Jonny Clarke-West, ‘Memory and Imagination: The Production of the Absolute in Proust's A La Recherche du Temps Perdu’

This week we will host the talk with a hybrid format. As usual, the room is S0.08 and on MS Teams.

Abstract:

In this paper I interrogate the roles of imagination and memory at what I take to be the culmination of Proust’s project in the Recherche – where he develops a moment of pure literature. Proust writes the Recherche in order to bring into being a truth that he first discovers (but cannot articulate) in the prologue to Contre Sainte Beuve. In and through the production of the Recherche, Proust is able to realise what previously eludes him. The truth that Proust seeks is resistant to philosophy and the powers of the intellect – it requires the powers of the imagination and the production of literature. The root of literature – the production of truth – is therefore connected to the formation (or Bildung) of Marcel in whom, over the course of the novel, Proust develops the requisite sort of imaginative being. The deep connection between these projects of the novel crystallises at what I take to be its zenith when, in Le Temps Retrouvé, Marcel receives an ultimate revelation following a series of involuntary memories. It is at this juncture that the Absolute of the Recherche can be understood to be brought into being.

I examine the deep connection that Proust develops between involuntary memory and imagination in the production of the Absolute of his novel. Critical to this connection are two intertwined sets of conditions by which the unlived side of life – that time which always accompanies us but that we have not lived as such – can be brought to life in literature: firstly, a chance encounter hosted by the present; secondly, the production of an imaginary space into which the unlived can form as memory. What emerges from this is that the present as we know it is shown by Proust to be only a region of time. There is more that can be discovered, and this is what Proust accesses for literature. For literature to obtain a purchase upon this excess, Proust has to expand the field of the imagination. At the zenith of the novel, imagination becomes the site of certainty. The experience of literature – the production of truth – is the experience of the unfolding of the imaginary. The common distinction between truth and creatures of the imagination is dissolved. As Proust develops a moment of pure literature, the unimaginable – that which in the prologue to Contre Sainte-Beuve he could not articulate – transforms into the product of imagination.

Please contact Raffaele Grandoni for further information.