The Guermantes Way

The Guermantes Way Review

The third volume of In Search of Lost Time is the social novel of the Search — the volume in which Proust’s account of French aristocratic life at the turn of the twentieth century reaches its fullest elaboration and most devastating comedy. The narrator has moved to an apartment in the same building as the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes, and his obsession with the Duchess — her wit, her manner, what she represents — drives the volume’s first half through a series of increasingly elaborate social encounters.

The Guermantes salons are Proust’s great set pieces of social comedy. The dinners and receptions unfold with a logic that is simultaneously very funny and deeply depressing: brilliant people saying mediocre things with perfect confidence; aristocrats performing their own aristocracy for an audience of social aspirants who are performing their own sophistication; the Dreyfus Affair dividing the room in ways that reveal everyone’s actual commitments beneath the veneer of wit and taste. The Duchess herself is the most carefully observed figure: genuinely intelligent, genuinely witty, and ultimately imprisoned by her own social identity in a way she is just perceptive enough to glimpse and not perceptive enough to escape.

The volume’s second half contains what many readers consider the greatest single passage in the Search: the death of the narrator’s grandmother. Proust builds toward it slowly — she suffers a stroke, declines over months, finally dies — and what he renders is not the event but its psychological aftermath: the way grief arrives not at the moment of death but much later, when a habitual gesture or a particular light or an involuntary memory suddenly makes real what the mind had been successfully refusing to know. The passage in which the narrator, bending to remove his boots in a hotel in Balbec, is suddenly overwhelmed by the physical memory of his grandmother bending to help him — grief arriving through the body rather than the mind — is as precise and as affecting as any prose in literature.

That these two halves coexist in the same volume is not a structural accident. Proust’s point is in part that the social world, for all its brilliance, is a world in which genuine human feeling is suppressed by performance. The comedy and the grief illuminate each other: the salons are so funny partly because we know what they are not, and the grandmother’s death is so devastating partly because the narrator has spent so long in rooms where nothing real was said.

The Social Novel of the Search

Among the seven volumes, The Guermantes Way is the one in which Proust’s portrait of French aristocratic life at the turn of the twentieth century reaches its fullest and funniest elaboration. The narrator has moved into an apartment in the same building as the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes, and his obsession with the Duchess — with her wit, her bearing, and above all with what she seems to represent — propels the volume’s first half through an ascending series of social encounters. What he discovers, slowly, is the distance between the Guermantes he imagined and the Guermantes who actually exist, a distance that is itself one of Proust’s permanent subjects.

The salons are the great set pieces here, and they are simultaneously hilarious and quietly depressing. Brilliant people say mediocre things with perfect confidence; aristocrats perform their own aristocracy for an audience of social climbers performing their own sophistication; and the Dreyfus Affair runs through the room like a fault line, revealing everyone’s true commitments beneath the veneer of taste and wit. Proust’s rendering of the Affair’s effect on Parisian society is historically irreplaceable — there is no better account of how a political and moral crisis reorganized the loyalties of a whole social world. The Duchess herself is the most carefully observed figure of all: genuinely intelligent and genuinely witty, and yet imprisoned by her own social identity in a way she is just perceptive enough to glimpse and never quite perceptive enough to escape. A reader should be warned that the narrator’s infatuation with her occasionally exceeds its object, and that patience is required; the obsession is part of Proust’s point, but it is a demanding part.

The Death of the Grandmother

The volume’s second half contains what many readers consider the single greatest passage in the entire Search: the death of the narrator’s grandmother. Proust builds toward it without haste — a stroke, a months-long decline, the death itself — and what he renders is not the event but its psychological aftermath. His insight is that grief does not arrive at the moment of death; it arrives much later, when a habitual gesture, a particular quality of light, or an involuntary memory suddenly makes real what the mind has been successfully refusing to know. The scene in which the narrator, bending to remove his boots in a Balbec hotel, is overwhelmed by the bodily memory of his grandmother bending to help him — grief arriving through the body rather than the mind — is as precise and as devastating as any prose in literature.

Why the Two Halves Belong Together

It can seem on first reading that the social comedy and the grief sit awkwardly in the same volume, and the considerable length only sharpens that impression. But the juxtaposition is not an accident of construction; it is the volume’s deepest argument. The social world, for all its dazzle, is a world in which genuine human feeling is continuously suppressed in favor of performance. Social brilliance and human depth turn out to be almost mutually exclusive — the people most at home in the salons are often the least fully alive. The comedy and the grief illuminate each other precisely because of this. The salons are so funny in part because we know what they are not, and the grandmother’s death is so shattering in part because the narrator has spent so many pages in rooms where nothing real was ever said. Held together, the two halves make The Guermantes Way the volume in which Proust’s comedy and his capacity for grief coexist at their most powerful.