You looking at me?

There’s this photograph, that I think I may have imagined, of a boy looking straight at the camera but without really seeing it. I thought it was a Sally Mann photograph of her son Emmett, but in all of them he seems to have an air of resignation or of frustration, defiance. He is interacting with the camera. Perhaps the “white boy” has a little more of the look that I’m thinking of. Looking, but not really interacting, thinking something to which the camera is not privy. But I’m not sure about this boy, it could be that he’s posing, even that he’s titillated by being photographed. In my imagined photograph, the boy is completely aware that the camera is trained on him, and he looks directly at it, but doesn’t attempt to attend to it, to to imagine what it wants from him. The camera is asking a question, but it is unclear what the answer should be. It’s just there, mute, not dictating anything other than its insistence on seeing him. The child can’t know what the camera wants, why it’s just there, watching. And the camera can’t know what’s going on in the child when he stares, seeing and not seeing. His gaze back is inscrutable, self-enclosed. Not posing. Not anxiously trying to present himself for the camera. Not trying to discern what the camera’s fantasy is and be the object of it. Not trying to be the object of fantasy.

What Marcel longs for from Albertine is to be able to look at her without her responding to his gaze, without her making herself into who he wants her to be. After all, his initial attraction to her began when she paid no attention to him, when she was unaware of him and she was just one of the girls in Balbec. In The Captive, Marcel’s obsession with her is so changeable, so not hooked to her, that she is constantly trying to be whoever she thinks he wants her to be at the moment. Thus the lies, the docility, the carefully controlled gaze. Caught, she can’t look at a woman or look away from a woman, for each action proves to Marcel that his suspicions are justified. Always wanting to catch her betraying her desire, he is both mollified and thwarted that her overt desire is to please him. How to see her when she is not aware of him? This voyeuristic urge is one of the fantasies that recurs throughout the book, and affords the narrator advantageous peeping positions where he can catch people (Mmme. Vinteuil, Charlus and Jupien, Charlus in an S/M situation) acting upon their desire.

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.

Proust starts the whole novel with his sleep, and returns to its states of reverie, possibility, and bare affect often. 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. Like Albertine, who can only be free of his gaze when she sleeps, he seeks to find a place where the reader’s presence will always be there but he will be able to speak in ways that do not try to respond so much to it. Much of the book shows his shame and self-disparagement around his failure to write, to produce that which his reader so much wants to see. Thus characters such as his family members, the people he knows in society, his friends, project onto his body, his language, his infirmity, his weakness a “literariness” that anticipates a production. Uncomfortable under this gaze, he seeks a sleep-like state where he can not be the object of their fantasy of him, where he can speak with a lessened anxiety about what they want from him. He is in search of the lost time of sleep, a space of dreams, of lack of self-consciousness, where the presence of the other lessens and the work of introspection, interiority, thought, can be done.

(In the longer version of this, as you can imagine, I compare the camera and the reader to the analyst. I also talk about the state of sleep being like that image of himself as a tree, needing to draw from within without the distraction of the other). --ELJ