Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Remembering forgetting: Le Drame du coucher
- 2 Impressions, the instant of artistic consciousness, and social history
- 3 Lying, irony, and power: Proust's deceptive allegories
- 4 Proust's forgetful ironies
- 5 Molloy's Way: The parody of allegory
- 6 Moran's Way: The forgetful spiral of irony
- 7 Malone Dies and the impossibility of not saying I
- 8 The Unnamable: The death of the ironical self and the return of history
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - Impressions, the instant of artistic consciousness, and social history
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Remembering forgetting: Le Drame du coucher
- 2 Impressions, the instant of artistic consciousness, and social history
- 3 Lying, irony, and power: Proust's deceptive allegories
- 4 Proust's forgetful ironies
- 5 Molloy's Way: The parody of allegory
- 6 Moran's Way: The forgetful spiral of irony
- 7 Malone Dies and the impossibility of not saying I
- 8 The Unnamable: The death of the ironical self and the return of history
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Proust's allegory of forgetting structures the Recherche as a series of stories about the interplay, in the first-person narrator's discourse, between remembering and forgetting representations of self. In the “drame du coucher” passage, the first-person narrator's search to remember past selves became an allegory of his forgetting. The very existence of a Proustian art of remembering depends upon the possibility of reversing this process, so that forgetting brings back remembering in the form of a repetition of that which has been erased.
The first-person narrator of the Recherche recounts Marcel's discovery of two modes of resurrecting his forgotten past: involuntary memory and art. Forgetting, Beckett points out, preserves memory in Proust. This preservational forgetting is brought about by habit, fear, and guilt. Habit, fear, and guilt erase unfamiliar and uncomfortable representations of the world from our mind. They replace these representations with familiar and non-threatening ones by constituting our consciousness in a socially acceptable manner. It is these habitual representations that the deliberate attempt to remember, “la mémoire volontaire,” recreates. But forgetting also preserves the memories that habit, fear, and guilt repress beneath our conscious representations, and these repressed memories can be reawakened in the form of involuntary memories. An involuntary memory takes place when a chance encounter with an object produces an unexpected sensation that recalls a past sensation, one to which our mind has associated repressed memories.
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- Information
- Proust, Beckett, and Narration , pp. 26 - 45Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003