The Old Man and the Wolves

This interview was conducted by Bernard Sichere and was first published in a 1992 issue of L'Infini. It appeared in an English translation by Leon Roudiez in Partisan Review. Although the interview is based on Kristeva's second novel, The Old Man and The Wolves, much of the conversation addresses politics and contemporary culture. This interview shows Kristeva at her most pessimistic, describing a world tainted with pain, disorder, mourning, violence, apathy, depression, barbarity, and banality. She defends her idea of a contemporary "civilizational crisis," supporting it with her account of a recent trip to Moscow. Commenting on contemporary intellectual life, Kristeva claims that we must free ourselves from "consensual ideology" and "moralizing, euphoric discourses," adapting instead an "analytic, relentless position" that takes negativity into account. Although she acknowledges that psychoanalysis needs to confront some serious issues (excessive literalism, internal power struggles, the media's appropriation of psychoanalytic jargon, the rapid growth of psychopharmacology), she contends that it continues to furnish us with a "living discourse." At the end of the interview, she claims that the age-old dichotomy between the "right wing" and the "left wing" may no longer be relevant, and she lambastes a political culture in which no one admits guilt. She challenges "writers," as opposed to "intellectuals," to reinvent the political realm, "even to circumvent it." Speaking specifically about her novel, Krisreva notes that the Santa Barbara she describes combines the collapse of the East and the malaise and banality of the West. Suggesting that her novel serves as an antidote to "a deep crisis in language," she describes it as a "grafting of what comes from another culture, another mentality, onto the language I adopt and that I assume welcomes me." Also addressed are the characters of Stephany. whose "truth-seeking" is said to counterbalance the overarching negativity of the novel, the couple Alba and Vespasian, and the Old Man, whom Krisreva affecrionately likens to her father.

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, whereas The Old Man and the Wolves brings to the fore a dark, negative dimension, an outlook on the world that is more pessimistic. The second feature involves form: why is there, in this new narrative, a scrambling of codes and genres (clipped dialogue, allegory, first-person narrative), and such an increase in the variety of voices, so many metaphors?

In connection with what you call negativity, I would refer to Holderlin's well-known query, "Wozu Dichter in durftiger 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 system) and a public unease—the acknowledgment, which was indeed barely present in my first novel, of a general disarray in a society—to begin with, our own. As a psychoanalyst (that is one of my frames of reference), 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 essays), because I realized that the novel form was a better way to portray that distress. On the other 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 rake on metaphore and intrigue seemed to be far behind the form of the novel. Recent French novels most often reject metaphor and 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 moment when the writer, raking two different objects, will posit their relation [. . .] in a metaphor. The relation might be uninteresting, the object 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 series, 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 rime I did not want to exclude the West, the malaise of our society.

And the wolves? To what extent does this key metaphor illustrate (beyond its explicit reference to book I of Ovid's Metamorphoses) what you have just said?

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 everyone's barbarity, everyone's criminality. They finally signify the invasion of banality, which erases the entire criterion of value amid the racketeering, corruption, wheeling and dealing.

Nevertheless, making all-pervasive violence or barbarity contemporary doesn't play off only on the level of the wolves. It also is reflected in the narrative fragmentation in the novel that 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 stable identities. Hence the presence of Doppelganger in the book: the Professor and the narraror's father, but also Alba and the other Alba who is discovered drowned. The shiftings in the narrative, the duplication and dissemination of identities, refer to the obvious fact that we are experiencing contemporary culture in a process of metamorphosis. Does it have to do with the return of the gods, as set our by Heidegger? Does it involve another fictional experience, and if so, which one? For the time being we are in the gothic roman noir.

But doesn't the book's shift to the first-person narrative, spoken by Stephany, the investigator, change the perspective from the dark, negative dimensions we have just conjured up?

Absolutely. Stephany doesn't play her part on the same level as the orhers. As soon as she speaks, the oneiric, confused universe of the novel's first section assumes the shape of a detective novel; it means that a crime has been committed and that it is possible to unravel the truth about this crime. A trurh-seeking effort takes place, thanks to Srephany Delacour, who will show up again in other episodes, for in the book there are a series of mystery, novels. So the "twilight of the gods" that makes up the first part of the novel acquires a meaning in the second part, which is simply the setting of a course, the shaping of a plot: it is possible to know. Henceforth, an ethics of knowledge, let us say, is involved. Consequently, I feel that to call my novel pessimistic is inaccurate. As long as the investigation is being carried out, the crime is challenged, and death does nor prevail. Stephany introduces the vigilance that is the resistant force of life, if not of hope. In the third section of the book, Stcphany imposes her diary upon the mystery novel, as a counterpoint.

Her subjective experience, her sensibility as a woman, a child, a lover is a veritable counterweight to death and hatred. If Srephany is able to undertake this investigative work and confront crime, it is because she doesn't ignore her personal experience, because she is plunged to a point of rapture, and not without cruelty, into the pain that mourning imposes on us: mourning for her own father, until then repressed, awakens on the occasion of the Old Man's mourning. As a consequence, the character of the journalist-detective introduces a certain psychoanalytic tonality in the book. Without this interior space sculpted out by mourning but given shape by other erotic upheavals— for mourning is an eroticism full of undulations, without the smooth visage of joy—no working-out of truth is possible. No investigation, no knowledge. Some based their aesthetics, for example, on Goethe, others on Rousseau, or Rimbaud; I consider myself a contemporary Freud. A possible wager: what about a novel that would be cognizant of Freud. Is such a novel possible? Would it attract readers? For my part, it is enough that the novel is disturbing.

The barbarity you alluded to earlier seems to me to be essential. Part of the opposition your book has encountered, I'm sure, has to do with its illumination of what is unbearable in our society, with people recognizing themselves. As I was reading the 600k—and what you have just said confirms it—I f ound two images of barbarity; criminality, violence, on the one hand, and on the other what you have termed "banality. " Coul you tell us a little more? To what extent does this duality reflect the distinction suggested by Guy Debark in Commentaire sur la sociere du spectacle between the "integrated spectacular" germane to the Western democratic societies and the archaic survival of tyrannic forms that, a short time ago, characterized communist societies?

'The Old Man and the Wolves is set in Santa Barbara—a city that also evokes the violence of our own societies, their racketeering and delinquency. At the same time violence has become banalized, a trivialization that is no less frightening. The psychoanalyst detects it in the speech of certain patients. We are basically dealing with the image of a depression that integrates aggression but under the ruinous guise of an erasure of meaning. That is what I depict in the character of Alba. Alba is one of those depressed persons who considers herself to be "void of meaning." She views her actions as neutralized, impossible to describe,even in the extreme, murderous facets that they might exhibit. A true depression of meaning itself takes place, and the insignificance into which the melancholy person sinks is not merely an individual, "pathological" occurrence. Because of its amplitude, it assumes the seriousness of a societal event, a civilization crisis. I should like to add something about the nature and the extent of that crisis. I have just come back from Moscow, where I have a series of lectures at the French Studies Institute in Moscow's Lomonosov University. I was struck by the pervasive crisis over there, the way in which it seemed to be the very realization of the crisis I portrayed in The Old Man and the Wolves. I recognized Santa Barbara. No one any longer respects authority; no one any longer occupies the seat of power, particularly in the university, where there are students but no semblance of rules and regulations; and no one is in charge. I am puzzled by contemporary studies of Soviet or Russian society that, knowingly or nor, minimize the extent of the catastrophe, which is not only economic but also ethical. In the face of such general decay, there is at the moment a massive regressive return to religion, which effectively serves as a solace but also a way to flee reality. The French Institute, which, on the other hand, enrolls a large number of very qualified and crirical-minded students who are eager to learn, constitutes a fortunate exception in that landscape. Basically, the most disquieting symptom, here as well as over there, the major consequence of which I have called banality, is the tendency that could result in a loss of interest in the psyche. In Western societies today, the most common temptation is to prescribe medicine to appease people's anguish rather than guide them to confront the pain of living. In this respect, I refer, in The Old Man and the Wolves, to Holderlin's Der Tod des Empedokes [The death of Empedocles] and Mnemosyne, from which the Old Man explicitly quotes, to the waning of the gods, which arouses in the Old Man a strange mixture of nostalgia, doubt, and fear. On the other hand, Alba in her own evil fashion rakes up a theme dear to Heidegger: the "protective heed" provided by being. Alba perverts the heed. She believes that paroxysmal conflict carried to the point of hatred is the only truth. That is her very own punctilious nihilism. She hates without feeling guilty, she ends up untouchable, "at home," proud within the supposed truth of her hatred. That is the dreadful part of it--the unscathed conscience, with neither unease nor hardship, present at the very core of hatred, which might go as far as murder. Within the reverberations of Holderlin and Heidegger, to which the Old Man and Alba harken again, the insistence of the question remains. In opposition, what strikes me in today's world, and this is why I speak of the loss of interest in the psyche, is the feeling that the very possibility of questioning has been closed. We have become unscathed in evil just as one might have been immaculate in love.

Fiction: The Samurai

In this interview, Kristeva speaks candidly and at length about The Samurai her first novel. The interview was published in an issue of L'lnfini, and the translation is by Ross Guberman. Kristeva explains why she wrote The Samurai and describes it as "popular" and "polyphonic."

With The Samurai, your first novel, you set aside theoretical writing and turned to fiction. How do you account for this shift from theory to the novel?

I was recently reading the manuscripts of Proust's notebooks, and I came across a question he asks in one of his drafts: "Should I make this into a novel or into a philosophical study?" People have always wondered if they should treat a subject that interests them through theory or through fiction. Is there really a choice to be made? Must we prefer one form of discourse to the other? If we think of more recent writers, we realize that Being and Nothingness did not prevent Sartre from writing Nausea. And Merleau-Ponty, who was less committed than Sartre or perhaps committed in a different way, planned to write a novel although he never did so. The imaginary could be understood to be the deep structure of concepts along with their underlying systems. The core of the symbolic lies in the fundamental drives of the signifier, that is, in sensations, perceptions, and emotions. When we translate them, we leave the realm of ideas and enter the world of fiction, which is why I sought to describe the emotional lives of intellectuals. You will forgive me, moreover, for believing that the genius of the French people is rooted in the links they make between popular passions and the dynamics of intellectual tensions. This close relationship exists nowhere else, yet certain time periods, particularly those plagued by national depression, such as our own, place a greater distance between intellectuals and the rest of the world. I thus tried to give nonspecialists a taste of what intellectuals do and what they are like. Finally, the lewd and pervasive influence of television has forced literature to go back and forth between documentation and invention and between autobiography and fiction. Yet because the whole truth can never be known—at least, this is what psychoanalysis along with other disciplines has taught us—inserting a bit of autobiography into a narrative guarantees a grounding in reality. At the same time, another piece, a fictional one, serves as a magnet for the intense subjective bonds that connect the narrator to other people as well as to himself. As opposed to the autobiographical piece, this fictional piece releases a certain discretion and modesty while transforming real-life characters into literary models.

Why did you wait so long to shift the focus of your work to fiction?

When I finished writing my book, I realized that I had needed to acquire enough distance from myself to become a "character" before I could become an "author." And my experience with psychoanalysis may have made me aware of the banality of life and the insipid richness of everyday language, which may have enabled me to take a step back from the symbolic asceticism of theory—for the time being, that is.

In which fictional genre would you place The Samurai?

I wanted to write a popular novel This may come as a surprise, especially because I wrote a story about intellectual circles. Let me explain what I mean. For me, a popular novel is a sensual and metaphysical narrative. I mean "popular" in the sense of Victor Hugo's phrase, "That enormous crowd eager for the pure sensations of art." Today, the crowds seem to be even more enormous and eager because they are so overtly targeted by the mass media. I mean "popular" in the sense of Mallarme's concern for the "necessary anecdote demanded by the public." I mean "popular" in the sense of Celine's claim that "in the beginning was emotion." I wanted to rely on language to reach an infralinguistic and infraconceptual experience consisting of emotion, sensation, and perception, an experience that could correspond to the conventions of the avant-garde and that could take shape as a source of jouissance that often remains hidden although it is occasionally acknowledged. I thus took note of Mallarme's declaration of his aesthetic project: In fact, it is to prolong, joyfully if possible, something for eternity. Let it be!" When a state of enthusiasm is attained through immediate access to an undecidable experience that appears to be less concerned with formal problems, it serves as a magnet of joy, anguish, and pain. In sum, such a state is a fusion of Eros and Thanatos seeking to create what is traditionally known as a "catharsis" for the reader as well as for the author. To put it another way, I wanted to reach the sensory core of language by sifting through a network of memories and fantasies. While I was writing my novel, I gave a course on Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception and on Proust. I had the feeling that The Samurai offered me a way to put into practice what I was trying to communicate theoretically to my students: the connivance between words and sensory rapture. So I wrote a story about intellectual creation, the conflicts that marked the years between 1965 and 1990, and the rise and fall of different theories and intellectual preoccupations: structuralism, psychoanalysis, political positions and experiments, religions, ecology (immersion in the mother-of-pearl reflection of a salty marsh or in the beautiful birds inhabiting an island), but also feminism, motherhood, an often burning or obscene intimacy.... The theoretical project, the "novel of ideas," never truly disappears from the novel, but it becomes increasingly intimate and personal as the novel goes along. The story becomes simply subjective, microscopic—and ethical.

Does the story become incarnate?

Yes, particularly in the experience of motherhood, which is rejected by Carole and chosen by Olga, who views it as a quasi-pantheistic accomplishment . . . My desire to reconstruct the sensory basis of language made me a great admirer of Colette. As to the theme of intellectual maturation, I was moved by the reflections on the body depicted in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. Mann's novel is not very well known to French readers, who fear the weightiness of German literature, but the character of Hans Castorp is confronted with an ill body just as the Samurai contemplate erotic bodies. That said (am I simply echoing avant-garde thought here?), I sought not to build a mountain but to construct fragments, discontinuities, unexpected links, and reciprocal relationships among characters, places, and discourses. I wanted the emblem of my book to be not a mountain but an island, a secret island where characters could meet, an island open to all winds, the winds of other chapters as well as the winds of the interpretations that readers would use to fill the empty space between narrative sequences.

How do you think your writing compares with the ‘neutral writing"[e'criturc Blanche] that Blanchot and Barthes discuss?

Roland Barthes's Writing Degree Zero, a book I have discussed at length and continue to admire, successfully delineates the most rigorous currents of postwar literature. With "neutral writing," the writer acts as a technician of words, a sort of Orpheus (as Blanchot says) who crosses the river Styx into Hades, the hell of daily life. Along the way, he collects a few rare trophies that he transposes onto a sparse poetic text through ellipses and litotes. This sort of writing condenses impossibilities; according to Barthes, it "outlines in detail the breakup of bourgeois consciousness." I would add that it outlines in detail the breakup of all consciousness by collecting the fragments that remain and by extracting minute, modest, and extremely sparse races. Our silent anguish latches onto dhese traces, and when we experience psychic catastrophes, evidence chat they exist is what enables us to survive. We see this process at work, for instance, in the writings of Samuel Beckett. These two forms of writing do not entail the same relationship to meaning . . . The version I call Plutonian" is more similar to contagious writing, the postmodern, communicable writing I mentioned earlier while discussing the "popular" novel. What is more, the fusion between Eros and Thanatos that inspired The Samurai dearly stems from Freud's conception of the psyche, a conception that precludes any idea of a rational power rooted in an existential demand. None of the characters in The Samurai could say that Shell is other people," for hell is inside us. Similarly, no one can ask, "Should we burn Sade?" because Sade burns inside us. Acknowledging such cruel truths may open a path to "neutral" writing, but striving for a more immediate and cathartic contagiousness and communicability can also pave the way for a writing marked by the plenitude and abundance of joy and suffering. Childlike and infantile, this sort of writing may respond to the eternal childhood lurking inside us and to our need for ghost stories and fairy tales. In The Samurai, Olga writes a children's book called The Samurai. (Guberman, Ross Mitchell. ed. Julia Kristeva Interviews. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.) [source]