SOURCE: Pope, Dan. “The Centrality of Personal Memory.” Gettysburg Review 2 (autumn 1989): 694-702.

In the following excerpt, Pope discusses how the past becomes an active force in Spencer's fiction.

When I was young?—Ah, woful when! Ah! for the change 'twixt Now and Then! 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In 1896 Marcel Proust wrote, in a letter to a friend: “It might be great, but it would not be natural, to live in our times as Tolstoy asks us to do. … At every moment of our life we are the descendants of ourselves, and the atavism which weighs on us is our past, preserved by habit.” The statement exactly characterizes Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, the primary (and surely the most voluminous) literary investigation into the problem of personal memory. For Proust, memory is the path to self-attainment: to gain true understanding of your present identity, you must uncover the past buried...