Time and the writer Proust against Chronos

The writer’s time intersects with that of history: in the episode that he devotes to the First World War, Proust establishes a scale of writer’s values, in which individual memory figures above major collective events. His work relied on various subterfuges to slow down or subvert Chronos, including deletions, insertions, and the temporal syncretism of his patchwork of “paperoles” (scraps of paper folded and glued to the page). The oeuvre of his manuscripts, distinct from that of his published novels, also calls for an anachronic reading.