Abstract
Thibaudet distinguishes, in social memory as in individual memory, between habitual memory and memory-remembering, in Bergson's terms [1]. Habitual memory is acquired and active: it is an individual's automatism, "par cœur"; it is society's tradition. Memory-remembering is spontaneous and contemplative: in Proust, it's voluntary memory - possibly triggered by an involuntary recollection - and in society, it's history or historiography.
The two memories are antagonistic in an individual, like action and contemplation: habitual memory is oriented towards the present and the future, memory-memory towards the past. But, Thibaudet continues, this is not the case with an artist, such as Proust, who transforms memory into action. This is the project revealed in Le Temps retrouvé. Nor is it the case in society, where the two memories are intertwined: the 19th century is both the century of history and the century of action, the century of teachers and the century of entrepreneurs. In society, as in an artist, gratuitous memory becomes effective. From Michelet to Lavisse, the history of France was thus converted into heritage, national identity, or even "national energy" in the case of Barrès.
Isn't collective memory, as we understand it today, a euphemism for tradition? Because tradition connotes conservatism, academicism and traditionalism, memory is preferred to it: it would be tradition without traditionalism, or the future of the past. Doesn't the title of this lecture, "Memory of Literature", itself refer to the search for a middle way between tradition and intertextuality, between convention and disorientation?
This opposition between memory and the history of literature was also of interest to Harald Weinrich, who described the "spatializing thought" of E.R. Curtius in his major book, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1948) [2]. Curtius studies the universal reservoir of Greco-Latin antiquity in the Latin Middle Ages. The topoi of rhetoric, Europe's cultural heritage, remain "constants" encountered at every step in modern literature. For Curtius, literature depends less on a linear, dialectical and progressive history, in which the new displaces and supplants the old, than it does on transmitting and projecting the old into the new. Two visions of the movement of literature are thus contrasted, one progressive and the other memorial, one eliminatory and the other accumulative.
