Abstract
Distinct from history, the memory of literature is complicated, contradictory and impure, like a terrain with a tangled geology. It is non-linear, allowing for backtracking, "anticipated reminiscences" and "unconscious recollections". Proust speaks out against progressive history as applied to the arts - music and painting - in a famous, ironic piece from Sodom and Gomorrah , where the scholastic vision of the evolution of modern art is defended by the young Mme de Cambremer, an advocate of progress in the arts: "Because she believed herself to be 'advanced' and (in art only) 'never far enough to the left', she said, she represented to herself not only that music progresses, but on a single line, and that Debussy was, as it were, a sur-Wagner, even a little more advanced than Wagner" (III, 210).
The narrator, who mocks her by assuring her that Debussy loves Chopin and Degas admires Poussin, contrasts her with the very Proustian idea of art as the solidarity of the old and the new, as tradition or memory. One sentence sums up his rejection of bourgeois history: "There are bits of Turner in Poussin's work, a sentence of Flaubert in Montesquieu" (III, 211). In this way, painting and literature reverse the meaning of time.
Malcolm Bowie - a remarkable critic who died a few days before this lesson, and to whom we have paid tribute - had analyzed the complex logic of literary memory at work in La Recherche : "Proust's characters use literary references and allusions like an unstable currency in social exchange. Proust's novelre-dreams European literature, giving an extension of imaginary life to the favorite characters of fiction and theater, and a new vigor to the memorable words of essayists. The monumental weight of a centuries-old literary tradition dissolves in the graceful ballet of the narrator's fantasies and chatter [1]."
There are long dissertations on literature in La Recherche, for example at the end of La Prisonnière (III, 880): barbey d'Aurevilly, Thomas Hardy, Stevenson, Dostoyevsky, Sévigné, Gogol, Paul de Kock, Laclos, Mme de Genlis, Baudelaire, Tolstoy... But, on the other hand, the Recherche is crisscrossed by works of memory, like veins that disappear before resurfacing hundreds of pages later: "Such works remain underground for long periods and, stored in the reader's memory, continue to play an active, formative role in the production of key episodes [2]. " François le Champi, for example , bridges the gap between the novel's opening and its finale.
