in this column, but I do like to be helpful when I can.) But I digress, and I haven't even started properly. If you haven't read Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, you have nonetheless probably absorbed by some sort of cultural osmosis the famous madeleine scene. It's just a small, round cake made with sugar, flour, melted butter and eggs, but it found literary fame when Proust's hero tasted one dipped in a limeflower tisane and it all came flooding back - all his childhood, all his past, all the lost time. So what tastes, I wonder, might my madeleine be? What flavours would recover a forgotten world for me? I started thinking about this a few weeks ago when I was on a panel chaired by the novelist Marion Halligan at a public forum held at Manning Clark House in Canberra. Sadly, I decided that my most evocatively Proustian sensations were not tastes but smells, and the smells were not of food. There's a certain furniture polish, for example, whose smell takes me straight back to a room at ANU in the early '80s. Or there's the strange aroma that is, I think, electronically heated dust, which you can smell at the rear of a certain cinema complex in Sydney. It immediately transports me to the London Underground. The point of these smells, though, is that they're rare. If I smelt them every day, they would inevitably lose their evocative power. It's the same with food: if Marcel had carried on eating madeleines like the madeleines of his childhood, madeleines would no longer spell childhood to him. Of course, the best way of losing track of the food of your childhood - thus enabling it to maintain its emotional potency - is to go far, far away from it. My favourite example of a man for whom food conjures up all that he has lost is Ben Gunn from Treasure Island, that dark and shaggy figure marooned for years on a desert island and dreaming not of sex or booze but of food. He's been living on goats, berries and oysters, which doesn't seem like a bad diet, but it's not what he wants: "You mightn't happen to have a piece of cheese about you, now?" he says to Jim Hawkins. "Well, many's the long night I've dreamed of cheese - toasted, mostly - and woke up again, and here I were." The great thing about this is that you couldn't think of anything less likely to be found on a desert island than English cheese. Yes, there were goats on the island and where there are goats there must be milk, so Ben Gunn could've made his own cheese. But it wouldn't be an English cheese, would it? A great, hard, golden cartwheel of a cheese. For Gunn, cheddar would have been the taste of home, and melted cheddar would be everything that he couldn't get on his island. (Curiously, though, Dr Livesy, one of Jim's shipmates who never takes snuff, keeps a bit of parmesan in his snuffbox: "A cheese made in Italy, very nutritious".)It's all over now, though. There are few desert islands left on the globe where there isn't a Club Med with a restaurant offering a selection of cheeses of the world. Which is one reason why Proustian moments seem doomed to become ever more rare. If everything is always available, nothing is evocative.
© 2005 Sydney Morning Herald