JULIA KRISTEVA
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seem to be rendering yesterday's struggle out of date. At the same time, it
is clear that we are not witnessing over there the triumph of economic
and moral principles being loudly proclaimed, but instead widespread
wheeling and dealing, passivity and incompetence. Democracy has not yet
been born, and what claims to pave the way for it isn't accceptable. So
people wonder what is to follow the destruction of totalitarianism. And
more basically, whether this is truly a renewal or only a masquerade of the
old, a ruse. The former dissidents seem puzzled. Listen, for instance, to
their doubts concerning the factitious coups: Is the old regime really dead,
or is it masquerading under a new
nomenklatura
more smoothly attuned to
the image-making process than the previous one, greedy for money but
yet incapable of creating it and managing it?
Having said that, we also have our own responsibilities. We must
depict and try to think through the unraveling of the social fabric of the
East, which the Spring 1991 issue of
L'Infini
reported on. Did the media
follow up? Of course not. They told us not to interfere in "the process."
But who can grasp the meaning of this process? Finally, we must remind
ourselves that we are not immune from peril, not penned up in a small
protected space. What goes on over there concerns us very closely, if for
no other reason than that we shall be called upon to pay for it -
financially and morally- for the sake of European solidarity.
BS: In your novel, the Professor is a strong and moving character. He is
simultaneously called the Old Man, Septicius Clarus, and acts as a
Doppel–
ganger
to Stephany's father. He is as complex as a Latin scholar (why Latin,
by the way?), at the same time skeptical, ironical, and troubled; a figure of
the ethical resistance worried about his impending death; a referential
third party to the disciples Alba and Vespasian; a wise old man, a paternal,
loving image for Alba .
JK: Why a Latin scholar? Aside from the fact that my father was one of
those cultured people who could express themselves in Latin (ridiculously
pretentious, wasn't it!), it seemed to me that, more than Greek culture,
the culture of the Roman empire just before the advent of Christianity
was already in harmony with our own. With Ovid, Suetonius, and
Tibullus there was a modern, Christ-like sensitivity that echoes our own
anguish. I might also add that I summon up Latin culture and language as
a way of calling attention to French as an endangered language. For there
is a withering away of language just as there is a general withering away of
culture, perfectly clear to you and me, as members of the teaching profes–
SIOn.
What I am suggesting here may appear quite ambitious, corning from
