Remembering Swann: Memory and Representation in Proust

Abstract

Regardless of their method and focus of analysis, readings of Proust's Recherche for the past forty years can be said to agree on at least one ground rule with regard to reading the novel itself. The primary rhetorical figures of Proust's narrative have been identified alternately as metaphor and metonymy, while the examination of the syntactic patterns relating those figures into a diachronic narrative has served to indicate a single logical conflict between the two.' But with respect to the story told by that narrative, one contextualized figure alone is conceded to govern its formation. The optics of Proust criticism suffer neither double nor divided vision in perceiving the central textual position, in Serge Doubrovsky's words, of place de la madeleine. As figure, the thing indicated by madeleine may be explained persuasively to stand for any number of things or their simulacra, fetishized objects or fantasmes, as Doubrovsky's analysis speculates at length.2 Yet the singular function ascribed to the Madeleine within the narrative structure is routinely accepted at face value, and in this one respect the different currents of Proust criticism, given oppositely but with equal extravagance to psychoanalytic rhapsody and taxonomic rigor,3 can be said to constitute a coherent tradition-a tradition, precisely, of reading the novel traditionally rather than critically. That is to say, whatever interpretative purpose to which it is put, the Madeleine is assumed, throughout the history of the novel's reception, to mean what the narrator explicitly says it means throughout the history of the novel's narration-the bearer