Memory of literature

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).

And that's not all, for, folding the two meanings one on top of the other, literature itself remembers literature; it is both the object and the subject of memory. It's not a question of closing in on itself: literature doesn't just speak of literature, but, through literature, it speaks of life and the world. Our interest in intertextuality has less to do with the production of the text it stimulates than with the possession of language and the reproduction of the world it enables. As Borges reminded us: "Emerson, I believe, wrote somewhere that a library is a kind of magic cavern filled with the dead. These dead can be reborn, can come back to life when you open their books [2]."

The fold or folding of literature's memory gives it its spring, its impetus, its enargeia. Bringing literature from the past into the present, memory transmits the measure of the world. An allusion does not accentuate literature's autonomy, but literature's openness to a vision of the world, first singular, then shared. The allusion, the withdrawal, the memory of literature, in the redoubled sense of subject and object, does not impoverish it, but enriches it with infinite echoes. An allusion by Proust - to Baudelaire, for example - shows how literature carries and transports literature, making it not a monument, but a movement: the memory of literature, then, is literature in motion.