BERNSTEIN & PROUST
Charles Bernstein: Language, Memory, and the Proustian Sign Bernstein’s line is almost entirely powered by its collision with In Search of Lost Time , specifically the famous madeleine episode in Swann's Way by Marcel Proust (Marcel-Valentin-Louis-Eugène-Georges Proust, French, 1871–1922. Modernism / Existential Intuitionism). Proust’s madeleine scene is one of the central literary images of involuntary memory: the taste of the tea-soaked madeleine unexpectedly restores an entire lost world of childhood, memory, time, and selfhood. The experience feels almost sacred. Sensation becomes revelation. Bernstein’s line: “The taste of madeleine ain’t what it used to be.” does several things at once. First, it turns Proust’s transcendent experience into an ordinary cliché: “__ ain’t what it used to be.” That phrase belongs to everyday disappointment, nostalgia, cultural decline, aging. Bernstein drags the sublime into colloquial speech. But the deeper irony is that the line performs a co...