Abstract
If the memory of literature can be described as a "kind of space", a palace or a landscape, a corollary is the representation of reading as a promenade. We walk in a book, following Montaigne's or Descartes' metaphor of thought as wandering. The analogy between narrative and hunting as the conquest of terrain has often been emphasized, as has the relationship between the novel and topography (see Joseph Frank, Carlo Ginzburg, Terence Cave, Franco Moretti). So the memory of literature, as opposed to history, directs us towards geography and the relationship of Proust's work to it, or to topography, cartography, orientation and the sense of direction.
How does one orient oneself in literature? How do we recognize ourselves in it? These are just some of the questions we've been asking ourselves about La Recherche, and they've led us to the notion of recognition, so important for memory, for literature, for poetics in general, and for Proust's novel in particular. This metaphor or model of the novel as landscape, as a territory we take possession of by walking, refers to a whole phenomenology of reading. During the first thirty or fifty pages of a novel, the reader is lost, and usually experiences a sense of disorientation. They lack bearings, don't know where they're going, and wonder what to expect. Then the world of the novel becomes more familiar: the reader builds up a pattern of expectation that the progression of the plot confirms or corrects, and feels increasingly at home. But the initial, vaguely disquieting experience - a feeling of disorientation, loss of bearings, perhaps anxiety, as one moves cautiously through a darkened house, or an unfamiliar city - is precious. And it is this very experience that the beginning of La Recherche thematizes through the parade of rooms.
