Hand-Me-Down Memories

I just finished the nearly 300-page first "chapter" of Swann's Way, which details the routines, rituals, and discoveries of the narrator's childhood in the titular town of Combray. The final paragraphs of Combray point ahead to the next chapter, Swann In Love, as the narrator describes the process of absorbing and recalling the memories of another person, memories of experiences that were never his, but which apparently had a significant impact on the narrator, to the point that he includes them with memories of his own direct experiences:

"All these memories, superimposed upon one another, now formed a single mass, but had not so far coalesced that I could not discern between them-- between my oldest, my instinctive memories, and those others, inspired more recently by a taste or "perfume," and finally, those which were actually the memories of another person from whom I had acquired them at second hand-- if not real fissures, real geological faults, at least that veining, that variegation of colouring, which in certain rocks, in certain blocks of marble, points to differences of origin, age, and formation."
Marcel Proust, p. 262-263

This particular quote brought to light the communal aspect of memory and remembering. As much as memory is a private recollection of direct, personal experiences, another part of memory and the history of an individual is attributable to second-hand memories. Although, I'm not entirely certain that I agree with Proust that it is so easy to discern the origin, age, and formation of memories. Try this for an example.

What was your first word?

How do you remember what that first word was? You were probably about a year old, give or take a few months. You probably remember nothing else until you were two or three years old. I know that, for me, my "memory" of my first word is not truly mine. My earliest memory is of being in a grocery store when I was about two years old, and I cannot be certain whether it's wholly my own receollection or if it was influenced by the perceptions of others, or perhaps entirely fabricated. Nevertheless, I have obtained these memories and countless others from my parents, sisters, family members, and neighbors. These stories of my infancy and early childhood have been repeated so often that I have absorbed them into my sense of self; although they are hand-me-downs, they have become mine. They have become me.

In one of my college classes, on 20th century American drama, I suggested that selfhood begins with the first memory. In some ways, I stand by that assertion, because identity is constructed, in part, through narratives; in order to have a sense of self, a person must have a sense of personal history and be able to reflect on past experiences. I mostly connected this sense of history to national identity and post-colonial readings (e.g., the insomnia motif in One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez illustrates the loss of memory and subsequent loss of self among a colonized people), but I think it also works on the personal level. Character is constructed through a series of actions, which are all supposedly guided by internal qualities-- the character's nature, so to speak. A person has to have access to (selected) events of his or her past in order to construct a cohesive identity.

Identity's dependence on memory is a theme of Proust's In Search of Lost Time; the narrator claims that "reality takes shape in memory alone" (p. 260). I read that sentence as an assertion that narratives are necessary to make things real, to gives things existence. Naming also serves a similar function in the Combray chapter; for example, the mysterious woman in the church takes on a completely different meaning once the narrator learns her name and that she is a descendent of the medieval, fantastic Guermantes family. At the moment of hearing her name, she becomes real to the narrator, and thus loses some of her mystique and appeal (if only for a moment). In Proust, art, in addition to reality, takes shape in memory; as Mosher's article details, memory transforms life into art. This frustrates the barriers between fact and fiction; art creates something new, something outside of material reality, and yet it is reality.

I think that Proust is referring to the reality of the mind, or consciousness, when he writes that reality takes shape in memory alone. This reality begins with sensory information, but it finds hidden depths, it goes beyond the world of the senses and creates meaning. The meaning consciousness creates may be fictional and imposed upon a physical world devoid of intrinsic meaning, but Proust certainly is not one to disparage the veracity of this inner reality; even if it is constructed, if it is art rather than bare fact, the world of the mind is real. In fact, Proust suggests that this internal world of the mind (and, intimately connected to this, the realm of art) is the most real of all.