Is Memory Just a Technical Tool in Modern Fiction? A Look Into the Growth of Time and Memory in Proust and Kafka

Abstract

This paper proposes an insight into the emergence of key concepts in modern narratives, especially related to time and memory in the literature of Marcel Proust and Franz Kafka. Knowing that 20th-century prose draws its novelty from its style and writing technique, we will thus argue that one needs to first inquire as to what modern literature entails before scrutinizing such complex and abstract ideas. Thus, the first part of this study is the mise-en-scène for later projections on memory as four-dimmensional time in Proust and metaphysical time in Kafka’s work, while in itself it defines, exemplifies, and analyzes the evocation technique that leads to this complementing view of time in these two writers. Coupled with inquiries into the great social and political panorama rendered by war and seconded by the shifts in narrative themes and topics, the props of Modernism are explored. Time and memory are themes that we will debate on while providing a view on the new prosodic procedures such as the abandonment of the linear narrative flow, the breaking up with conventional ideas of unity and coherence of the plot and characters, and the encouragement of ironic and ambiguous juxtapositions that challenge the action’s traditional moral and philosophical meaning.

Keywords

• modernism
• memory
• time
• proust
• kafka