The Esoteric Wordsmyth
Involuntary Memory
Involuntary memory (fr. souvenir involontaire) is a concept made famous by the French writer Marcel Proust in his novel In Search of Lost Time (or Remembrance of Things Past), although the idea was also developed in his earlier writings, Contre Sainte-Beuve and Jean Santeuil. It is, thus, sometimes referred to as 'Proustian memory.'
Proust contrasts involuntary memory with voluntary memory. The latter designates memories retrieved by "intelligence," that is, memories produced by putting conscious effort into remembering events, people, and places. Proust's narrator laments that such memories are inevitably partial, and do not bear the "essence" of the past. The most famous instance of involuntary memory by Proust is known as the "episode of the madeleine," yet there are at least half a dozen other examples, as in In Search of Lost Time, including such distinct memories produced by the scent of a public lavatory on the Champs-Élysées.
The function of involuntary memory in the novel, however, is not self-evident. It has been argued[who?] that involuntary memory unlocks the Narrator's past as the subject of his novel, but also that he does not, for example, begin writing until many years after the episode of the madeleine. Other critics have suggested that it is not the recovery of the past, per se, that is significant for the Narrator, but rather the happiness produced by his recognition of the past in a present moment. Maurice Blanchot in Le Livre à venir points out that involuntary memories are empyreal and poignant, and cannot effectively support a sustained narrative. He notes that the difference between Proust's uncompleted Jean Santeuil and In Search of Lost Time is that voluntary memories provide the connective tissue between such moments, making up the vast bulk of the narrative of the later novel.
A possible contemporary influence on Proust's conception of involuntary memory may have been his cousin-in-law, the French philosopher Henri Bergson, who, in Matter and Memory (1906), made a distinction between two types of memory, one, the habit of memory as in learning a poem by heart, and two, the spontaneous memory that stores up perceptions and impressions, which later reveals itself in sudden flashes. Critique of Proust in the last quarter century, however, has tended to discount the influence of Bergson on Proust's ideas.
NR
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