Proust's Remains*

OCTOBER 144, Spring 2013, pp. 3–24. © 2013 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Proust, who claims to have no memory, keeps track of everything. His letters (there are several thousand) provide a running inventory of his bodily functions—letters to his mother providing an update of his respiratory condition, letters to his doctor listing the details of his menu, little notes handed to his housekeeper every morning reporting the number of times he coughed the night before. September, 1904: “two creamed eggs, a wing of roast chicken, three croissants, a dish of fried potatoes, grapes, coffee, a bottle of beer . . . followed by a quarter of a glass of Vichy water when I go to bed nine or ten hours after my meal. . . . ” Proust counts his bites and gasps and belches with the precision of a Loyola keeping a running tally of his tears, or of a Molloy his farts. October, 1922: “I just finished coughing more than 3,000 times. . . . ” The involuntary processes of the body are registered in the archive of the voluntary memory until the very act of accounting is transformed into a kind of spiritual exercise—a running litany of complaints from which emerges at once both the possibility and the impossibility of writing: illness provides the stimulus, the impediment, and the essential content of literary production. Nowhere has the act of not writing provided such fertile opportunities for writing. Proust writes to his friends endless letters of apology for not writing, a shopping list of excuses that turn out to be all more or less the same and that therefore generate endless opportunities for new complaints, in turn requiring further apologies for being so boring, and so on. February, 1905: “The words ‘I have been so ill, I am still so ill’ have been uttered by me so often . . . that I’m very afraid they will reach your . . . ears somewhat faded and quite lacking in exculpatory and absolving power. . . . ” 1 Proust’s catalogue of his own bodily functions forms a small but significant part of the archive of the larger corpus of his writing as it pulses through a com-