Smellscape And Memory

Since its publication,Remembrance of Things Past written by the French writer Marcel Proust,as one of the most important novels in the history of world literature in the 20th century,has been constantly challenging scholars' ability to interpret this novel in addition to awakening readers' reading experience.From Maurois,Deleuze to Benjamin,such a rich history of theoretical interpretation is just the tip of the iceberg floating on the surface of the water,but a tremendous amount of energy carried in this "book of life" is still under the surface,which also reserves a space of follow-up and interpretation for the research in this paper.Since the 1970s,the western academia of humanities and social sciences has undergone several important turning points of theoretical perspective including "textual turning" in the 1970s,"the body turn" in the 1980s,and "the sensorial turn" in the 1990s,which provides a new direction for the social,cultural and historical research,further radiating to the field of literary research.In the case that these theoretical perspectives are interwoven,the past implicit scents in Proust's novel begin to emerge from the surface of the water,and the childhood experience,lust changes,and identity hidden in these faint scents are able to be reproduced.Therefore,this paper tries to carry on writing by locking the scents in Marcel Proust's novel,constructs a smell map of the protagonist according to the "smell-memory" model,makes use of the stimulation,interweaving and fusion of various different scents and smell organs to stimulate the subconscious memory and experience a personal sense of time and space with the sense of smell,and weaves out a personal smell map.In order to achieve this writing purpose,this paper adopts textual intensive reading,takes the culture poetics criticism theory as the main research path,combines with the criticism methods of creation subject criticism,social history criticism,psychoanalytic criticism,aesthetic criticism,literary geography criticism,and trauma theory criticism,and regards the scent theme in the novel as the research focus to make an analysis and in-depth interpretation from three aspects of the protagonist,namely,childhood,love and self.This paper consists of the following six parts.The introduction explains the origin,background and theoretical basis of problem in this paper,introduces Proust,the research object in this paper,and emphasizes his particularity in the smell culture research.Then it systematically sorts and summarizes the smell culture research results in both domestic and foreign academia,but there is less research on this topic in China now,so the introduction makes a detailed analysis of the existing research results and main criticism methods in the western academia,and identifies some problems and shortcomings in the development process of smell culture research.On this basis,it elaborates the research focus and research methods of this paper,and points out the research significance and innovative points of this paper.The first chapter mainly discusses how Proust's scent view is formed and concretely manifested.The writer turned from a man who was allergic to scent into an scent observer in the living environment,and eventually grew into a real scent catcher.Those meticulous,tiny,and mixed scents are intertwined among his words and between his lines,and this writing feature is closely related to the disease of his olfactory organ,namely,asthma.The writer makes use of this incurable olfactory disease in an orderly manner so that he can observe scent changes in the urban space from a perspective of scent observer in order to show another important side of modern city life.Ultimately,his asthma became part of his art,and by rethinking the expression of the scent modernity,he really takes readers into the most intrinsic tone of his work.The second chapter mainly analyzes the stability of scent and the reproduction of childhood memory.Many years later,the protagonist Marcel was accidentally triggered by fragmented scents of vetiver grass,Madeleine cake and linden flower tea,and then a complete memory picture of the protagonist's childhood in Combray was constructed including two roads in Combray-people,thing,scenery,and object in Swan Family and Guermantes Family.Unlike the case that the memory searched by people in the past mostly appears in visual images,Proust finds that the sense of smell is the only adhesive if a man wants to really wake up the most distant memory and put together those vague,unclear and uncertain memory materials.The third chapter mainly interprets the liquidity of scent and the sublimation of emotional lust.In the private space of a modern city,scents,especially a variety of aromas,trigger lust and sex jealousy and provide comfort of remembrance of things past,which is manifested in two unforgettable love relationships of the protagonist Marcel.The original pure English hawthorn flower fragrance had always lingered between Marcel and his first lover Gilbert,and then the emergence of the mock orange fragrance triggered the lust entanglement among Marcel,Albertina and Andre.The shadow of "sex jealousy" emerging in the mock orange fragrance also diffuses in the Cattleya hybrida orchid scent,and the scent of that Cattleya hybrida orchid is precisely the lust password between Swan and Odette.The fourth chapter mainly discusses the metaphor of scent and the discovery of real self.In this chapter,the author of this paper changes the smell object from those tiny,delicate and mixed scents in private space to the same scent that cannot be chosen in public space.The protagonist Marcel changes the scent environment from Paris to his dreamland Venice,completing the change in the dense steam of Venice.Marcel draws lesson from Georges Poulet's space theory to present a travelling space promoted by the cumulative scent tension,thus constructing a real personal smellscape.Proust makes a spatial analysis of the smellscape and finds the real self subject in Venice after summoned by the remaining,cumulative,and lingering scents of civilization formed since the Roman Empire.He not only "inhales" and "hunts"scents,but also "exhales" and "produces",scents,finishing the complete scent cycle in the public space of Venice.In this way,the subjectivity is established in this cycle process.In the conclusion,the author summarizes the main ideas in this thesis.The smell map,painted by the scent catcher Proust,not only restores the presence of scent in language and experience which extends and expands its semantic field and experience modernity,but also creates the writer's integral personal scent recurrent space.A real universe of scent comes into being.