Vision problems: Sight, knowledge and rhetoric in the works of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras

Many of the novels of postwar French writers Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras portray the link between visual perception and the acquisition of knowledge as problematic. Subjects depicted in these works fail to gain accurate knowledge about, and thus assign meaning to, visual objects. Drawing upon work in the fields of cultural studies, history and philosophy of science, literary theory, and feminist studies, I argue that the failure of the gaze to acquire knowledge is directly tied to the process of metaphorization that informs traditional epistemological strategies. This rejection of metaphorization lies at the heart of postmodern aesthetics.;Anti-visual bias found in the fields of media studies and twentieth-century French philosophy provides cultural and intellectual contexts for the depiction of spectatorship in the works of Robbe-Grillet and Duras. Robbe-Grillet's early novels problematize the visual through their portrayal of simulacra. Traces left by the anterior presence of objects frighten and fascinate the subjects depicted in Robbe-Grillet's works. These traces constitute a writing similar to Jacques Derrida's notion of ecriture: a writing marked by iterability, the overflow of meanings, and the movement of differance. The operation of the trace is that of failed metaphor. While the subject of the gaze attempts to uncover a transcendent meaning behind it, the materiality of the trace blocks such a reading.;Marguerite Duras's texts stage the problematics of sight and epistemology primarily through the depiction of acts of voyeurism. The voyeuristic male gaze fails to acquire knowledge about the feminine because, in a metaphoric operation of substitution, it forces individual women to stand in for Woman as an essential category. Contrastingly, in a metonymic operation of combination, the female subjects in Duras's texts add the sense of touch to that of sight, thus lending a notion of process to the typically static gaze. Theories of metaphor and metonymy developed by Roman Jakobson and Luce Irigaray provide valuable insight into the workings of these figures in Duras's narratives. Ultimately, the failure of metaphor portrayed in the texts of Robbe-Grillet and Duras is consonant with postmodernism's rejection of the "metarecits" (Lyotard) of the Enlightenment.