Editing In Search of Lost Time (section)

=== Memory ===
The role of memory is central to the novel, introduced with the famous [[Madeleine (cake)|madeleine]] episode in the first section of the novel and in the last volume, ''Time Regained'', a [[Flashback (literary technique)|flashback]] similar to that caused by the madeleine is the beginning of the resolution of the story. Throughout the work many similar instances of [[involuntary memory]], triggered by sensory experiences such as sights, sounds and smells conjure important memories for the narrator and sometimes return attention to an earlier episode of the novel. Although Proust wrote contemporaneously with [[Sigmund Freud]], with there being many points of similarity between their thought on the structures and mechanisms of the human mind, neither author read the other.<ref>Bragg, Melvyn. "In Our Time: Proust". BBC Radio 4. April 17, 2003. See also Malcolm Bowie, "Freud, Proust, and Lacan: Theory as Fiction," Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. For differences between Freud and Proust, see [[Joshua Landy]], "Philosophy As Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust," New York: Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 29, 165.</ref>

The madeleine episode reads:

<blockquote>No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. ... Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? ... And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea.</blockquote>

[[Gilles Deleuze]] believed that the focus of Proust was not memory and the past but the narrator's learning the use of "signs" to understand and communicate ultimate reality, thereby becoming an artist.<ref>Ronald Bogue, [https://books.google.com/books?id=FTkOAAAAQAAJ&dq=Proust+Deleuze&pg=PA36 ''Deleuze and Guattari''], p. 36. {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230407015832/https://books.google.com/books?id=FTkOAAAAQAAJ&dq=Proust+Deleuze&pg=PA36 |date=2023-04-07 }} See also Culler, [https://books.google.com/books?id=cBZCOD8SVzMC&dq=Proust+narrator&pg=PA122 ''Structuralist Poetics''], p. 122. {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230417080046/https://books.google.com/books?id=cBZCOD8SVzMC&dq=Proust+narrator&pg=PA122 |date=2023-04-17 }}</ref> While Proust was bitterly aware of the experience of loss and exclusion—loss of loved ones, loss of affection, friendship and innocent joy, which are dramatized in the novel through recurrent jealousy, betrayal and the death of loved ones—his response to this, formulated after he had discovered [[John Ruskin|Ruskin]], was that the work of art can recapture the lost and thus save it from destruction, at least in our minds.{{Citation needed|date=January 2016}} Art triumphs over the destructive power of time. This element of his artistic thought is clearly inherited from [[romanticism|romantic]] [[platonism]], but Proust crosses it with a new intensity in describing jealousy, desire and self-doubt. (Note the last quatrain of [[Charles Baudelaire|Baudelaire]]'s poem "Une Charogne": "Then, O my beauty! say to the worms who will / Devour you with kisses, / That I have kept the form and the divine essence / Of my decomposed love!"){{Citation needed|reason=The relevance of Baudelaire to Proust's own writing needs support.|date=January 2016}}