BERNARD SICHERE
An Interview with Julia Kristeva
BS:
Two features of your second novel distinguish it from the first, it
seems to me. Thematically, there was in
The Samurai
a sort of emphasis
on the positive aspects of the main character as well as on her intellectual,
erotic, and domestic journey, while
The Old Man and the Wolves
brings to
the fore a dark, negative dimension, an outlook on the world that is more
than pessimistic. The second feature involves form: why is there, in this
new narrative, a scrambling of codes and genres (clipped dialogue, alle–
gory, first-person narrative), and such an increase in the variety of voices,
so many metaphors?
JK:
In connection with what you call negatiVIty, I would refer to
Holderlin's well-known query, "Wozu Dichter in diirftiger Zeit?" and
rephrase it by asking "Of what use are novels in times of distress?" The
thrust of my new book stems from the conjunction of the personal shock
of mourning (the death of my father, who was killed in a Sofia hospital
through the incompetence and brutality of the medical and political sys–
tem) and a public unease - the acknowledgment, which was indeed
barely present in my first novel, of a general disarray in a society - to be–
gin with, our own. As a psychoanalyst (that is one of my frames of refer–
ence), I am sensitive to the collapse of minimal values and the rejection of
elementary moral principles. I found it imperative to choose the form of
the novel instead of a theoretical form (as was the case in my earlier es–
says), because I realized that the novel form was a better way to portray
that distress. On the one hand, within the novel form
metaphore
operates,
giving form to infantile psychic inscriptions that are located on the border
of the unnamable. On the other hand, by elaborating
intrigue
one enacts
the dramatic essence of passion, the intolerable aspect of love as it is
necessarily coupled with hatred. In comparison, the ability of theoretical
discourse to take on
metaphore
and
intrigue
seemed to be far behind the
form of the novel. Recent French novels most often reject metaphor and
Editor's Note: This interview was first published in
L'Infini
(Spring 1992, #37) .
The Old Man and the Wolves
by Julia Kristeva , translated by Barbara Bray, will be
published in February by Columbia University Press.
