Swann's Way, Combray II, pp.251-265

Beginning with "how often, after that day, in the course of my walks along the Guermantes Way"

These are the final pages in part I, Combray and they bring us almost full circle to the narrator's thoughts at the beginning of the work, as though backing out from the more focused view to the more general one at the beginning.

After seeing Mme Guermantes in the church M returns to lamenting his impotence as a writer. He is afraid that he has no talent for his chosen profession and can find nothing to write about. It isn't until a return trip from a walk along the Guermantes Way that his writers block is broken and he writes a snippet on steeples in his view (the steeples of which he writes, not of Combray, are a trio—originally just two, and then a third attempts joins them—bringing to my mind the social triangle). He is relieved to be able to write again. It is a writer's epiphany.

He finishes the description of the Guermantes Way by linking it to feelings of "melancholy" because on nights they take that route, being late after such a long walk his mother is not free to come put him to bed. This is a break in the night-time routine upon which his happiness is dependent. The Guremantes Way embodies the dichotomy between utter happiness and desperate melancholy.

Some meandering thoughts...
I see another difference between the walks now, too, the first (Méséglise or Swann's Way) being connected more with sensuality, the second (Guermantes) with his intellectual (and social?) pursuit, or at least that's how they were depicted in his descriptions. Méséglise is sensual, lower class, country, French, stormy. Guermantes is intellectual, upper class or nobility. So while the Méséglise Way is a confirmation of all that is French and home, the Guremantes Way is what separates him from home and mother and comfort.

And then we're out in his more vague memories and ideas again, with a reminder of the madeleine cake and tea, and a preface to the upcoming memory, "a story which, many years after I had left the little place, had been told me of a love affair in which Swann had been involved before I was born" (p.262).

And finally we leave his sleep walking mind through the same door by which we had entered it, only instead of his confusion over which room he is half asleep in, now the room's true features are coming into focus with day. He is awake and memory is dawning?

Swann's Way, Combray II, pp.211-233:Méséglise: sensuality, sadism, and guilt

Begining with "Since the Méséglise way was the shorter of the two that we used to take on our walks round Combray..."

Several pages here are a description of Méséglise and reference to Roussainville. Méséglise is the walk that corresponds more to regular French life (as opposed to high society the Guermantes way). Proust gives us deep descriptions of the nature and architecture of the walk (of the church of Saint-André-des-Champs he says "how French that church was!" [p.212]) He describes for us the carvings of the church, relating them to the people of Françoise and Théodore (both of the lower French classes), and also to the "country-women of those parts" (p.213). The people, the countryside, the architecture are all immeasurably French.

Years have passed. Léonie has died and M is allowed to walk by himself while his parents handle her estate. If he was innocent or naive when he met Gilberte in the pink Hawthorns, he is now "in touch with" his sensuality ("my imagination drawing strength from contact with my sensuality, my sensuality expanding through all the realms of my imagination, my desire no longer had any bounds" [p.220]), and he seeks its fulfillment on this walk, looking for girls to hold behind every tree and ruin, but mostly in Roiussainville "into which I had long desired to penetrate," (p.220).

He begs Roussainville to send him a girl (from what I imagine to be a phallic "castle-keep" rising from the landscape) while he masturbates (for the first time) in his room at Combray.

"I could see nothing but its tower framed in the half-opened window as, with the heroic misgivings of a traveller setting out on a voyage of exploration or of a desperate wretch hesitating on the verge of self-destruction, faint with emotion, I explored, across the bounds of my own experience, an untrodden path which for all I knew was deadly—until the moment when a natural trail like that left by a snail smeared the leaves of hte flowering currant that drooped around me." (pp.222-223)

It's even better in the purely Moncreif translation:

"...an untrodden path which, I believed, might lead me to my death, even—until passion spent itself and left me shuddering among the sprays of flowering currant which, creeping in through the window, tumbled all about my body." (p.217 volume I, Chatto & Windus uniform edition)

But before these particular descriptions (of sensuality and masturbation) we are told that our narrator is now of age, but not yet disillusioned (pp.221-222), which is an intermediate step between the innocence of the earlier encounter with Gilberte in the hawthorns and the even that follows at Montjouvain.

Coming upon Montjouvain, the house of M. Venteuil, on one of these solo walks M witnesses a scene between Venteuil's newly bereaved daughter and her lesbian lover. He refers to this as the incident that formed his impression of sadism. Though he's talked about homosexuality before (in reference to the same girl), this would be his first witnessing of it, and here again a picture is drawn of homosexuality being a divide between the daughter and her father; she brings shame to his house and his memory, her willingness to take part in the affair is like spitting on his image.

But M is still certain that her father would have continued to love her, would have continued to see the good in her, and I can't help but hear a parallel between this and relationship Proust believed he had with his own family. At the same time he is certain that she wishes she could be different, or at least escape her connection to the good of her father, but she is too like him, and I wonder if here he (Proust) talks about himself, or if it is a reference to M's guilt over the masturbation, or both. Mlle Venteuil's, or M's, or Proust's, the guilt is there.

"It was not evil that gave her the idea of pleasure, that seemed to her attractive; it was pleasure, rather, that seemed evil. And as, each time she indulged in it, it was accompanied by evil thoughts such as ordinarily had no place in her virtuous mind, she came at length to see in pleasure itself something diabolical, to identify with Evil." (p.232)

Cool stuff:

An article about the different translations

Swann's Way, Combray II, pp.204-211: M. Vinteuil and homosexuality

Beginning with: "Once in the fields, we never left them again during the rest of our Méséglise walk."

M. Vinteuil, whose daughter is a lesbian, has a house along the Méséglise Way. Proust himself was a closeted homosexual, but he has written his narrator as heterosexual, an arrangement that will allow Proust to explore the place of homosexuality in a wider social context.

Here the reference to homosexuality is with regards to parental shame, ruin, and death. But while society blamed the daughter for her father's death (due, they said, to a broken heart), they also admitted that M. Venteuil continued to love his daughter very much, even allowing her supposed lover to live in their home. This would seem to make society, and its harsh judgement, actually to blame for Venteuil's demise.

"And yet however much M. Vinteuil may have known of his daughter's conduct it did not follow that his adoration of her grew any less." (pp.208-209)

"But when M. Vinteuil thought of his daughter and himself from the point of view of society, fromt he point of view of their reputation, when he attempted to place himself by her side in the rank which they occupied in the general estimation of their neighbours, when he was bound to give judgment, to utter his own and her social condemnation in precisely the same terms as the most hostile inhabitant of Combary; he saw himself and his daughter in the lowest depths, and his manners had of late been tinged with that humility, that respect for persons who ranked above him and to whom he now looked up" (p.209)

There may also be a comparison drawn here between the fall of M. Vinteuil, due to his daughter being a lesbian, and the fall of Swann, due to his chosen wife being of dubious morals. Both have been cast out by a judgmental society.

Notable passages:
"On my right I could see across the cornfields the two chiselled rustic spires of Saint-André-des-Champs, themselves as tapering, scaly, chequered, honeycombed, yellowing and friable as two ears of wheat." (p.205) This makes me think of Proust's love for Ruskin, and Ruskin's fourth tenet, the one regarding beauty which says that architecture should draw from or reflect nature (post).

Cool stuff:
Xavier Boniface Saintine (p.206) was an 19th century French writer.

Marc-Charles-Gabriel Gleyre (p.206) was a Swiss artist who spent much of his life in France. The piece to which M refers is probably Lost Illusions, with the moon "silhouetted against the sky in the form of a silver sickle."

Swann's Way, Combray II, pp.186-195: The two ways

Beginning with "We used always to return from our walks in good time to pay aunt Léonie a visit before dinner" (after a break in the text).

Proust's descriptive language, drawing the picture of the setting sun, is remarkable.

The two ways to walk, the Guermantes Way and the Méséglise Way (Swann's Way), M says are "diametrically opposed" and are irreconcilable.

"But above all I set between them, far more than the mere distance in miles that separated one from the other, the distance that there was between the two parts of my brain in which I used to think of them, one of those distances of the mind which not only keep things apart, but cut them off from one another and put them on different planes." (p.189)

M sees them as ideals of their types (Méséglise as a plain view, Guermantes as river), and refers to them as sacred soil. They are also the namesakes of two volumes of the work, so I am looking to them as major symbols.

Guermantes way is the longer of the two walks, and Guermantes is also the old noble of the area. It is the walk they took the least. To M Guermantes "meant no more than the ultimate goal, ideal rather than real, of the 'Guermantes way,' a sort of abstract geographical term like the North Pole or the Equator or the Orient." And if the Guermantes way is intended as an ideal, perhaps a class ideal, then we get a bit of foreshadowing when M tells us "I was to know it well enough one day, but that day was still to come" (p.188)

Méséglise way, or "Swann's way," is a shorter walk that goes in the direction of Méséglise-la-Vineuse, and along which they pass by Swann's estate. It may be a commonly traveled road because M mentions seeing people in Combray whom they assume have come from Méséglise-la-Vineuse. Taking the Méséglise way is a relaxed walk, and they talk to people and tradesmen along the way.

With regards to Swann's estate: "My grandfather pointed out to my father in what respects the appearance of the place was still the same,, an dhow far it had altered since the walk that he had taken with old M. Swann on the day of his wife's death" (p.191)
On their first walk by the land in some time because they refuse to go near it when the young Swann's wife might be present (because of the bad marriage) M might mean a comparison here between the old regime, when the decidedly middle class elder Swann was respected and devoted to his wife, and the new regime, when the younger Swann has risen in status, but has married beneath him, making both a socially bad and an unhappy match. Each generation sees a dying off of their parents' morals, and this was a time of class mobility for the French.

Notable passages:

"Overshadowed by the tall trees which stood close around it, an ornamental pond had been dug by Swann's parents; but, even in his most artificial creations, nature is the material upon which man has to work; certain places persist in remaining surrounded by the vassals of their own special sovereignty, and will flaunt their immemorial insignia in the middle of a park, just as they would have done far from any human interference," (pp.191-192)
Man vs. nature?