| Vol. I: Swann's Way |
Combray
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Combray |
Part One Combray [2001.02.23]
I II The above structure helps me immeasurably. It is taken from a few pages at the rear of the book, called Synopsis. Thus the first section consists of an initial musing about awakening which leads to some memories of going to bed in Combray when he was a yong boy and ends with more thoughts on the nature of memory. The second section contains a lengthy piece on various people and places he remembers in the village of Combray as well as a description of two of the major paths near the villlage. Great! I now have a map of the first 264 pages. It has been almost 9 months since I last had a go at this novel, and this web site. My top priority at the moment is the structure of both the novel, and the web site. I am not happy with my first approach. The separate pages for the characters is okay, but the basic summary of the sections and my comments about them is too linear and mechanistic. I will leave that effort and redo it using the above structure. An hour’s effort with copy & paste should get me back on track. After reading about 200 pages, I have a preliminary sense of the novel. There appear to be 3 types of “sections”:
Other than a sense of the author remembering his youth, and presumably a path of watching him mature, there appears to be little plot. The point appears to be to portray, as completely as memory allows, a particular segment of society (French upper class) at a particular point in time (early 1900’s). With a little more thought, I can see about 6 sections:
[2001.03.02] Fair enough, but once again I seem to be falling into a mechanistic trap. I have decided to abandon these approaches, which are too analytic, and to instead focus on a brief summary of each of the sub-headings from the Synopsis, identify the quotations that appeal to me, and which will usually be related to psychology/memory and to the passage of time. |