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someone who is a foreigner, a migrant. But it seems to me that in the face
of a deep crisis in language, there are two possibilities. The first consists in
turning back toward tradition in a loving, proud, reactive, nostalgic fash–
ion. The other, which I uphold in this novel, is the grafting of what
comes from another culture, another mentality, onto the language I adopt
and which I assume welcomes me. In this case, it means grafting onto the
body of the French language and syntax an experience of sorrow and hurt
that originates elsewhere and is perhaps liable to awaken other effects.
BS: Could we return to the Professor as father figure? Such a figure, of
course, cannot be dissociated from the work of mourning that the
daughter (Alba or Stephany) must carry out after the father's death. But
what kind of mourning is it? And what ethics emerge out of it?
JK: The theme of mourning is central, and the Professor is foremost a
father in the novel. A father's love and love for the father does not consti–
tute a fashionable theme, since every contemporary artist who wants to be
worthy of the name begins by defiling the father. Can you imagine? A
likable father? Nevertheless, love for the father is not only an antidote to
the barbarity of the novel's Santa Barbara but also an experience that
Stephany lays bare with a certain lack of modesty, as if it were the secret,
not always an idyllic one, of her passion for life, her combativeness. For
what makes Stephany Delacour run? Sensuous and indecent as they are,
her dreams tie her to an Old Man- the Professor, the Ambassador, who
knows? -who is far from being a master, even less so a hero, but who
remains an enigma at the very bottom of a sea of insignificance or brutal–
ity. This orphan, suffering, uprooted father is certainly an image of the
law. But it is neither a stern law nor an abstract law. The Professor is not
a superego; he is a man endowed "with a body" who is present with the
full weight of his psychology, his affects, his fears . A rebel, if you wish ,
and at the same time a man of sorrows, in a certain way a Christ-like
figure. What needs to be done under these circumstances is to prepare a
place for a possible law, and I might also say that it involves new images
of atheism that fit the situation we are experiencing, at the end of a
world.
BS: You have written about a similar father image in
Tales of Love
and
notably about his humanism.
It
was already that of a traveling, skeptical
scholar who embodies what you sketched out in
Strangers to Ourselves .
It
accords with a humanism that doesn't belong in the realm of principle or
idea but is embodied in a singularity. The most profound message the
dead father appears to transmit to his daughter lies in this realm: "Don't
