The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Possesssions by Julia KristevaRenée Kingcaid
Julia Kristeva. Possessions. Trans. Barbara Bray. Columbia Univ. Press, 1998. 211 pp. $27.50.
I’m afraid that Julia Kristeva’s excursion into the genre of the thriller is not terribly thrilling. Possessions returns the reader to the mysteriously corrupt world of the fictitious Santa Varvara, overrun by allegorical wolves in Kristeva’s previous novel, The Old Man and the Wolves. That book introduced the theme that Kristeva pursues more insistently here: the single murder eventually determined to have been perpetrated by multiple murderers, all with equally cogent motive and convenient opportunity. In both books, the murder (of the Professor in the first and the socialite/translator Gloria Harrison here) is “solved” by the French journalist Stéphanie Delacour, who occasionally narrates in the first person, thus suggesting that she speaks for Kristeva herself in her end-of-millenial musings on love, decadence, politics, art, language and motherhood. Certainly Ms. Delacour’s adventures in Santa Varvara, where she had spent her childhood as the daughter of the French ambassador, constitute an interior voyage of discovery meant to parallel the unravelling of the murder mysteries, the first time done on her own, and the second in company of a pompous official inspector, one Nicholas Rilsky, who tempers his professional interest in crime with a passion for the violin.
Yet it is hard to determine exactly what Kristeva/Delacour wishes us to discover here. Despite her well-detailed manias, such as for the good scotch unavailable in repressive Santa Varvara and for sleeping, coffinlike, in trundle beds, Stéphanie Delacour is rarely more than wispy as a character or narrator; that the stories she files are not always those her editor is interested in, is perhaps indicative of a problematic status of narrative itself in fin-de-siècle culture. The best part of The Old Man and the Wolves was the reworking of the father/daughter relationship evoked by the death of the Professor; the best part of Possessions is its opening description of Gloria’s decapitated corpse and Kristeva’s reflections on the human madness revealed by such deliberate mutilation. The suggestion, however, that we all are mad, that we all are potential murderers, strains the imagination even as Kristeva hints at it in these novels that sit like the brittle tip of the iceberg atop her massive works in psychoanalysis and semiotics. It is on these latter that Kristeva’s reputation rests, and despite the occasional moments of insight and ingenuity in her novels, will probably continue to rest. [Renée Kingcaid]