Water, Memory and the Material Imagination: Reading the Sea of the Temps Perdu Against the Flows of Capital

As an important component of what Gaston Bachelard calls “the material imagination,” water brings a powerful and varied repertoire of emotional, cultural and sensual associations to its role as metaphor. This paper explores the tension between two very different metaphoric bodies of water, tracing the ways in which water’s symbolic potency can be engaged both to confirm and to challenge current systems of exploitation, domination, and ecological devastation. The first of these metaphors encompasses the “flows of capital.” In everyday linguistic usage, people pool their resources, liquidate their assets, flood the market, and hope that prosperity will trickle down to the poor. Such aqueous imagery implies that the circulation of currency is as fundamental to the maintenance of life as the blood flowing through the veins of vascularized creatures, or the arterial branchings of river deltas. The second metaphoric waterway sparkles between the pages of a handful of modernist novels and their critical commentary. It is an infinite depth in which everything is retained, and where all times mingle together. In writing about the works of Marcel Proust, Walter Benjamin calls it the “sea of the temps perdu.”

Through an analysis of these two figural waterways, MacLeod focuses on the different modes of temporal experience associated with the realm of commodity exchange on the one hand, and with the material memory of water on the other. As the commodity form sinks more and more deeply into everyday lived experience, it separates time into discrete, disconnected fragments, and evicts the past from objects and landscapes. By contrast, the sea of the temps perdu seems to provide an imaginative antidote to the amnesiac floods of reification, evoking the pervasive immanence of the past within the materiality of the present. Literary depictions of the waters of memory may thus offer us access to a counterhegemonic temporal experience, one that foregrounds the interpermeation of bodies and events across both generations and geographies.