La Mémoire du lecteur: essai sur ‘Albertine disparue’ et ‘Le Temps retrouvé’ (review)

Despite its seemingly unoriginal title, this exploratory volume charts new territory in an area of Proust research that has repeatedly been exploited. Guillaume Perrier starts with the observation that reading À la recherche du temps perdu sets in motion a complex process of remembering the text itself. In order to understand this process, he puts ‘entre parenthèses ce que l’écrivain dit de la mémoire, au profit de ce que son texte fait effectivement’ (p. 26). In the foreground is no longer the well-known distinction between voluntary and involuntary memory (one deplores the rather cursory overview of previous critics who have discussed Proustian memory from this angle), but instead the role that memory — and forgetting — plays not only for the reader but also for the hero and narrator of Proust’s novel. By focusing on such practices of memory as allegory, mnemotechnics, and visual memory that are at work in the novel, Perrier establishes a Proustian Ars memoriae. Starting with Cicero’s tragic tale of Simonides of Ceos in De oratore, he traces the art of memory via the Middle Ages to Giotto, John Ruskin, Émile Mâle, and Frances Yates. His study is undoubtedly strongest in this attempt to uncover the ‘lien privilégié’ between architecture and memory in À la recherche du temps perdu, which, importantly, relies on images of disappearance, destruction, and forgetting (p. 181). The subtitle suggests that Perrier will concentrate on the last two volumes of the novel, but, as the emphasis on Michel Charles’s concept of ‘mémoire contextuelle’ highlights (p. 23), this necessarily means tracing the reminiscences of earlier scenes in both the retrospective and prospective context of the later volumes in sometimes lengthy, though rich and thought-provoking, close readings that combine literary and philosophic sources and convincingly integrate scientific research and genetic criticism. A particular highlight is the discussion of the ‘Matinée chez la princesse de Guermantes’ as founding a ‘nouvel art de la mémoire’ (p. 150), and also the invaluable section on the various meanings, psychological implications, and visual associations of ‘disparaître’ in the genesis of Albertine disparue. The last of the six chapters stands apart, as it extends the notion of the hypothetical reader and assesses two exemplary readers — Roland Barthes and Joseph Czapski — and the way they put their involuntary memory of À la recherche du temps perdu to work in La Chambre claire and Proust contre la déchéance. This functions as an elegant ‘epilogue’, underlining the essayistic quality of the study, but it is regrettable that Perrier’s reasons for choosing and combining Barthes and Czapski are not laid out more explicitly either in the introduction or later on, as the book fails to cohere into a convincing whole. Nevertheless, Perrier offers not only a useful framework through which to think memory in À la recherche du temps perdu, but also, as Éric Marty suggests in his preface, ‘une théorie de la lecture et une méthode de lecture’ (p. 9).