Abstract
We haven't gone back over "Proust and memory" for too long, as it's a critical cliché. We've only mentioned it for the record, as a reminder of what this lecture won't - or hardly ever - be about.
By "Proust and memory", we usually mean a reflection on "the literature of memory", or on "the novel of memory", where memory is understood, once again in the ambiguity of the genitive, as the object or subject of the novel. Not only does the novel speak of memories, but above all - and more decisively - it is memory that constitutes and structures the novel.
In the first sense, it is essential to remember that La Recherche belongs to a whole literature of memory, against a backdrop of Romantic melancholy and nostalgia for the past. Following the formula of the Romantic poem, a present sensation summons a dead past, as in Lamartine's Le Lac : "Un soir, t'en souvient-il? nous voguions en silence." In the modern world, memory is the condition for the poetry of the world and the harmony of life. Involuntary memory thus runs through La Recherche, from the madeleine at the opening of Combray to the cascading reminiscences in Le Temps retrouvé. The novel traverses the great arc of memory, between the narrator's long impotence to write and the final revelation of the means to his vocation, both impotence and revelation linked to memory.
On the other hand, and more essentially, memory is not an object but a subject, and it provides the very structure of the novel, which is founded on memory: after a prologue marked by the disordered return of memories of the rooms where the narrator has lived, the narrator goes through and recounts his life, generally in retrospect, until the decision to write unravels his impotence, so that he can set about writing the novel we have in our hands (we're deliberately simplifying, because is it really this novel?). The novel, thanks to an immense flashback, relates an action that belongs to the past.
A final evasion: we'll say little about the relationship between involuntary memory - the object and subject of the novel - and intellectual memory, except to recall their well-known opposition. This second lecture was therefore mainly a reminder of what would not be discussed later.
