Looking at You: Sleep and Fantasy

One of the canonical moments of In Search of Lost Time must be the moment in which Marcel reflects upon falling asleep, the moment that opens the book. Eva-Lynn writes in her entry the following:

The place where Albertine stops trying to be the object of his fantasy is perhaps at the moment when she most is: in her sleep. He turns her head so that she looks the way he wants, he gazes at her, he kissses her, he masturbates against her. This would seem to be the place where she is most objectified, most made to fit his image of her. Yet there is something untouchable in it as well. Yes, she is there, being looked at and touched, but she is not engaging with him, not trying to be what he wants. Lost in sleep, she is in the only place that she can get away from her consciousness of his desire.

There is something interesting about this and yet I am not quite certain what to do with it. If it is true that the moment when Albertine stops being the object of fantasy is the moment she sleeps which paradoxically is the moment she is most desired, what are we to do with Marcel’s ruminations about sleep? Or, in other words, is it simply that Marcel longs to be desired, the object of fantasy, etc.? I guess in this regard, perhaps, I am just inverting Eva-Lynn’s comment about the expectations of the reader:

I would argue that this is because he knows that to be able to write he needs to be able to be aware of his readers without being too anxious about how to fulfill their fantasy of him and his book.

In my reading, I would suggest that instead perhaps Marcel longs to be desired and longs to be the object of fantasy. However, I’m not entirely certain, as I suggested at the beginning, of just how all of this will unfold (if at all).

J.A.