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3.2 Disenchantment

4 July 2004 / / 0 Comments

If the first half of the volume was an alternately dreamy and dreary description of the romance of the Guermantes, the second half is an attempt to contextualize it and explain Marcel’s severe disillusionment with them and their place in society. Their charm, he says, lies in the following:

The Guermantes were not only endowed with an exquisite quality of flesh, of hair, of transparency of gaze, but had a way of holding themselves, of walking, of bowing, of looking at one before they shook one’s hand, of shaking hands, which made them as different in all these respects from an ordinary member of fashionable society as he in turn was from a peasant in a smock. And despite their affability one asked oneself: “Have they not indeed the right, though they waive it, when they see us walk, bow, leave a room, do any of those things which when performed by them become as graceful as the flight of a swallow or the droop of a rose on its stem, to think: ‘These people are of a different breed from us, and we are the lords of creation’?” (455)

Remember that this comes in the context of Marcel having rejected the so-called intellectual social life, thinking it to be false, misleading, and a waste of time. Earlier, Proust had extensively celebrated the pleasure of frivolous association with silly young girls over any would-be meaningful conversation. He chooses to restate this theme at length early in the second half of The Guermantes Way, at a moment of frustration and boredom with Saint-Loup:

I had reached the point, at Balbec, of regarding the pleasure of playing with a troop of girls as less destructive of the spiritual life, to which at least it remains alien, than friendship, the whole effort of which is directed towards making us sacrifice the only part of ourselves that is real and incommunicable (otherwise than by means of art) to a superficial self which, unlike the other, finds no joy in its own being, but rather a vague, sentimental glow at feeling itself supported by external props, hospitalized in an extraneous individuality, where, happy in the protection that is afforded it there, it expresses its well-being in warm approval and marvels at qualities which it would denounce as failings and seek to correct in itself. (409)

Again, the emphasis is on how friendship saps the soul, how it takes up valuable time and spiritual resources. Again, Proust stresses that people are not so malleable as to gain insight and growth from a supposed interchange of ideas; rather, he insists, it leads one to water down one’s self-possessed ideas in the service of illusory connections.
Coming as it does after long passages about how people’s passions and desires can turn on a dime (Marcel himself, Swann, Saint-Loup, Albertine, etc.), the repeated emphasis on a fortress mentality towards one’s own personality seems incongruous. If past feelings can become as alien to one’s own self as a country to which you’ve never been, suitable for study but never knowable immanently, why protect the inner self from such violence that is visited upon it by friendship?
The book is not a treatise and Proust is attempting to explain, iteratively, what he sees around him, which encompasses both radical changes in one’s own self at the same time that clear spirits prevail throughout, as with Elstir and Bergotte. (Though Bergotte is showing his age and is a shadow of his former self.) Artistic creation takes place over time and may evolve, but Proust evidently advocates a hermetic mentality towards such an act preserves whatever spirit informs it, rather than allowing it to be corrupted by the standards of the day.
It is the standards that Proust seems most irritated with by the end of The Guermantes Way. His attacks on the Guermantes revolve around the sheer banality of their culture, and the relentless conformity that informs it. There is both disappointment and anger in his reaction, and the two responses aren’t quite synchronized. The disappointment is one of the larger themes, one of having chased after something that seemed distinct and unique, but turned out to be the same old crap:

After having scaled the inaccessible heights of the name Guermantes, on descending the inner slope of the life of the Duchess, I felt on finding there the names, familiar elsewhere, of Victor Hugo, Franz Hals and, I regret to say, Vibert, the same astonishment that an explorer, after having taken into account, in order to visualize the singularity of the native customs in some wild valley of Central America or Northern Africa, its geographical remoteness, the strangeness of its place-names, of its flora, feels on discovering, once he has made his way through a screen of giant aloes or machineels, inhabitants who are engaged in reading Voltaire’s Merope or Alzire. (545)

However tedious I found the Guermantes’, however shapeless I found the endless descriptions of their mores and unique manners, I can sympathize with this crushing despair, as well as the miserable sense of embarrassment that accompanies it, the sense of having bought into a system that has ultimately provided no benefit whatsoever, not even novelty. That it happens without the standard plot twist of a societal mishap or misunderstanding, or some patently unjust act, leaves the focus firmly on the development of Marcel’s own views of the culture in which he has invested.
Yet there is petty anger as well, and Proust’s deployment of it is too vicious to make the haughty, resigned disappointment of the above passage ring entirely true. A few samples:

As though corrupted by the nullity of life in society, the intelligence and sensibility of Mme de Guermantes were too vacillating for disgust not to follow pretty swiftly in the wake of infatuation (leaving her still ready to be attracted by the kind of cleverness which she had alternately sought and abandoned) and for the charm which she had found in some warm-hearted man not to change, if he came too often to see her, sought too freely from her a guidance which she was incapable of giving him, into an irritation which she believed to be produced by her admirer but which was in fact due to the utter impossibility of finding pleasure when one spends all one’s time seeking it. The Duchess’s vagaries of judgment spared no one, except her husband. He alone had never loved her…M. de Guermantes for his part, pursuing a single type of feminine beauty but seeking it in mistresses whom he constantly replaced, had, once he had left them, and to share with him in mocking them, one lasting and identical partner. (489)
The life of the Duchess was by no means easy. M. de Guermantes only became generous and human again for a new mistress, who would, as it generally happened, take the Duchess’s side. (500)

Nasty stuff, and Proust continues with it at length, expressing the same vigor in his disapproval and gossip as he did in his infatuation in the first half of the book. I remarked earlier that Proust reminded me of The Good Soldier in the way that the narrative shifted unreliably to reflect the currents of the narrator’s thoughts. The Guermantes Way tells a very simple story of the extremes of enchantment and disillusionment, but it is the credence that is built up in both parts that prevents the final judgment from being wholly negative. In light of previous developments of the book, his disgust is too calculatedly over the top to displace completely the earlier aesthetic joy (even if I found it fairly dull). In fact, Marcel’s arc closely mirrors that of Swann with Odette, Saint-Loup with Rachel, and to some extent, Marcel himself with Albertine:

Mme de Guermantes’s mind attracted me just because of what it excluded (which was precisely the substance of my own thoughts) and everything which, by virtue of that exclusion, it had been able to preserve, that seductive vigour of supple bodies which no exhausting reflexion, no moral anxiety or nervous disorder has deformed. Her mind, of a formation so anterior to my own, was for me the equivalent of what had been offered me by the gait and the bearing of the girls of the little band along the sea-shore. Mme de Guermantes offered me, domesticated and subdued by civility, by respect for intellectual values, all the energy and charm of a cruel little girl of one of the noble families round Combray who from her childhood had been brought up in the saddle, had tortured cats, gouged out the eyes of rabbits, and, instead of having remained a pillar of virtue, might equally well have been…the most brilliant mistress of the Prince de Sagan, But she was incapable of understanding what I had looked for in her–the charm of her historic name–and the tiny quantity of it that I had found in her, a rustic survival from Guermantes…A misunderstanding that is entirely natural, and one that will always exist between a young dreamer and a society woman, but nevertheless profoundly disturbs him, so long as he has not yet discovered the nature of his imaginative faculties and has not yet resigned himself to the inevitable disappointments he is destined to find in people, as in the theatre, in travel and indeed in love. (522)

In a self-pitying manner, he seems to shoulder some of the blame on himself, just as Swann was painted as having built Odette up into an internal image wholly unlikely the actual woman. The slightly obnoxious tone beneath it (the combined forces of disappointment and anger serving to undermine each other) indicates, however, that Marcel has not really been damaged, not to the extent that Swann was. Disappointed and annoyed, but not mortally wounded. Compared to the drama of Swann’s infatuation and despair, it is calculatedly smaller. And it is with this echo firmly in mind that Proust brings Swann back at the very end of the volume, to drag the book once more back to serious topics. Swann by this point is easily one of the most likable characters, and it’s pretty obvious why he hasn’t had much to say for the entire volume. And his announcement in the final pages puts an uneasy stamp on what the decorative flourishes that have made up the last 600 pages. He declines an invitation to go to Italy with the Guermantes, and having taken offense, the Duchess demands to know why:

“Very well, give me in one word the reason why you can’t come to Italy.”
“But, my dear lady, it’s because I shall then have been dead for several months. According to the doctors I’ve consulted, by the end of the year the thing I’ve got won’t in any case leave me more than three or four months to live, and even that is a generous estimate,” replied Swann with a smile.
“What’s that you say?” cried the Duchess, stopping for a moment on her way to the carriage and raising her beautiful, melancholy blue eyes, now clouded by uncertainty. Placed for the first time in her life between two duties as incompatible as getting into her carriage to go out to dinner and showing compassion for a man who was about to die, she could find nothing in the code of conventions that indicated the right line to follow; not knowing which to choose, she felt obliged to pretend not to believe that the latter alternative need be seriously considered, in order to comply with the first, which at the moment demanded less effort, and thought that the best way of settling the conflict would be to deny that any existed. “You’re joking,” she said to Swann.
“It would be a joke in charming taste,” he replied ironically. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I’ve never said a word to you about my illness before. But since you asked me, and since now I may die at any moment…But whatever I do I mustn’t make you late; you’re dining out, remember.” (618)

The back and forth continues for a while until they do go off to dinner, with the Duke complaining about how difficult the Duchess is:

The Duke felt no compunction in speaking thus of his wife’s ailments and his own to a dying man, for the former interested him more and therefore appeared to him more important. And so it was simply from good breeding and good fellowship that, after politely showing us out, he shouted in a stentorian voice from the porch to Swann, who was already in the courtyard: “You, now, don’t let yourself be alarmed by the nonsense of those damned doctors. They’re fools. You’re as sound as a bell. You’ll bury us all!” (620)

And so the volume ends, with a scenario contrived to make the Guermantes look as bad as possible, not able to express a bit of sincere concern for a terminally ill man. Whatever their redeeming aesthetic value, it’s a fair dead certainty that Proust has his readers on the same page at this point, and ready to move on.

3.1.4 Polite Society

21 June 2004 / / 0 Comments

The emphasis on the decay beneath the polite, dull society of the Guermantes mirrors the decline of the emotional vividness of Marcel’s existence. Part of this is ascribable to Marcel himself not playing a huge role in the proceedings, but even when he does, there is a lifelessness to it all. Only a few times does he drop hints as to the nature of what is going on, which form the thin backbone of the first half of the book, and a good part of the second. It is this: just as Marcel had earlier found that he could enjoy the company of some silly girls more than any profound conversation with intellectuals, he is here slowly discovering that such high-minded conversation has only the most tenuous link to interaction. Several times, he encounters people behaving strangely with him, and several times he realizes that although he had assumed that their words and actions were in response to his own, it is actually nothing more than a spark escaping from their own solipsistic existence.
Legrandin, dull even by the standards of The Guermantes Way, snaps at Marcel at one point:

“You might at least have the civility to begin by saying how d’ye do to me,” he replied, without offering me his hand and in a coarse and angry voice which I had never suspected him of possessing, a voice which, having no rational connexion with what he ordinarily said, had another more immediate and striking connexion with something he was feeling. For the fact of the matter is that, since we are determined always to keep our feelings to ourselves, we have never given any thought to the manner in which we should express them. And suddenly there is within us a strange and obscene animal making itself heard, whose tones may inspire as much alarm as the person who receives the involuntary, elliptical and almost irresistible communication of one’s defect or vice as would the sudden avowal indirectly and outlandishly proffered by a criminal who can no longer refrain from confessing to a murder of which one had never imagined him to be guilty. I knew, of course, that idealism, even subjective idealism, did not prevent great philosophers from still having hearty appetites or from presenting themselves with untiring perseverance for election to the Academy. But really Legrandin had no need to remind people so often that he belonged to another planet when all his uncontrollable impulses of anger or affability were governed by the desire to occupy a good position on this one. (208)

From this he later concludes that Norpois, who insulted him behind his back earlier, was acting out of similarly unknowable motives. And thus:

What we remember of our conduct remains unknown to our nearest neighbor; what we have forgotten that we have ever said, or indeed what we never did say, flies to provoke hilarity in another planet, and the image that other people form of our actions and demeanour no more resembles our own than an inaccurate tracing, on which for the black line we find an empty space and for a blank area an inexplicable contour, resembles the original drawing. (281)

This is, again, an almost Wittgensteinian notion of speech, yet Proust allows for sudden anomalous expressions, as though the absence of semantics in the translation of internal feeling to external behavior produces inherent imperfections. And as the behavior of Marcel’s associates is more circumscribed by society, so their deviations become more apparent, as they progress from silly teenage exclamations of intuitive feelings to becoming models of decorum. Ironically, this exposes their own preoccupations more, since the deviations are easy to spot.
The most blatant example of this disparity is Marcel’s relation to M. de Charlus. Charlus is, as Proust will discuss at great length, homosexual, and his interest in Marcel is so assaultive and histrionic (not to mention manic-depressive) that the narrative strains credulity in attempting to portray Marcel as fairly oblivious to Charlus’s quirks. (Alain Delon played Charlus in Swann in Love, but hell, Rip Taylor probably could have pulled it off.) But coming after hundreds of pages of genteel boredom, Charlus is vastly entertaining. A sample:

“Let us return to yourself,” he said, “and my plans for you…Given a very considerable lead over your contemporaries, who knows whether you may not perhaps become what some eminent man of the past might have been if a beneficent spirit had revealed to him, among a generation that knew nothing of them, the secrets of steam and electricity. Do not be foolish, do not refuse for reasons of tact and discretion. Try to understand that, if I do you a great service, I do not expect my reward from you to be any less great. It is many years now since people in society ceased to interest me. I have but one passion left, to seek to redeem the mistakes of my life by conferring the benefit of my knowledge on a soul that is still virgin and capable of being fired by virtue…Perhaps in teaching you the great secrets of diplomacy I might recover a taste for them myself, and begin at last to do things of real interest in which you would have an equal share. But before I can discover this I must see you often, very often, every day.” (301)

Though it’s a comical example, it again paints an exchange in which the subtext is, by a huge margin, exclusively within the mind of only one of the participants. Though Charlus has a unique manner of speaking, he has done reasonably well in society, and has somehow kept his own predilections from surfacing in speech.
When Marcel’s grandmother falls to her deathbed pages later, the effect is paradoxical; the grandmother, unconscious and dying, communicates more to her family than all those in high society have up until that point. It’s this irony that lies when Marcel recalls his mother chastising him over his infatuation with Mme de Guermantes:

“You really must stop hanging about trying to meet Mme de Guermantes. You’re becoming a laughing-stock. Besides, look how ill your grandmother is, you really have something more serious to think about than waylaying a woman who doesn’t care a straw about you,” instantaneously–like a hypnotist who brings you back from the distant country in which you imagined yourself to be, and opens your eyes for you, or like the doctor who, by recalling you to a sense of duty and reality, cures you of an imaginary disease in which you have been wallowing–had awakened me from an unduly protracted dream. (385)

This memory isn’t mentioned until the second part of the volume, but since it occurs chronologically in the first part, it serves as the epitaph to his infatuation with the Guermantes, since he shortly goes on the warpath against them.

3.1.3 Grandmother’s Death

21 June 2004 / / 1 Comment

At the end of the first half of The Guermantes Way, Marcel’s grandmother dies. Over the course of fifty pages, she slowly degenerates, is treated by doctors, and finally passes on. It’s the most memorable sequence in the volume, and even without its surrounding material, it would be a remarkable deathbed sequence, sentimental but not mawkish, detached without being impersonal.
Marcel’s grandmother figured heavily in the second volume as a protective, benevolent figure, merging with the placid scenery of Balbec. She disappears for the first part of this book, only to reappear with a phone call to Marcel in which he, somewhat sadly, finally feels independent of her. Shortly thereafter, he is shocked to see her:

We never see the people who are dear to us save in the animated system, the perpetual motion of our incessant love for them, which, before allowing the images that their faces present to reach us, seizes them in its vortex and flings them back upon the idea that we have always had of them, makes them adhere to it, coincide with it…[here follows a verbose passage in which Proust seems to be putting off saying the inevitable]…And–like a sick man who, not having looked at his own reflexion for a long time, and regularly composing the features which he never sees in accordance with the ideal image of himself that he carries in his mind, recoils on catching sight in the glass, in the middle of an arid desert of a face, of the sloping pink protuberance of a nose as huge of one of the pyramids of Egypt–I saw, sitting on the sofa beneath the lamp, red-faced, heavy and vulgar, sick, vacant, letting her slightly crazed eyes wander over a book, a dejected old woman whom I did not know. (142)

And what follows from there is a private struggle between Marcel’s grandmother and her impending death, which is played out uncomfortably in public. Legrandin spies the family in a cab one day and gives a look of shock:

She had seemed to be foundering, slithering into the abyss, clinging desperately to the cushions which could scarcely hold back the headlong plunge of her body, her hair disheveled, her eyes wild, no longer capable of facing the assault of the images which their pupils no longer had the strength to bear. She had appeared, although I was beside her, to be plunged into that unknown world in the heart of which she had already received the blows of which she bore the marks when I had looked up at her in the Champs-Elysees, her had, her face, her coat deranged by the hand of the invisible angel with whom she had wrestled. (326)

Twenty-five pages later, it is continuing inexorably, but by this point Marcel’s grandmother is so central and so present in her final struggle that she seems to warp the environment around her to draw others in:

I found myself in the presence of a sort of miracle. Accompanied by an incessant low murmur, my grandmother seemed to be singing us a long, joyous song which filled the room, rapid and musical. I soon realized that it was scarcely less unconscious, that it was as purely mechanical, as the hoarse rattle that I had heard before leaving the room. Perhaps to a slight extent it reflected some improvement brought about by the morphine. Principally it was the result (the air not passing quite in the same way through the bronchial tubes) of a change in the register of her breathing. Released by the twofold action of the oxygen and the morphine, my grandmother’s breath no longer laboured, no longer whined, but, swift and light, glided like a skater towards the delicious fluid. Perhaps the breath, imperceptible as that of the wind in the hollow stem of a reed, was mingled in this song with some of those more human sighs which, released at the approach of death, suggest intimations of pain or happiness in those who have already ceased to feel, and came now to add a more melodious accent, but without changing its rhythm, to that long phrase which rose, soared still higher, then subsided, to spring up once more, from the alleviated chest, in pursuit of the oxygen. (352)

(Amazing passage, no?) Finally:

Who knows whether, without my grandmother’s even being conscious of them, countless happy and tender memories compressed by suffering were not escaping from her now, like those lighter gases which had long been compressed in the cylinders? It was as though everything that she had to tell us was pouring out, that it was us that she was addressing with this prolixity, this eagerness, this effusion. At the foot of the bed, convulsed by every gasp of this agony, not weeping but at moments drenched with tears, my mother stood with the unheeding desolation of a tree lashed by the rain and shaken by the wind…Suddenly my grandmother half rose, made a violent effort, like someone struggling to resist an attempt on his life…At that moment my grandmother opened her eyes…The hiss of the oxygen had ceased; the doctor moved away from the bedside. My grandmother was dead. (357)

I don’t have a lot to say about the sequence–it speaks for itself as a self-contained entity–but coming as it does in the middle of one of the driest parts of the book, its self-contained force obscures its connections to what surrounds it. The seemingly intentional striving for a dramatic, profound climax contracts with the apparent formlessness of what’s gone before. Underneath the polite nothings of the Guermantes and high society, the entire volume is, in fact, suffused with death and decay. Bergotte, aging and beginning to see the renown that most great writers never live to see, is a shell of man, and even Marcel’s affection for his work has faded. “Nice guy” Saint-Loup beats a man who solicits him for sex. Bloch is so alienated from his own faith and so attracted to high society that he ignores the implications of the Dreyfus case. And Swann, as is revealed at the end of the volume, is sick with cancer.

3.1.2 Saint-Loup

18 April 2004 / / 0 Comments

To return to a quote from last time, having left this for a few months:

Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success.

I don’t know if Proust is referring to Wordsworth here, but it’s the Wordsworth of Tintern Abbey that this passage brings up for me, and how he implies an almost inviolate integrity of the self and its memories, one which Proust has already systematically destroyed in Swann’s Way and is now extending to social networks themselves. Very little happens in the entirety of The Guermantes Way; the main plot points are his grandmother’s death and his eventual disenchantment with the Guermantes (on this point, Marcel is a lot more patient than I would have been), and the final revelation at the end of the volume, which I’ll mention later. The main function of the book is to establish how tenuous Marcel’s images of people are, and how the brightest things that he saw earlier have faded or have been completely replaced.
Saint-Loup was one of the most likable characters in Within a Budding Grove, and he’s still likable here: his basic goodness, politeness, and generosity contrast favorably with the pettiness and amorality of most of the other high society characters. But he is a Guermantes, and to the extent that the book is an indictment of the Guermantes way (which, believe me, it is), Saint-Loup is included. He still comes off as the best of the lot, not least for his steadfast anti-Dreyfusism, which appears to come from a genuine moral stance rather than simple trendiness. Yet the conclusion on him is, I think, that his inability to be critical damns him to complicity.
His good side is on display at a party:

It occurred to me on one of these evenings to tell a mildly amusing story about Mme Blandais, but I stopped at once, remembering that Saint-Loup knew it already, and that when I had started to tell it to him the day after my arrival he had interrupted me with: “You told me that before, at Balbec.” I was surprised, therefore, to find him begging me to go on and assuring me that he did not know the story and that it would amuse him immensely…And throughout the story he kept his feverish and enraptured gaze fixed alternately on myself and on his friends. I realized only after I had finished, amid general laughter, that it had struck him that this story would give his comrades a good idea of my wit, and that it was for this reason that he had pretended nto to know it. Such is the stuff of friendship. (103)

The story about Mme Blandais is never mentioned; it’s not important. Marcel’s affection for Saint-Loup here is nearly unmatched. So it comes as a disappointment shortly after Saint-Loup appropriates one of Marcel’s trite conclusions about the world:

I had reckoned without the reverse side of Robert’s cordial admiration for myself and certain other people. That admiration was complemented by so an entire an assimilation of their ideas that after a day or two, he would have completely forgotten that those ideas were not his own. And so, in the matter of my modest thesis, Saint-Loup, for all the world as though it had always dwelt in his own brain, and though I was merely poaching on his preserves, felt it incumbent upon him to greet my discovery with warm approval…
He paused for a moment, with the satisfied smile of one who had digested his dinner, dropped his monocle, and, fixing me with a gimlet-like stare, said to me challengingly:
“All men with similar ideas are alike.”
No doubt he had completely for gotten that I myself had said to him only a few days earlier what on the other hand he had remembered so well. (119)

This gesture is as significant as the last. Saint-Loup is not a malicious person, but he possesses a certain thoughtlessness that, while generating moments of friendship, just as soon alienates Marcel when Saint-Loup treats those around him as sources from which to draw elaborations of his personality. Not that Saint-Loup himself doesn’t suffer. When he gets involved with Rachel, the prostitute that Marcel and Bloch met in the previous volume, he is completely oblivious to her nature:

Robert was ignorant of almost all the infidelities of his mistress, and tormented himself over what were mere nothings compared with the real life of Rachel, a life which began every day only after he had left her. He was ignorant of almost all these infidelities. One could have told him of them without shaking his confidence in Rachel. For it is a charming law of nature, which manifests itself in the heart of the most complex social organisms, that we live in perfect ignorance of those we love. (292)

Proust generalizes Saint-Loup’s behavior to the world at large, but Saint-Loup’s is a particularly extreme case, somewhat like that of Swann but different in that Saint-Loup does not seem to go through the extreme mood swings that Swann did with Odette. He is merely happily oblivious, and pleased to defend that attitude. And for Proust at least, it blunts Saint-Loup’s virtue.

3.1.1 The Situation

8 February 2004 / / 0 Comments

Maybe it’s reading The Guermantes Way under drastically different circumstances than the first two books, or maybe it’s that by the third volume, you can no longer see clearly back to the beginning of the entire work, nor can you see anything like the end. But really, The Guermantes Way seems like a tougher slog in general, because there’s no longer a clear narrative thread, and there is less philosophical substance (Proust having dispatched the idea of it in the previous two volumes) than previously. Instead, there’s endless parties with endlessly revolving characters, with no clear end and no clear direction.
That’s the way it reads for the first three hundred pages. There’s nothing to match the drama of Swann and Odette, and no passages as concentrated as those in the first section of Within a Budding Grove, though there are some nice bits in the later pages. They’re not enough to stave off the feeling that Proust’s leviathan has run aground and is flailing.
That’s not to say that it is not a compelling portrayal. Marcel, now a young adult, wanders through the upper social circles of Paris and sees characters, mostly seen before, dithering about in their own preoccupations. He does very little; he seemingly has no obligations. The rest of the crowd, including such past charmers as Cottard, Bloch, M. de Charlus, and Mme de Villeparisis, evince no development whatsoever, just a presentation of their often shallow selves. In “Swann in Love,” they provided the background tableaux against which Swann acted out his passions. Here, with Marcel considerably less involved and active than he was in “Place-Names: The Place” (in Balbec), there is only the peopled scenery. Marcel’s infatuation with the elite Guermantes clan, on display during a visit to the theater where he rhapsodizes over the Princess’s dress, and his concern with the art of the actress Berma: these things are the raw material of his memories, and they don’t resonate as earlier passages did because they are so particular to their time and place, shorn of passions that readers in which readers can recognize themselves.
This network of private, unique connections is what he’s after:

Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years. And great fatigue followed by a good night’s rest can to a certain extent help us to do so. For in order to make us descend into the most subterranean galleries of sleep, where no reflexion from overnight, no gleam of memory comes to light up the interior monologue–if the latter does not itself cease–fatigue followed by rest will so thoroughly turn over the soil and penetrate the bedrock of our bodies that we discover down there, where our muscles plunge and twist in their ramifications and breathe in new life, the garden where we played in our childhood. There is no need to travel in order to see it again; we must dig down inwardly to discover it. (89)

The problem with such an approach, as Proust intimates, is that without an external point of reference, with only an excavation of purely internal sensations and impressions, the relation of one’s own mind and memories to common, shared experience does not exist. In going over and over the shared experience in the first part of The Guermantes Way, he leaves readers very little to grasp, other than portraits of scenery.
It is not until three-hundred pages in, halfway through the volume, that the death of Marcel’s grandmother gives shape to what’s gone before. Given that the second part of the book accelerates rapidly, the contrast feels intentional. It serves to make the first part even more elusive.

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