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...

Interwoven in the telling of Swann and Odette's romantic entanglement are three important factors in its development: the Verdurins' group which starts by bringing them together and ends by coming between them; Swann's consequent exile from high society; and the importance of music, in particular Vinteuil's sonata, in their relationship. In relation to the first two of those themes, Proust's skills as a portraitist and as an observer of subtle class distinctions are illustrated in his sketches of the attendees of both the Verdurins' bourgeois and the Marquise de Saint-Euverte's upper-class salons; while, in relation to the third theme, his profound appreciation of music is demonstrated by his thoughts on the sonata which is heard in both salons. The Verdurins' circle Proust commences Swann in Love with a description of the “little clan” who attend the Verdurins' salon. Immediately, with just one quote, he renders the personality of the group...

  After the momentary respite resulting from having waited outside the wrong bedroom window, Swann's hard time immediately resumes: “his jealousy, as it had been the shadow of his love” returns, which renews his imaginings of Odette tendering her love to another ( p.81 II Scott Moncrieff, p.301 Kilmartin ). “A fresh turn was given to the screw” when he remembers a look of admiration in her eye while Forcheville had been making a scene at the Verdurins'. And soon his suspicions are revived after she fails to answer the door one afternoon despite the porter telling him he believed her to be at home. He repeats his earlier behaviour of going round the back of her house, standing beneath her bedroom window and knocking on it. On receiving no answer this time, he later returns to her front door and she lets him in, telling him she had been asleep when he had called earlier. He believes her to be lying and his suspicions are confirmed upon reading a letter which she has given him to...

  At this point the novel moves away from Marcel's memories of his childhood and Combray as he narrates an event that occurred before his birth: Charles Swann's love affair with Odette de Cr é cy. This section is anomalous in that it is the only one out of chronological sequence (which is not to say that Proust never relates some shorter episodes out of order) and it is the only one relying on third-person narration (Dickens made the same switch from first- to third-person in The Old Curiosity Shop – but for very different reasons). All of this creates a technical problem: how does Marcel have access to all the details and, in particular, to Swann's emotions and even one of his dreams? The answer is to be found at the very end of the novel and allows us to reach a conclusion about the relationship between the author and the narrator that most critics are unwilling to draw. For now, however, that will have to wait. We have already met Swann as he was a neighbour at Combra...

  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 M éséglise 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 L é onie 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 h...

The narrative so far has mainly concentrated on Combray and its inhabitants. It is now time to take a look at its immediate surroundings. When Marcel's family go for a walk, they can take one of two routes: one which they call “Swann's way”, which is the route to the nearby village of M ésé glise that goes past Swann's country residence; or one which they call the “Guermantes way”, which goes to the seat of the aristocratic Guermantes family ( p.183 Scott Moncrieff, p.146 Kilmartin ). We are introduced first to Swann's way. During the family's walk along it, Marcel hopes to catch sight for the first time of the young Mlle Swann, with whom he already imagines himself in love after he discovered from her father that the distinguished novelist Bergotte is a frequent visitor and her “greatest friend” ( p.133 SM, p.107 TK ). As they pass by the grounds of Swann's house, “ an invisible bird, desperately attempting to make the day seem shorter, was exploring with a...

 In the second chapter of Combray (or the only chapter called Combray in the Scott Moncrieff (SM) and Kilmartin (TK) editions, their having called the first chapter Overture instead), we are introduced to a number of  characters, mainly local and of varying degrees of importance such as Aunt Léonie, M. Legrandin, Uncle Adolphe, the Lady in Pink, Bloch, M. Vinteuil, Gilberte, and Mme de Guermantes, and also to places and things which figure largely in Marcel's mind such as the church of Saint Hilaire, Swann's Way (also referred to as the Méséglise Way), the Guermantes Way and hawthorn blossom. Proust animates each brilliantly by a variety of techniques. Even buildings such as the church spring to life: "the worn old stones of [its spire] the setting sun now illumined no more than the topmost pinnacles, which, at the point where they entered that zone of sunlight and were softened and sweetened by it, seemed to have mounted suddenly far higher, to have become truly remot...

 And so we come to the one part of the novel that everyone who has heard of Proust, non-readers included, knows: the episode of the madeleine. Proust prepares by introducing the idea of voluntary memory. He describes this as the memory of the intellect and does not prize it very highly because "the pictures which that kind of memory shows us preserve nothing of the past itself" ( p.57 Scott Moncrieff, p.47 Terence Kilmartin ). Of our own past, he says: "It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm and reach of the intellect in some material object ... which we do not suspect", or to be more precise "in the sensation which that material object will give us". Rather, we can only recapture the past by way of an involuntary memory (a term which Proust coined) and we will discover in the final part of the novel, after a series of similar but lesser known ...