Ratatouille, Madeleines and Memory

This piece was originally published on 17/04/20

If you haven’t watched Ratatouille, then this essay probably won’t mean much to you; it’s a decent use of two hours, though. If you haven’t read Proust, join the club! Not even a worldwide lockdown is enough time for that — but you can find the relevant passage in English translation here, pages 60–65.

‘An exquisite pleasure’ invades Anton Ego

The climactic scene of Pixar’s 2007 hit Ratatouille depicts the restaurant critic Anton Ego, physically modelled on a vulture, tasting, with extreme disdain, Remy’s pièce de résistance: what Colette had dismissed as a ‘peasant dish’ transports Ego back to his childhood, the sensation of Remy’s ratatouille reviving a repressed memory of the joy which food had brought him as a child, and which, it is implied, he had since lost.

Marcel Proust (1871–1922)

The fact this scene is a homage to the most famous scene in Marcel Proust’s enormous A la récherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) occupies a peculiar cultural position: for those who have heard of Proust and his madeleines, the implication is obvious, the comparison trite; yet I can’t find a mainstream review that acknowledges the connection. I think there’s some value in exploring the connection, and the concepts of memory which underpin both depictions.

Memory has a long tradition; in classical and medieval times, memory as a skill was held in high regard. Orators used ‘memory theatres’ or ‘memory palaces’ as spatial constructs in which they could place artifacts to remind them of the flow of their argument; as they moved in their memory from one object to the next, they recalled the next point in their speech. In this case, a spatial or sensory object in the memory was used to recall the semantics of an argument; and the links between those objects were spatial and sensory as well — a street with shop-fronts, or a room with objects. The sensory came first; semantic words and ideas were attached to it.

The Enlightenment, however, was to invert this relationship: the widespread adoption of written records in 12th century Europe meant that things which previously had to be remembered, such as customary law and land ownership, could now be recorded on paper. With the growth of the written word came a shift from visual, sensory, and spatial memory to a semantical, verbal model. This had two aspects. First, whereas Plato had associated knowledge in the memory with images in their entirety, direct knowledge of an object’s Form, increasingly indirect knowledge became acceptable — one did not remember the object itself, but rather a set of statements about it. Second, the connections between objects in memory, which had been sensory and spatial, became logical: rather than being situated in a visual representation of space, objects in the memory were articulated in a syntactic space of words and statements. Language functions as an aide-mémoire, creating conceptual categories to organise our memories. Semantic knowledge can often be safely be stripped of its spatial and sensory context; a mathematical concept can be remembered independently of the context in which it is learnt. This is an advantage in the sense that it allows us to remember more, and yet semantic memory sacrifices the personal and subjective. Over the course of the Enlightenment, as semantic memory overtook sensory, memory itself lost its former prestige and value; Montaigne remarked that “an excellent memory is often conjoined with the weakest intellects”. In the process, we may have lost something.

We can use this semantic/sensory framework to compare Pixar’s film with Proust’s experience with the madeleines.

Semantic and Sensory

Ego has a torturous relationship with food; glorious food is the only thing that matters to him, and he has built a career on its analysis; yet he savages every restaurant he visits, maintaining his reputation as the fiercest critic in Paris. Ego has let the perfect become the enemy of the good. The crucial image is his pen; Ego creates semantic representations of sensory experiences, sharing his memories of food through his writing; when a critic eats at a restaurant, it is almost as if it is his pen that is doing the eating, as it constructs a verbal record of the meal. So it is significant that when Ego takes his first mouthful of ratatouille, we immediately focus on his pen, abandoned, falling to the floor; the sensory overpowers the semantic.

Proust, however, gives a slightly different account. Like Ego, he describes how:

“an exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory — this new sensation having had the effect, which love has, of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal.”

Madeleines

While there may initially have been “no suggestion of its origin”, Proust moves quickly to rule out one possibility. The second and third bites fail to replicate the sensation: it is clear that it derives not from the food itself, but from within Proust: “Il est clair que la vérité que je cherche n’est pas en lui, mais en moi.” (It is clear that the truth which I seek is not in it, but in me). To attempt an Aristotelian causal framework, the madeleine is the efficient cause, but the formal and material cause is Proust’s memory; and perhaps the final cause is Proust himself. While the source of this experience is, for both Proust and Ego, within themselves, they access the memory in different ways. For Ego, the sensory experience comes with the memory: to use P.D. MacLean’s evolutionary concept of memory, recognition, recall and articulation (functions of the reptilian, paleo-mammalian and neo-mammalian brain) happen all at once. On the other hand, for Proust recognition comes immediately; but recall is much more difficult: he asks his

“mind to make one further effort, to bring back once more the fleeting sensation.… 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 leaves its resting-place and attempts to rise, something that has been anchored at a great depth; I do not know yet what it is, but I can feel it mounting slowly; I can measure the resistance, I can hear the echo of great spaces traversed… But its struggles are too far off, too confused and chaotic; scarcely can I perceive the neutral glow into which the elusive whirling medley of stirred-up colours is fused, and I cannot distinguish its form… Ten times over I must essay the task, must lean down over the abyss. And each time the cowardice that deters us from every difficult task, every important enterprise, has urged me to leave the thing alone, to drink my tea and to think merely of the worries of today and my hopes for tomorrow, which can be brooded over painlessly. And suddenly the memory revealed itself.”

Proust’s efforts at recall are arduous, not immediate; the connections are spatial and sensory — “I can hear the echo of great spaces traversed”, “the elusive whirling medley of stirred-up colours”. The memory for which he is searching is Platonic, a fully realised form. And when the memory does come, of his aunt in childhood, the connections to other memories are spatial: “And as soon as I had recognised the taste of the piece of madeleine… immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like a stage set to attach itself to the little pavilion opening on to the garden… and with the house the town”. We should, perhaps, expect to reach a childhood memory by a sensory connection; semantics are less developed in children. But given the pleasure the memory brings Proust (and Ego) in their malaise, it is clear that we are supposed to feel that sensory connections are more authentic and wholesome than semantics.

In the film, Ego’s memory transports him away from the restaurant to a cottage kitchen, much like the one from which Remy escaped at the start of the film; his arrogance is replaced with humility and authenticity. The same goes for the way Ego interacts with food: the implication is that by abandoning his semantic analysis for sensory experience, he is reconnecting with what really matters: childhood not adulthood, simplicity not refinement, country not city.

Ego, an unhappy child

It’s noteworthy, however, that both Ego and Proust seem to have had unhappy childhoods, as well as being depressed as adults: Proust found respite not in his mother’s bedtime kiss, but in the sound of her coming up the stairs, for the kiss itself heralded the terrors of the night, while the footsteps meant just joyful anticipation; when we first see the young Ego, the boy is clearly upset. If we are meant to think of these memory Forms as authentic and happy, it is ironic that they were moments of respite in otherwise miserable childhoods.

Separation and Connection

While Ego is at the climax of the film, the film itself isn’t really about him; Ego is Remy’s vindication, but the story is Remy’s. I think the big theme in the rest of the film is separation and connection. Crucially, everything in the film happens at a remove, or indirectly. Ego is a critic, not a chef; the rats (and Linguine) have to leave their home to move to Paris; Remy can only cook in the kitchen through Linguine. Even the real villain, Chef Skinner, acts indirectly: he is marketing frozen food, which disembowels the act of cooking, and, since he is head chef, we never actually see him doing any cooking of his own.

Chef Skinner (and the kitchen door)

The most important separation of the film isn’t a person, but a thing: the kitchen door. Doors structure the whole kitchen: the door to the street, through which Linguine and the rats arrive; the door to the larder; but most importantly the kitchen door which separates the customers and the waiters from the cooks. When food leaves the kitchen door, it loses its context and its creation; it no longer matters that a rat cooked the soup, only that the soup is delicious. Information can pass the other way, as well — the film turns on the moments when the diner says “Give my compliments to the chef.” The praise re-associates the food with its creator, but even this happens at a distance, through the waiter. In the final service scene, when only Linguine, Colette and the rats are left in the kitchen, the separation in the earlier scenes is taken to its logical conclusion. Rather than Remy acting as a homunculus in Linguine’s hat, what Arthur Koestler would have called the ‘ghost in the machine’, Remy now cooks directly, while Linguine acts as the go-between.

Authenticity, in both these interpretations, is thrown into question. The joyful memories of Ego and Proust — the plaisir délicieux of food — are supposed to be authentic because they are sensory and spatial, not semantic. But we know that this happy memory isn’t an authentic representation of what were actually two miserable childhoods. Remy’s talent is genuine, and joyful: he is “in this critic’s opinion, nothing less than the finest chef in France.” But Linguine is, as Chef Skinner suspected, a fraud — he belongs as a waiter, while Remy does the cooking. And because of Remy’s “humble origins”, as Ego puts it, he can never be honest about his talent. It may be that a great chef can come from anywhere; but a great chef may not come from anywhere.

The message of both the madeleine and the ratatouille is, I think, empowering. The thing which so moved Proust, and which changed Ego’s life for the better, was not an external thing, but a memory they held within themselves. If searching needed to be done, then the proper object of the search was their own soul. If the message of these works is authentic, then the key to our happiness, however wretched our lives may have been, could yet be in our grasp.