Madeleines and chocolate bridges - scent and memory ~ Deleted Scenes from the Perfect Scent
by Chandler Burr, 22 January 2008
Details of how you can obtain the book, as well as the chance to discuss this extract can be found at the end.
This is a section I wrote around two things. First was the famous Proust quote about smell, memory, & the Madeleine. I had to go look it up. Everyone has heard of it, and no one I know—including me—has actually read the thing, or at least I hadn’t read it. You think it’s a little paragraph you’re going to whiz through. In fact, it turns out to be pages and pages of extremely densely written text. The guy goes on and on. I read it in French and then, because I didn’t really understand it, I read it in English. I spent hours getting it down to an essential core that I liked. The other reason was my friend Rich “Toast” Trost, who mentioned to me that his favorite NPR piece was about how the Chicago bridges smelled like brownies.
Researchers studying this phenomenon have found that our ability to recall a specific scent surpasses even our ability to recall what we've seen. Show photos to people, then show them the photos months later; it's estimated that visual recall is about 50% after four months. Dr. Trygg Engen, Professor of Psychology, Brown University, found that people recall smells with a 65% accuracy after a year.
Everyone talks about Proust's damn madeleine thing that he wrote in Swann's Way. Our touchstone for the power of smell over memory. I realized I’d never actually read it.Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray had any existence for me, when one day in winter on my return home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea with one of those squat, plump little cakes called petites madeleines, which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell. And dispirited after a dreary day, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake.No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. It had on me the effect love has.I drink a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the first, then a third, which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is losing its magic. It is plain that the truth I am seeking lies not in the cup but in myself. The same message I cannot interpret, though I hope to be able to call it forth again. I put down the cup and examine my own mind.
I place in position before my mind's eye the still recent taste of that first mouthful, and I feel something start within me, something that has been embedded like an anchor at a great depth. I can feel it mounting slowly; I can measure the resistance. It must be the visual memory linked to that taste, trying to follow it into my conscious mind. And suddenly. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray, when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom , my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea. The sight of the madeleine had recalled nothing, perhaps because I had so often seen such things in the meantime, without tasting them, on the trays in pastry-cooks' windows. But 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 unsubstantial, 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.And as soon as I had recognized the taste of madeleine which my aunt used to give me, immediately the old grey house rose up like a stage set, and the town, the Square where I used to be sent before lunch, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. All the flowers in our garden sprang into being from my cup.
I admit it's a brilliant depiction of the brain's limbic system triggering memory at a smell. But the one I like better came from my friend Rich Trost, who told me about a story he'd heard on some NPR show. There was a guy who had moved from Chicago to New York and the interviewer asked, "So how do you like New York?" and the guy said, "It's OK, but I miss Chicago," and the interviewer said, "Why?" and the guy replied, "Because the bridges smell like brownies." They looked into it, and it turned out to be true. There was a chocolate factory on the Chicago's North River whose cocoa manufacturing process was scenting the air, and the sweet cocoa molecules were most palpable on the bridges. You went over the river in the scent of chocolate.
The coda of the story is that someone wound up calling the EPA, which investigated and cited the factory for pollution, forcing it to install scrubbers, and the brownie scent evaporated from Chicago and disappeared. At least that guy will always remember it.
Q&A with Chandler Burr
I love the way a scent you haven't smelt for years can take you back to a very precise moment. Do you ever use fragrance to forcefully create this situations?
That’s interesting—I don’t think I’ve ever in my life consciously used scent to force my memory back into some time or place, but I sure as hell would like to try because it happened once, totally involuntarily. I went to Paris for The Times to do a piece on Chanel’s Les Exclusifs. They start opening up the bottles, and I’m smelling them, and suddenly we’re at No 22, and I actually almost—and I’m not really this kind of guy, but—start to cry. My mom used to wear it. And it totally, but totally freaked me out. That one moment made me understand the mnemonic power of scent. I wish I could smell my grandmother’s house again. I wish I could smell my elementary school. And those moments when I have scent déjà vu are just as amazing for me as they are for all of us, but I have no idea how to plan that out.
Well, I have one idea: I’d go see Christopher Brosius and ask him to recreate my olfactory memory, and if I had enough money to pay him to do it, and the time to give him to allow him to do it, I bet the result would be literally jaw-dropping—better than drugs.
- Discuss this extract at the Basenotes Community
- 'The Perfect Scent: Inside the Perfume Industry in Paris and New York' will be available now. Published by Henry Holt. Click here to pre-order from Amazon.com
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