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

Review: Delta of Venus, by Anaïs Nin

When I added this book to my list of must-reads I imagined it would be something like D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, a work I greatly enjoyed. But while Lawrence's Chatterley is a striking modernist novel about class systems, gender disparity, and sexuality with many well written and daring erotic scenes, Nin's Delta of Venus is its opposite. This is a book filled with daring erotic scenes, with many well written stories about class, gender disparity, and sexuality thrown in. Delta of Venus is actually a collection of short works written by Nin for a collector of erotica. Her instructions were to eliminate poetic writing in favor of heavily descriptive sex scenes, but Nin melds description and story telling artfully. Her writing, her tendency to delve further and further into the relationships and personal emotions of her characters, reminds me Lawrence's handling of prose, while her characters' sexual abandon reminds me of Martin Amis's more recent novel, The Pregnant Widow, about the feminist and sexual revolution of the 1970s (which also harks heavily back to Lawrence). This book probably isn't for everyone—there is sex on every page—but Nin is credited with giving literature a language for sex and sensuality, and I think for giving women a place in that language as well. She continued what Lawrence started, and what society in general continued a few decades later.

Book 18 on my way to 52