[In the following essay, Brophy explores two of Kristeva's essays, “The Adolescent Novel” and “Women's Time,” in an effort to examine Kristeva's “two forms of creativity” and how they relate to motherhood.]

I take up two moments—two essays—where the French-Bulgarian psychoanalyst and linguist Julia Kristeva attempts ways of understanding literature as a creative act.¹ These moments are of interest because while they claim for psychoanalysis certain new, more flexible and more ideologically self-conscious ways of understanding literature, they reveal Kristeva's enterprise as a hopeful construction struggling to survive against implosive forces of contradiction and ideological rhetoric.

In some ways Kristeva adopts the stances and the rhetorical devices of a traditional psychoanalytic discourse. She can claim for instance that “the reality of castration is no more real than the hypothesis of an explosion which, according to modern astrophysics, is at the origin of the universe: nothing proves it, in a sense it is an article of faith, the only difference being that numerous phenomena of life in this ‘Big-Bang’ universe are explicable only through this initial hypothesis. But one is infinitely more jolted when this kind of intellectual method concerns our subjectivity than inanimate matter …” （Kristeva Reader, p. 197）.² Here, like Freud, Lacan, and the Surrealists before her, she aligns her discourse with a progressive and powerful new science. But when we pause over the claim we can see how inflated it is. The “Big-Bang” theory of the origin of the universe must stand or fall on rigorous mathematical, astronomical and experimental testing. It can only survive as a theory if it is shown repeatedly to be not only plausible but necessary, predictive and exhaustive as a model of the universe's first moments of existence. No such rigour has ever been applied in establishing the claims of psychoanalysis. Unconscious fantasies of castration remain no more than possibly plausible and useful constructs. They have not been shown to be predictive, exhaustive, nor even the only possible explanations for neurotic discourse. Kristeva attaches her argument to one similarity between the “Big-Bang” theory and castration-fantasy theory: neither of these “events” can be observed, remembered or experienced. But this similarity does not give them equal status as scientific hypotheses. Her argument here participates in a longstanding rhetorical tradition among psychoanalysts. It demonstrates this discourse's lingering desire for a certain kind of patriarchal legitimacy and superiority.³

When she turns to literature Kristeva stands alongside Freud in regarding the artist—in particular the writer—as one who is perversely immature. In her essay “The Adolescent Novel”, Kristeva moves towards the view that immersion in adolescence—a psychically “open structure” which need not be literally confined to one's teenage years—is central to the production of novels and indeed to all imaginary writing.⁴ The novelist, in her view, is motivated by opportunities to move freely in an “adolescent economy” characterised by depression, projection, pregenitality and narcissism. Writers, it seems, still face the sorts of psychotic dangers Freud saw for them.

Yet Kristeva is rightly uneasy with directly Freudian interpretations of literature. Like Freud she approaches literature with enthusiasm, interest and intellectual interrogation. But unlike Freud—and like Lacan—she maintains areas of indecisiveness and overlap between the discourses of psychoanalysis and literature. In asking, for instance, what a reader might find of any use in the open and incomplete structures of novels, Kristeva concedes that the novel can offer “a certain working-out that is not unrelated to the one inspired by transference and interpretation” （New Maladies, p. 152）. The novel can offer a kind of therapy to the reader. This is far from the Freudian view of art as fundamentally socially conservative and as symptom of neurosis. Kristeva takes her view to its conclusion and asks, must we choose then between sending an adolescent/neurotic “to an analyst or encouraging him to write novels?” （p.152）. Or should analyst and patient write the novels together? Kristeva ends this discussion by noting that it is not only the writer who lives with the problem of perversion. The well-meaning listening of the analyst includes a degree of perversion—and perhaps novels can teach analysts how to approach perversion with empathy and without complacency.

It is not clear what such advice might mean in practice for an analyst, but we know from Kristeva's case histories that she does encourage her patients to write and draw creatively—and she continues to seek liberation and subversion, not simply evidence, from literature. In 1990 Kristeva published her first novel drawn from （or departing from） stories told to her by patients: “My patients tell me about their emotional troubles and make sure they suffer from them … So I shut my eyes and imagine the story …” （The Samurai, pp.2-3）.

Psychoanalysts have long been preoccupied with the question, “From where does literature come?”—and it is in a neurotic connection between writing and the unconscious that they have found their answer. Kristeva, as an analyst, has arrived at a more complex and more unstable answer to this question by acknowledging that writing and ideology interact as crucially as do writing and the unconscious. She calls the novel's adolescent mode—its polyphony, ambivalence and flexibility—semiotic （New Maladies, p. 152）. In the play between the semiotic and the symbolic orders, out of which, as Kristeva sees it, language and its discourses become possible, literature （and in particular the novel） operates predominantly under a pre-oedipal, maternal, diffused and rhythmic semiotic order. It comes from that “youthful” zone of language which first evolved under the influence of the mother and survives as a source of resistance and revolution in tension with the （father's） symbolic order.

In this way Kristeva frees literature from an assigned role as symptom and refuses its relegation as a merely （or threateningly） “feminine” pursuit. Creativity can thus be seen to work as a conscious resistance to the symbolic order's tendency towards homogeneity and closure even while as an adolescent project it participates perilously with psychotic and neurotic possibilities.

But now, let us listen to another passage from Kristeva on an experience of true creativity:

The arrival of the child, on the other hand, guides the mother through a labyrinth of a rare experience: the love for another person, as opposed to love for herself, for a mirror image, or especially for another person with which the “I” becomes merged （through amorous or sexual passion）. It is rather a slow, difficult, and delightful process of becoming attentive, tender and self-effacing. If maternity is to be guilt-free, this journey needs to be undertaken without masochism and without annihilating one's affective, intellectual, and professional personality, either. In this way, maternity becomes a true creative act, something that we have not yet been able to imagine. （New Maladies, pp. 219-20）

In Kristeva's essay, “Women's Time,” this passage links two discussions: in the one leading up to this section she acknowledges that the wish to be a mother has been embraced by the present generation of feminists. “What lies behind this desire to be a mother?” she asks. Kristeva tempers the simply Freudian interpretation of this impulse as a desire to have a penis （without altogether denying that pregnancy is a dramatic “splitting of the [female] body”） in her production of a lived maternity as a truly creative act. Following this description of motherhood Kristeva moves into a discussion of women's literary creation. “Why the emphasis [among women] on literature?” she asks—evoking those （already hoary） Freudian interpretations of the source of creative acts. But she does not come any closer to Freud than this for she takes up more political, more discursive, more subversive possibilities: Perhaps it is because women desire a “more flexible discourse that is able to give a name to that which has not yet been an object of widespread circulation: the mysteries of the body, secret joys, shames, hate displayed toward the second sex … women are writing. And we are eagerly awaiting to find out what new material they will offer us” （pp. 220-1）. And what is more new and more secret than the experience of being a mother?

But why does Kristeva deliver motherhood/creation to us in this particular light? Why the emphasis on motherhood as true creativity—and, for that matter, on the mother's responsibility to perform—and to control the performance? What has happened to the ambivalence, the open-ended structures, the psychotic dangers and the sexual ambiguity of the adolescent state of mind which, she has suggested in “The Adolescent Novel,” are fundamental to creativity? Why this perverse emphasis on the heroic altruism of motherhood as a model of creativity?

One of Gwen Harwood's best-known poems of motherhood, “In the Park,” was originally published under one of her male pseudonyms, Walter Lehmann:

She sits in the park. Her clothes are out of date.
Two children whine and bicker, tug her skirt.
A third draws aimless patterns in the dirt.
Someone she loved once passes by—too late
to feign indifference to that casual nod.
“How nice,” et cetera. “Time holds great surprises.”
From his neat head unquestionably rises
a small balloon … “but for the grace of God …”
They stand a while in flickering light, rehearsing
the children's names and birthdays. “It's so sweet
to hear their chatter, watch them grow and thrive,”
she says to his departing smile. Then, nursing
the youngest child, sits staring at her feet.
To the wind she says, “They have eaten me alive.”

Later Harwood was delighted to be told that only a man could have had the necessary self-detachment to write that poem. A woman would never have written that savage last line.⁵ The revelation that it was her line has helped construct the poem's reputation as an emphatic statement of a woman's experience of motherhood. Does Harwood's poem reveal Kristeva's version of motherhood as a conventionally romantic portrait of the compensations women should find in motherhood—according to patriarchal tenets? Or is Harwood's poem an example of a needlessly masochistic reflection on motherhood? Or is motherhood like this—is the man's “but for the grace of God …” the recognition of a truly fortunate escape? On the one hand there is Kristeva's joyous self-effacement and on the other Harwood's woman consumed alive. The shift is slight and the difference immense.

These views of motherhood do exclude each other, for in Kristeva's version there is control: one child arrives and a professional career and even erotic relationships are juggled successfully against the experience of motherhood. In Harwood's poem there are already three children under school age and all control, all erotic hope and any career seem to be lost for that mother.

And yet, the poem does get written—and by a mother.⁶ This is the writing Kristeva celebrates and eagerly awaits in her essay. The two versions of motherhood serve in part to demonstrate her argument elsewhere （and Lacan's） that “Woman” （or for that matter “Mother”） does not exist as a homogeneous abstraction—at best only perhaps as a tendency, as a position of vulnerability and unease in relation to the symbolic order.⁷ These versions might also serve to remind us that Kristeva is herself a writer, that her paragraphs are constructed in hope, in perversion, under aesthetic as well as intellectual and ideological demands. Her intellectual commitment to a psychoanalytic framework, for instance, cannot easily be reconciled with her idealised version of creativity.⁸ The two views of motherhood offered by these two writers are creative—small novels or autobiographies. One seeks to convey and dramatise a truth about motherhood while the other offers an inspiration to the reader and is no less but differently creative for this.⁹

Kristeva's two versions of creativity—as “adolescent” language and as selfless maternal love—bring into sharp relief tensions within her psychoanalytic discourse as she attempts to bring it into a sympathetic relation with literature. Does her claim about motherhood indicate that the “adolescent novel” （made to stand for all literature） is after all an inferior form of creativity? If this is the case, then she is pursuing the Freudian project of exposing the neurotic in artists and their art. Is it only by becoming a “mother” that the “adolescent” artist can become truly creative? Perhaps these contrasting versions of creativity demonstrate simply that an assertion can always operate as an opportunity for reversal and resistance. Perhaps Kristeva's particular discourse requires these two versions to survive alongside each other, for her apparent inconsistency here might be nevertheless broadly consistent in bringing back the silenced or marginalised roles of adolescent and mother, to re-present them as central to creativity. It is perhaps from within her category of the semiotic that motherhood and adolescence can become a common source of creativity. Her versions of creativity are indeed more open-ended, more complex, contradictory and up-in-the-air than Freud's science would want to have it.

Notes

1. These essays are “The Adolescent Novel” and “Women's Time,” both published in translation in New Maladies of the Soul （Columbia, 1995）. “Women's Time” is also translated in The Kristeva Reader, edited by Toril Moi （Blackwell, 1992）.

2. In The Kristeva Reader this sentence is translated to give a nonsensical meaning which is opposite to the meaning of the same sentence in Maladies of the Soul. I have followed the meaning of the translation in Maladies.

3. This tradition continues into the present. In July 1996 the secretary of the Australian Psychoanalytic Society, Dr Ron Spielman, responded to criticism of psychoanalysis by remarking, “To me, the exploration of inner space is as interesting and as important as the exploration of outer space … the subject method is little different. We infer black holes. Nobody knows if there's a black hole out there. And we infer the unconscious. No-one has ever seen the unconscious but there's more than enough evidence that it exists than any reasonable scientist should require” （Nikki Barrowclough, “The Incredible Shrinking Profession”, Good Weekend, 20 July 1996, p. 38）.

4. Kristeva writes, “Whether the novelist plays the role of an adolescent represented by an ego-ideal, identifies with the adolescent, or is himself an adolescent, the theme of the adolescent is one of the most salient characteristics of Western novels” （New Maladies, p.140）.

5. Stephanie Trigg, Gwen Harwood （Oxford, 1994）, p. 39.

6. Between 1946 and 1952 Gwen Harwood had four children, including twins （Trigg, p.vii）.

7. Toril Moi quotes Kristeva from a 1974 interview: “To believe that one ‘is a woman’ is almost as absurd and obscurantist as to believe that one ‘is a man’” （Sexual/Textual Politics, Methuen, 1990, p.163）.

8. See Christine Delphy, “French Feminism: An Imperialist Invention” in Diane Bell and Renata Klein （eds.）, Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed （Spinifex, 1996）, pp. 383-92.

9. Harwood conceded the partial nature of her version of motherhood in a parodical poem published in 1992 which reads as a possible retraction or complication of the much anthologised earlier version: “She sits in the park, wishing she'd never written / about that dowdy housewife and her brood … ‘Eating you alive? / Look at me. I've lived through it. You'll survive’” （Meanjin, 51, 1992, p.10）.

   “In the Park” is taken from Gwen Harwood, Selected Poems （Angus & Robertson, 1988）, p. 27.