The fiction of memory in Proust

In the narrative of our own lives, there are no demarcations between past and present for they exist simultaneously and it would be a dedicated effort towards deception to differentiate the two. And thus too the future, for inevitably, our perceptions affect us, the residues from the past pressurizing our now and the moments to come. In the Proustian oeuvre, this is felt everywhere, and we are constantly in a world of sensations, for each sensation leads to a backward perception of memory. But the distinguishing characteristic of this narration is the fluid compartments from where we shift from one to the other, as if tranced. Thus memory here, like the flow of narrative is not going forward but mixing, dependent on the impetus, the tug of each sensation.

The narrator's perception of Combray, for instance is not an intended memory but reminded of by a perception, by the Madeleine cake dipped in tea. The idea of involuntary memory, as opposed to a voluntary one was coined by Proust. As I just mentioned, this memory or memories is a contingent one, swaying in our mind, but brought to us, sometimes gentle, sometimes harshly by an external force which might not always be unkind. My interest in involuntary memory in Proust is not to see or approach it or analyze it from any great psychological perspective ( one I am also incapable of ) but I was surprised to note that Blanchot considers this narrative process in Proust as epiphanic, as it was something I had considered myself but was afraid to admit. It is important to ascertain for the reader as to why all usual narrations should be linear because that is not how we actually live. In Proust, this problem does not exist for the narration is never linear but always admitting to a door through which a slip, an escape can be made.

This is not a philosophical question alone but a practical one, for even while beholding an object of beauty or terror, another object, similar or dissimilar tides into our mind. If we read this passage:

"as soon as I had recognized the taste of the piece of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-blossom which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like a stage set to attach itself to the little pavilion opening on to the garden which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated segment which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I used to be sent before lunch, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine".

The above passage illustrates the point I want to make.The initial perception, of the cake, leads to the recovery of latent memories, which are hidden somewhere, waiting to be uncovered. And the sights and sounds of present surroundings are a stimulus, leading to a memory. However, speaking phenomenologically, a real stimulus is adequate for a sensory perception in the real world, but here, the inner world is laid siege to, thrown on the surface of the narrator's mind, which sways and recedes like the sea. We must not however ignore the unreality of some memories for the unearthed ones could be actually fictitious, as they are accessed through the present stimulus. We are therefore in the midst of a world of memories awash with a fictitious desire for what should have happened, culminating in the narrator's mind with this, which may not have been that.

This is based on surmise, on my own conjectures, for my surmise too is based on the supposed reality of reading a text, a narration, that since when I first read it, has undergone so many revisions. Thus, my memory, prone to error, recovers from Proust's narrator a fiction that is not factual but based on my faulty memory of it, with some flashbulb memories of my own, when I too, privy to the white nights under the moon when I first read that, remember my own perceptions based on a myth that is actually real. This could lead us to question the act of reading in itself, for reading thus is as inaccurate as writing itself. However, this is a problem that needs to be tackled elsewhere. Suffice it to say now that my readings of Proust are based on this duality of the narrator's text, which from his perception down to the act of final rendition is fraught with many possibilities. But this is the narration that we must seek, for it is a reflection of the duality of our experiences and Proust restores these to us in a language that is a moonlit mix of memory and desire.

The problem of memory in Proust must be differentiated from the question of desire.....desire thwarted in a past which gives the preesenting memory of now those nameless rights that are hard to accept. This is thus an issue for us when our present perception of the past is not entirely wilful but a fruition of those sensations whose import had escaped us.We do not however take the narrator's account as some kind of testimony but as a baring of an inner life, sketched for us through the intimacy of memory. Proust's narrator is not deceptive but a striver towards the mystical world of seeing and feeling, some of which perceptions he takes for the truth. We read his effusive remembrances and search for our own swing, smells, sunshine, days and nights, sounds, desires and regrets that have escaped us, and that having been lost permanently, we hope to recover from a mind in search of lost time.