Marcel's Dreams

Marcel tells us at the beginning of Swann’s Way about his trouble falling asleep, dreams, day-dreaming, and the “room of one’s own”. To these ends, I want to write here about a particular paragraph to further my previous post:

Sometimes, too, as Eve was created from a rib of Adam, a woman would be born during my sleep from some misplacing of my thigh. Conceived from the pleasure I was on the point of enjoying, she it was, I imagined, who offered me that pleasure. My body, conscious that its own warmth was permeating hers, would strive to become one with her, and I would awake. The rest of humanity seemed very remote in comparison with this woman whose company I had left but a moment ago; my cheek was still warm from her kiss, my body ached beneath the weight of hers. If, as would sometimes happen, in waking hours, I would abandon myself altogether to this end: to find her again, like people who set out on a journey to see with their eyes some city of their desire, and imagine that one can taste in reality what has charmed one’s fancy. And then, gradually, the memory of her would fade away, I had forgotten the girl of my dream. (I.3)

This is a very confessional moment and a very early moment in the novel, so, what does the reader do with this? It seems at the very least here that Proust is negotiating the difference between masturbation and nocturnal emission. We are dealing with an adolescent who, as Carter notes, “felt isolated and misunderstood” (4) and yet, I would contend that there is a doubling problem here about the nature of arousal and the erotic. What, if any, is the difference between the masturbator and the sleeper? Or, what is the difference between a day-dream and a wet-dream? Read closely, the “wet-dream” is facilitated by the misplaced thigh that allows for him to imagine a woman “who offered [him] that pleasure” (I.3). Everything here is taking place in slumber – the sleeping male is like Adam. We have a description, so to speak, of coitus: “my body ached beneath the weight of hers” (I.3) and then, suddenly, an awakening, and a subsequent search for this woman: “I would abandon myself altogether to this end, to find her again” (I.3). The question of desire is available to readers in both and yet it would seem that the initial dream scene lacks the agency (will) of the latter dream scene. Indeed, Marcel speaks to this very problem – a problem as old as the Church Fathers – when he says: “Alas! I did not realise that my own lack of willpower, my delicate health, and the consequent uncertainty…” (I.14), he continues to note that it weighed heavily on his grandmother’s mind – in reality, it weighed heavily on his parents’ minds. In a letter to Bizet he writes that his mother feared the two boys might share “the same faults . . . independent spirit, nervousness, a disordered mind, and perhaps even masturbation” (Carter 4). The concern is that masturbation causes all sorts of maladies, and if there is one thing we know from Proust’s life and masterwork, illness and sickness overwhelm the pages.

If this novel opens with masturbation and the privacy of a room of one’s own, why can we not presume that this trope runs wild throughout the duration of the novel? Could we read this novel structurally to show that it has an “orgasm principle and cycle” that very much mimics the masturbatory/sexual/erotic experiences of Marcel?

J.A.