About the two "Ways"

by Mark Calkins

In French, the 1st volume is "Du côté de chez Swann," the third volume, "Le
côté de Guermantes"; the English translation makes the titles parallel or
twinned, when in fact they are not ... at least as titles.

In the UK Penguin edition the title of volume 1 is "The Way by Swann's,"
although Lydia Davis' first choice was "By way of Swann's" (Penguin UK vetoed
this) in order to be faithful to the preposition in Proust's title (du côté
de' is a preposition, whereas 'le côté' is a nominative; "Swann's Way" in
French would be "Le côté de Swann").

The story goes that Proust was horrified when he first learned of
Montcrieff's translation of volume 1 as "Swann's Way" because, even though
he translated Ruskin from English into French, Proust thought that 'way'
signified 'manner' or 'way of doing things'.

by Patrick Alexander 

There are two possible walks around Combray and the one which leads past Swann's estate is called the Méséglise Way, but the family often refer to it as Swann's way. This is the path most often taken and the one with which the narrator is most familiar. The alternative walk, the Guermantes' way, in the opposite direction, was much longer and to be taken only when the weather was good and there was no chance of being caught in the rain. Because the walk was longer the family would usually arrive home later which in turn meant a late dinner. A late dinner meant that there would not be a goodnight kiss in bed. Marcel therefore has ambivalent feelings about the Guermantes way.

The importance of these two family walks to the novel as a whole is obvious from the very title of the books themselves. The first is called Swann's Way, the third is called Guermantes Way and references are made to the two different and apparently irreconcilable 'ways' all through the whole of 'Search". Volumes could be written about how they differ, on political, psychological and symbolist grounds but more important is what they shared. Those two walks around Combray as a child form the core of the narrator's memory and the essence of his concept of reality. Everything and everyone that he encounters in later life is, in some way, judged and compared with the real world he first discovered walking around the countryside of Combray.

"But it is pre-eminently as the deepest layer of my mental soil, as the firm ground on which I still stand, that I regard the Méséglise and Guermantes ways. It is because I believed in things and in people while I walked along those paths that the things and the people they made known to me are the only ones that I still take seriously and that still bring me joy. Whether it is because the faith which creates has ceased to exist in me, or because reality takes shape in the memory alone, the flowers that people show me nowadays for the first time never seem to me to be true flowers. The Méséglise way with its lilacs, its hawthorns, its cornflowers, its poppies, its apple-trees, the Guermantes way with its river full of tadpoles, its water-lilies and its buttercups, constituted for me for all time the image of the landscape in which I should like to live, in which my principal requirements are that I may go fishing, drift idly in a boat, see the ruins of gothic fortifications, and find among the cornfields ... an old church, monumental, rustic, and golden as a haystack; and the cornflowers, the hawthorns, the apple-trees which I may still happen, when I travel, to encounter in the fields, because they are situated at the same depth, on the level of my past life, at once establish contact with my heart." [I. 201] This sense of being spiritually grounded in these very physical memories of his childhood walks provides a powerful and consistent theme throughout the novel.

These two different family walks, each leaving from the house by two separate garden gates and moving in opposite directions become a recurrent metaphor in all seven volumes. The Méséglise way (Swann's Way) is the more familiar bourgeois path while the Guermantes way is nobler and more romantic but more difficult to follow. Swann's Way is like St Honore, on the right bank, in the 8th where Marcel's bourgeois family lives while the Guermante's way is like St Germain on the left bank, in the 7th where high society reside behind the mysterious high walls of their mansions. Through most of the seven volumes these two paths are presented as forever incompatible but in the final pages of Time Regained, Marcel meets Mlle. Swann, the daughter of Robert St. Loup (a Guermantes) and Gilberte (Swann's daughter) - and in her, the two paths are finally reconciled.