Narrative Palimpsest: The Representation of Identity in Agota Kristof’s The Notebook, The Proof, and The Third Lie

The question of how to represent unrepresentable experiences, especially those related to traumatic circumstances, has long been a central concern in literature. In today’s highly self-conscious culture, many authors employ postmodernist techniques and thematics in order to confront this issue. Fragmentation, decenteredness, indeterminacy—all are viable conditions on which one can draw when attempting to represent the self in a context that precludes a stable sense of who we are. There are also problematic consequences of these conditions—consequences that lack the qualities we associate with being human. One key aspect of the missing human component, which is requisite if any type of understanding of our fragmented, decentered, context-dependent selves is to result, is a recognition of our predilection for life stories to have causal narrative structure, even if what develops is a far cry from a traditional linear, teleological story. An awareness of narrative form is therefore unsurprisingly prevalent in contemporary fiction that deals with the more disturbing events of history. This proclivity is often only noticeable in the traces that linger in our desire for the structure, causality, and meaning that we traditionally associate with a story. But it is nonetheless powerfully functional in our understanding of both the bewildering worlds we encounter in contemporary fiction and our own identity. An examination of the former, I contend, can therefore help us to comprehend the latter, and it is with this goal in mind that I analyze Hungarian-born author Agota Kristof’s ambiguous twins trilogy. Read together, these novels provide a fittingly revised model for a narrative representation of the self in a context teeming with obstacles to doing just that.

Kristof’s trilogy of novels—The Notebook (Le grand cahier), The Proof (La preuve), and The Third Lie (Le troisième mensonge)—comprises a puzzling mix of history and fiction that challenges the stability of historiography, life-writing, and identity in its representation of twin brothers who grow up in the war-torn conditions of Hungary during and after World War II.¹ The novels that make up this trilogy graphically convey conditions of living in such a context, and, as a result, we might not readily associate them with the more “western” conditions of postmodernity.² All the same, the novels engage postmodern concerns and manifest contemporary narrative trends that recycle social, cultural, and literary theories in self-conscious ways. In the process, Kristof highlights the narrative difficulties of telling one’s story in a setting fraught with an especially difficult historical context, and she creates a parallel confusion for readers faced with textual complications that disallow logical patterns of interpretation. I contend that Kristof provides a revised palimpsestic model for understanding the self within all of this convolution. And it is in this context that formal experimentation through retellings and revisions is foregrounded as a means to navigate the difficult process of constructing identity in the midst of chaos.

This navigation is by no means simple, and we need interpretive strategies to be able to understand the model the novels present. First, I propose that the continuations each novel brings to bear on the others and the baffling palimpsest that is formed in the process can be better understood with something akin to the perspective of Michel Foucault’s genealogist, who approaches the past as “effective” rather than traditional history. Foucault sees the traditional goals of historical narrative as too limited. He explains that the “entire historical tradition (theological or rationalistic) aims at dissolving the singular event into an ideal continuity—as a teleological movement or a natural process” (154). Genealogy, as he defines it, is contrastingly meant to “maintain passing events in their proper dispersion; it is to identify the accidents, the minute deviations—or conversely, the complete reversals—the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us” (146).³ Furthermore, he claims that genealogy “operates on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have been...