You Can Go Your Own Way

In Alison Bechdel’s multiple award winning 2006 graphic novel memoir, Fun Home, she tells her coming out story along side an outing of her father’s closeted homosexuality. In the story, she makes frequent references to numerous classic novels, including In Search of Lost Time. In one particular section, she describes Marcel’s childhood in Combray and the event of having to choose to take his walk either along Swann’s (Méséglise) Way or the Guermantes Way, routes which are “diametrically opposed.” Bechdel takes the choice of direction as a figurative one and associates the two directions with binary oppositions: “bourgeois vs. aristocratic, homo vs. hetero, city vs. country, eros vs. art, private vs. public.” She then uses Proust’s classic as a filter through which to portray her own childhood and the choices with which she felt the need to identify.

Indeed, Marcel discusses the walks he took as bearing great significance not only on his daily life as a child, but also on his development and memories; for it was at the end of a walk down Swann’s Way that he first spotted and fell in love with Gilberte, and it was also along Swann’s Way that he first took a stab at writing. The Guermantes Way was much longer but had just as many wonderful things about it. The lingering effect of these experiences and the trauma of having to choose one “way” remained throughout his life:

“No doubt, by virtue of having permanently and indissolubly united so many different impressions in my mind, simply because they made me experience them at the same time, the Méséglise and Guermantes Ways left me exposed, in later life, to much disillusionment and even to many mistakes” (Swann’s Way 202).

But what “mistakes,” what “disillusionment” is he referring to?

Although I agree that Bechdel’s reading of the “diametrically opposed” choices we are given in life resemble Marcel’s choice of promenade, for me the two “ways” refer to something more concrete in his childhood than the option of being gay or straight—a sexual binary that he was perhaps unaware of until he was a bit older. For me, the Méséglise Way and the Guermantes Way rather refer to the two pillars of importance in his life at Combray: his father and mother:

“So the ‘Méséglise Way’ and the ‘Guermantes Way’ remain for me linked with many of the little incidents of the life which, of all the various lives we lead concurrently, is the most episodic; the most full of vicissitudes; I mean the life of the mind” (Swann’s Way 200).

Since his parents openly disagreed on different rules of his upbringing and had very different personalities, they influenced the young Marcel in very different ways. It would seem that a child would then feel he had to choose to follow in the footsteps of one or the other; to choose one after whom he would model himself.

I invite others to challenge me or to offer their analysis of the two “Ways”…