E-L. J.'s thoughtful post regarding Proust's Albertine and the power of her slumber reminded me of the double meaning of the verb "to lie" that Shakespeare takes such advantage of in Hamlet. The only time Albertine cannot lie is when she is lying. In bed. Asleep.Ok, so my comparison and poetic analysis kind of crumbles after this, especially when considering that Proust, unlike our Elizabethan beloved, writes in French and thus does not use the verb "to lie" at all. But, the idea remains despite the downpeel of its symbolic skin.
The last three posts from E-L. J. and J.A. are blending together in my thoughts. Moments of reading and being do mix together into a single timeline wherein the reading becomes being and our being starts to be self-reading. And this idea of lying (asleep) and lying (to be deceptive) are just forms of being. But the difference is in the position of the being, one is upright and one is horizontal. Lying in bed is a theme that persists throughout In Search of Lost Time, though whether Marcel is just too ill to get up, or Albertine is channeling Sleeping Beauty (now there's a whole other parallel romance), the crux of this theme is just as much about ways of seeing as it is about moments of being.
Rosalind Krauss writes, “[i]t will be symmetry and particularly center that will ballast rules [of good physical form].” An infant’s “I” is prefigured by his/her viewing of a “figure of coherence, balance, and wholeness.” What changes if the body is unwell or seen to be unconscious, alseep? It seems that this horizontal positioning places the subject one step closer to death: by lying, the body rehearses its own "putting to rest," so to speak.
But the most important part of "The Mirror Stage" seems to be the "seeing" part. It's not so much what is there that matters, but what is seen to be there. The imagination reflects much more detail and depth than the mirror does in its raw form. In this sense, to get back to Jonathan's point, it is more of a "reading into" or a "being into" than a simple reading and being. It is a deeper, layered seeing that transforms the image from just-another-thing to "my body;" transforms object into subject.
And when we lie down to sleep, or to rest our sickly bodies we see the world sideways. We go back to a time before our verticality, or perhaps we merely foreshadow our permanent rest; either way, with our seeing altered, our subjectivity changes and we again, like in the mirror stage, become not only what we see, but the way we see. Prof. Jagoe's discussion about Marcel's attraction to Albertine only when she is unaware of his objectification of her actually resembles our own viewing delight in gazing at the aloof boys in Mann's photos in more than one way. Might I suggest that sleep is also a metaphor for childhood? Or at least child-likedness?
In the sense that sleeping allows her to escape the super ego, self-critiquing, inhibitioned, begazed self-object that is aware of everyone else around her, Albertine becomes the aloof boys shooting their "so what?" looks back at the camera. 
What Lacan calls an “eminent manque-à-être” or a "lack of being" can only be amended by accessing “the forgotten language of [one’s] childhood.” This language is a spoken language, the immediacy of which opens the passageway for expressing one’s unedited, uncensored thoughts that lay buried in the unconscious, that we can not edit, delete, scratch out and rewrite
Krauss suggests the “upright” subject also reflects the ill subject’s perspective on “being” from a horizontal, rather than vertical position. For, in their resting state, the sickly are always laying down, and as V. Woolf articulates in her On Being Ill, “[d]irectly the bed is called for, or, sunk deep among the pillows in one chair, we raise our feet even an inch above the ground on another, we cease to be soldiers of the upright; we become deserters” (12). We become deserters of being. Deserters of being what others want us to be or what we think others want us to be. We become children (?).
Being is seeing is reading is sleeping.
-natalie
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ReplyDeleteThis is all very interesting. I wonder if the double-meaning of "to lie" is also revealing if we think of how, paradoxically, the truth emerges for Marcel more through Albertine's lies than in the moments when she is being truly sincere -- that there is in lies a revelation that impresses itself more strongly (and painfully) on Marcel than the bare truth, precisely because it is, for example, by saying "actually, I don't want to go to the Verdurins" that Marcel can read precisely how much -- and why -- Albertine does in fact want to go (more so than if she had said, "I would still like to go to the Verdurins", a true statement that would, actually, have concealed the truth behind her motivations more completely than the lie does). Proust writes, "Thus did we exchange lying speeches. But a truth more profound than that which we would utter were we sincere may sometimes be expressed and announced by another channel than that of sincerity" (Captive, 153). Sleep also has this paradoxical quality, that it opens up a dream world that is, in terms of psychological motivations, more truthful than the waking world, which is filtered by consciousness. Hence Marcel writes about Albertine's sleep: "her sleep would seem to me a marvellous and magic world in which at certain moments there rises from the depths of the barely translucent element the avowal of a secret which we shall not understand" (144). Both sleep and lying perhaps produce for Marcel an innocence that is 'tarnished' by the conscious, waking self, with its many 'parrying' psychic screens.
ReplyDeleteYes, this is pretty fascinating stuff. "Our own little mannikins..." I like that very much, that little wooden puppet with his hood on, popping in and out, alive and not. There's a lot to be said about sleep and what it means for Proust, how it relates to truth and the desubjectified drive beyond the law of desire.
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