JULIA KRISTEVA
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avoid drama: "good taste" demands a certain amount of restraint. For my
part, I have not ceased reading Proust: "Truth shall arise only at the mo–
ment when the writer, taking two different objects, will posit their rela–
tion . .. in a metaphor. The relation might be uninteresting, the objects
mediocre, the style awful, but so long as that has not taken place, there is
nothing there."
The allegorical dimension, for instance, which is indeed central in
The Old Man and the Wolves,
needs to be understood in that context. In
contrast to
The Samurai,
my second novel is anchored in a pain to which
allegory aims to give significance without fixing it, instead irradiating it,
having it vibrate, in an oneiric way, according to each reader's personal
framework of ordeals and choices. Thus, the fictional city in the novel,
Santa Barbara, might be located in the heart of Central or Eastern Europe,
but it also suggests an American megalopolis, or some continental city: it
harbors a fountain that strangely resembles the one at the Pompidou
Center, and the Oasis Bar in the novel brings to mind a rather fashionable
spot in San Francisco. Santa Barbara's very name suggests to me first the
surrounding barbarity but also, by alluding to an American television se–
ries, the surfeited elements of American society and that vulgarization
which constitutes one of the aspects of contemporary savagery. In short,
the novel's negative diagnosis first applies to the collapse in the former
Communist countries of Europe, but at the same time I did not want to
exclude the West, the malaise of our own society.
BS: And the wolves? To what extent does this key metaphor illustrate
(beyond its explicit reference to Book One of Ovid's
Metamorphoses)
what
you have just said?
JK: Those threatening wolves, setting wildly upon their victims, recall the
invasion of the Red Armies, the establishment of totalitarianism - my
readers in Eastern Europe have had no problem identifying them. More
deviously , the wolves are contagious; they infect people to the extent that
one can no longer make out their human faces. They symbolize every–
one's barbarity, everyone's criminality. They finally signify the invasion of
banality, which erases the entire criterion of value amidst the racketeer–
ing, corruption, wheeling and dealing.
Nevertheless, making this all-pervasive violence or barbarity contem–
porary doesn't play off only on the level of the wolves. It also is reflected
in the narrative fragmentation in the novel which you mentioned, in the
multiplicity of codes and voices. In the novel's Santa Barbara, which is
comparable to the declining Roman Empire, history cannot unfold in a
naive, indubitable manner, nor can the characters themselves embody
