The ‘Search for Lost Time’: Memory Convergence and Literary Afterlife

Marcel Proust's masterpiece A la recherche du temps perdu ('In Search of Lost Time') is the paradigmatic novel of memory in modern European literature. Since its original publication between 1913 and 1927, this monumental chronicle of artistic awakening and development amid European modernity's transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century has been a touchstone for discussions of memory and its representation in literature. Almost a hundred years later, Proust still informs our thinking about memory in all discourses, from the literary and the cinematic, to the psychological and the neuroscientific. Why is this the case? How can a literary work – and, in particular, resonant episodes such as dunking a madeleine in green tea or the petite phrase of the Vinteuil sonata – have such a staying power in culture and engender so much thinking about memory?

This paper understands Proust's novel and its various afterlives (e.g. allusions, adaptations, references, reworkings, or rewritings) in later literary works as productive acts of cultural recollection.[1] In doing so, it interrogates the extent to which these afterlives might reduce or enhance the original work, while also asking what of the original is both remembered and forgotten – what is lost, but perhaps also gained – in its later incarnations. In order for such a powerful and generative schemata to emerge and enable the creation of new narratives, however, something must be forgotten. Specifically, this paper will consider what, in the writing of the Recherche, Proust is remembering and forgetting alongside how his work, in turn, is remembered and forgotten. Is it possible that such a canonical text, a cultural heritage, an integral part of the modern European canon, so monumental an artefact of cultural memory could in fact be (partially) forgotten? Furthermore, can one speak of Proust and the Proustian, inventing new searches for lost time without even having knowingly consulted the original, such that later writers, readers, and even non-readers are able to interpret references to Proust without recourse to the novel yet still understand them correctly? These questions have broad and resonant implications for understanding the history and future of European literature, culture, and society.

This paper explores how memory processes are thematized across twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary works, investigating not only how they envision memories of the past, but how they might articulate visions of the future. Proustian afterlives, this paper proposes, suggest new and productive possibilities for literary criticism as various works are brought together and set apart. Confronting the convergent relationships between Proust and other writers, this paper sets out to challenge and revitalize our understandings of the potential of both literature and literary criticism to reimagine the past, the present, and the future, while also exploring the particular reasons for the endurance of Proust's Recherche as a barometer for memory discourses.