“Whether it is because the faith which creates has ceased to exist in me, or because reality takes shape in the memory alone…”
This passage had me thinking about both reality and memory and their relationship. If reality is in the memory alone, which type of memory? Voluntary memory, memory that we construct in our minds, intentional memory, that pays attention to the events that we want to pay attention to. Or is reality shaped in within the powers of involuntary memory? How is reality constructed?
As I am reading In Search of Lost Time, I notice that memory and how it is the source of the narrator’s reality, experiences, and existence. The first part of Swann’s Way, where the narrator describes his experience of emerging from sleep without a clear sense of where he is or what time it is, when he required a few minutes to place himself and reclaim his identity, indicates that this conflict between reality and memory may be a theme that threads through this novel, a theme of finding one’s identity, of awakening and determining what is memory, what is reality and the possibility that the recovery of lost realities can be accomplished by remembrance.
“The hour when an invalid, who has been obliged to start a journey and to sleep in a strange hotel, awakens, in a moment of illness and sees with glad relief a streak of daylight showing under his bedroom door. Oh joy of joys! it is morning. The servants will be about in a minute; he can ring, and someone will come to look after him. The thoughts of being made comfortable gives him the strength to endure pain. He is certain he heard footsteps: they come nearer, and then die away. The ray of light beneath his door is extinguished. It is midnight; someone has turned out the gas; the last servant has gone to bed, and he must lie all night in agony with no one to bring him any help.”
With the reading of this passage it is apparent that the for the narrator, the present is uncomfortable and painful and that he suffers with no one that will come to his aid and so he looks through his memories of his past trying to relive what will never again occur.
By the end of Swann’s Way, the narrator acknowledges his total discontent with the present; especially when compared to his memories of the past.
Several passages describe this disillusionment:
“… The flowers that people show me nowadays for the first time never seem to me to be true flowers.”
“I sought to find them again as I remembered them…they had long fled, and still I stood vainly questioning their paths.”
His disappointment is significant. The narrator confesses, “How paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one’s memory… The reality that I had known no longer existed.”
In these quotes he seems to indicate that the past memory holds a greater reality then the present. Yet it there are differences. In the first quote he is disappointed in the present and feels that the present is not the true reality, in the latter quote it seems that he is searching for the past reality and it still has possibility of return and finally he comes to the conclusion that that the past reality no longer exists.
The narrator has manipulated his memories to include or omit certain aspects. Stored in that memory isn’t the actual events, but how those events made sense to him and fit into his previous experiences.
Our memories are filled with gaps and distortions, because by its very nature memory is selective. When we try to remember an event or time, we often recall a deception. Are our memories therefore fiction? Or do we have the power to create our own reality?