Remembering Through Taste: Sensory Memory and the Reconstruction of Identity in Joanne Harris' The Lollipop Shoes

Abstract

This paper examines the role of sensory memory in the reconstruction of identity in Joanne Harris's The Lollipop Shoes through David Sutton's gustemological approach to food, memory, and embodied knowledge. Sutton's gustemological perspective understands taste, smell, cooking, and other sensory practices as embodied forms of knowing through which memory, identity, and cultural belonging are experienced, interpreted, and negotiated. Building on this perspective, the study explores food not merely as a symbol of nourishment or pleasure but as a multisensory medium through which fragmented identities are remembered, understood, and reconstructed. The novel's rich representations of chocolate, confectionery, spices, aromas, textures, and culinary practices function as multisensory gustemological experiences that reconnect characters with their personal histories, emotional selves, and cultural inheritances. Vianne's intuitive chocolate-making embodies inherited culinary knowledge that reconnects her with her itinerant childhood and maternal legacy, while Anouk's sensory encounters with food shape her evolving understanding of family, belonging, and selfhood. In contrast, Zozie's manipulation of sensory perception reveals the unstable relationship between memory, embodied experience, and the performance of identity. Rather than treating memory as a purely cognitive process, this study argues that remembering is an embodied gustemological practice in which sensory experiences generate knowledge of the self and facilitate the reconstruction of identity. By foregrounding the relationship between food, multisensory perception, and identity, this paper demonstrates how culinary experiences preserve individual and cultural continuity amidst displacement, loss, and personal transformation. The paper contributes by introducing David Sutton's gustemological perspective as an innovative framework for understanding the novel's culinary imagination and argues that sensory memory functions as a narrative strategy through which identity is continually reconstructed rather than merely recovered.