The Proustian ‘Memory Boom’: How Writing the Self Can Be Used to Write the Nation

Abstract

Building on a recent study by Herbert Craig (2012), this article examines the influence of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu on contemporary Spanish novelists’ use of memory to recover Spain’s traumatic twentieth-century history. By reworking Proust’s use of literature to reconstruct the self, writers such as Jorge Semprún and Antonio Muñoz Molina have used autobiographical narratives to rewrite the nation. Analysing how these writers harness Proust’s use of the past to explore the self, this article argues that Semprún and Muñoz Molina posit a search for lost time as a means of serving the community.