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Stories to Remember
Narrative and the Time of Memory
Jens Brockmeier

It has often been noted that the vividness and immediacy with which we remember certain events is independent of their remoteness in time. Days or years
are no valid currency in the realm of remembrance.
Our psychological life, as Freud stated, is timeless.
Why does the unremarkable furniture of the kitchen
in which my family ate dinner when I was a child still
stay with me? Whats so special about my old childs
chair, which became increasingly rickety over the
years due to my constant teetering? We all live in the
midst of memories of rickety chairs, first kisses, and
painful separations, irrespective of their age and ours
and of whether we want to or not. For some, involuntary memories are a precious gift, as we know perhaps most famously from Marcel Proust, who seemed
to have dedicated most of his life to the psychological
and narrative experience of such mmoirs involontaire.

Proust was well aware that our mnemonic life ignores the rules of common time and that memory has its own time. For a human being, he
wrote, is that ageless creature who has the faculty of becoming many
years younger in a few seconds, and who, surrounded by the walls of
the time through which he has lived, floats within them as in a pool the
surface-level of which is constantly changing so as to bring him within
range now of one epoch, now of another (1983: 3:627).
Understandably, faced with this Proustian scenario of simultaneity,
experimental psychologists have sensed fundamental problems with the
traditional notion of memory. And they are not alone. Landy (2004)
wonders whether Prousts involuntary memories are proper memories
at all; for whenaccording to Proustan odor, texture or sound returns us to a former state, we are not dragging into the light a set of
impressions that have long since departed but, instead, summoning
up a part of us that is still very much present within our mind (110).
Prousts pool of time as an allegory of our simultaneous existence in
different temporalities, with remembering as the central mode of creating and mediating this simultaneity, may have been an original trope
as certainly was much of the narrative repertoire he employed to articulate the sudden time shifts between different pasts and presents. But
the phenomenon he aimed to capture was anything but new, as was the
awareness of it. Other writers, philosophers, and scientists had already
described the simultaneity of multiple temporalities in which human
beings live, and probably everyone had (and has) experienced it in one
way or another, even if this experience was not necessarily consciously searched for and reflected upon. Here, however, we find one of the
reasons why Prousts meandering explorations of the weave of memory
and time in his Recherche were so spectacularnamely, that its narrator intentionally seeks the experience of involuntary remembering, an
experience that allows him to float in the pool of time by being simultaneously in touch with different epochs of his life, epochs that by common standards may be separated from each other by years and decades.
For the French writer the multiple temporality of memories, in all their
nonlinear and achronological randomness, represents most authentically the time of human memory, in fact, of our life. As a consequence,
both the narrator and the author of the Recherche have come to live
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their lives with almost complete disregard for what they perceive as the
external, mechanical and mindless, time of clocks and calendars.
There is a second aspect of Prousts investigation of memory and
time that is, I think, similarly important if one wants to examine their
interwovenness: both appear as narrative phenomena. And they are not
just narrative in the sense one would expect in the work of a narrative
artist, but in a strong philosophical and psychological sense, because
they only take on a gestalt in narrative form. Differently put, both memory and time, as well as their fusion, only become intelligible in as far as
they exist in linguistic form; they are only thinkable and imaginable as
autobiographical discourse and narrative time.
In this essay I want to take a closer look at this narrative weave of
memory and time, a weave I have elsewhere tried to describe under the
concept of autobiographical time (Brockmeier 2000). In particular, I
am interested in the following question: what is it that ties the time of
memoryof autobiographical memory, to be more preciseso inextricably to its narrative form? Subsequently, having drawn on Proust in
the first part to explore this question and its implications for our understanding of time and memory, I compare in the concluding part its
Proustian articulation with that of another autobiographical writer,
Walter Benjamin.

The Weave of Time and Mind: The Newtonian

and the Narrative View
Time and memory are essential dimensions of human existence and,
not surprisingly, highly contested areas of investigation und contemplation; they are the subjects of many opposing views. I want to discuss two
of them. For brevitys sake, I call one the Newtonian view, the other the
narrative view. The ontological assumption underlying the Newtonian
view, which can safely be called the standard view, claims that time is
an objective and absolute system, a fixed background against which all
events in the universe are spatiotemporally localized or, at least in principle, can be identified. Since all knowledge is perspectival, this view
does not preclude that time appears in different and changing subjective versionsin human experience, memory, and narrative. Nor does it
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rule out that time is perceived and reflected upon in phenomenological,

cultural, and historical terms. But whatever the specific interrelationship between mind and time, the basic supposition is that ultimately it
can be represented in terms of an underlying Newtonian trajectoryin
the same fashion as, in classical narratology, the discourse time of all
narrated and narratable events and experience can be mapped along the
linear and homogenous trajectory of story time.
The narrative view assumes that our concepts of time are neither universally given entities nor epistemological preconditions of experience
but outcomes of symbolic constructions, constructions that are by their
very nature cultural and historical. The more complex these constructions becomefor example, when they go beyond basic representations
of duration, chronology, speed, and frequency and comprise simultaneous combinations of different times and time orders, including times of
possible, subjunctive worlds, as typically is the case in autobiographical narratives and other life storiesthe more they create scenarios like
those with which Marcel Proust is concerned. In other words, the more
we deal with human temporalities (and these are the subject of Prousts
contemplations), the more the construction site is language, and in particular the language of narrative.1
Narrative discourse is our most advanced way to shape complex
temporal experiences, including remembering. All natural languages
provide a broad spectrum of grammatical and semantic resources and,
on an overarching and integrative level, narrative forms and models by
which humans temporalize themselves, that is, by which they localize
themselves in a self-woven symbolic fabric of temporality. In telling stories about ourselvesand this is the type of discourse in which I am
first of all interestedwe not only give meanings to experiences present and past, as well as question given meanings and reflect about possible new and future meanings, but also unfold, explicitly or implicitly,
temporal scenarios. These scenarios not only align events and experiences in time, but they also define and evoke time and its meaning
in the first placefor example, by configuring an experience as past
or present, or as a mix of both, or as simultaneous with another experience.2 In this way we are marking the surface level in Prousts pool
in which we float up or down, in a few seconds, to other epochs of
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time. Temporal structures, in this view, appear not as a condition for

narrative (nor as a condition of the possibility for narrative experience,
as the Kantian might put it), but as a consequence of narrative acts of
meaning, to adopt a term by Jerome Bruner (1990). In this sense an important portion of our time constructions can be understood as a result or effect, indeed, as the side effect of meaning constructions, with
narrative as our most powerful anthropomorphic operator of time
(Brockmeier 1996).
All theories, in the strong sense of the word, try to recast different
and opposing theories in their own terms. While the Newtonian view
incorporates the narrative view as a subjective or phenomenological
version of a universalist given, the narrative view frames the Newtonian
view as a particular cultural-historical conception that emerged in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and was itself replaced at the beginning of the twentieth century. Bender and Wellbery (1991) have argued that it is particularly apt to characterize the difference between the
Newtonian and the post-Newtonian modern and modernist conception of time as that of two distinct chronotypes. Chronotype is a variation on the term chronotope that was introduced into narrative theory
by Michael Bakhtin (1981). Bakhtin borrowed the term from Einsteins
physics to portray the fusion of temporal and spatial structures that
characterizes space-time formations in specific narrative genres, such
as the romance, the folktale, and the picaresque novel. Bakhtins term,
Bender and Wellbery state, is suggestive because it points to the diversity of prototypical cultural forms within which time assumes significance (1991: 3).
Yet even if we agree with Bender and Wellberys argument that the
post-Newtonian chronotype tends toward a more constructionist, pragmatist, and contingent point of viewan argument elaborated in detail
by Richard Rorty (1989)and that the new chronotype thus encompasses the drive to comprehend temporal construction as a function
of narrative formation (Bender and Wellbery 1991: 3) this still does not
answer our question regarding the narrative fabric of the time of memory. Why should we accept the claim that narrative plays a pivotal role
for our understanding of the temporal dynamic of remembering and
forgetting?
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Temporal Self-Localization
Let me offer two reasons. The first emerged with the historical development, beginning in the eighteenth century and culminating with
modernism, in which narrative evolved as the royal road to the representation and study of autobiographical memory. Countless autobiographical authorswriting for literary and personal motives, published
and unpublished, famous and unknownhave dedicated themselves
to examining their own practices of remembering and forgetting; and
among these practices, again, narrative has proved to be essential. For
many, this dedication has even turned into an obsession, an all-consuming way of life. Autobiographers, as the anthropologist would say,
tend to live permanently in the field, blurring the limits between object
and subject of observation, third- and first-person perspective, teller
and told, the fictive and the factual. Their field notes and research reports have yielded numerous thick descriptions: undercover investigations that often have extended over years and decades, and sometimes
over entire lives.
Once more, Marcel Proust is an exemplary figure. Between 1909 and
the time of his death in 1922 he continuously worked on In Search of
Lost Time, of which a 3,200-page version was published in seven volumes. Although not strictly autobiographical in terms of genre and plot,
this unparalleled endeavor of self-examination attributes to its protagonist personal experiences, concerns, and micropsychological observations that undoubtedly originated in the life of its authoreven if the
relationship between narrative and life, as has often been emphasized,
is anything but direct, linear, and mimetic, and this is all the more true
with Proust. Much of his life, as Tadi (2000) describes it, happened
analogously to his work: as something that only gradually took shape
and brought out its themes, motifs, and structures of intentionality.
Most of these themes and structures never found any definitive closure.
A case in point is Prousts fascination with the multiple times of
memory and the remembering self. In Prousts narrative universe, these
events are pivotal to the entire process of narrative identity construction; they are a vital concern of the novels protagonist, the younger
Marcel, and its narrator, Marcel at the time of the storys telling, for the
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continuous oscillations in the pool of time are closely related to the dynamic of the innumerable selves that compose our personality (1981:
3:437). Thus it makes no difference whether one self becomes another
self after a lapse of years and in the putatively natural sequence of time,
or whether one self changes at any given moment into another, exposing in this way the incompatible persons, malicious, sensitive, refined,
caddish, disinterested, ambitious which one can be, in turn, every day of
ones life (657). On a narrative level, this becomes manifest by Prousts
permanent use of anachronisms that suggest, as Jauss (1986: 139) observed, that the narrator continuously turns the hand of his clock back
and forth, so that his protagonist simultaneously dines with his lover
and plays ball with his nanny. Hence the concept of a natural flow of
time reveals little about the shifting simultaneity of different experiences, temporal states, and, in fact, different selves of the experiencing or
reminiscing narrator. Eventually the assumption of a given time within which we are to localize ourselves appears itself to be an effect of our
fundamentally unstable identity and our narrative strategies to make
sense of such fluid existence.
In terms of autobiographical memory, Proust arguably brought to
its fullest expression an age-old idea: namely, that the remembered self
is unavoidably intermingled with the remembering self (Bruner 1994;
Olney 1998). Since the Recherche, the nexus of autobiographical remembering, time, and narrative has become an almost natural concern at the
heart of innumerable writers and generally accepted in the world of letters; which is not to say that all shared Prousts version of this nexus.
Proust has predisposed us to interpret much of twentieth-century literature as autobiographical in one way or another. It either explicitly deals
with the lives and minds of the writers themselves, with their selves in
timein remembered (autobiographical and historical) timeor it indirectly draws on and exploits the dramas of their lives. And what is
more, the texts in question are about the project of self-understanding
and the activity of self-examination itself. Put bluntly, if we want to
know what it means to look at ones own existence and the existence of
others from a first-person point of view, clearly literary narratives are a
privileged site for investigations of this sort.
Autobiographical writers, as Ender (2005) remarks, are exemplary
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architects of mnemonic scenes; through their detailed descriptions

of processes of remembering they reveal the artifices of imagination
and rhetoric that bring the past to life (5). Enders goes on to say that
writers who have a vocation for remembrance have long known about
its subtle complexities; especially, they have learnt that memories are
constructions, that they are dependent on mood and context, and above
all that there is no ready-made template to be found somewhere in the
brain that reproduces an initial impress or trace (5). Many autobiographical writers have especially emphasized what seems to be true for
all autobiographical remembrance: that it is a process of meaning construction that includes the simultaneous configuration of scenarios in
very different times, times that are inextricably tied to their narrative
reality.
My point is that this multifarious autobiographical discourse, as it
unfolds in many works of self-writing, allows for insights that no cognitive and neuroscientific memory research can provide. It opens a
window on the workings of the autobiographical process that are not
reduced to cognitive (or neural) operations of encapsulated memory
systems but, rather, are revealed as a form of life fundamental to human
existence.
This leads to the second reason why I think narrative is crucial for
our understanding of the temporal dynamic of remembering and forgetting: because this dynamic is itself fused with that of the narrative
process. We are not only talking about narrative representation (or reflection) of a prior entity memory or distinct cognitive memory systems responsible for mental time travels; rather, the focus is on narrative as carrying out the autobiographical processwhich implies that
there is no autobiographical process in itself, independent of narrative.3 This is especially manifest in the intricate scenarios of temporal
self-localization unfolding in the autobiographical process. I suspect
that what Bruner (1993) pointed out about human life in general also
holds true for this dynamic, namely, that to look at it as if it were independent of the autobiographical text that constructs it is as futile a
quest for reality as the physicists search for a Nature that is independent of the theories that lead him to measure one rather than another
phenomenon (55).
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The many narrative experiments that we can observe in the autobiographical process invite us to study how modern individuals try to localize themselves in a world that does not provide any existential stability; how they are engaged in the special human activity of interpreting
and making sense of themselves in continuously changing time frames;
and how they employ, in the process, the narrative models, genres, and
strategies offered to them by the cultural world in which they live. In
this view the human condition appears to be tantamount to an everchanging construction site for meaning. Exploring, in this light, modernist attempts at autobiographical self-construction reveals how such
practices of self-writing exemplify what Foucault (1984) called le souci de soi, the care of the self. Foucault saw this kind of self-care deeply
rooted in the Western tradition, where it seems to have become, over
the last two centuries, more of an obsession than a care. This obsession,
in turn, may reflect what sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (2000) has described as the increasingly liquid nature of modernity, its dissolution
of earlier certainties and foregrounding of the precariousness of humans existential situation.
With this in mind, the approach to the narrative linkage between
time and memory that I propose can be formulated this way: The autobiographical process offers a most appropriate venue for the study of the
temporal structures of our attempts to make sense of our experiences
all the more as these experiences are part and parcel of our modern and
postmodern reality. In opening a unique window on how we come to
terms with the diachronic dimension of our being in the world, we witness how we try to endow the Heraclitian fleetingness of our existence
with meaning. In fact, we observe how the structures of such meaning
change as our experiences and their affective make-up change.
It would therefore be misleading to imagine the autobiographical
process as a closed system, akin to the traditional idea of memory as
a unitary faculty (or system) of the individual mind or brain. The autobiographical process does not lead to or depart from an archive of
the past. Nor can it be categorized in terms of cognitive constructs such
as semantic memory and episodic memorydistinctions that have
been criticized for their artificial status that makes them fail each time
we leave the memory laboratory and are confronted with the narrative
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complexities of real autobiographical processes. Rather, it is through a

multitude of autobiographical forms and practices, intermingled with
all kinds of material and social forms of life (including language), that
we localize ourselves, our experiences, thoughts, and feelings within a
temporal horizon (Brockmeier 2002). The study of the narrative dynamic of this process reveals that this temporal horizon reaches much
farther than the economies of clock and calendar time could possibly
capture.

Memory, Time, and Intentionality

Let me return to the multiple temporality of memory. The argument
that I have presented in tandem with the narrative view is that our ideas
of time are side effects of our meaning constructions, rather than their
(ontological, epistemological, or narrative) preconditions. How and
whether we qualify, in the autobiographical process, experiences, emotions, hopes, fears, and fantasies in terms of the Newtonian trajectory
of past, present, and future (or as combinations of them), depends on
the specifics of the meaning-making process in which they play a role.
Clocks, calendars, and other forms of societal time regulation are extremely useful in our everyday life; yet as soon as it comes to the autobiographical process such devices, as sophisticated as they may be, are
of no great help. Reading them has to be replaced with the effort to understand the meanings of narrative time scenarios; and these meanings
relate to the time of clocks like the meanings of our lives relate to the
chronologies listed in a CV.
To take a closer look at such meaning-based temporalization, I want
to distinguish two sides of this, to be sure, very dialectical process. On
the one hand there is, as already mentioned, the cultural and historical
world with its specific semantic and grammatical resources, its discursive orders, concepts, and narrative models of time and memory. On
the other hand there is the individual as a subject of intentionality, a
person with a social life, emotions, motives, and desires that, embedded
in this social life, drive and orient his or her meaning constructions, including their temporalization. Without recognizing the subjects intentional attitude toward temporality and the personal significance of re124

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membrance as well as of specific memories we cannot comprehend the

concrete temporal scenarios that emerge in his or her autobiographical
discourse.
This view resonates with a renewed focus in narrative theory on
the role of intentionality in discourse and narrative understanding, an
interest inspired by research in several areas about humans tendency
to read for intention (Herman 2008) or, differently put, to reach for
meaning (Brockmeier 2009). For Herman (24041), storytelling, stories,
and storyworlds are irreducibly grounded in intentional systems, while
intentional systems are grounded in storytelling practices. Drawing on
this hermeneutic rationale, we can view autobiographical narrative as,
to use Hermans terms, a primary resource for (re)constructing psychological states and, more generally, states of consciousness, thanks
to which circumstances, participants, actions, and intentional states of
various kinds can be connected together into (more or less) coherent
representations of social scenarios (241). Now, within the Proustian
universe of discourse, I want to highlight one element of such a scenario: the narrators (and, in this respect, also the authors) intentional
stance toward time and memory.
Consider, once more, Prousts picture of the pool of time and his
idea of human life as encompassing at any given moment a multitude
of different epochs. We understood this as essentially suggesting the simultaneity of experiential states and temporalities that, in traditional
terms, would be conceived of as situated at distinct past and present
moments in chronological time (with the moments in the past simply
called memories). Can we discern a profile of intentionality behind
this vision of time and memory? Let me make this picture the starting
point in attempting to indicate an answer. Of course, this can only be a
short hint, for the entire Recherche is nothing else but an extended project of temporalization. Timeas discussed by philosophers like Ricoeur
(1985), critics like Jauss (1986), narratologists like Genette (1980), and
writers like Beckett (1957)is the great theme of Prousts work (Marcels
entire existence is a search for lost time); it also is the domain of origin
of art (time regained is the very material of artistic beauty) and its
foremost subject of reflection; it furthermore is supposed to define the
form of the work as well as its overall composition (at the end of his
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search, after Marcel has undergone a series of experiences in the resuscitation of time lost, he resolves to write a book that will have the shape
of time, the book the reader just finished). A concern with time even
insinuates itself into Prousts stylethink of Prousts notorious syntax
as a form of reminiscing that assumes a timeless or even multitemporal universe of discourse, with meandering sentences whose epic dependent clauses are like mnemonic search movements, determined at the
onset but then all of a sudden hesitating, moving back and forth, to the
side and ahead and returning again, as if they had forgotten something
and came back for it.
What I am most interested in, however, lies on a more elemental psychological or, perhaps, more existential plane. Is there a distinctive quality of Prousts overall attitude to time and memory, an intentional stance
that shapes not only the stories he wants to remember but also his temporalization of certain events as memories and of others as immediate
experiences in the here and now? With this question in mind, compare
Prousts writing with that of another autobiographical writer, Walter
Benjamin. This comparison is far from random. Benjamin was an early
admirer of Proust; he was not only an addictive reader, as he called it,
but also a translator, commentator, and sympathetic philosophical critic of Prousts work. Benjamins own autobiographical prose, first of all
the collection of short pieces of his Berlin Childhood around 1900, reveals many features reminiscent of Proustthe bittersweet memories
of the beloved mother, the noises from the courtyard and thus from a
foreign world, and the places whose magic caught the boy and never
left him. Not least, there is what Peter Szondi (2006: 10) describes as the
key insight of Prousts work: that almost everything childhood was can
be withheld from a person for years, suddenly to be offered him anew
as if by chance. Further, at the level of theoretical reflection, Benjamin
comes close to Prousts vision of the simultaneity of multiple times in
the autobiographical process, for example, when he ventures the idea
that a remembered event is infinite, because as a memory it is a key to
everything that happened before and after it (Benjamin 1968).
Nevertheless, Szondi (2006) suggests in his analysis of the relationship
between Prousts and Benjamins work that ultimately little is gained by
such comparisons; it would be difficult to refute the objection that such
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similarities reflect only that both writers tackle typical autobiographical

raw material situated in the same fin-de-sicle epochmaterial whose
presence in their lives they attempt to trace in many-layered scenarios
of time and memory. Can we even be sure, Szondi asks, that Proust
and Benjamin really share the same theme? Does their search for lost
time arise from the same motive? Or is the common element merely
an appearance that should be pointed out because it could obscure the
fact that the intentions of the two works are not only not related but
are in fact totally opposed (11). To understand Szondis suspicion, we
first have to follow his reading of Prousts work. It tracks the meaning
of Prousts search for time past as evolving out of two main emotions,
a painful one and a happy one. Both run through the entire Recherche.
The inexplicable feeling of happiness seizes the hero first when, with the
madeleine dunked in tea, the whole world of his childhood reappears;
whereas the other feeling, that of consternation, takes hold with the recognition that there is one, existentially threatening dimension where he
does not stand outside of linear and chronological time, but is subject
to its law. The high point of Marcels autobiographical endeavor is at the
end of the book when he recognizes that these two feelings of happiness
and terror are intrinsically connected. That, writes Szondi, which underlies the feeling of happiness in the one case liberates him from the
terror of the other (12).
It is interesting to see that this point is illustrated by a passage from
the Recherche in which Marcel, in describing his feelings of happiness
and his memories of them, also reflects on their temporal status. The
experience of the simultaneity of different times coincides with the liberating emotional experience of breaking free from the sway of temporality itself.
I caught an inkling of this [. . .] when I compared these various
happy impressions with one another and found that they had this in
commonnamely, that I experienced them simultaneously in the
present moment and in some distant past, which the sound of the
spoon against the plate [. . .] , or the peculiar savor of the madeleine
even went so far as to make coincide with the present, leaving me
uncertain in which period I was. (Proust 1983: 2:995)
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For Proust, this sense of identities between the present and the past
that accompanies his search for time lost allows him to escape from the
threat that the idea of the irreversible flow of time exerts on him and,
instead, to live and enjoy the essence of things [. . .] entirely outside of
time (995).
For Benjamin, both time and memory have a different meaning. The
intentional stance behind the evocation of his autobiographical Berlin
Childhood can be readily perceivedand again I follow Szondifrom
scenes that present moments of departure, emerging, and first times.
Consider the moment when Benjamin (2006) recalls the walks of the
boy to the Tiergarten, to the the strangest part of the park, where he
feels drawn not to the statues of the royals but to their pedestals, the
place of a first time sensation: Here, in fact, or not far away, must have
lain the couch of that Ariadne in whose proximity I first experienced
what only later I had a word for: love (54).
Like the Tiergarten memory, there are many experiences in which
Benjamin detects signs of his later life, early traces of things to come
that are irrevocably gone once those things have come: I can dream of
the way I once learned to walk. But that doesnt help. I now know how
to walk; there is no more learning to walk (142). Such observations and
memorieswhich do not limit themselves to personal concerns but include historical and social mattersare not so much about the past as
about a perspective in which present and future are brought together,
where the premonition of the child and the knowledge of the adult are
merged. What Benjamin is interested in, as Szondi concludes, is not the
past in itself but the invocation of those aspects of his childhood in
which a token (Vorklang) of the future lies hidden (21).
Prousts search for time lost is driven by his desire to defend himself
from the idea of chronological temporality. The real goal of his absorption of all times past and present in the simultaneity of the autobiographical process is to escape from the present and, perhaps even more,
from the future, with all its uncertainties and threats, of which the ultimate one is death.
In contrast, the future is precisely what Benjamin seeks in the past.
Almost every place that his memory wishes to rediscover bears traces
of what was to come, as he puts it at one point in Berlin Childhood.
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And it is no accident that his memory encounters a personage from

his childhood in his capacity as a seer prophesying the future. Proust
listens attentively for the echo of the past; Benjamin listens for the first
notes of a future which has meanwhile become the past. Unlike Proust,
Benjamin does not want to free himself from temporality; he does
not wish to see things in their ahistorical essence. He strives instead
for historical experience and knowledge. Nevertheless, he is sent back
into the past, a past however, which is open, not completed, and which
promises the future. Benjamins tense is not the perfect, but the future
perfect in the fullness of its paradox: being future and past at the same
time. (Szondi 2006: 19)

Benjamins autobiographical quest for time gone by, for lost time, is, in
sum, a quest for the lost future. This future never became real; it only
emerged briefly in moments of promise and Vorklang in the pastand
we have to keep in mind that even this past only emerges in hindsight,
in the act of remembrance that takes place in the here and now as the
invocation of a utopia that never came true. The here and now consists
of Benjamin writing his memories in the 1930s, trying to escape from
fascisma man haunted and hounded without any hope either for his
own future as a writer and philosopher or for the future of humanity.
Without being aware of this cultural constellation of intentionality
(of which the individual intentional stance of the author is only one element), the temporalization of Benjamins autobiographical scenarios
remains unintelligibleas it does for Prousts elegiac visions of a past
that he tries to evoke as a timeless present.
This difference between their ideas of time and memory is also responsible for what Szondi calls the formal difference of Prousts and
Benjamins narrative works, that gulf which separates the three-thousand-page novel from the collection of brief prose pieces (21). But despite their differences, both texts resonate with the chief claim made
in this essay: namely, that the emerging scenarios of autobiographical
time are more adequately understood as results and side effects of narrative worldmaking than as mnemonic representations of the past in
the present. Autobiographical scenarios do not unfold in time, along
a Newtonian trajectory; nor can they be reduced to or projected onto
such an ontological model of time. Rather, if we closely investigate such
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scenarios of memory and time they prove to be inextricably intertwined

with their very narrative constructiona construction whose understanding, as both Proust and Benjamin suggest, necessarily reaches beyond mere narrative analysis.
Notes
1. By human temporality I mean a temporality that is specific to and fundamental
for the human being in the world. On a more general plane, this human-specific dimension of time (which includes phenomena discussed as social, cultural,
historical, phenomenological, and noetic times) is to be distinguished from
concepts of time that refer to biological and physical temporalities (see Fraser
1992; 1987, ch. 3).
2. Drawing on the ideas of Ricoeur and Wittgenstein, I have discussed this argument in greater detail elsewhere (Brockmeier (1995/2001, 1996, 2008).
3. This claim does not exclude, on a psychological and philosophical plane, the
possibility that one can have a sense of self and identity despite the absence of
narrativeor even the absence of language and memory (Eakin 1999; Freeman
2008; Medved and Brockmeier 2008).

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