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, 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..."