Swann's Way, Combray II, pp.233-251: Guermantes Way,

(pp.233-234) M compares his remembering the town in its historic setting to art as a means of preservation. pp.54-56 of Proust in Venice, by Peter Collier is a great commentary on Proust's themes of art and memory. It brings us back to the grandmother's desire to buy art in a state as removed from the original as possible. I connected this to needing to be removed from reality in order for the senses not to get in the way (mentioned by M earlier when reading in the garden at Combray), but Collier treats it as a symbol for the preservation of memory—the original crumbles but is preserved in engravings (like those from the grandmother of The Last Supper) or paintings (St. Marks in Bellini's Procession In St. Mark's Square):

"The vertiginous spiral of Proust's metaphor presents the very substance of the Combray memory (the grandmother's artistic prejudice) as the spiral mental structure ensuring its own perpetuation, through transformation into a more lasting aesthetic form" (p.56, Proust in Venice)

Compare to the moment a little later on (p.236) when he is called by the ruins of old battlements to imagine Combray as "an historic city vastly different, gripping my imagination by the remote, incomprehensible features which it half-concealed beneath a spangled veil of buttercups", most specifically remote, half-concealed images. These ruins have not been preserved and he can only imagine them as they were, or take them now as they are, overrun by nature.

We are now traveling with M along the Guermantes way. It is strikingly different from the Méséglise way almost immediately: descriptions of the Méséglise way include peasant girls and general, wild landscapes, while the Guermantes way brings to M's mind "the rumble of the coaches of the Duchesses ode Montpensier, de Guermantes and de Montmorency" (p.234) and also the various counts and lords and abbots of long ago (p.236). And where the Méséglise way seems practically pornographic, or at least bawdy, by comparison the Guermantes way seems clean and refreshing with its views of THE steeple and the Vivonne (Loire).

Neurasthenia (p.238) is an archaic psychiatric diagnosis of nervous exhaustion. It was often associated with the upper classes, and was possibly psychosomatic. On p.238 M mentions it with reference to Léonie, but Proust is said to have had neurasthenia (see The Diseases of Marcel Proust in Neurological Disorders in Famous Artists, Part 2, by Bogousslavsky and Hennerici) and I'm starting to see a parallel drawn between them. When he mentions the illness it is with a desire to shake it, a feeling of helplessness, and later he says, of the Vivonne, "how often have I watched, and longed to imitate when I should be free to live as I chose" (p.240) giving a picture of a man who felt trapped in a sick body (which could be the asthma and neurasthenia, or could be the homosexuality, as viewed during that time).

M has two goals he wishes to reach along this walk: the source of the Vivonne, and Guermantes, itself, for a view of the noble family. The ancestry of the Guermantes family, is equally as impossible to find, but M attributes it to the legendary Geneviéve de Brabant (of the magic Lantern) and Gilbert the Bad, who, being legends, are timeless. He sees them in the tapestry and windows at the church of Combray, and it is at the church where he finally gets his first glimpse of the real Mme de Guermantes. He is disappointed, of course. She is too like a normal woman. But he reminds himself of her legendary heritage and looks for signs of her nobility and perfection, which of course he finds, and he "fell in love with her" and plants in his mind a connection between them, believing that she saw him and will think on him later.

Passages of note:
"satisfied with their modest horizon, rejoicing in the sunshine and the water's edge, faithful to their little glimpse of the railway-station, yet keeping none the less like some of our old paintings, in their plebeian simplicity, a poetic scintillation from the golden East." (p.237) he's talking about buttercups in the field, but I can't help noticing the railway-station reference, which I feel has some sort of significance in the work. Or maybe it doesn't.

Cool stuff:
Eugéne Viollet-le-Duc was the French architectural antithesis of John Ruskin. While Ruskin advocated restoration of buildings to their original states, Viollet-le-Duc restored buildings to a finished state, not caring whether they still resembled themselves at that point or not. Proust was a fan of Ruskin.

Gentile Bellini's Procession in St. Mark's Square


And of course DaVinci's The Last Supper

Swann's Way, beginning Combray II, pp. 65-83

A description of Combray, using terms such as medieval and primitive (p.65) creates a direct connection to the distant past. (A bit on Illiers-Combray on this site and also on Wikipedia.)

A re-mentioning of the magic lantern (p.65) and Golo and Geneviéve de Brabant (p.66)

We meet Léonie, the narrator's great aunt (his grandfather's cousin) who, when he was a child, gave him the madeleine cakes that later trigger his memories of her home. She is an invalid (self-proclaimed?) "perpetually in a vague state of grief, physical debility, illness, obsession and piety." (p.66) She never leaves her room, she claims to never sleep. She is associated with death or illness, and with God or church—She loves the taste of the "dead lime leaves or faded blossom" (in her tissane), and by her bed is"a table which served at once as dispensary and high altar, on which, beneath a statue of the Virgin and a bottle of Vchiy-Célestins, might be found her prayer-books and her medical prescriptions..." (p.70)

Memories, descriptions, again very linked to a sense of smell (pp.66-68, and previously noted in the stairway in Combray I).

More on Françoise, and her service to the family (first to Léonie, then the narrator's), and her own family, and the narrator's mother is kind to her, asking her about her children and grandchildren (I remember she also asked Swann about his daughter during the dinner). (pp.71-72)

The church at Combray: ancient, visited for ages by peasant-women, housing the "noble dust of the Abbots of Combray" that are "themselves no longer hard and lifeless matter", and the windows all "so old that you could see, here and there, their silvery antiquity sparkling with the dust of centuries" (pp.80-81).
Two things about this: A return to the concept of transmigration(?), and a mention of class. Françoise was also noted as a peasant earlier, but the narrator and his family are middle class, and the Abbots are referred to as noble. Church as the great unifier? Time as the unifier of class?

Guermantes: since the name heads a whole volume of Proust's work, it might be worth noting its arrival on the scene, from inside the church at Combray, as part of the stained glass depiction of "the coronation of Esther (tradition had it that the weaver had given to Ahasuerus the features of one of hte kings of France and to Esther those of a lady of Guermantes whose lover he had been)" (p.82)

Side note: Interesting History on cards
Proust describes one of the church windows as "composed of a hundred little rectangular panes, of blue principally, like an enormous pack of cards of the kind planned to beguile King Charles VI" (p.81).
From tradegames.org.uk "The earliest references to cards in Europe are mostly in France (the records of King Charles VI show that he bought 3 packs in 1392). These original cards featured four suits (Cups, Swords, Coins and Batons) of 14 cards each - there was an additional card in each suit - the "Cavalier" or "Mounted Valet", the lowest of the four court cards."
Some believed the cards of Charles VI to have been among the first decks of tarot cards, but more recent belief is that they were simply playing cards, tarot cards having been invented about 100 years later.

Passages of note
"...the pleasure of finding that these were sprigs of real lime-trees, like those I had seen, when coming from the train, in the Avenue de la Gare, altered indeed, precisely because they were not imitations but themselves, and because they had aged. And as each new character is merely a metamorphosis from something earlier, in these little grey balls I recognised green buds plucked before their time;" (p.69, with respect to the lime-blossom for making Léonie's tissane).

Vocabulary
antimacassar (p.67, noun) small covering on the backs and arms of upholstered furniture to prevent wear.

priedieu (p.67, noun) a desk used for kneeling in prayer.

Swann's Way, Combray I, pp.35-58

At a dinner party our young narrator is sent to bed without being able to say goodnight to his mother. Swann is the dinner guest, and we meet Francoise, a house maid, who is described as uncompromising and ancient and devoted to the family.

A connection made between narrator and Swann: "As for the agony through which I had just passed, I imagined that Swann would have laughed heartily at it if he had read my letter and had guessed its purpose; whereas, on the contrary, as I was to learn in due course, a similar anguish had been the bane of his life for many years, and no one perhaps could have understood my feelings at that moment so well as he ;" (p.39) Foreshadowing/social triangulation

Our narrator has a nervous nature. This is played out in his waiting anxiously for his mother to come to bed so he can ambush her, on the stairway outside his door, into kissing him goodnight, even at the risk of angering both her and his father. Here, as he waits in the hall, memory is linked with sense of smell, and again with the inflexibility of place—the staircase as a horrible location because it signified the separation from his mother.

When he meets his mother his father arrives soon after, but gives him no punishment. In general the narrator believed his father to be hasty or unfair, which left him somewhat afraid of his father, or uncertain ("Even at the moment when it manifested itself in this crowning mercy, my father's behaviour towards me still retained that arbitrary and unwarranted quality which was so characteristic of him..." [p.49-50]), but he does not doubt that his father loves him.

He is reunited with his mother, who spends the night reading (George Sand novels) to him in his room, but his victory at this moment is actually a loss of innocence, which he writes "brought me of a sudden to a sort of puberty of sorrow, a manumission of tears. I ought then to have been happy; I was not. It struck me that my mother had just made a first concession which must have been painful to her, that it was a first abdication on her part from the ideal she had formed for me..." (p.51)

In regard to the books we learn more about the grandmother, who is strongly connected to the past, to the old, to the un-useful.
She "could never permit herself to buy anything from which no intellectual profit was to be derived, above all the profit which fine things afford us by teaching us to seek our pleasures elsewhere than n the barren satisfaction of worldly wealth." (p.53) And when forced to buy something "useful" "would choose antiques, as though their long desuetude had effaced from them any semblance of utility and fitted them rather to instruct us in the lives of the men of other days than to serve the common requirements of our own." (p.53)
She prefers the antique to something more conventional and useful. Even in books she has chosen for him George Sand novels which he accuses of being "regular lumber-rooms full of expressions that have fallen out of use and become quaint and picturesque..", and she prefers ancient depictions of place as well, avoiding photographs in favor of prints (or photographs of prints) or artists' renderings.

Art in life
"...[I] would so prepare my thoughts as to be able, thanks to these mental preliminaries, to consecrate the whole of the minute Mamma would grant me to the sensation of her cheek against my lips, as a painter who can have his subject for short sittings only prepares his palette, and from what he remembers and from rough notes does in advance everything which he possibly can do in the sitter's absence." (p.35)

Art imitating life is not always accurate, as images of paintings of locations (Venice) do not always portray them accurately.

Time and memory
Perception is a part of reality. Is it immovable? Movement through the class system, for instance, breaks the concept of immobility in reality, but perception of class is maintained, as when we meet Francoise:
"refinements of etiquette which nothing in Francoise's background or in her career as a servant in a village household could have put into her head; and we were obliged to assume that there was latent in her some past existence in the ancient history of France, noble and little understood, as is in those manufacturing towns where old mansions still testify to their former courtly days, and chemical workers toil among delicately sculptured scenes of the Miracle of Theophilus or The Quatre Fils Aymon." (p.37-38)
Francoise may in reality have changed class status, but yet she holds onto her original status as immoveable. This way she is a blend of past and present.
The Miracle of Theophilus and the Quatre Fils Aymon are both French textual works from the middle ages, another blending of time periods like the references to Golo and Genevieve de Brabant.

And in reference to Swann, immobility of perception:
"said my great-aunt, 'what a change I find in Swann. He is quite antiquated!' She had grown so accustomed to seeing Swann always in the same stage of adolescence that it was a shock to her to find him suddenly less young than the age she still attributed to him." (p.45)

Compare this to the immobility of perception of a person's character or physical appearance mentioned on p.23 (always the same for one, never the same for any two people), and of physical space on p.5: "perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves and not anything else, by the immobility of our conception of them."

And the difference between the physical state of something, and its state in our memory is revisited often, like here in the staircase as he stands with his mother before his father arrives:
"Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase, up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb, was long ago demolished...It is a long time, too, since my father has been able to tell mamma to 'Go along with the child.' Never again will such moments be possible for me. But of late I have been increasingly able to catch, if I listen attentively, the sound of the sobs which I had the strength to control in my father's presence, and which broke out only when I found myself alone with Mamma. In reality their echo has never ceased;" (p.49)

Love as pain
Our narrator loves his mother so much that he suffers for the emotion. We spend the latter part of this section mired in his anguish over a missed goodnight kiss, and then suffer with him a loss of innocence even after he receives it. Love is pain and suffering, because even when achieved it cannot atone for the struggle, or it cannot live up to the desire.

Then Swann is "much less unhappy of late" because "he no longer loves that [his wife]." (p.45)

And the role of the social triangle:
"Alas! Swann had learned by experience that the good intentions of a third party are powerless to influence a woman who is annoyed to find herself pursued even into a ball-room by a man whom she does not love. Too often, the kind friend comes down again alone." (p.41)

Vocabulary, etc.:
viaticum (p.36, noun) 1. Communion as given to a dying person, 2. provisions for travel

desuetude (p.53, noun) 1. The state of being no longer used or practiced

Benozzo Gozzoli was an Italian Renaissance painter from the 15th century, but I was unable to find an image of the print or painting mentioned (of Abraham and Sarah, p.49)

Swann's Way, Combray I, pp. 1-15

An hour with the book and my computer and that's all the farther I got before it was time to make dinner.

Overview:
The state of memory, space and time fluidity. Where is the narrator, and when? Is he young? Old? An invalid? Is he remembering his fear of his uncle or is he remembering the instance of that fear? Or are these things the same? (Ahhh...waking up and thinking you are somewhere else. But he describes it so much more eloquently.)

Our narrator (our Proust) is searching for his memories, and the narration seems confused and wild, but it's actually following a very careful order. He begins by reaching wildly and time and space are confused, then he slowly settles on more distinct places, times, and people, and we see him go from vague memories to more specific stories (and finally he tastes the madeleine cakes, which trigger the next set of memories, and so on, but I'm not there yet on this second read).

From within this twilight state he mentions place names and people, possibly in foreshadowing or a roadmap: locations such as Combray and Tansonville, Balbec (Is it a hilarity or a commercial ploy that someone named their anti-aging cream Combray?), and people like Swann.

My own, possibly silly, thoughts:
His grandmother reminds me of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that great French philosopher who embraced nature and believed children should be allowed to run around in downpours and go barefooted in winter.

Some things to pay attention to?
Travel or the train station (pp 2, 10)
the mother/son relationship (pp 6, 15)
the magic lantern (pp 9-10)
Genevieve de Brabant and Golo (pp 10-12)
The social triangle

The magic lantern was a new one on me, and so was the story of Genevieve de Brabant and Golo. I don't know if we'll see a return of the lantern later in the book, but I found it interesting as a tool melding the distant past (Merovingian) to the present. And Genevieve is the wife and mother, falsely accused by Golo of infidelity with him against her husband, who is to be put to death but escapes and is aided by a roe deer in caring for her son. Later she is cleared and re-accepted by her husband. There is an obvious link here to the mother/son relationship, and possibly also to that between mother and father/husband and wife, and our first example of the social triangle.

Then there is his grandmother whose sister keeps tempting his grandfather with liqueurs he shouldn't have, thus creating unrest between the husband and wife (p.13-14), another social triangle.

And the narrator's familial relationship, the son insinuating himself between the mother and father, and sometimes additional guests taking a place as well (pp.15+), more social triangles.

Passages/quotes worth noting:
p.1-2 "I could hear the whistling of trains, which, now nearer and now farther off, punctuating the distance like the note of a bird in a forest, showed me in perspective the deserted countryside through which a traveler would be hurrying towards the nearby station; and the path he is taking will be engraved in his memory by the excitement induced by strange surroundings, by unaccustomed activities, by the conversation he has had and the farewells exchanged beneath an unfamiliar lamp that will still echo in his ears amid the silence of the night, and by the happy prospect of being home again."

p.8 "Habit! That skilful but slow-moving arrranger who begins by letting our minds suffer for weeks on end in temporary quarters, but whom our minds are none the less only too happy to discover at last, for without it, reduced to their own devices, they would be powerless to make any room seem habitable."

p.12 "...while my mother, keeping very quiet so as not to disturb [my father], looked at him with tender respect, but not too hard, not wishing to penetrate the mysteries of his superior mind."

p.15 "Sometimes when, after kissing me, [my mother] opened the door to go, I longed to call her back, to say to her 'Kiss me just once more,' but I knew that then she would at once look displeased, for the concession which she made to my wretchedness and agitation in coming up to give me this kiss of peace always annoyed my father, who thought such ceremonies absurd..."