La memoria medieval de Proust. Iluminaciones del pasado

Abstract

«Proust’s medieval memory. Illuminations of the past». This article is meant to be an intertextual revision and interpretation of different aspects which relate Marcel Proust’s work to Chrétien de Troyes’: gothic cathedrals (Amiens and Rouen), the works of late medieval painters, and a representation of memory as documented on medieval rhetoric. The connection is established through John Ruskin, Marcel Proust’s «spiritual» father in his quest for a writing style, which he eventually found in In Search of Lost Time. It is precisely in this last volume that the narrator establishes a particularly suggestive relation with Foucquet’s book of hours, a work with illustrations whose reference is the anticipation of metaphor theory in the very narrative text of the last volume, Time Regained. Keywords: Marcel Proust, Chrétien de Troyes, Jean Foucquet, John Ruskin, memory, gothic cathedral, book of hours, metaphor.