In Practice

A practicing doctor's views on psychiatry and contemporary culture.

by Dr. Peter Kramer

Homage to Robbe-Grillet

By Peter D. Kramer on February 19, 2008 in In Practice

I see by the papers that Alain Robbe-Grillet has died. The juxtaposition may sound odd, but his writing has exerted an enormous influence on my own. Read More

On the Homage

Submitted by LD Bursten on June 15, 2008 - 6:53pm.

The In Practice blog is scintillating,never shortshrift even in the more precis forms. I deeply enjoy reading it, as well as other writings of P Kramer.
I am wondering, though, about the comments on the "human drive to create meaning through metaphor and the countervailing moral imperative to see oru surroundings with a neutral eye".
Is it the creation of meaning thru metaphor or is it the realization of meaning thru the "spectacles" or instruments of metaphor? Could there not be an otherwise invisible order or sense of things that is revealed to consciousness thru metaphors that are (shock! horror!) true (in the sense of being connected to the real, not to beg the issue)?
For example, if an anorexic sees resisting consuming food at a dinner as a triumph of spirit over matter as well as freedom to choose being pulled into certain family dynamics etc couldn't this be both real and an instance of personal symbol making that also has a pathology to it?

Would a "neutral eye" be a truthful eye? Why would one aspire to neutrality anyway? Maybe neutral is only a function of a certain very artificially maintained perspective, and so just a form of mannerism?

Perhaps objects without a viewer enjoy "lives of their own" or perhaps not.
It seems that Robbes Grillet while trying to avoid the pat formulas of the 19th c has engendered his own set of cliches of meaning, or non meaning.

What happened to the truth, anyway?
Or are we fated to be only on the outsides of everything with rulers and quantatative "aids" on questions of "truth. Pity the post modern muddles.