Searching for the Smells of the Past – Affective Memory in Novels by Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust’s epic work In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Thing Past) shows an innovative way of practicing literature as the artist’s struggle with time. This series of works, earning the author a place in the literary pantheon, depicts the writer’s desire to rediscover intensity with which he used to experience sensory stimuli and his wish to return to the happy times of his childhood and youth. This explains the special role of emotional memory that characterises Proust’s monumental work. The complex perceptual and cognitive mechanism of the narrator becomes the keynote of the work, which is saturated with smells of the past, with a clear dominance of subjective perception and description of the remembered events.

Marcel Proust’s epic work In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Thing Past) shows an innovative way of practicing literature as the artist’s struggle with time. This series of works, earning the author a place in the literary pantheon, depicts the writer’s desire to rediscover intensity with which he used to experience sensory stimuli and his wish to return to the happy times of his childhood and youth. This explains the special role of emotional memory that characterises Proust’s monumental work. The complex perceptual and cognitive mechanism of the narrator becomes the keynote of the work, which is saturated with smells of the past, with a clear dominance of subjective perception and description of the remembered events.