Just a woman from behind the Iron Curtain…
Julia Kristeva, acclaimed intellectual and detective fiction writer, started out in Paris with $5 in her pocket and no ticket home
Ask any academic about Julia Kristeva, one of the most influential contemporary French thinkers and feminists, and he will launch into a complex explanation of notions she is particularly famous for. “Le semiotique,” he will say, “is the idea that speech works as much through sub-verbal codes as by what is actually said. The concept of abject exists in between the concept of an object and the concept of the subject, something alive yet not.”
Difficult? Well, so it sounds. However, it is only when I meet Kristeva in the flesh, in the lobby of Nicosia’s Hilton Hotel, a day before she is to receive the Doctor Honoris Cause from the University of Cyprus, that I admit I have no clue what it is all about. Luckily, the famous semiotician, aka practising psychoanalyst, aka successful author of detective novels, doesn’t seem to mind.
But she does mind being photographed. I hesitate for a moment considering whether I should try to persuade her otherwise. On the one hand, I can easily relate to anybody saying “I don’t look good in pictures.” On the other, I am pretty sure that Kristeva, with her high, almost Asian looking, cheekbones, and very chic, very French, and very red-lipstick smile, will look just fine.
Eventually though I resign. I guess I find it impossible to discuss such trivia with the woman who in the world of French structuralist thought occupies the space somewhere between Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. Especially that, at least theoretically, she should have never managed to get there in the first place. And this is not only because of her gender (yes, I know, it sounds bad but let’s face it, she is the only female among all these big names), but also because she is not even French to start with.
Kristeva was born in 1941 in Sliven, Bulgaria. She was educated by French nuns, studied French literature at university and worked as a journalist before going to Paris at the age of 25 with $5 in her pocket and a scholarship from the French government to do graduate work on the nouveau roman. And when she landed at Orly she discovered that the man who was to meet her there never arrived. “I was shocked and surprised,” she remembers the whole experience with her characteristic warm smile. “I didn’t have a return ticket home and didn’t know what to do. But there was a lady on the plane who was going to the Bulgarian embassy in Paris and she said: ‘come’.”
That seemed like the first of many strokes of good luck for Kristeva. At the embassy she met a Bulgarian journalist whose book she had reviewed in Bulgaria some months before (“It was about democratisation of Stalinism, and nobody wanted to write about it, but I did because I was 24 and completely na?ve”), who helped her to find a place to stay. Once she had her accommodation sorted out she started attending lectures at Sorbonne and Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociales where she met French intellectuals such as Claude Levi Strauss, Lucien Goldman and Philippe Sollers, her future husband and editor of the famous magazine Tel Quel.
Wasn’t she terrified of them? They were, after all, the very big names of French culture, all men and she was just a young woman from behind the Iron Curtain…
She takes a sip of her tea and ponders the question for a while. “I think there is a something in the French culture that they are not anti-feminists, they are not puritans, so the fact that I was a woman it was not a handicap,” she finally answers, again with a smile.
“And France was then just after the Algerian war, and people were very depressed. There was a nationality crisis. But at the same time, intellectuals in Paris were very open and curious about was happening in the world and particularly in Eastern countries. And I was unique because at that time there wasn’t a flow of thousands of Eastern Europeans coming to the West like now. For them I was a curiosity, and they were also very cosmopolitan so they gave me their attention. I think it was a coincidence. And as for myself, I just didn’t know what I was doing. It was a situation of astonishment, something absurd, unthinkable. I just allowed myself to be carried by a river.”
The river carried Kristeva through her book About Chinese Women that she published after she travelled with a Tel Quel Group to Maoist China in the 1970s, through many ground-breaking publications in the fields of literary theory and criticism, psychoanalysis and feminism, and finally through detective novels such as The Old Man and the Wolves, Possessions and Murder in Byzantium. She writes detective fiction because she sees it as an optimistic genre that “always ends up in discovering the cause of evil”. Quite a river, indeed.
Julia Kristeva was given the Doctor Honoris Cause by the University of Cyprus in late September. Books by her and on her are available at the Moufflon Bookshop.
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