Abstract

The essay explores the bounds of the modernist novel, where fictional possibilities are tested,

reframed and recast. The import of memory as a crucial aspect of modernist fiction is focused

on in this essay, through Marcel Proust's Swann's Way, wherein memory reconstructs the

subject matter of the novel in ways that unlock its political, social and historical scope toward

the psychical, the lived and the experiential, establishing literary art as an important

consideration in explorations of philosophy and human consciousness.

Keywords: modernist novel, Marcel Proust, memory, the madeleine moment, Swann's Way.

Modernist novels display an extreme keenness to reject and turn back upon the traditional

narrative modes in order to voice more authentically and affirmatively, the need to focus on

individualism, promote experimentalism, and attack such constrictive notions as hierarchy,

race and class. Modernism, which is both philosophical and artistic in orientation, took its

birth from a varied and wide range of radical changes in the Western society during the late

nineteenth and early twentieth century, making evident an unquenchable thirst for newer

trends in art, writing, philosophy, psychology and social and industrial set ups, gave way to a

great deal of experimentation in matters not just of themes and content but also to revised

frameworks and formats in order to showcase their new subject matter.

The term, ‘avant-garde’, was the initially applied qualifier to denote and describe modernism

which stuck with it and goes on to explain many other movements such as vorticism,

surrealism, expressionism, impressionism etc., associated with the dethroning of the existing

norms in its endeavour to experiment and ring in the new forms and newer responses. The
trend is quite clearly discernible in the works of the high modern novelists like Marcel Proust,

James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, and William Carlos Williams to name some.

The major influences and instrumental impetuses which facilitated and furthered the progress

of Modernism can be listed as advancements achieved in the fields of Cultural and Social

Anthropology, Historiography, Physics, Psychology, Philosophy under the aegis and theories

of Darwin, Karl Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Einstein, Bergson etc.,

Around this period of time in Europe, the focus in literary studies began to shift from the

production of literature to understanding and interpreting literary texts, with a majority of

literary works engaged in the author’s artistic endeavour to discover his/her individualism

and artistic intentions and transposing them on to their texts to further an understanding of the

relationship between the author and the text. Their findings became part of national literary

histories. And soon in the late 1920s the focus began to shift to the text per se with

researchers and critics paying greater attention to how texts came into being and to their

intertextuality thus rejecting any kind of hints or assistance from the author and making a

cautionary approach so as not to commit the, by then, infamous ‘intentional fallacy’ in

comprehending the text. This tendency in a way sowed the first seeds of the reader-centric

approach to literary texts. It was around the same point of time the German psychologist,

Hermann Ebbinghaus was making inroads into empirical research in ‘memory’ and had

uncovered certain important facts and patterns about memory retention and also about the

process of forgetting. His findings left his contemporaries, Sigmund Freud and Francis

Galton with the task of establishing a remarkable tradition in Memory Studies and Research

which continues to be resourceful for contemporary research in the area.

It is important to acknowledge the fact that the shift in interest from the text to the reader
coincided with a similar shift that happened from encoding and storage to recall with the

advent of Memory Studies. One of the books published in 1932, Remembering by Frederic

Barlett in this area further strengthened the pursuit of research in this area. Added to this were

the formal and technical requirements, a multitude of other connected and unconnected

factors at the personal level - the disillusionment and frustrations embodying an intense sense

of loss, futility, death and decay in the aftermath of the two World Wars - clubbed with the

serious intent of the thinkers and writers of the Bloomsbury Group to explore the limits of

thinking on the interconnectedness of the cultural, philosophical, socio-political, sexuality

and gender related issues and a fast developing research in human psychology. The list of

writers who tended to grab the themes related to human psyche in consonance with the intent

to achieve technical finesse thus and to provide an alternative to the mundane, quotidian

detailing of the “materialist” writers includes the names of such European writers as Marcel

Proust, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, D H Lawrence, Dorothy Richardson etc., who may be

credited with the honours of launching the “Stream of Consciousness,” novel. Also roughly

referred to as the psychological novel, arrived with immense possibilities for further

explorations into the human psyche and the writers who practised this form of writing to be

referred to as the “spiritualists” by Virginia Woolf in her essay, “Modern Fiction.”

The stylistic scope of the psychological novel suited perfectly the experimental tendencies of

the Modernists and their themes related to the internal world of human psyche. Thus

experimentation in literary writing and other art forms had their heyday in the 1920s and 30s

with the above mentioned writers not just exploring the limits of language by reinventing the

potential and range of the efficacy of language to fit their requirements for capturing action in

the depths of human consciousness including the thoughts, sensations, memories etc., And it

is against this backdrop ‘Memory’ came as a possible subject and entity to be explored,
studied, and exploited as a means to retrieve the inexplicable, palatable and unpalatable,

known and unknown truths about human nature as well as to gain a sense of control over the

past, the moments transpired and gone, thus bringing into the frame of work, the entity of

‘Time’ which again was put to a great deal of experimentation. Thus ‘Memory Studies,’ as it

later came to be known has radically transformed the lay out and the preoccupations of the

modernist writers for more than a century now and continues to have its sway given the

important role it has come to play in the recent and upcoming research in the area of Medical

Humanities. ‘Memory’, to the modernist writer is much more than just a theme, it is a means,

a door-way into an altogether dark, hitherto inaccessible and unexplored zone in the human

mind, the unconscious workings of the subconscious mind full of untapped possibilities for

“knowing oneself”, in all its chaotic, ambiguous, undecipherable state.

Art uses reality as raw material to redefine, refine, and re-present it in the process of which it

‘defamiliarizes’ reality to challenge and intrigue the reader/consumer and thus sharpen

his/her artistic imagination and aesthetic sensibilities as well as the intellectual faculties. That

is to say the modernist writer creates conundrums not just to puzzle the reader but also to

challenge his own artistic self and brace himself up to groom himself into a shrewd retriever-

observer-narrator of what goes on within the depths of human psyche wading through its

fogginess, blurred outlines and help others in having a glimpse of the kernel of meaning

amidst the chaos.

Memory aids the modernist writer in having a partial grasp of the past events in the form of

flitting vignettes and not as fully done painting. It facilitates in changing and recasting the

understanding of the reader, the world, people, language and what it can do and does. It

transforms the reader’s perspective into that of an impressionist – on ‘how’ the perception
happens rather than ‘what', is perceived, deviating from apparent objectivity into a

preoccupation with ‘self’ and its world, one’s inner life. As memories come from the

historical past comprising of the social, cultural, political, religious events in the lives of the

people, and in this case both the flat and round characters of the text. ‘Memory’ is used to

establish the validity and importance of a text if it is based on expertise. The modernist

novelist, on the other hand, uses it as a means to instil a feeling of nostalgia and also as a

method of constructing individual and cultural identity.

Skopljanac, in his paper, “Literature Through Recall: Ways of Connecting Literary Studies

and Memory Studies,” studies the interfaces of common interest between literary studies and

memory and dwells at length on the studies conducted by Frederic Barlett (Barlett: 1932)

who advanced the concept that memories of past events and experiences are actually ‘mental

reconstructions’ that are coloured by cultural attitudes, and personal eccentricities rather than

being direct and voluntary memorization of events happened at a point of time. Norman

Holland who followed Barlett with a different aim and concludes that memory is important as

a medium for conscious expression even as it resorts to varied means to encode and recall the

text, as per the preferences of the individual natures of the readers and what is situated in an

individual memory: “In reality each reader reads only what is already within himself. The

book is only a kind of an optical instrument which the writer offers to the reader to enable

him to discover in himself what he could not have found but for the aid of a book” (as quoted

in Skopljanac: 1932, pp 203-204), which one can easily notice happening and manipulated

with skill in case of the “witness narratives” and ‘trauma tales’ based on such gory events as

the holocaust, the partition, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It has been quite interesting and fetching for both the Western Literary Studies and the
psychoanaytic Studies to have been in collaboration right from the beginning of the 20th

century. With Freud having chosen to study select literary texts for his research into the

workings of human psyche, which he found to be the churning centre of all mental ailments

and abnormalities and a little later the modernists too getting interested in the goings on of

the inner world rather than the external world the foundation for the collaborative work

between the literary and scientific worlds got buttressed around the same time with these

writers also keenly following the progress in the field of physics as well in matters of Time

and duration of time. Holland and Freud both suggest in their own way that memories and

recollections from the past, (which are neither long-term nor readily available) can be used as

templates to psychoanalyze the individuals’ personalities. Just as many of these

psychoanalytic researchers used certain extracts from literary texts in their experiments for

reading and recalling from them on the basis of which they psychoanalysed the personalities

of individuals, Marcel Proust too initiated an experimental technique of the evolution and

evaluation of memory in his monumental autobiographical novel, Remembrance of Things

Past, in seven volumes, originally written in French, A la recherche du temps perdu (In

Search of Lost Time). It has been the most acclaimed novel for its profound use of memory

and which, to this day, remains, more than any other text, the most impacted and indelibly

impressed novel on the modern mind. The concept of “involuntary memory” in which cues

gathered in everyday life evoke unconscious recollection of the past as against the deliberate

and conscious recall of the memories, the voluntary memory is considered as the most

remarkable contribution of Proust to the field of modern psychology.

For Proust, ‘memory’ is not just the means and method to unfold the contents of his novel but

it is through the narrator’s journey down the memory lanes, into the inner landscape of his

mind at different phases of his life he succeeds in attaining an identity formation for himself
as well as for the others who play important roles in his life. ‘Enigmatic’ is the word to

describe or estimate the nature, status, age, location and the mental state of the protagonist at

any point of time in this novel. It is from the conscious mind of the half-awakened narrator at

night in his bedroom that the plot, characters evolve and gain palpability through the

unfolding movements and incidents from his childhood at Combray and his interactions with

Aunt Leonie, other maids at home and above all his subtle encounters with Mr Swann, his

rival to start with but who becomes an alter-ego later on when the narrator himself grows up

into an adult himself and who in fact is instrumental in his identity formation. Memory as a

stylistic device makes possible a transportation into the past which, of course, is not adequate

to gain control of the past and perceive the truth as in itself it really is, is made clear by

Proust’s illustration. Proust strives to perceive the truth by situating himself in the past and

find or discover his own self in the present through Marcel, the narrator in Swann’s Way.

Memory plays a crucial part in recreating the pictures, in re-drawing the lines and thus re-

constructs the past in order to link it with the present where the narrator is to re-position

himself. The narrator endeavours to anchor himself in the present moment by writing about

the past in the present and understand the significance of past events and moments in relation

to the present moment. The need to orient and re-orient oneself time and again to the past and

the present brings to the fore another important theme that closely needs to be worked out and

inalienably linked to memory- ‘Time', and how the narrator highlights its importance in his

struggle against the ravages of time and also in the words with which the novel begins and

ends: “For a long time” and “time” respectively, referring to the times during which Proust

lived and wrote about love and ‘Time’ is also the enemy the narrator defeats by finishing the

novel. The novel reads like a virtual obsession with time – as to how it brings about changes

in time, in the beauty of the body, character, attitude, stability of human personality. It

becomes a kind of a heroic battle against time, which is invariably won by ‘Time’ all the time
as is suggested in the elegiac tone of the novel. All the same it is also about a search for the

absolute truth- something stable enough to fight against the ravages of time. As the

translation of the French title suggests, it is a search for the Lost time – to retrieve it and

preserve it in an invincible form to achieve which the narrator protagonist is seen trying many

things like friendship, romantic love, political, philosophical, philological ideas but none

seem to work as they are all subject to time. Even the self, the ‘I’ is not really the same as the

protagonist finds out – with some elements of his personality getting strengthened and some

others weakened, the passionate self experiencing disillusionment – all these notions forming

the mental furniture not just of the protagonist but that of the ‘age’ itself- due to the influence

of the Bergsonian (1859-1941) ideas of time and duration. With the self constantly

undergoing changes at all levels giving way to the formation of successive selves, the next

questions to pop up are: Where do all these successive selves go? Do they get destroyed over

time? And Proust himself has said, quite affirmatively, that they live on, never go away, can

be contacted with, in our dreams, and if lucky, even when we are wakeful.

An illustration of the modernist artistic preoccupations could be seen in the very opening

section “Overture” of volume I of Proust’s novel, Swann’s Way. The opening of Swann’s

Way describes a literal awakening of the narrator very similar to the kind of awakening each

one of us experience when we wake up every day, leaving the state of unconsciousness for a

state of consciousness. For Proust, every morning, every waking up was a recovery of an

identity, a particular self he was inhabiting at that moment:

When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the

years,     the order of the heavenly host. Instinctively, when he awakes, he looks to these, and
in an instant reads off his own position on the earth’s surface and the amount of time that has

elapsed during his slumbers, but this ordered procession is apt to grow confused, and to break

its ranks. Suppose that, towards morning, after a night of insomnia, sleep descends upon him

while he is reading, in quite a different position from that in which he normally goes to sleep,

he has only to lift his arm to arrest the sun and turn it back in its course, and, at the moment

of waking, he will have no idea of the time, but will conclude that he has just gone to bed. Or

suppose that he gets drowsy in some even more abnormal position; sitting in an arm-chair,

say, after dinner: then the world will fall topsy-turvy from its orbit, the magic chair will carry

him at full speed through time and space, and when he opens his eyes again he will imagine

that he went to sleep months earlier and in some far distant country. But for me it was enough

if, in my own bed, my sleep was so heavy as completely to relax my consciousness; for then I

lost all sense in which had gone to sleep, and when I awoke at midnight, not knowing where I

was, I could not be sure at first who I was; I had only the most rudimentary sense of

existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal’s consciousness. (Swann’s

Way 3)

Voluntary memory, which is associated with intellect and is deliberate, rational, deductive

and calculated and involves a wilful recollection of events and is good at refreshing routine

events as in this case: the narrator’s memory of his aunt taking him for regular walks after

dinner in the small town of Combray, the regular visits of their neighbour, Mr Swann in the

evening, the details of architecture of the Combray Church, his mother’s reading out the

novel by George Sand, the nightly ritual of his mother’s good-night kiss to put him to sleep

each night. Voluntary memory is also effective in recalling traumatic events. One such

traumatic memory is to do with his being whisked away to the upstairs one evening on the

arrival of Mr Swann, which makes him uneasy and extremely unhappy because he thinks that
he might have to forego the good night kiss of his mother and which makes him send a

hurried note to his mother through the maid in panic. The fear of probable punishment, for

the same, of getting banished to some military academy keeps him on tenterhooks for long,

till his father, quite unexpectedly allows him to sleep in his mother’s company for the night.

All this is to do with the voluntary memory which is highly selective and omits a large part of

the details. In that half-awakened state he could recall only these things about Combray and

asks himself:

…as though all Combray had consisted of but two floors joined by a slender staircase, and as

though there had been no time there but seven o’clock at night. I must own that I could have

assured any questioner that Combray did include other scenes and did exist at other hours

than these. But since the facts which I should have recalled would have been prompted only

by an exercise of the will, by my intellectual memory, and since the pictures which that kind

of memory shews us of the past preserve nothing of the past itself, I should never have had

any wish to ponder over this residue of Combray. To me it was in reality all dead.

Permanently dead? Very possibly.” (Swann’s Way 36)

Proust makes the narrator revive the remaining Combray experiences through the use of what

he christens as the “Involuntary memory”, which is distinct from the voluntary memory in

not being associated with deliberate and intellectual effort but something that emerges out of

an intense movement or triggering mechanism, similar to Joycean “epiphany.” Involuntary

memory has been described as “instances in which memories come to mind spontaneously,

unintentionally, automatically, without effort, and so forth.” (Mace: 2007, 2) popularly

termed as “Proustian rush,” which again has been classified into three varieties, “those which
occur in everyday mental life, those which occur during the process of voluntary recall or

involuntary recall, and those which occur as part of a psychiatric syndrome.” (Mace 2) the

first of these varieties is what gives way to the depiction of the most important moment of not

just Proust’s magnum opus but the entire terrain of Modern fiction, the “madeleine episode,”

that has changed the course of modern writing for many decades to come. It enabled Proust to

present the Combray experiences in all their freshness as they were happening and in no way

close to the intellectual, packaged and pigeon-holed version in which the realist novels would

have delivered them to us. Proust always believed that realistic art was always in pursuit of

the external and confined itself to the outlines, only the surface of things whereas the true

reality existed elsewhere, in the essence of objects, not visible to the naked eye. Proust’s

protagonist discovers the true essence of life’s freshness and its invincibility in the

“Madeleine episode” and it further took him 3000 more pages to sustain it.

Henri Bergson, a French philosopher and Proust's contemporary, characterised involuntary

memory as an elevation of spontaneous memory in most circumstances when the nervous

system's sensory-motor balance is disrupted. That involuntary memory is an exaltation of

spontaneous memory may be too basic for Marcel and his own definition of involuntary

memory has a crucial feature that Bergson overlooks: chance. Marcel claims, “The past is

hidden outside the realm of our intelligence… in some material object it depends on chance

whether we encounter this object before we die, or do not encounter it” (Swann’s Way 39).

According to Marcel's account of the encounter, he discovers the madeleine crumbs in his tea

by coincidence and, after tasting it, obtains information from both his thoughts and his

senses. Then he attempts to figure out what the flavour is and what it means: “I can just

barely perceive the neutral glimmer in which the elusive eddying of stirred-up colors is

blended; but I cannot distinguish the form, cannot ask it, as the one possible interpreter, to
translate for me the evidence of its contemporary, its inseparable companion…” (Swann’s

Way 40). Marcel is anxious for this memory to surface so he can mould it and build

something from it, but no matter how hard he tries, he can't seem to identify it. He can't

reconcile the taste with its one possible interpreter, the shape, the image of the past that the

flavour evokes. After repeated efforts at distinguishing the flavour, Marcel has a much more

rounded and vivid remembrance of Combray:

And once again I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction

of lime-flowers 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 gray

house upon the street… and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their

proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of

tea. (Swann’s Way  40)

The limited ability of the mind to recall gives way to a free-flowing stream of pictures that

grows on itself and spreads across the expanse of a childhood memory for Marcel. Marcel's

involuntary memory not only fills in the blanks, but also colours the pictures that were

initially provided by his active voluntary memory, resulting in a full picture in his mind.

However, as will be seen, memory does not have the capacity to get created on its own.

Marcel can only genuinely create something that does not exist through Art, implying that

memory is less of a goal in itself for Marcel than as a means to Art, an artistic tool.

The Madeleine moment in the novel illustrates Proust’s use of language to the full in order to

convey that the strength of a memory, however little and intangible, overpowers the forces of
time and place. Initially, Proust had suggested that Marcel had talked about only select

memories of Combray based on his limited ability to recollect and the rest, which were left

out were dead to him, but the madeleine episode proves that to be wrong by laying stress on

the long lastingness of the sense of the smell and taste. A memory is a method of loosely

revisiting the past, though it is true that it is just what is left behind after the death of

something. The taste of madeleine crumbs in lime-blossom tea renders palpability to the

impalpability resulting from his inability to understand the importance of the flavour and his

attempts to bring it to the surface, and give it a form in his thoughts. The act of recognizing

appears to be a vital prerequisite to remembering, as Paul Ricœur opines in his Memory,

history, forgetting. Recognition is that which coats the otherness of what has passed away

with presence. Memory is, if nothing else, a reminder that what was once present is no longer

there – a site demolished, a person dead, moment passed – and that which was once present is

no longer present and thus making it an elusive entity sans a clear existence. Proust, through

the madeleine episode, drives home the importance of memory, in particular, the power of the

senses of taste and smell to revive visions of the past. And when memory becomes associated

with longing, a longing to possess and fulfil the experience, to recall, and to reformulate it

that motivates him to write. Proust chooses to write the novel about his own memories in the

stream of consciousness mode and what emerges is a memory of Combray from his cup of

tea conveying a sense of association between art and memory:

Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray...had an existence for me, when

one day in winter, as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a

thing I did not ordinarily take. ... She sent out for one of those short, plump liitle cakes called

“petite madeleines,” which look as though they had been molded in the fluted scallop of a
pilgrim’s shell. And soon …, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a

morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate

than a shudder ran through my whole body, and stopped, intent upon the extraordinary

changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual,

detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And once the vicissitudes of life had become

indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory and I- this new sensation having

had on me the effect which love had of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this

essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal.

Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy?... What did it signify? How could I

seize upon and define it? (Swann’s Way 37)

Proust’s novel also illustrates the use of “memory’ as a device to analyse identity formation.

Marcel who appears to be an emotional, home-sick, bookworm of a youngster introduces to

the reader many characters who matter to him in life through his memories. Through his

memories we get to know his caring, affectionate, educated, high-class Jewish mother who

initiates the desire for books in the narrator very early in life, his professionally very

successful and eminent father who in the narrator’s initial memories meets us as a highly

disciplining father but suddenly ends up with an unexpectedly humane and kind side to his

personality in one of the casually shared memories of Marcel, Aunt Leonie, his

hypochondriac, overly inquisitive aunt who seems to have a markedly strong influence on the

narrator who the reader can notice to be a similarly hychondriac and with a tendency to be

inquisitive in matters related to neighbours, and some other minor characters as the cook,

Francoise who reveals herself as a bipolar personality, betraying completely opposite natures

and attitudes towards different times and people in her life. Marcel arrives at these identity

formations not in just one or two encounters but in a series of encounters in which these
people reveal their varied, simultaneous selves, all of which don’t exist at the same point of

time and also do not disappear or get replaced completely with the others one after the other

but seem to exist in some remnant form only to pop up suddenly with the onset of a

corresponding external stimulation. Thus it is not only the town of Combray but each and

every character in the novel acquires a life-likeness exuding a refreshing attribute about them.

More importantly, it is the portrait of the eponymous character of Mr Swann. The narrator’s

initial memories of Mr Swann depict him as an intruding and unwanted evening guest in their

house as the child Marcel’s only worry seemed to be his obsession with his mother’s good-

night kiss that would put him to sleep every night. And as Marcel grows up Mr Swann’s

personal life, his artistic interests not only begin to interest him but also tend to shape his

preferences and interests in art and life, and love life too. He arrives at a realization of his

own identity and personality and sees in Mr Swann, his own second-self. The earlier

frustrations and sense of dislike and discomfort give way to an acceptance of him as a

Freudian father-figure in matters pertaining to art and love. What appears in an embryonic

form in “Overture”, continues elaborately in the final section, “Swann in Love” in which the

narrator relies completely on the memories retrieved from oral resources to attain the

necessary textual authority because of the simple reason that he was not born when Swann

was in love with Odette. Nevertheless, memory aids him in depicting a clear picture of the

unusually dark and complex Romance in Swann’s love story with an endearing delicateness

and artistic accuracy.

What we perceive in Proust’s manipulation of ‘memory’ as a creative tool to achieve his

artistic end – that of capturing the refreshing aspects of life’s experiences as they happen in a

given moment thus defeating the ravages of the passage of time - brings to the fore a cultural

activity which is dependent on both personal and cultural memory in the writer’s artistic
creation and the reader/interpreter’s act of re-creation and gets an identity also through the

identity of a cultural memory through an interplay with other texts of varied contours and

forms. And the act of interpretation and re-creation of new texts through new readings lives

on with no end seen in the vicinity to the act of reading.

Memory as a significant entity might have always existed in a dormant state––securely

embedded in the recesses of human consciousness since time immemorial right from the

primitive ages––impacting the historical, cultural, social, psychological, and anthropological

aspects of human history. But the credit of visualising it in all its potential and reshaping

them as “mental reconstructions” to aid in the creative process of fiction writing to

metamorphose memories into stories of perennial value and relevance and to finally have the

last laugh in the contest with the all-destroying passage of time goes to Proust who himself

became a marker in the history of art of fiction., and in creating a bridge between the

discipline of literary studies and psychoanalytic studies.

Works Cited

Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and William Scott Palmer. 

London: G. Allen, 1912

Elizabeth Andrews McArthur. “Following ‘Swann’s Way: To the

Lighthouse.’” Comparative 

Literature, Vol. 56, No. 4, 2004

Mace, John. “Involuntary Memory: Concept and Theory.” Involuntary Memory: New

Perspectives in 

Cognitive Psychology. Wiley-Blackwell, 2007.

Meyers, Jeffrey. “Proust’s Aesthetic Analogies: Character and Painting in Swann’s

Way.” The Journal 

of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 30, no. 3, American Society for Aesthetics, 1972

Proust, Marcel. Swann’s Way. Trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Dover-Thrift, 2002

Ricœur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer.

Chicago 

University Press, 2004

Skopljanac, Lovro. “Literature Through Recall: Ways of Connecting Literary Studies and

Memory 

Studies.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, vol. 14, no. 2, The Pennsylvania State

University, 2012.