"A new fear assailed her.  When she thought of Martin as perhaps dead, his remembered features suddenly dissolved, and the more she strove to recollect his appearance, the vaguer grew her memory. When she was not trying to remember him, his face would sometimes reappear, suddenly distinct in color and outline.  Then she would start and tremble inwardly and try to hold the vision.  But the harder she tried the dimmer grew the face.  The same thing had happened to her, she now remembered, after her mother's death.  The beloved image had faded.  An impression of warmth, of security, the tones of the voice, the pressure of the hand had remained, but he could not see her mother's face.  She had spoken of this to Madame Guerre, who had replied: 'There are people like that.  They do not remember with their eyes, but with their ears, maybe." (37-38)

I love this passage.  When I read it I am reminded of the famous passage from Swann's Way (from which I have read little more than passages) when Proust describes the moment that incites his pilgrimage to memory.  He dips a madeleine cookie into a cup of tea and the scent, redolent, is heavy with memories of his childhood summers in Combray.  This begins for Proust an exercise in remembrance, revealing to him the following: the more we try to remember, the weaker the factuality of the memory; the weaker the factuality of memory, the stronger our fictions; certain senses provide better guidance for memory and intimacy -- scent, in this instance, trumps vision.

Bertrande experiences her own Proustian moment in this scene, and I highlight it not only for its beauty but for its portending of later dilemma.  Notice, first, that ultimately the dominant sense conveying memory in this scene is audition, rather than vision.  This transmission of power among the senses lends to notions of the unreliability of perception, the uncertain methods we use to detect narrative.  Perhaps Lewis is hinting here at the arrival of Bertrande's delirium: the loss of sensual hierarchy occasions the loss of conviction, the incapacity to determine what is and isn't, the construed from the real.

More importantly, the gradual decline of Bertrande's memory, its erosion of sensual detail (sensual in both senses of the word), leads to the most critical shift in her perception: her replacement of the facts of her husband with (what seem, at this point in the narrative, before Tilh is introduced) her fictions.  These "apparent" fictions -- that her husband was not so gentle, that her husband more closely resembled his father -- are startling for Bertrande and Lewis' reader, but introduce a more nuanced discussion of truth and reality in the context of narrative.  If Bertrande's memories shift, are her current perceptions any less "true," over time, than her older ones?  If reality proves insufficient to convey the "truth" of a matter, may we replace reality with a fiction that cleanly does the job?  (Consider, for instance, the dilemma readers of Tim O'Brien face when we are forced, in The Things They Carried, to reconsider the meaning of "what really happened.")