Borders, fiction and history in the work of Agota Kristof (original) (raw)

Abstract

Borders is one of the main themes of Agota Kristof's works, both in prose and theatre. Having escaped from communist Hungary in 1956, she experienced the crossing of Austrian border, then exile in Switzerland and her "lutte acharnée" for the possession of French language and writing. The border crossing is narrated in Kristof's autobiography The Analphabet, in all her novels, in several short stories of her collection C'est égal, as well as in some of her dramatic texts. The beginning of the rift, the moment of separation of the self and constitution of a double bind, the border crossing also splits the author's world in two: reality, in which the author leaves her country, and imagination, in which she remains at home. Such dichotomy of history and fiction affects the entire work of Agota Kristof, becoming an obsessional theme. In my research, I propose to read Kristof's work as the continuous rewriting of a single story, with some variables changing from time to time, giving birth to a series of counterfactual biographies. Border is a metaphor for division. Its crossing engenders painful changes: from one language to another, from a definite identity to the loss of certainty, from poetry to prose, from truth to lies, from history to fiction.

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