Writing the Unseen: Envisioning the Face in the Works of Marguerite Duras and Hélène Cixous Público

Abstract

Abstract

Writing the Unseen: Envisioning the Face in the Works of Marguerite Duras and Hélène Cixous

By

Noelle Christin Giguere

The word visage features prominently in the works of Marguerite Duras and Hélène Cixous; yet, their texts contain relatively few descriptions of physical faces. Instead, the anonymous and indistinct visage dominates these twentieth-century and (in the case of Cixous) twenty-first-century authors' diverse bodies of work. For both Duras and Cixous, this unstable and intractable image motivates the act of writing. Their texts seek to encounter the face of the other--both cultural and psychological--even as these same texts reveal the visage to be ephemeral, fleeting, and ultimately unrepresentable.

In their novels, plays, and essays, the visage, that which by definition should be available to vision, is unseen. Each author incorporates different visual arts, including film, painting, and photography, in her work in order to explore how the visage constantly escapes sight and creates the possibility of vision beyond what is seen. The elusive visage is central to each author's understanding of how literature not only questions received ideas about sight and representation, but also (in terms of the feminist and postcolonial aspects of their work) unmoors societal and cultural constructs of identity.

The fundamental distinction that the unseen face disrupts is the separation between self and other. As explored by scholars such as Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot, the visage does not just define a self; it is proof of otherness or alterity at the conception of selfhood. The paradoxical image of the face is central to how works by Duras and Cixous reinterpret the power exercised in the gaze, the relationship between the self and other, and the generic conventions of fiction and autobiography. Writing in different eras where the face is either hyper-visual and available or fragmented and vacant, Duras's and Cixous's texts develop around the elusive visage, an image both desired and adored in its inaccessibility.

Table of Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ...................................................................................................1

PART ONE: MARGUERITE DURAS

Chapter One: Transparent Looks.........................................................................10

I. Resembling Nothing

II. Lol V. Stein: The Missing Face

III. Anne-Marie Stretter: Facing Death

IV. Les Yeux verts and Aurélia Steiner: Facing the Image

Chapter Two: Desiring Faces..............................................................................63

I. Mediated Faces

II. Le visage détruit de L'Amant

III. Le sans visage de L'Amant de la Chine du Nord

PART TWO: HÉLÈNE CIXOUS

Chapter Three: Painting and Writing Works of Being................................................119

I. La venue au visage

II. Portraits of Passage

III. Writing Painting

IV. Transfiguration

Chapter Four: The Other Face............................................................................169

I. Writing Blind

II. Writing Faces

III. Mourning Faces

IV. Living Faces

V. Separating Faces

VI. Illusory Faces

Conclusion .....................................................................................................228

Works Cited....................................................................................................234

About this Dissertation

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School	Laney Graduate School
Department	French
Degree	PhD
Submission	Dissertation
Language	English
Research Field	Literature, Romance Cinema
Palavra-chave	Hélène Cixous 21st century French literature Marguerite Duras 20th century French literature visual studies
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Marder, Elissa, Emory University
Committee Members	Loichot, Valerie, Emory University Oeler, Karla, Emory University Bonnefis, Philippe, Emory University

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