THE PROUST CURE

“Bayonne, Bayonne, the perfect city: riverain, aerated with sonorous suburbs (Mouserolles, Marrac, Lachepaillet, Beyris), yet immured, fictive: Proust, Balzac, Plassans. Primordial image-hoard of childhood: the province-as-spectacle, History-as-odor, the bourgeoisie-as-discourse” 

– Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, 1977.

The rationale for the procedure emerges from a three-year absence of the sense of smell. The subject’s sense of taste has also been diminished to a base differentiation between the five chemical sensations of sweet, salty, sour, bitter and “umami” or savory. All other flavours being inaccessible, food often seems to lack evocative connotation, to be bland or tasteless. The trial procedure will progress as follows:

1. Beginning on the afternoon of the third anniversary of the onset of the subject’s anosmia, each day a therapeutic quantity of Linden tea (aka lime blossom tea) will be brewed  in a teapot with the capacity of approximately three standard cups. Five minutes will elapse between steeping and proceeding to drink the Linden tea as per the manufacturer’s label, which will be used to clear and calm the senses from the day’s events and concentrate consciously on engaging the missing senses, in particular the sense of smell, through both sensory immediacy and memory. 

The subject, in proceeding to drink the entirety of the tea as a dosage, will proceed unhurriedly, engaging consciously with the missing senses, while simultaneously reading Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913), in the 2003 Penguin classics paperback edition. Echoes and resonances of the senses of smell and taste and their relation to memory within the text should be consciously sought out and noted. The section of the text arrived at when finishing the third cup of tea will be further noted with the time and the date, and the book put aside. 

2. The above procedure will continue every day, as is feasible, until either:

a) the patient’s long-Covid anosmia is cured and the sense of smell returns 

b) the end of the novel is reached 

In the event of b), the procedure will move to the second stage, as follows:

The preparation of Linden tea will continue as in the first stage. All relevant slow, sensory and imaginative engagement with the tea and the echoes within Proust’s text should also continue. However, instead of reading for the duration of the tea dose, there will instead be an according shift to writing for the duration, via a work (loosely of poetry) being composed. This work should focus an open question toward the notes made in the first stage, including incorporating references to smell in Proust’s novel that have been notated, but should also shift this accumulated emphasis to the patient’s own thematic meditations on involuntary memory, remembered smells, sensory engagement with the material world, childhood etc. 

Sally Ann McIntyre, 29 November 2025. 

DAY 1 

date: 29 November 2025 

time: 4:30-5:09pm 

page range: Book 1, pp. 7-21

olfactory notes: 

“I had been mentally poisoned by the unfamiliar odour of the vetiver,…” [p. 12]

“…in a little room that smelled of orris-root and that was also perfumed by a wild blackcurrant bush…” [p. 16]

DAY 2

date: 30 November 2025

time: 6:54-7:42pm 

page range: Book 1, pp. 22-45

olfactory notes:

“to that first Swann abounding in leisure, fragrant with the smell of the tall chestnut tree, the baskets of raspberries and a sprig of tarragon.” [p. 23]

“That detested staircase which I always entered with such gloom exhaled an odour of varnish that had in some sense absorbed, fixated, the particular sort of sorrow I felt every evening and made it perhaps even crueller to my sensibility because, when it took that olfactory form, my intelligence could no longer share in it (…) my sorrow at going up to my room entered me in a manner infinitely swifter, almost instantaneous, at once insidious and abrupt, through the inhalation – far more toxic than the intellectual penetration – of the smell of varnish peculiar to that staircase.” [p. 31]