ABSTRACT
MARCEL PROUST’S BEDROOM might at first seem to be a peculiar choice to conclude a book about space. After all, Proust devoted his thirteen years in his apartment on boulevard Haussmann to the single-minded production of a book about time. A la recherche du temps perdu is a novel that concerns nothing if not involuntary memory, the sudden sensory reclamation of a time past, or what Proust calls, in Le temps retrouvé, “a fragment of time in the pure state.”1 Yet A la recherche is as much a book about the search for lost space as the search for lost time. The involuntary memory triggered by the touch of a stiff napkin, the sound of a railwayman’s hammer, or the smell and taste of a madeleine soaked in tea evoke not just a past moment but a forgotten place. Involuntary memory, in many ways the inverted mirror image of traumatic memory, effects an immediate temporal and spatial dislocation that suspends not only then and now but also here and there. In Proust’s novel, time inhabits space; the one cannot be refound without the other.
