"One morning, Saint-Loup confessed to me that he had written to my grandmother to give her news of me and to suggest to her that, since there was a telephone service functioning between Paris and Doncières, she might make use of it to speak to me. In short, that very day she was to give me a call, and he advised me to be at the post office at about a quarter to four. The telephone was not yet at that date as commonly in use as it is today. And yet habit requires so short a time to divest of their mystery the sacred forces with which we are in contact, that, not having had my call at once, my immediate thought was that it was all very long and very inconvenient, and I almost decided to lodge a complaint. Like all of us nowadays, I found too slow for my liking, in its abrupt changes, the admirable sorcery whereby a few moments are enough to bring before us, invisible but present, the person to whom we wish to speak, and who, while still sitting at his table, in the town in which he lives (in my grandmother's case, Paris), under another sky than ours, in weather that is not necessarily the same, in the midst of circumstances and preoccupations of which we know nothing and of which he is about to inform us, finds himself suddenly transported hundreds of miles (he and all the surroundings in which he remains immured) within reach of our ear, at the precise moment which our fancy has ordained. And we are like the person in the fairy-tale for whom a sorceress, at his express wish, conjures up, in a supernatural light, his grandmother or his betrothed in the act of turning over a book, of shedding tears, of gathering flowers, close by the spectator and yet very far away, in the place where she actually is at the moment. We need only, so that the miracle may be accomplished, apply our lips to the magic orifice and invoke---occasionally for rather longer than seems to us necessary, I admit---the Vigilant Virgins to whose voices we listen every day without ever coming to know their faces and who are our guardian angels in the dizzy realm of darkness whose portals they so jealously guard; the All-Powerful by whose intervention the absent rise up at our side, without our being permitted to set eyes on them; the Danaïds of the unseen who incessantly empty and fill and transmit to one another the urns of sound; the ironic Furies who, just as we were murmuring a confidence to a loved one, in the hope that no one could hear us, cry brutally: 'I'm listening!'; the ever-irritable handmaidens of the Mystery, the umbrageous priestesses of the Invisible, the Young Ladies of the Telephone.And as soon as our call has rung out, in the darkness filled with apparitions to which our ears alone are unsealed, a tiny sound, an abstract sound---the sound of distance overcome---and the voice of the dear one speaks to us.It is she, it is her voice that is speaking, that is there. But how far away it is! How often have I been unable to listen without anguish, as though, confronted by the impossibility of seeing, except after long hours of travel, the woman whose voice was so close to my ear, I felt more clearly the illusoriness in the appearance of the most tender proximity, and at what a distance we may be from the persons we love at the moment when it seems that we have only to stretch out our hands to seize and hold them. A real presence, perhaps, that voice that seemed so near---in actual separation! But a premonition also of an eternal separation! Many are the times, as I listened thus without seeing her who spoke to me from so far away, when it has seemed to me that the voice was crying to me from the depths out of which one does not rise again, and I have felt the anxiety that was one day to wring my heart when a voice would thus return (alone and attached no longer to a body which I was never to see again), to murmur in my ear words I longed to kiss as they issued from lips for ever turned to dust.That afternoon, alas, at Doncières, the miracle did not occur. When I reached the post office, my grandmother's call had already been received. I stepped into the booth; the line was engaged; someone was talking who probably did not realise that there was nobody to answer him, for when I raised the receiver to my ear, the lifeless piece of wood began to squeak like Punchinello; I silenced it, as one silences a puppet, by putting it back on its hook, but, like Punchinello, as soon as I picked it up again it resumed its gabblings. At length, giving up in despair and hanging up the receiver once and for all, I stifled the convulsions of this vociferous stump which kept up its chatter until the last moment, and went in search of the telephonist, who told me to wait a while; then I spoke, and after a few seconds of silence, suddenly I heard that voice which I mistakenly thought I knew so well; for always until then, every time that my grandmother had talked to me, I had been accustomed to follow what she said on the open score of her face, in which the eyes figured so largely; but her voice itself I was hearing this afternoon for the first time. And because that voice appeared to me to have altered in its proportions from the moment that it was a whole, and reached me thus alone and without the accompaniment of her face and features, I discovered for the first time how sweet that voice was; perhaps indeed it had never been so sweet as it was now, for my grandmother, thinking of me as being far away and unhappy, felt that she might abandon herself to an outpouring of tenderness which, in accordance with her principles of upbringing, she usually restrained and kept hidden. It was sweet, but also how sad it was, first of all on account of its very sweetness, a sweetness drained almost---more than any but a few human voices can ever have been---of every element of hardness, of resistance to others, of selfishness! Fragile by reason of its delicacy, it seemed constantly on the verge of breaking, of expiring in a pure flow of tears; then, too, having it alone beside me, seen without the mask of her face, I noticed in it for the first time the sorrows that had cracked it in the course of a lifetime.Was it, however, solely the voice that, because it was alone, gave me this new impression which tore my heart? Not at all; it was rather that this isolation of the voice was like a symbol, an evocation, a direct consequence of another isolation, that of my grandmother, for the first time separated from me. The commands or prohibitions which she constantly addressed to me in the ordinary course of life, the tedium of obedience or the fire of rebellion which neutralised the affection that I felt for her, were at this moment eliminated and indeed might be eliminated for ever (since my grandmother, no longer insisting on having me with her under her control, was in the act of expressing her hope that I would stay at Doncières altogether, or would at any rate extend my visit for as long as possible, since both my health and my work might benefit by the change); and so, what I held compressed in this little bell at my ear was our mutual affection, freed from the conflicting pressures which had daily counteracted it, and henceforth irresistible, uplifting me entirely. My grandmother, by telling me to stay, filled me with an anxious, an insensate longing to return. This freedom she was granting me henceforward, and to which I had never dreamed that she would consent, appeared to me suddenly as sad as my freedom of action might be after her death (when I should still love her and she would for ever have abandoned me). 'Granny!' I cried to her, 'Granny!' and I longed to kiss her, but I had beside me only the voice, a phantom as impalpable as the one that would perhaps come back to visit me when my grandmother was dead. 'Speak to me!' But then, suddenly, I ceased to hear the voice, and was left even more alone. My grandmother could no longer hear me; she was no longer in communication with me; we had ceased to be close to each other, to be audible to each other; I continued to call her, groping in the empty darkness, feeling that calls from her must also be going astray. I quivered with the same anguish which I had felt once before in the distant past, when, as a little child, I had lost her in a crowd, an anguish due less to my not finding her than to the thought that she must be searching for me, must be saying to herself that I was searching for her, an anguish not unlike that which I was later to feel, on the day when we speak to those who can no longer reply and when we long for them at least to hear all the things we never said to them, and our assurance that we are not unhappy. It seemed to me as though it was already a beloved ghost that I had allowed to lose herself in the ghostly world, and, standing alone before the instrument, I went on vainly repeating: 'Granny! Granny!' as Orpheus, left alone, repeats the name of his dead wife. I decided to leave the post office, and go and find Robert at his restaurant in order to tell him that, as I was half expecting a telegram which would oblige me to return to Paris, I wanted, just in case, to know the times of the trains. And yet, before reaching this decision, I felt I must make one more attempt to invoke the Daughters of the Night, the Messengers of the Word, the faceless divinities; but the capricious Guardians had not deigned once again to open the miraculous portals, or, more probably, had been unable to do so; untiringly though they invoked, as was their custom, the venerable inventor of printing and the young prince, collector of Impressionist paintings and driver of motor-cars (who was Captain de Borodino's nephew), Gutenberg and Wagram, those telephone exchanges, left their supplications unanswered, and I came away, feeling that the Invisible would continue to turn a deaf ear."
Induction into the Guermantes Way"Sometimes, hidden in the heart of its name, the fairy is transfomed to suit the life of our imagination, by which she lives; thus it was that the atmosphere in which Mme de Guermantes existed in me, after having been for years no more than the reflexion of a magic lantern and of a stained glass window, began to lose its colours when quite other dreams impregnated it with the bubbling coolness of swift-flowering streams ." (MKE 3)Expectation. This third volume of La Recherche, "The Guermantes Way" is as irresistible to the solitary reader as a kaleidoscope is in the hands of a quiet child, for it presents the Guermantes Way as seen through the social kaleidoscope of Proust's expectant imagination. The Guermantes name is one of enchantment for we are always enchanted by that which we do not know. Through Proust, we make acquaintance with a dream and a name long memorized in the form of the ditty, " Gloire à la Marquise de Guermantes", that the wet nurse sang to the narrator as a child. It is a name of famous tapestries and a name of poetic domain that has long occupied obsessive daydreams needing to be set free. If the sound of the wind were to be put to sheet music, so for the narrator should the witticisms of Oriane, Duchesse de Guermantes.Dazzled by what we see, the kaleidoscope becomes a perfect metaphor for Proust's writing. Just as light travels through space until it hits an object and then reflects back to you, so do Proust's thoughts and observations that keep shifting, creating multiple reflections of the characters he's created, affecting how we begin to see things constantly changing, evolving, questioning what it is that we think we know. We never see the same image twice and are always seeing the effect of time on everything. Nothing is ever the same.The reader asks herself," What is it that I am not seeing?" When she really should be asking herself, "How can I see things differently?" The kaleidoscope shifts, dishevels, and rearranges perception. We look at the same pieces of colored glass, but each glance tricks us into believing that we are viewing something new and to view it with awe. Proust also stretches out and rewires our brains to see the world differently. The long sentences, the 90 - or-so page dinner scene get the reader to activate areas of the brain more verbal. Reading Proust we evolve.Like the narrator, the solitary reader also " knows more books than people and literature better than life" and understands how a genuflection to the Guermantes creates a crystallization in the mind , the necessity of which cannot ever be taken lightly. We become infected by the Guermantes spirit. The commonsense reader however realizes the potency of this magic dust is unlikely to last. Living in the world of ideas, reading between the lines, taken in by outward appearances, we wake up to our "schtubidity", nimrods that we have become and the role we have played in the absurd farce of the life of the social world. Envy truly makes us blind."How very well phrased!"Having discovered beauty in Balbec, we can now recognize the ugliness of the Faubourg Saint-Germain making us seek consolation in another shake of the kaleidoscope. The socially insecure, falling for the irrational, deceptive charm of a historic name, paying homage to its benefactress playing the part of a great lady, spending time in her company, gradually tugs away at the gossamer veil of delusion. Proust resorts to humor and makes us laugh at the zoo story unfolding infront of us and makes us feel grateful that there exists between us a line of demarcation in the form of a social barrier. Usurped of a joy that he has been thirsting for, the narrator too becomes indifferent as has previously happened to him in the past. The solitary reader is satisfied with Proust's depiction of the society of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, of the Guermantes way, the superior way that drives people into raptures over cuisine and carnations, " an intoxication so artificial that it turns swiftly into boredom, into melancholy." ( MKE 751) Expecting a drawing room of Dresden figures, the narrator sees the Guermantes come to life only to disappoint his imagination, they become no longer worthy of their name. But they are not to blame for the simple truth is that we are " the lords of creation" that bestow upon them immeasurable admiration. If they have a family genie that has them pirouette in their aristocratic ballet, it is we who applaud their performance, and we do it with such gratitude believing ourselves clever in basking in their elegance that makes us forget the commonplace dullness of our lives. Preceding Picasso, Proust gives us a cubist interpretation of people. He sheds their layers and exposes their vulnerabilities. He sees a bourgeoisie society that is apathetic to the Dreyfus affair that makes him lose faith in the corrosive culture of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. He shows how people concern themselves with trivialities to avoid looking at the truth. Bequeathed a heritage, the Guermantes are simply linked to names that survive in castles and a geneology tree that exists in stained glass. "Words do not change their meaning as much in centuries as names do for us in the space of a few years. Our memories and our hearts are not large enough to be able to remain faithful." (MKE 729)We can now say that we have been to Combray and visited the Guermantes Way! The mysterious Guermantes name, the unimaginable life has been imagined and found to be as wanting as a "green" carnation.
What do You think about The Guermantes Way (2005)?
Guermantes Way is like the pretentious, over-educated older sister of Budding Grove who constantly outdoes her little sister at everything. She's longer, she's more boring, she's more interesting, she's wittier and funnier, and she just loves to show off how much she knows. We really get to know Saint Loup in this volume, as well as the Guermantes family in general - who are some pretty superficial crazies anyway. M., being a creep, stalks Mme. de Guermantes everyday on her morning walks, and befriends her nephew, Saint-Loup and is like "oh can I have that picture of your aunt? ...why? uh......." - whatever, we've all been there right? ..right? ....anyone? anyone? Bueller?We also get historical in this one with the Dreyfus affair as the background. There are a few Jewish characters, Bloch who is totally oblivious about being unwanted and annoying, and Charles Swann who of course we love and sympathize with since he married a whore. The Dreyfus affair really wears Swann out, which is sad, but as a reader you're really distracted by the total creepiness of Marcel so you get over it pretty quickly.This chapter also emerges us in, what every book ought to have, TONS OF SOCIETY BITCHES. And they're all really obsessed with seeming witty (which I've learned from Balzac is REALLY important to French people). We get a LOT of Mme. de Guermantes superrr bitchy opinions about her friends and family. Like Princess de Parma and etc. We also hear lots of gossip about people we've met, like Charlus and his dead wife and M. de Norpois and his affair with Mme. de Villeparisis. SCANDALOUS. My only complaint about this volume is I felt like it talked about the lineage of the Guermantes for way too long, and like, the lineages of everyone in all of France. It got rather dry for a good 30-100 pages, but it picked up later.This book kind of kills Elstir in M.'s eyes a little since the Guermantes don't like his paintings. Whatever...bitches.There's a really funny scene (and witty, go figure) where B. de Charlus has given M. a book of Bergotte's (which happens pretty much right after he's all like "Bergotte sucks"), and then Charlus calls M. to his house and accuses him of slandering him because M. told people he would help him into society (which he did), and he says "Similarly, you did not even recognize on the binding of Bergotte's book the lintel of myosotis over the door of Balbec church. Could there have been a clearer way of saying to you: 'Forget me not!'?" I laughed out loud in an untrammeled geeky way, since it is totally absurd to read that much into such a thing.The book ends on a CLIFFHANGER. Guys, Proust is basically the Agatha Christie of 4000 page novel-y things that sorta don't have a plot and sorta don't have action verbs and stuff. It ends and its like, WILL M. BE INVITED TO THIS PARTY? You would die without knowing if you didn't ever read volume four. How could you live with that suspense? You couldn't. Onto V.4: Sodom + Gomorrah!
—David
how can a sociopath love society so much??because, make no mistake, that is what we are dealing with here.in this third installment, our dear narrator graduates from being a feeble child, from being a lovesick adolescent into a manipulating, stalking, social climbing creature who learns a lesson in disillusionment. cheers.for all his bookish intelligence, his overthinking, his lofty words, at the end of the day, he is just a pale sticky thing masturbating in society's stairwell. this is his idea of true love: "I was genuinely in love with Mme. de Guermantes. The greatest happiness that I could have asked of God would have been that he should send down on her every imaginable calamity, and that ruined, despised, stripped of all the privileges that separated her from me, having no longer any home of her own or people who would condescend to speak to her, she should come to me for asylum."THAT would be his greatest happiness?? dude..."I was less sad than usual because the melancholy of her expression, the sort of claustration which the startling hue of her dress set between her and the rest of the world, made her seem somehow lonely and unhappy, and this comforted me."he is such a little shit.so then how does he get to simultaneously have such refinement and linguistic elegance to make these beautiful observations:"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 in 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. "this is how salieri must have felt that such a wanker as mozart was given such talent.(and yes, i get all my history from peter schaffer)i do love proust, but it is not the way i love anyone i want to spend a lot of time with, and not the kind of love you feel for distant relations, where you kind of have to love them.i don't feel an obligatory book-lover's love for him; he moves me so often that i know my love is genuine, but he also kind of sickens me.because he writes these gross scenes:"My food was brought to me in a little panelled room upstairs. The lamp went out during dinner and the serving-girl lighted a couple of candles. Pretending that I could not see very well as I held out my plate while she helped me to potatoes, I took her bare forearm in my hand, as though to guide her. Seeing that she did not withdraw it, I began to fondle it, then, without saying a word, pulled her towards me, blew out the candles and told her to feel in my pocket for some money." you just know after the money-in-the-pocket routine, he went home and had himself a good scrawl, kevin spacey-in-se7en kind of way, in his notebooks piling to the ceiling. he pursues women the way he pursued his mother, with this obsessive need that once obtained is quickly discarded, as a scene in this book which i will not spoil for others makes most apparent. (incidentally,mommy is only mentioned once or twice in this volume - we are all grown up now)and why does that serving-girl scene gross me out so much? because i love byron, and he is known for his "falling upon chambermaids like a lightning bolt".what, ultimately, is the difference between byron and this guy? is it just a matter of proactivity vs passivity? because if byron had said that about a serving wench, i would have just sighed "oh, byron..." but this guy - suddenly pulling out his one tough-guy move, it just makes the skin crawl.he hasn't earned my belief as an irresistable lady-killer, and comes across instead as kind of rape-y.i picture him as a tiny, pale truman capote creature in the corner, complaining about the draft while trying to look down ladies' blouses and calling it love.unrelated to the last paragraph, the whole time i was reading this, all i could think of was this song, one of my all time favorites.and then i found that youtube video which was great because someone else had made the leap from recording studio to salon and made the visual for me just to use in this review. thanks, internet! (note - the video has changed, but the song remains the same...music pun intentional)this is a perfect song about the purity of nostalgia and hero-worship and all of that, with a different ending than proust offers, but i think,a more sweetly poignant ending. who knew there was a bigger downer than morrissey?it is a different situation entirely, of course, but the impulse of infatuation with someone you only know through reputation - these society women were the rock stars of their times. why am i dwelling so much on morrissey? cuz he is my madeleine.and this makes it sound like i didn't like this book, but that's not true. i am just focusing on what i felt the most strongly about. the first 200 pages were not terribly fun for me, despite an alarming number of bookmarks indicating my favorite passages. and then - dialogue! it was like a revelation - that's what has been missing! from then on i liked it a lot more, but less than the previous two volumes. i am giving it four, but shhh it really means 3.5. the parts that were good were very very good, and reminded me of another favorite non-book related piece of entertainment, but let's be honest - there were some dull bits here.in a novel about the emptiness of the social elite, the impulse is to side with, emotionally, the narrator over the shallow society types. but here, you really can't, because his fawning judgmental inertia is not heroic. he has done nothing to earn my love or readerly hurrahs. there are no heroes here. it is france.
—karen
4.5Of the three volumes I've read so far, this is the one I loved most and found the most frustrating. Frustrating, from its beginning, with the narrator's obsession with Duchesse de Guermantes that mirrors his earlier obsessions, as if he hasn't learned anything, which is true: he hasn't learned a thing ... yet. This is a looking back on what he didn't know then with the knowledge he has now. So, of course, the reader sees before he does and to read of his later awareness is a joy ... mostly. The unraveling of an ingrained cherished belief is laborious and we need to see the whole thought process ... I guess. So when I again became frustrated, much later, by a long digression about Duchesse de Guermantes' way of speaking, I wished to tell our narrator: "Just say she is a contrarian and be done with it!" I felt vindicated when I finally come across that exact word (at least in translation) to describe her. Each time I thought I couldn't possibly take one of these passages any longer, they either ended or up popped one of those lines that seems a throwaway but immediately causes excitement, my inner self perking up to pay even more attention.Though the narrator's world may seem constrained by the aristocratic set that has befriended him, the narrator-as-character is becoming just a tiny bit more clear: through an actual line he speaks in conversation when we don't usually get to hear what he says otherwise; with an almost shocking instance of pure anger. But then there's this that perplexes me as to how he could go on to the Guermantes' to ask about a party invitation directly after some knowledge of which he has this to say: Now this wait on the staircase was to have for me consequences so considerable, and to reveal to me a picture no longer Turneresque but ethical, of so great importance, that it is preferable to postpone the account of it for a little while by interposing first that of my visit to the Guermantes when I knew that they had come home. Of course, it's a cliffhanger. I was also impelled to look up the other references to a staircase in this volume and I now feel they'll have more meaning in retrospect than I first afforded them, a meaning I am sure will only come to me after the completion of four more volumes.My reading a novel by Zola -- also dealing in part with upper-class prejudices -- at the same time added to my enjoyment, as he is mentioned quite a bit in the salons of this volume due to his real-life involvement in the Dreyfus affair.
—Teresa
