Seeking Byzantium on the Borders of Narration, Identity, Space and Time in Julia Kristeva's Novel &lt;i&gt;Murder in Byzantium&lt;/i&gt;

Helena Bodin

doi:10.7557/13.1464

Abstract

This article discusses the notion of Byzantium and Byzantium's potential capacities as a multifaceted borderland, as shaped and perceived in Julia Kristeva's novel Murder in Byzantium. In spite of its title, this is not a historical, but rather a so-called total novel, which reconciles several different plots - romantic, criminal, political and philosophical. It relies on both fictive and historical texts, especially on The Alexiad, written in the 12th century by the Byzantine princess and the first female historian ever, Anna Comnena. Through a literary analysis, this article shows how Byzantium is shaped in the novel by transgressions of the borders of narration, identity, space and time. Byzantium is thus of great interest to the general public and an academic discussion of borders, origin, history and culture, so important for the discussion of Europe's role today in - or, as suggested in the novel, perhaps between - Eastern and Western cultures.

Highlights

Some years ago, I had the opportunity to hear a lecture given by Julia Kristeva, the French-Bulgarian linguist, psychoanalyst, literary scholar and writer, at Stockholm University
One example is the North Calotte and the Barents region, which the Swedish writer Bengt Pohjanen has described as an interface and a borderland – not between Russia and Norway, but between Byzantium and Rome (Pohjanen 2000: 70-71)
Byzantium is studied as a historical empire, ending in 1453, but since its Orthodox Christian tradition is still active in parts of Europe – in the Orthodox countries of Eastern Europe, as well as in several Western European multilingual and multicultural regions, there are good reasons to extend the traditional range of its study in time as well as in space, to include even later and imaginative perceptions and functions of Byzantium

Summary

Helena Bodin

I had the opportunity to hear a lecture given by Julia Kristeva, the French-Bulgarian linguist, psychoanalyst, literary scholar and writer, at Stockholm University. In this Byzantine framing in today’s France, the revenge of the male Far East on the male West has allegorically become real for a moment, before a woman – a Westerner identifying herself as a Byzantine – takes the command and wins This attempt to trace some of the narrative threads and their possible allegorical interpretations is still too rough-hewn to correspond to the novel’s complexity, but it points to the conclusion that in Murder in Byzantium, Byzantium’s importance for Europe today is not a simple question of likeness, or of collapse. Back in Paris, when the cases are closed, after the sudden deaths of the two murderers, and after all her Byzantine inquiries, Stephanie eventually questions understanding as such: “Where is one when one is understanding? In history? Outside history?” (228) But this new case is closed very rapidly, when she promptly answers herself: Understanding is “another story” (228)

Conclusion

Works cited