Reading Proust - A Running Commentary

  This section, Place-Names: The Name, performs a double balancing act. On the one hand, as the final part of Swann's Way it is a counterpoise to the first part. The opening few pages of Combray start in the present with the narrator as an older man lying awake and thinking about places he has slept, before going on to recall his boyhood in Combray; whereas Place-Names: The Name starts in the past with the narrator's recollection of his youthful relationship with Gilberte Swann, before the last few pages end in the present with his reflections on the changes he has seen. Thus the older narrator in the present literally bookends the series of remembrances that constitute the majority of Swann's Way. And on the other hand, it is the obverse of Place-Names: The Place (which forms part of Within A Budding Grove). The two similarly titled parts represent, respectively, the already familiar dichotomy of imagination and reality (we will later learn in Time Regained that real...