‘For our culture, Proust is the arch-rememberer, just as the blind Homer is our first storyteller,’ writes Evelyne Ender. Marcel Proust's status as iconic rememberer is particularly founded not in authenticity or automaticity or thoroughness of recall but, as Jonah Lehrer explains, in ‘the discovery of memory reconsolidation. For him, memories were like sentences: they were things you never stopped changing.’ What is it that catalyzed Marcel Proust's singular attention to the complex referential prompting, sensory registry, affective coloring, and perverse temporal storage and retrieval of memory?

Henri Bergson's conception of voluntary memory has been viewed as one important source for Proust's consciousness of the challenges of voluntary memory, and there is no doubt of the literary synergy between A la recherche du temps perdu and Bergson's observation in his 1896 Matière et mémoire that ‘le souvenir spontané, qui se cache sans doute derrière le souvenir acquis, peut se révéler par des éclairs brusques; mais il se dérobe au moindre mouvement de la mémoire volontaire.’ This is the spirit of Proust's narrator's comment in the famous Madeleine passages that ‘Je … ne puis distinguer la forme, lui demander, comme au seul interprète possible, de me traduire le témoignage de sa contemporaine, de son inséparable compagne, la saveur.’ Yet to align Proust with Bergson is to emphasize his relationship with the cognitive philosophy of his time, and with a literary relationship at the expense of the ‘folk psychology’ of experiential memory. As Emily Troscianko summarizes, Marcel Proust's representations of memory are astoundingly diverse and in effect escape the confines of any one interlocutor's memory categories. His fiction features: