Abstract
All true literature is classical, but in the sense of impure, complex, profound, vital, integral and open, as well as international, cosmopolitan, Russian and English, and anti-scholarly. Proust reinvents the 17th century, his 17th century, its classical tradition, its genealogy and precursors, its literary memory.
In La Recherche , we find numerous developments on the complexity, complication or complexification of the work of art, an indefinite process to which Proust is very sensitive. In particular, this is what the narrator calls the Dostoyevsky side of literature, as opposed to the regulated, reserved Princess of Cleves side. Memory versus history implies a certain chronological disorder, linked to the non-progressive bias of literary development. The narrator would like literature to represent the world from the point of view of effects, not causes, i.e., the bewilderment, disorientation and lack of bearings one experiences in an unfamiliar city, in a book or in a sonata. Mme de Sévigné and Dostoyevsky, or Elstir, the imaginary painter in La Recherche, show us things in the order of our perceptions, not as we know them to be.
The narrator finds obvious pleasure in this heterogeneous, disparate and arbitrary association between Sevigne, Dostoyevsky and Elstir, despite dates, languages and genres: a 17th-century epistolary woman, a 19th-century Russian novelist, an imaginary 20th-century painter. This anachronistic assimilation illustrates the nature of the history of writers, as opposed to the history of teachers, as a history in reverse. After Dostoyevsky, we reread Sévigné differently, and after Proust, we reread Sévigné and Saint-Simon differently, or Racine and Baudelaire. Two histories are in competition, the official and the living, or history and memory, for memory is by definition composite and entangled.
Literature as memory and not as history calls for a final image: for memory, literature is a person, like Michelet's France. "Germany has no center, Italy has none. France has a center; one and the same for several centuries, it must be considered as a person who lives and moves. The sign and guarantee of the living organism, the power of assimilation, is found here in the highest degree", wrote Michelet in the preface to Introduction à l'histoire universelle. He went on to say that "France [is] the country in the world where nationality, where national personality, comes closest to individual personality", in Tableau de la France, a text familiar to Proust. Curtius, patron saint of literary memory, saw, in his 1932 Essay on France , this "geographical personality" of France, "fruit of its history", as a "spiritual" space represented par excellence in its literature, which transcends localism and provincialism.
