The Genesis of the Involuntary Memory in Proust's Early Works

Abstract

That Curious psychological phenomenon, the involuntary memory, is not an original discovery of Proust. Nor does he claim it as such, since, in Le Temps retrouvé, he himself mentions Chateaubriand, Baudelaire, and Nerval as predecessors. Critical investigations have since amplified this list. What is original, however, is Proust's use of it: only he conceived of its many facets—poetic, dramatic, philosophic—and exploited its possibilities by incorporating it centrally in the substance of a novel. Within his own work the involuntary memory underwent a lengthy evolution, appearing in embryonic form from the outset in Les Plaisirs et les jours and recurring, progressively more refined, in all subsequent writing, but not fully modeled nor centrally placed until the final work. In La Recherche three separate forms of the involuntary memory are delineated. There is a dream memory operating in a state of full or partial somnolence found principally in the “Ouverture” and in La Prisonnière where the senses and imaginative powers pursue a course unchecked by reason or will, where the evocations are fleeting, vague in contour, limited in significance and never surprising. There is a sentimental memory evoking a person once loved by the narrator (Gilberte, his grandmother, Albertine), in effect resuscitating that person since the narrator experiences her as present, as a living reality within him, surrounded by the full force of all old emotional ties. It is operative only while some trace of the original affection remains and affords no pleasure but rather acute and often prolonged sorrow, since the circumstances necessary for such recollection are so precarious (love being ephemeral). There is finally an esthetic memory, far more dependable than the sentimental memory in its life-preserving powers, and also richer quantitatively and qualitatively, recalling and bringing back to life whole worlds (connected with a period such as Combray, Balbec, Venice, or with an instant) framed and colored by the narrator's past aspirations. Its mechanism is uniquely poetic and dramatic. It presents a highly specific content—the affective comprehension of a particular place and moment. It causes an intense and durable pleasure and contains the answers to the narrator's questions.The present analysis will trace the emergence of these forms along with other basic features of Proust's affective memory: its involuntary character, its structural function, its intricate mechanism including unusual impetus-sensations, original and beautiful content, striking subsidiary effects.