Proust, Freud, and the Art of Forgetting

Abstract

Proust's oeuvre is less a work of memory than a play of forgetfulness. Rather than establishing the primacy of regained memory in the work of art, Proust's novel almost seems to function like a creative manuel d'usage on how to lose presence of mind. And this absent-minded quality, it seems to me, accounts for the intensely poetic nature of the Proustian narrative, which even while it recounts a linear story, a chronological recit, nonetheless leaves itself open to poetic detours, extended prose poems in the text. In this paper, I shall read Proust as an absent-minded poet, and I shall suggest that poetic oubli has profound consequences for the order of the Proustian narrative, the assembly of Proust's prose. Thanks to oubli, rather than memory, Proust's syntactical discourse bears the dispersive marks of poetry, or figure.3 In the final scenes of Le temps retrouvi, Marcel is plagued by absentmindedness; he mislays objects, forgets appointments, neglects correspondence. His forgetful introversion is both a precondition and a symptom of artistic transport: Marcel's discovery of a vocation coincides with this vacation from ordinary daily commerce, with his loss of mooring in the mundane. Set adrift by his broken ties with the external world, his attention emptied of its usual central concerns, the antisocial artist has become ex-centric, disoriented, given over to a kind of amnesiac wandering among a jumble of resurrected images and experiences. For Proust, writing seems to be a diversionary, side-tracked process, which requires that the artist forget to