Week ending 01/21: Swann's Way, to page 224 (to the paragraph beginning: “It is perhaps from another impression which I received at Montjouvain...”)

[Rajesh]

week 3

[Natalie]

Have we discusssed the "Two ways" here? Page 137 of the Lydia Davis translation:

“For in the environs of Combray there were two “ways” which one could go for a walk, in such opposite directions that in fact we left our house by different doors when we wanted to go one way or the other: the Meseglise-la-Vineuse way, which we also called the way by Swann’s because we passed in front of M. Swann’s estate when we went in that direction, and the Guermantes Way. About Meseglise-la-Vinesue, to tell the truth, I never knew anything but the ‘way’ and some strangers who used to come and stroll around Combray on a Sunday, people whom, this time, even my aunt, along with all the rest of us, ‘did not know at all’ and whom because of this we assumed to be ‘people who must have come from Meseglise.’ As for Guermantes, I was to know more about it one day, but only much later; and during the whole of my adolescence, if for me Meseglise was something as inaccessible as the horizon, concealed from view, however far we went, by the folds of a landscape that no longer resembled the landscape of Combray, Guermantes, on the other hand, appeared to me only as the terminus, more ideal than real, of its own ‘way’ a sort of abstract geographical expression like the line of the equator, like the pole, like the Orient.”

[Natalie]

I think that the two ways in general point to a duality that is often going on in the book: between the masculine and feminine, between the mother and the father; between the church and art; between the Verdurin circle and other circles, between the "demimonde" and the upper crust; etc.

[Lori]

I have always been confused as to what these two ways mean, to be honest! Not that I haven't spent time trying to figure it out...

[Natalie]

Lori, I am trying to figure it out myself. I think that they must be significant---Swann and Guermantes are two of the most important names in the book.

[Dan]

I've always thought that the Guermantes Way was the aristocratic, high society way, involving titles and family wealth (The Top of Society Way), while Swann's Way was the prosperous (Upper Class Way) of doctors and stockbrokers of recent, not inherited, wealth. The young narrator sees these as two totally different ways that are completely separate. Two very different worlds.

A duality, between two ways of life.

[Jasmine]

Regarding Dan's reading... What is the narrator's family's position in society? This never seems very clear to me. Are they also straddling some place between successful professionals and the upper class/aristocracy?

[Dan]

Well in real life Marcel's father was a prominent doctor so I would say they were well off, but not of society. His grandmother and aunts (in the novel) makes fun of Swann for hanging around people "above his level" Swann father was a stockbroker. Little did they realize how high in society Swann was connected to.

There is a certain stability to life in Swann's Way. Things have not changed for a long long time - aristocratic life was not very different than centuries earlier. And for all that time, the strata of the society was separate and fairly rigid. (You were born a Prince, or not).

Physically the two ways or paths are different, and the two ways stand for that difference through their different names - and there is little talk here of factories or farmers and that level, outside of family servants.

Day to day life for all levels of society in the late 19th century was still remarkably similar to life lived in the 18th, 17th and 16th century.

I don't think Marcel's family straddled the aristocracy. There are very few instances I can remember where they do. In other words, Marcel's father read about major events in the newspaper, he was not part of them. Swann is from the same class as Marcel's family, and he does mingle with the highest levels of of European society.

Marcel is keen to hang out with the top and famous people, but has a hard time even getting an invitation to lunch at Swann's.