Abstract
One image sums up the relationship between books and space, memory and recognition: the "inner compass". Albert Thibaudet often associates the novel with nature, thinking of the "thick forest of the Russian or English novel", a novel laid down, not composed like the French narrative, and he compares it with life, which seems random to us but which we discover afterwards that there was for each of us a "life line", what Schopenhauer, he says, calls "a hidden sense of direction, an inner compass, thanks to which each of us is set on the path that is the only one he needs to follow, but whose regular and logical direction he only sees after he has already travelled it [1] " Thibaudet translates by "inner compass" what Schopenhauer called " der innere Kompass ", "the inner compass", just as Proust compared the automobile taking possession of the land to a compass on a map, and as we see the reader's searching or hunting head.
Yet this dated image of the "inner compass" is not absent in Proust's work, always in a passionate context, for example in his relationship with Gilberte: "Then I was irresistibly drawn back to her by my thoughts, and these alternative orientations, this panic of the inner compass persisted when I returned, and were reflected in the drafts of the contradictory letters I wrote to Gilberte" (I, 574-575). Or with Albertine: "[...] if I was a little calmer, I didn't feel happy. The loss of all compass, of all direction, which characterizes waiting, persists even after the arrival of the expected being" (III, 135). It is love that disturbs the "inner compass".
For Schopenhauer, this inner compass was linked to reading, even if he understood it negatively, as a substitute: we need books, he said, when our inner compass is lacking. Nevertheless, he recognized the vital relationship between our reading and our inner compass, the one that gives us a sense of direction in books and in life.
Thibaudet, even more Bergsonian than Proust, spatializes both memory and literature. For them, becoming is always thought of in spatial terms. They substitute geography for history. Michelet's history has left a lasting impression on them, as seen in Proust's favorite text, Tableau de la France. Géographie physique, politique et morale, preface to the second volume of Histoire de France, published in 1833, and a cavalier view of the country: "Let's go up to one of the high points of the Vosges, or, if you like, the Jura." Thibaudet and Proust read Bergson with Michelet's compass, so to speak.
