World War I

World War I appears as a precise point of reference in Antoine Roquentin’s listening: the tune on Madeleine’s phonograph recalls American soldiers whistling it in La Rochelle in 1917. The brief memory binds a present sound to a remembered wartime street, while distinguishing the melody’s apparent age from the record’s later date.

The War as a Point of Recall

As Madeleine turns the phonograph crank, Antoine Roquentin recognizes the tune from its opening bars. He remembers hearing American soldiers whistle it in the streets of La Rochelle in 1917, during World War I. The memory is not a battle account or a description of military service; it supplies the historical circumstance in which the tune first lodged in his mind.

The Tune and Its Dates

Roquentin thinks the rag-time must date from before the war, although the recording itself is much more recent. He identifies it as the oldest record in the collection, a Pathé recording made for a sapphire needle. The contrast separates three temporal layers: the tune’s presumed origin, the 1917 street memory, and the comparatively recent recording now playing.

Memory Within the Listening Scene

The recollection surfaces while Roquentin listens to the instrumental opening, before the vocal chorus he especially likes arrives. In the present, the rapidly passing notes strike him as brief and irrecoverable; the remembered whistling gives the music a distinct past, but does not restore that past to the present. World War I therefore functions here as a personal temporal marker, joining an ordinary act of listening to a remembered moment in La Rochelle.