Interview: A member of the Paris intellectual group that included Barthes and Lacan, psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva turned to the detective novel following her father's mysterious death, she tells Louise East
As a novelist, Julia Kristeva is nothing if not mischievous. In her last novel, Possessions, a character with striking similarities to Kristeva herself ended up decapitated. Her latest detective fiction, Murder in Byzantium, features a creepy academic, Sebastian Chrest-Jones, and his obsession with his name's origin in the word "cross".
In her native Bulgaria, Kristeva's name means "of the cross" and as she recently pointed out to a gathering of fans in London: "I am not a killer but my psychotic limits recognise [ Chrest-Jones's] psychoses".
If that doesn't sound like the usual author soundbite, then that's because Julia Kristeva is not your usual bullets 'n' babes sleuth writer. Philosopher, linguist and practising psychoanalyst, Kristeva thrives in the border country between disciplines. Academic work (she has written more than 30 books) occupies the daytime, novel-writing, the night; other than that, she sees the two as inseparable.
"For maybe 50 years now, theory has been contaminated by the imagination," she explains. "People like me, [ Jacques] Lacan and [ Jacques] Derrida write in a different way to the English, Irish and Americans because we apply ourselves in our writing. We say 'I', and allow ourselves some feelings and desires, some hatreds. But I felt the need to engage myself more intensely, to make another step, which is the novel."
To anyone who has taken an English literature under-graduate degree in the last 30 years, that last paragraph is a little like Bob Dylan riffing on life with Baez and Lee Hooker in the Village. Kristeva and her Paris 1968 generation are the rock stars of literary theory, the icons who created the mould, then tossed it aside, spawning generations of beret-wearing, Gauloise-smoking neophytes in the process.
Yet Kristeva has never rested on her laurels. At 65, she is glamorous still, with carefully streaked hair and a quick laugh. The only hint of the intimidating French intellectual is in her elegant high-necked jacket, which is suspiciously akin to a black polo-neck.
In a career spanning four decades, the one constant has been her unpredictability. She has already "gone electric" once before, when she trained as a psychoanalyst in the 1970s, but her decision to turn to fiction after a life in theory still came as a surprise.
"I wrote my first novel after I had my son. You don't have a programme when you begin to write a novel, you just can't continue to live without writing something in a different way. But when I thought about it afterwards, I got the impression that Les Samouraïs was an unconscious desire to tell this baby the story of my generation."
That all of her subsequent novels have been detective fiction, a genre once subjected to a certain intellectual sniffiness, is down to a grim biographical detail. In 1989, Kristeva's father died in a Bulgarian hospital and was cremated, contrary to his wishes, before his family could reach him. Kristeva uses the word "assassinated" to describe his death, and claims he was experimented on before his death.
"I was in despair and the only way I found to pass through this was to write about it . . . It was just obvious there had been this crime which could not be solved because it was not possible to make any enquiries. We didn't know where was the good, where was the evil. In this situation, the idea of writing a detective novel developed."
In Murder in Byzantium, the third outing for her journalist-turned-gumshoe, Stephanie Delacour, pages are devoted to the history of the first Crusade, complete with maps and photos. A plane journey provokes a discussion of transitional space and the serial killer goes by the mathematical sign for infinity. Characters are both two-dimensional and quasi-real; there's even a fictional academic called Julia Kristeva (presumably the same Kristeva who came up with the term "intertextuality" back in the 1960s).
Arguably, Murder in Byzantium does not work as a piece of fiction, detective or otherwise, despite Kristeva's claim that it is "the anti-Da Vinci Code". The mix of tones and emphasis is indigestible, the pace circuitous, and while the lectures on Byzantine history take place, the plot tension tends to slouch off for a whiskey and a smoke.
Yet for all that, it's a book chock-full of ideas and experiments, a baggy monster wilfully refusing to be a novel rather than something which has failed in the attempt.
"It is a mixture," Kristeva concedes. "It's a detective novel, but it's also an ironic reflection on society. I call this the non-existent genre, which is, to my mind, a metaphysical detective novel."
For Kristeva's many fans and followers, her refusal to stay within the confines of a genre won't come as a surprise. Roland Barthes, the iconic post- structuralist once said of her: "Julia Kristeva changes the order of things: she always destroys the latest preconception, the one we thought we could be comforted by", which is as good a synopsis as any of Kristeva's astonishing life of ideas.
Born in Sofia in 1941, Kristeva left communist Bulgaria on a study scholarship to Paris, arriving on Christmas Eve 1965. Quickly, she became part of a loose but intense grouping of philosophers, psychoanalysts and linguists who used the literary journal Tel Quel to hammer out the ideas behind post-structuralism. The group included Claude Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Lacan and Philippe Sollers, Tel Quel's editor and later, Kristeva's husband.
"They were very interested in newcomers like me because I was acquainted with Russian formalism, which is the ancestor of structuralism," Kristeva recalls. "I didn't feel any hostility or misogyny. It was very open."
Nonetheless, Kristeva's work has always been informed by her otherness; her theories on motherhood, on depression and on abjection have all explored the idea of a liminal, third space. That makes her perfectly placed to comment on what she calls "the modern situation" - migration and cultural clash.
"Society has always been made through flux, but now those fluxes are so strong and so rapid, they don't have enough time to settle down and be integrated into the other cultures. They try to assert themselves while the other cultures, who have to welcome those in flux, perceive themselves as violated and they reject the newcomers. Never before in history have we had such an exacerbation of difference."
Although Kristeva's 1989 book, Strangers to Ourselves, has long been influential in exploring the potential of foreign-ness, experience has led her to question her earlier assumptions.
"I get the impression from analysing my patients that we have a tendency to idealise foreigners. I don't say this from a xenophobic point of view; I can say this, because I am foreigner," she says firmly. "For instance years ago, the hero-history belonged to the proletarian class or women or gays.
"Now the foreigner is the hero who will open our society up and defeat our conservatism. That's not entirely false, but what we cannot see is that the foreigner is very often in a situation of despair, and this despair pushes him very close to psychosomatic illness, to vandalism, to drugs and so on. This situation is very difficult to treat with politics or ideological discourses, without turning into xenophobia, but you can do it in a novel."
In 2004, Kristeva was the first recipient of the prestigious Holberg International Memorial Prize, and in her acceptance lecture she chose to speak on the two models of freedom; the American belief in enterprise and adaptation as compared to the European tradition of questioning everything.
"In Europe, we are inclined to a kind of anxiety, a Byzantine splitting of hairs," she says now. "I belong to this tradition and I think it's a helpful one. Maybe Byzantium fell because of such kinds of subtleties, but the times may be ripe now not to succumb but to transformthis anxiety into a resistance to fundamentalism."
Murder in Byzantium is published by Colombia University Press (£19.50)