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YOU CAN RETURN to a book, but you cannot return to yourself I had remembered Proust's In Search of Lost Time as a memoir driven by a nostalgic yearning for the past. Yet when I went back to it after a period of twenty years, Proust's research, in fact, turned out not to be about nostalgia at all. Rather, he frames a critique of such willful yearning and poses a certain form of aesthetic practice as counter to it. Proust's many-volumed book bears an analogue to memory, but not to experience; it opens on a world already shaped by desire, but in its manifold of sensual particulars it reveals far more than the reader would expect it to reveal, and in its layers of coincidence it creates an art that is counter to the temporality of everyday life. Through such detail and coincidence, Proust draws us out of our social conventions for structuring time. Those structures themselves are created in light of the inimitable fact of death and the inevitable transformation of the world around us from a world inhabited and en aged by the living to a world haunted and inflected by the dead. Our relations to the dead, unlike our relations to the articulated systems of time consciousness, take place under the opposed, yet interconnected, conditions perhaps most clearly and rigorously explored in Proust's research: the forms of voluntary and involuntary memory. Proust makes evident the futility of volitional memory as expressed in nostalgia. He shows how nostalgia's willfulness is compensatory to our submission to time and, simultaneously, how nostalgia, as a dream of the recreation of what is lost in the ongoing flow of experience, is doomed to an inauthentic form.
Proust himself claims, in Within a Budding Grove, that the names designating things in the world correspond only to the intellect and thus remain alien to our true impressions. But it may be useful to trace the etymology of nostalgia as it gives evidence to an evolution out of the original Greek words nostos, or return home, and algia, a painful condition -an evolution from physical to emotional symptoms, rather than a continuing state. In a famous passage in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton discussed nostalgia as "a childish...