“In the same passage, personal time and physical time are translitera- tions of Bergson’s chronological

time and durée. But on the theme of memory, Pla was more influenced by applied Bergsonism, especially
Proust’s great novel. In his chronicle of literary Parisian life in the 1920s in the book Sobre París i França,
he observed perceptively: “Marcel Proust is not a realist of raw, direct, and some times poeticized reality.
He is a realist of the memories of reality – of time regained – which is something quite different and often
more complicated” (4:230). We see here explicit recognition of a superior, subtler realism and an intu-
ition that Proust’s method – inspired by Bergson – was to isolate time as something experienced by an
observer of memory. In other words, Pla found in Proust a literary fulfilment of the reflections with
which Bergson anticipated a phenomenological examination of memory. Years later, on the occasion of
the Proust Questionnaire submitted by Destino,

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Pla said in conversation with a friend that Proust “started copying Berg- son like a madman” (Valls,
Converses 30). “ (50-51)

Chapter 3. The Gray Notebook: Between Chronicle and Memoir

Josep Pla, de JOAN RAMON RESINA.