| Summary: | In this article we reread Flaubert’s conclusions, starting from two observations: first, that they contain an excess of memory, due both to the characters and to the mementoes they collect; second, that these efforts to remember and preserve inevitably give way to oblivion. We interpret this combination of hypermnesia and amnesia as a problematic attempt to produce a memory of the text itself: in their final pages, Flaubert’s novels appear to be erecting their own monuments, while suggesting their inadequacy. Fiction, here, is at one and the same time the space in which a ‘memory crisis’ is unfolding and the very object of this crisis.
|
|---|
