Les aventures de la mémoire involontaire (Rousseau, Proust, Wagner)

In the present study, the author focuses on the phenomenon of involuntary memory, as treated, most famously, in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. He, nonetheless, attempts to trace a “pre-history” of the notion in question by making reference to one particular passage to Rousseau’s Confessions that perhaps does not name the phenomenon of involuntary memory in an explicit manner, but certainly does treat a concrete experience that seems strongly reminiscent of Proust’s later and more sophisticated analyses. In the second part of the paper, he attempts to show that literature is not the exclusive domain in which involuntary memory becomes a crucial topic. He presents a “musical” analogy of involuntary memory by comparing Proust’s writing to the Wagnerian notion of leitmotif.