Proust remembered: has Proust's account of odor-cued autobiographical memory recall really been investigated?

In the opening section of their paper entitled ‘Odour-evoked autobiographical memories: psychological investigation of Proustian phenomena’ (Chu and Downes, 2000a) the authors refer to ‘a literary anecdote from Proust’ as an example of ‘folk wisdom concerning the power of odours to vividly remind one of particular past experiences’. Providing a one-paragraph excerpt from Proust’s three-page account of this ‘anecdote’, they define ‘what has become known as the Proust phenomenon’ as ‘the ability of odours spontaneously to cue autobiographical memories which are highly vivid, affectively toned and very old’. They then present a critical review of published research on odor memory in which they correctly point out that all studies but one (Aggleton and Waskett, 1999) were only partially relevant to the Proust phenomenon, either because they did not involve truly autobiographical memories, or because they did not provide a comparison between memories elicited by olfactory stimuli with memories triggered by other stimuli such as verbal or visual ones, or else because they were not run under ecological conditions (e.g. by requiring active association between odor and other stimuli during the encoding process). Chu and Downes (2000a) then proceed to summarize the findings of two new studies which were later to be published in full (Chu and Downes, 2000b, 2002), characterizing their approach in these studies as ‘translating the essence of Proust’s anecdotal literary descriptions into testable scientific hypotheses using the language of contemporary cognitive psychology’. In my opinion, the method used in these studies precludes them from being relevant to ‘spontaneously cued’ memories and from revealing memories that are ‘affectively toned’ or ‘very old’ in the sense of Proust’s (1956) account. Moreover, Chu and Downes’ definition fails to include essential parts of the complex chain of psychological processes which Proust describes. Let me address this final point first. To gain a clear understanding of Proust’s clinically detailed description of the psychological event that was to become the key to his multi-volume novel À la Recherche du Temps perdu (Proust, 1913), I turned to a modern French edition (Proust, 1956). The very title of the authorized English translation (Proust, 1928), Remembrance of Things Past, tends to lead the reader astray. ‘Temps perdu’ refers not to ‘things’, but to time itself, that Bergsonian subjective human time in which the individual’s life is embedded. And ‘perdu’ is not ‘past’, but ‘lost’, with overtones of an irretrievable loss as in Milton’s Paradise Lost. The passively nostalgic word ‘remembrance’ fails to convey the shock of Proust’s revelation occasioned by the crucial, sudden vision of a past recaptured, nor does it convey the urgency of the quest for an understanding of this vision, expressed by ‘à la recherche’, an expression which denotes both a mission and an exhortation to pursue this mission (as in ‘aux armes, citoyens!’). For the sake of general comprehensibility, I will nevertheless quote from the English translation, replacing or supplementing parts of it by my own rendition; these parts are printed in italics.