Music, more than anything else, has the power of invoking Swann's associated memories. A little phrase of old Vinteuil's Sonata runs like a fine thread all through the tangle of Swann's love for Odette de Crecy, although the memory of the phrase goes back prior to his meeting Odette—to the night of the party at which he had heard it, after going home from which
“he was like a man into whose life a woman, whom he has seen for a moment passing by, has brought a new form of beauty, which strengthens and enlarges his own power of perception, without his knowing even whether he is ever to see her again whom he loves already, although he knows nothing of her, not even her name.”
Swann had tried in vain to identify the fugitive phrase which had awakened in him a passion for music that seemed to be bringing into his life the possibility of a sort of rejuvenation.
“Like a confirmed invalid whom all of a sudden, a change of air and surroundings, or a new course of treatment, or, as sometimes happens, an organic change in himself, spontaneous and unaccountable, seems to have so far removed from his malady that he begins to envisage the possibility, hitherto beyond all hope, of starting to lead—and better late than never—a wholly different life, Swann found in himself, in the memory of the phrase that he had heard, in certain other sonatas which he had made people play over to him, to see whether he might not, perhaps, discover his phrase among them, the presence of one of those invisible realities in which he had ceased to believe, but to which, as though the music had had upon the moral barrenness from which he was suffering a sort of recreative influence, he was conscious once again of a desire, almost, indeed, of the power to consecrate his life.”
“It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture our own past; all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die.”
Associative memory depends upon the fact that though the grouping of the stimuli is novel, the elementary components are individually similar to previous stimuli, and Proust avails himself of this established fact. These elementary stimuli leave retention traces in the central nervous system. When the same stimuli recur in a new grouping the pathways and centres that bear such traces are brought into connection and are combined in new ways. This modifies the form of the response. As the separate retention traces were due to conditions resembling the present, the new response will tend to be adaptive. This associative memory is known in psychology as mnemonic combination.
Although no attempt is made to describe the development of the personality of the sensitive, sentimental, impressionable, precocious child who narrates the story, one gets an extraordinarily vivid picture of him. He has the hallmarks and habituations of neuropathy, and amongst them phantasying and substitution.
“In those days, when I read to myself, I used often, while I turned the pages, to dream of something quite different. And to the gaps which this habit made in my knowledge of the story more were added by the fact that when it was Mamma who was reading to me aloud she left all the love-scenes out. And so all the odd changes which take place in the relations between the miller's wife and the boy, changes which only the birth and growth of love can explain, seemed to me plunged and steeped in a mystery, the key to which (as I could readily believe) lay in that strange and pleasant-sounding name of Champi, which draped the boy who bore it, I knew not why, in its own bright colour, purpurate and charming.”
That his neuropathic constitution was a direct inheritance is obvious. He got it through his Aunt Leonie
“who since her husband's death, had gradually declined to leave, first Combray, then her house in Combray, then her bedroom, and finally her bed; and who now never 'came down,' but lay perpetually in an indefinite condition of grief, physical exhaustion, illness, obsessions, and religious observances.... My aunt's life now was practically confined to two adjoining rooms, in one of which she would rest in the afternoon while they aired the other.”