The two great twentieth century hunt-masters of memory, Marcel Proust and Vladimir Nabokov, have very different notions regarding the nature of their quarry and how to catch it. For Nabokov memory is an act of will. Madame Nabokov fades once the Revolution whisks away her glorious setting. Neither we nor her son quite recognise the scented creature of his youth in the quiet old lady living among her relics in a dusty Paris room. Proust is an ardent materialist.
Scents deny the passage of time, the extinction of the past.
However firmly rejected by experts and artists, the folk notion of the sludge of daily memory resting quietly until stirred into life by some accidental stimulus is often vindicated by experience. The surge of blood into my father's brain in the last year of his life tossed him back into the churned battlefields of France, as if the explosion in his head had effected an equivalent explosion in memory so that what had been decently buried for decades was brought writhing, horribly, to the surface. After the transplant my own mind, agitated by the leaking of chemicals into the brain, tossed up living fragments of my own deep memory which I did not even recognise as mine, until they began their parade behind my eyelids. The stimulus need not be dramatic. Proust was right about that.