Swann's Way: Combray Chapter 2 (7th post)

 

Finally in the Combray section (which consists almost entirely of the remembrance of his youth in that Norman village by an older Marcel while lying in bed somewhere else unspecified), we come to the Guermantes way. This is a longer walk than Swann's way (aka the Méséglise way) and so the family only embark on it when the weather is fine (p.227 Scott Moncrieff, p.180 Kilmartin).

The route runs alongside the Vivonne river where, on each stroll, Marcel observes a single lily “which the current, across whose path it had unfortunately grown, would never leave at rest for a moment, so that, like a ferry-boat mechanically propelled, it would drift over to one bank only to return to the other, eternally repeating its double journey.” The lily's plight is first compared to that of neurasthenics such as his Aunt Léonie and then to the never-ending repetitions of the inhabitants of the Inferno, to whom Dante would like to have talked for longer had he not been whisked away by his guide Virgil, just as Marcel is forced to keep apace with his parents (p.232 SM, p.184 TK). Once again, Proust allows the similes to multiply before tying them up neatly (family walk – lily – neurasthenics – Dante's sinners – family walk).

While going the Guermantes way, Marcel sometimes daydreams about the as-yet-unseen Duchesse de Guermantes and his imaginings remind him that one day he hopes to become a writer. Unfortunately, whenever he tries to think of a subject, he draws a blank and begins to suspect he is totally devoid of talent (p.237 SM, p.188 TK). Marcel's doubts about a literary career are an important theme to which he returns several times and are only resolved at the very end of the book (one reason why In Search of Lost Time is not a perfect translation – “perdu” means not only “lost” but also “wasted”, that felicitous ambiguity being unavailable in English and so the hint that Marcel is wasting his time is less obvious to anglophone readers).

His daydreams run up against reality when he sees the duchess for the first time at a local wedding (p.239 SM, p.190 TK). As ever, his first impressions of someone new who will become important to him are ambivalent. Marcel notes her long nose, on which he spies a spot, and the redness of her face.

Countess Greffulhe (model for Duchesse
de Guermantes) by Paul Helleu

For Proust, reality is always inferior to imagination. Marcel's disappointment is “immense” because she does not match up to the lady of his dreams, whose likeness he had conjured from portraits. He had pictured her “in the colours of a tapestry or a painted window, as living in another century” and it had not occurred to him that she might be like other, less magical women, such as “the wives of doctors and tradesmen”. But as he continues to gaze at her in the church, he begins to find her beautiful. “How lovely she is! What true nobility! It is indeed a proud Guermantes, the descendant of Geneviève de Brabant, that I have before me!” (p.243 SM, p.193 TK). We realise that Marcel is not, as he believes he is, just seeing “the sight, pure and simple, of her in the flesh”: he is also fleshing her out with a romantic ancestry.

When eventually her glance alights on Marcel, he believes he has found favour in her sight and at once falls in love with her (p.244 SM, p.194 TK).

Often after that day, when he walks along the Guermantes way, his doubts as to a literary career return (p.245 SM, p.194 TK). However, he notices that he has a necessary, but unfortunately not sufficient, aptitude for it as he has what might be termed a poetic sensitivity melded with a philosophical instinct. “Suddenly a roof, a gleam of sunlight reflected from a stone, the smell of a road would make me stop still, to enjoy the special pleasure that each of them gave me, and also because they appeared to be concealing, beneath what my eyes could see, something which they invited me to approach and seize from them, but which, despite all my efforts, I never managed to discover.” For Keats, the reaction to the roof, the stone and the road is all that is required for the “negative capability” of a poet, who should accept this state of half-knowledge and not seek, as Marcel does in vain, to gain access to some hidden meaning that lies buried in the objects. Marcel's impetus towards such a penetralium is probably a result of Proust having been a philosophy student (he had completed a bachelor's degree in literature and philosophy at the Sorbonne). One of the perennial problems of philosophy is that which arises from the distinction between reality and appearance. The question, which has troubled philosophers since Plato introduced his Allegory of the Cave (see The Republic, Book VII), is how we can come to know reality when we only have direct access to appearances: our senses merely perceive various contingent attributes of an object such as its weight, hardness, colour etc. How can we penetrate through the appearance, and to the reality, of Marcel's roof or stone? The suggestion of this passage is that (contra Keats) such percipience is the job of the poet or novelist.

Marcel cannot understand why the line of the roof or the colour of the stone seemed to be “ready to yield up to me the secret treasure of which they were themselves no more than the outer coverings” (p.246 SM, p.194 TK). He admits that these sensitive reactions are not enough to restore his hopes of becoming an author and poet “for each of them was associated with some material object devoid of any intellectual value, and suggesting no abstract truth. But at least they gave me an unreasoning pleasure, the illusion of a sort of fecundity of mind.”

Marcel never penetrates the inner reality that eludes him in the roof, the stone and the road; but one day on the Guermantes way, when the family have wandered further than usual and have to accept a lift back on a horse and carriage, he has a similar mysterious experience as he watches the twin steeples of a church moving relative to the carriage, themselves and a third steeple in another village. “At a bend in the road I experienced, suddenly, that special pleasure, which bore no resemblance to any other, when I caught site of the twin steeples of Martinville, on which the setting sun was playing, while the movement of the carriage and the windings of the road seemed to keep them continually changing their position; and then of a third steeple, that of Vieuxvicq, which, although separated from them by a hill and a valley, and rising from rather higher ground in the distance, appeared none the less to be standing by their side.” (p.247 SM, p.196 TK). Again Marcel feels “I was not penetrating to the the full depth of my impression” but on this occasion he subjects that impression to a more thorough examination and is prompted to write down his thoughts. This translation into words gives him great happiness and rids him of his obsession with the steeples' concealed mystery. The Combray section then ends and Marcel's composition is forgotten about for several hundred pages before re-appearing briefly, but significantly, in Within a Budding Grove (A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs).

However, first Proust interposes the story of Swann in Love (Un amour de Swann), which takes place before Marcel is born but which he informs us he has been “told” with a seemingly “impossible” “accuracy of detail” (p.256 SM, p.203 TK) - Proust is defying our disbelief!