Abstract
Far removed from Proust's memory seems to be artificial memory, the architectural memory of Antiquity and the memory theater of the Renaissance, examined in Frances Yates' great book, The Art of Memory (1966). Yet doesn't Proust, surrounded in his bed by the mountain of his notebooks and notepads - draft notebooks and notebooks from manuscript to net, plus typescripts and proofs copiously worked, corrected and amplified - represent the modern form of the theater of memory? His store testifies to the prodigious memory of a writer who gives us the feeling of possessing everything he moves in this immense palace, between his notes de régie, which demonstrate his mastery of the terrain, and his notebooks with memorable names (Babouche, Serviette, Fridolin, Dux, Vénusté). He needs a whole mnemonic system to remember where the fragments have been deposited: a veritable treasure trove, a copia, a database, from which the writer draws as he drafts the novel.
The two traditions of the arts of memory and poetic memory may seem to be at odds, but they converge. In the spatialization of memory by ancient rhetoric - images inhabit a given place - as in the modern literary scene of reminiscence since Romantic poetry, place plays the role of "memorial sign", or "memorial" tout court, to use Rousseau's expression. It is the place that links the present to the past. For Rousseau, music acts as a memorial and holds a power of reminiscence, but so does the herbarium. The herbarium is a highly distinctive system of places and images.
At the beginning of "Combray", memories are presented in the random order of their return to consciousness, but very soon the chronological narrative takes precedence. Between the two, the spatial organization of memory, that of the chambers of recollection, still presents strong analogies with the architecture of memory: "A man who sleeps, holds in a circle around him the thread of hours, the order of years and worlds" (I, 5). We've quickly moved from the indeterminate advent of memories to their organization in rooms, and from time to space. Memory links time and space. Ramon Fernandez has already spoken of the spatialization of time and memory in Proust's work.
