quick thoughts

The madeleine is the symbol of the past that arises unintentionally through the novel. Proust traces the subjectivity that accumulates memories without realizing it, like the madeleine. If analysts speak of “affective consciousness” to describe memories, it is to emphasize the non active dimension and assigned the matter that the memories come to him without being summoned. (involuntary memory)
The smell and taste, in other words it is a sensual action, or intelectual? It could be the consciousness that restores the thread of memory. Like past and present memories.
In other words the subject can somehow bend time and break the contrast between past and present with these senses. The dominant time of the human condition seems to be the past in Proust. Man is essentially nostalgic.
Proust’s seven books form a cycle. They kind of seem to be, Proust’s memoir. Many significant facts have been changed to enhance the effect of the novel, in order for it to seem, to the author and the reader, to actually recapture the past, Proust’s childhood, and the happening of World War I in France. Here is where the madeleine comes in. Quick after talking about his single night of bliss with his mother, he remembers how it was a family custom to visit his great aunt Sunday afternoons. She would always offer her visitors madeleines and cup of tea. When he enjoy this combination again, a sense memory of visits to the long dead great aunt returns to him. As he gets older, novels progress, he despairs of making anything of his life and his literary aspirations until several repeated instances of this effect show him how he might portray scenes and senses from his past with enough intensity to go beyond memory, and therefore beyond loss, grief and sadness. In the last book, he talks about how three sense memories in a short space of time motivate him to finally get started, and to produce the seven novels.