Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection

Throughout Powers of Horror, Kristeva structures her text from the general/abstract toward the increasingly specific/concrete. The first chapters introduce her theory of human psychosexual development as the source of abjection, and the middle chapters discuss biblical prohibitions and taboos that lead to the exclusion and marginalization of certain ideas and people. In Chapters 6 through 8, she uses the critical/philosophical lens she has developed over the first five chapters to read Céline. In so doing, she moves from theory to praxis. In this section, Kristeva takes on the role of literary critic, first engaging with the text as a reader-response critic before turning toward a Bakhtinian critical framework to examine Céline’s language. Finally, Kristeva resorts to poetic language and allusions to delve deeply into the world of Céline’s abjection.

Throughout this section, Kristeva not only considers Céline’s novels and pamphlets, but she also reports directly on the act of reading this material. She reveals how she becomes an active participant in the process of meaning-making from a literary text. Reader-response criticism regards the reader as an equal partner with the text and author in the production of meaning. Just as authors bring their experiences, knowledge, and life into whatever they write, readers draw on their backgrounds to understand the work before them. That Kristeva is throwing her whole self into her reading seems clear: she writes, “We are thrown into a strange state when reading Céline […] the true ‘miracle’ of Céline resides in the very experience of one’s reading” (131). With this, Kristeva implies that her act of reading is as important as Céline’s novels and pamphlets.

In her discussion of Céline’s narrative of suffering and horror, Kristeva also draws on Mikhail Bakhtin’s historical/cultural theories, which posit that any literary text must be read in the historical/cultural context in which it was written. For this reason, Kristeva looks deeply into the abjection of the Nazi era, the suffering and horror of World War II, and Céline’s confrontation with the abject body. Additionally, Bakhtin argues that the critic must always “examine how people use language—how language as a material practice is always constituted by and through subjects” (Klages, Mary. Literary Theory. Bloomsbury, 2017). Kristeva, with her concern for individuation and subject formation, thus considers how the historical moment during which Céline writes Journey to the End of the Night and other novels impacts the language he uses to frame the horror. Céline’s fracturing of language, syntax, and grammar corresponds to the fundamental upheaval of society brought about by the pain and suffering of war. The constant exposure to the abject via death, vomit, and corpses threatens Céline’s subjectivity to such an extent that his narrative comes close to breaking. Kristeva argues that his narrative of suffering and horror offers “evidence of such states of abjection” (141). Were the narrative pushed farther in “its approaches to abjection, one would find neither narrative nor theme but a recasting of syntax and vocabulary—the violence of poetry, and silence” (141). Kristeva asserts here that only through ambiguous, fractured language can Céline manage a fragile hold on his subjectivity. In the ambiguity of poetry, or the silence of the Semiotic, the abject bursts through.

Likewise, Kristeva’s writing becomes increasingly lyrical and experimental throughout these chapters. Her language is poetic and ambiguous, the act of reading more visceral and embodied than Symbolic language can contain. She must resort to metaphor, image, and allusion to describe the experience. For example, she finds in Céline “A universe of borders, seesaws, fragile and mingled identities, wanderings of subject and its objects, fears and struggles, abjections and lyricisms” (135). In sentences and fragments such as these, she applies pressure to syntax and grammar, bending what is possible in language to capture the uncapturable horror and suffering experienced in war. In another example, she piles on abject allusions: “The theme of the two-faced mother is perhaps the representation of the baleful power of women to bestow mortal life” (158). In this sentence, she alludes first to Janus, the two-faced Roman god who simultaneously looks forward and back. Janus is the keeper of doorways, the border between past and present. As such, Janus symbolizes the abject task of border keeping. In the second allusion, the word “baleful” points to Satan in Book 1, lines 56-57 of Paradise Lost: “Round he throws his baleful eyes/that witnessed huge affliction and dismay.” Satan, the rebellious angel trying to upset the order of heaven is himself a Céline-like figure, an agent of abjection. Using allusion, Kristeva connects herself and Céline with a mosaic of cultural texts in what Bakhtin would call “dialogism.” Kristeva is also an agent of abjection herself in this usage—she subverts the power of the male Satan and the male Janus and attributes that power to Céline’s female characters.