Reading Proust for the first time, I was amazed and incredulous that this man claimed to remember such trivial events of his life in such amazing detail.  I then read the Lerer article which relieved my suspicions by saying that Proust himself knew that his memories were inaccurate.  The article then goes on to describe Freud and his possibly lying patients, who may have created memories simply by imagining them.  I think the ideas of planted and false memories are different from what Proust is doing; he probably knows a vague account of what he has done, he is simply filling in the gaps, fleshing out an outline.  Since Proust writes mainly about himself, he only has to fill in gaps that pertain to what he was thinking; and since Proust knows himself, maybe he can fill in these gaps fairly accurately by imagining what he would do in certain situations.  Of course, this is all conjecture.


On a different tack, I disagree with Bergson's (and Proust's) idea of intuition, or the idea that you can discover truths about yourself simply by thinking for long enough.  Proust did indeed describe many truths that are now known to modern neuroscientists (memories are inaccurate; odor and taste have strong links to memory in mammals) but he had no way of knowing that they were indeed true.  It's likely that Proust also described many aspects of himself and his memory that were simply due to his own idiosyncrasies and misperceptions.  It is for this reason that I think intuition is a faulty way of discovering significant truths about human consciousness.


Regarding Tristram Shandy, I think the author's method of making Tristram's recollections a scattered and dissociated affair is perhaps a more accurate depiction of memory than Proust's; when I remember things, I do not remember them in great detail and so linearly (this also relates to the issue brought up in class where literature is linear but thought isn't necessarily).  Instead, I remember things more like Tristram.  I will remember one thing for a while, then it will remind of of another thing and I will start to think about that.