Literature as a technique of recollection

There is a caricature of Marcel Proust in which the despairing writer is consoled by a friend saying, 'Aber, aber, mon cher Marcel, nun versuchen Sie sich doch zu erinnern, wo Sie die Zeit verloren haben.' Literature in general, not only A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, deals with a different form of memory than that of mnemonics, in which the hints of places lead to a retrieval of what has been stored there before. Nevertheless it is difficult to pinpoint the criteria that make this difference. How does literature transcend the technologically limited sense of memory in terms of a storage and retrieval system? ..