Involuntary memory (fr. mémoire involontaire) is a concept articulated by the French writer Marcel Proust in his novel In Search of Lost Time, although the idea was also developed in his earlier writings, Contre Sainte-Beuve and Jean Santeuil. Proust contrasts involuntary memory with voluntary memory. The latter designates memories retreived by "intelligence," that is, memories produced when we put conscious effort into remembering events, people, and places. Proust's narrator laments that such memories are inevitably partial, and do not bear the "essence" of the past. Involuntary memories, on the other hand, function similarly to the phenomenon known as déjà-vu: they possess a vivid and plenary sensory immediacy that seems to obliterate the passage of time between the original event and its re-experience in involuntary memory. The most famous instance of involuntary memory in Proust is known as the "episode of the madeleine," but there are at least half of a dozen in In Search of Lost Time, including the memories produced by the scent of a public lavatory on the Champs-Élysées. French (français, langue française) is one of the most important Romance languages, outnumbered in speakers only by Spanish and Portuguese. ... Marcel-Valentin-Louis-Eugène-Georges Proust (July 10, 1871 – November 18, 1922) was a French intellectual, novelist, essayist and critic, best known as the author of In Search of Lost Time (in French À la recherche du temps perdu, also translated previously as Remembrance of Things Past), a monumental work... This article is in need of attention. ... Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (December 23, 1804 – October 13, 1869) was a literary critic and one of the major figures of French literary history. ... This article is about d vu, the psychological phenomenon. ... A madeleine is a traditional sweet from France. ... Avenue des Champs-Elysées from Place de la Concorde, seen from above the obelisk The Champs-Elysées (pronounced â–¶ (help· info) literally the Elysian fields) is a broad avenue in the French capital Paris. ...

The function of involuntary memory in the novel is not self-evident, however. It has been argued that involuntary memory unlocks the Narrator's past as the subject of his novel, but also that he does not begin writing until many years after the episode of the madeleine, for example. Other critics have suggested that it is not the recovery of the past per se that is significant for the Narrator, but rather the happiness produced by his recognition of the past in a present moment. Maurice Blanchot in Le Livre à venir points out that involuntary memories are epiphanic and pointed, and cannot effectively support a sustained narrative. He notes that the difference between Prout's uncompleted Jean Santeuil and In Search of Lost Time is the voluntary memories that provide the connective tissue between such moments and make up the vast bulk of the narrative of the later novel. Maurice Blanchot (September 27, 1907-February 20, 2003) was a French philosopher, literary theorist and writer of fiction. ...

A contemporary influence on Proust's conception of involuntary memory may have been the French philosopher Henri Bergson, who in Matter and Memory (1906) made a distinction between two types of memory, the habit of memory as in learning a poem by heart, and spontaneous memory that stores up perceptions and impressions and reveals them in sudden flashes. However, Proust criticism of the last quarter century has tended to discount the influence of Bergson on Proust's ideas. Image:Bergson. ...