The cloth of remembrance: Proust, Benjamin and the writing of the past

Abstract

Resonances between Marcel Proust and Walter Benjamin lie not only on the aesthetic affinities that made the German thinker translate and write about the novelist. Departing from the dynamic of memory discussed by both, this article aims to relate the Theses on the concept of history, wrote by Benjamin, with notions of time featured in In search of lost time. By the analysis of a main scene from the novel, a sequence that fits in a series, the idea of an empty and homogenous time, challenged in the Theses, is intertwined with the intimate and fragmentary perspective of remembrance presented by Proust. In relation are forms of addressing time that aim the discontinuity representative from the act of remembering, a movement that results in an extended perception of experience.