From Julia Kristeva to Paulo Mendes Campos: Impossible Conversations with Virginia Woolf

Abstract

This chapter discusses the concept of the name ‘Virginia Woolf’ as a ‘signature’. While Julia Kristeva uses Woolf's name in About Chinese Women as a signature for the summation of depression and suicide, Brazilian cronista Paulo Mendes Campos's lyrical review of Virginia Woolf's Orlando presents the name as a signature that gestures towards interminable movements of life and makes fiction an element of permanent novelty. In this sense, Campos finds contemporaneity with Woolf, thus momentarily escaping the limiting reality of his own place in time. Campos’s essay ends with the word ‘life’. Even when death is at the heart of a sentence (‘I can’t go on’), life is its final word. The task of this chapter is to bring Kristeva and Campos into coexistence with Woolf’s final philosophy, as presented in Woolf’s autobiographical essay ‘A sketch of the past’, and also to make Kristeva and Campos our contemporaries in an undulant conversation about writing and life, not death – for it is interesting that conversation implies coexistence in its etymological roots: -con (with) -versari (to turn), which together form the Latin verb conversare, to turn round and round and round, and its deponent conversari, to live with, dwell together.