Transnational Paradigms of Modernist Pictorial Memory: Carpaccio, Vermeer and Narrative Structure in Proust’s Search

To talk about memory in In Search of Lost Time is a tautology today. Yet, in the interpretative discussion opened by new modernist studies and following Rabaté’s transnational approach, reading Proust’s work can open new horizons and show how his literature develops innovative operational concepts – historically situated yet still relevant for our present – used by contemporary theorists. Didi-Huberman’s concepts of anachronism and of “pan” (patch), related to painting and image, both draw on modernism, and Proust anticipates them by using the pictorial techniques of the foreign painters Carpaccio and Vermeer to renew the French narrative tradition. By linking Didi-Huberman’s patch to Ricœur’s ideas on literary temporality, this article explains and exemplifies this concept and shows how it can be applied to Proust’s literature so as to emphasize the importance of cultural experience for the construction of personal and collective memory through narrative structures.