Forgetting to Remember: An Approach to Proust's Recherche

Abstract

Since Walter Benjamin’s observation that “remembrance is the woof, and forgetting the warp” in À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, critics have observed the importance of oubli, as a “réserve” of memories, for the return of involuntary memory. Late 19th and 20th-century psychological discourse on forgetting and memory, however, evinces a more complex interplay between forgetting and memory. Théodule Ribot’s Les Maladies de la Mémoire, in particular, posits that memory depends upon a balance between forgetting and memory, in which forgetting corrects hypermnesia - an excess of memory - so that other memories no longer overwhelmed by competing memories may return. This study examines the expression of this paradigm of forgetting and memory in the Recherche, suggesting that oubli acts not only as a reserve for memory, but that the destructive agency of forgetting paves the path for memory by undoing the effects of habitude - impressions that become ingrained as a habituated perceptual response. I probe this exchange in the Recherche by examining not only how forgetting shapes the ability to remember in the Recherche, but is ultimately also essential to the perception and creation of art. I show that Swann’s and the narrator’s experiences of the Vinteuil Sonate demonstrate that the forgetting that takes place over successive encounters with a work of art wears away at aesthetic habits so that one may perceive a work of art anew. Illumination rétrospective, I suggest, similarly depends upon an interval of forgetting that renews the artist’s perspective and in turn allows for the discovery and implementation of an underlying unity: a unity “vitale et non logique” produced by the artist’s inconscient. Oubli, I argue, thus is not only the source of memory but the condition for remembering - a vital aspect of memory in both life and the creative process.