Abstract
Fifteen lessons were given under this title, which could take on two or three meanings, depending on the subjective or objective value of the genitive. On the one hand, in the subjective sense, it refers to the memory of which literature is the agent, i.e. what it remembers; on the other hand, in the objective sense, it refers to the memory of which literature is the object, i.e. what remembers it.
In the first sense, literature as memory is opposed to history, or historiography in its chronological progress. Everything, or almost everything, can be found in a work like Proust's, but in no particular order, somewhere, as in an integral sum of culture: not only the most important events, known as "historical", such as the Dreyfus affair or the Great War, but also the most insignificant "gossip". The narrator has just heard one in a salon: "This 'gossip' enlightened me on the unexpected proportions of distraction and presence of mind, of memory and forgetfulness, of which the human mind is made; and I was as wonderfully surprised as the day I first read, in a book by Maspero, that we knew exactly the list of hunters that Assourbanipal invited to his battues, ten centuries before Jesus Christ" (I, 469 [1]).
In the second sense, literature is the object of memory, and is remembered. We know poems by heart, we can recount the plot of a novel we read long ago. The Boulbon doctor asks the narrator's grandmother about Bergotte's work: "At first I thought he was making her talk literature because he was bored with medicine [...]. But, since then, I've understood that, especially remarkable as an alienist and for his studies on the brain, he had wanted to find out through his questions whether my grandmother's memory was really intact" (II, 597-598).
