FATHER TONGUE

Agota Kristof’s own writing of the novel in French echoes the twins’ use of their father’s dictionary to write the notebook. Their action resembles the need to learn a foreign language. Their opting for the “father tongue” of rationality becomes a means of survival and translates their integration into, and their capacity to manipulate, the symbolic order. For example, when they want to get hold of pencils and a notebook, which will become the notebook, they formulate their request to the reluctant bookseller as follows: “Nous sommes disposés à effectuer quelques travaux pour vous en échange de ces objets”.⁴¹ When the bookseller complains that they do not speak

“normally”, they tell him that they speak “correctly”. The association of the father with the dictionary and with writing itself signals the rootless, “unnatural” character of their apathetic language and their hard-earned insensitivity. This perverted Bildungsoman can then equally be considered an Oedipal trial. The elimination of the father at the end of the novel, and the subsequent separation of the twins from each

39 Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York, Columbia University Press, 1982, p. 3–4.

40 Kristof, Le Grand Cahier, p. 22. Cf.: “it doesn’t hurt” (Kristof, The Notebook, p. 17).

41 Kristof, Le Grand Cahier, p. 32. Cf.: “We are quite prepared to perform certain tasks for you in exchange for these things.” (Kristof, The Notebook, p. 26.)

other appear as necessary steps towards individuation: they must leave behind the symbiotic relationship that replaced the intimate bond with the mother.

As noted earlier, the fate of the twins parallels in many ways that of Kristof and, particularly, Kristof’s choice to write in French. Commentators generally mention her making the French language strange by way of her dispassionate style.⁴² One of her Hungarian translators, András Petőcz, also notices her use of Hungarian syntax. Indeed, her French has the effect of being translated from a language, a mother tongue, that it simultaneously wants to forget and commemorate. Petőcz himself draws attention to the lack of participles and to the frequent appearance of active, rather than passive, sentences, which is a characteristic trait of Hungarian.⁴³ Hungarian is, therefore, not only a language that haunts the narrative, but haunts it in a very specific way. For while the predominance of the active voice is a normative feature of Hungarian, in French it foregrounds the active agency, rather than the passive suffering, of the subject of the utterance. The twins’ (manly) agency is therefore underlined by the active voice rooted, quite paradoxically, in Kristof’s mother tongue.

For Kristof, French similarly appears to embody the name of the Father, or the Law. As she says in her autobiography: “Je parle le français depuis plus de trente ans, je l’écris depuis vingt ans mais je ne le connais toujours pas. Je ne le parle pas sans fautes, et je ne peux l’écrire qu’avec l’aide de dictionnaires fréquemment consultés”.⁴⁴ As we said before, she considers French the “langue ennemie”, which destiny and the circumstances imposed upon her, most particularly the circumstance that her husband chose to emigrate to Switzerland. If she had had a choice, she says, she would rather have stayed in Hungary in poverty and oppression than working eight-hour shifts in a Swiss watch factory. Turning the cruel literality of the watch factory into a metaphor, we get a glimpse of the ways in which immigration may erase the depths of time and experience: the objective time of the clock obliterates the subjective time of memories.

Kristof, however, has always considered her fate a “challenge”, turning the passive role of the wife and the labourer into the active role of the writer. Paradoxically, while she laments that French has been “killing her mother tongue”, she makes it equally clear that she has never even wished to write in Hungarian. Although in the past, she had been accustomed to composing poems in her native language, she found these too “sentimental” and came to the early realisation that “nothing was born from

42 Cf.: Bacholle, Un passe contraignant..., respectively: Miletić, European Literary Immigration into the French Language.

43 Petőcz, András. 2007. “Az analfabéta.” http://www.petoczandras.eu/konyvek/analfabeta.html. Accessed 28 April 2011.

44 Kristof, L’Analphabète, p. 24. Cf.: “I have spoken French for more than thirty years, have written in it for twenty years, but I still do not know it. I do not speak it without making mistakes, and I need to consult the dictionary frequently when I write.”

RESISTANCES

Hungarian”.⁴⁵ Whereas French has turned into the enemy outside, Hungarian, the mother tongue has remained the abject within.

In Beyond the Mother Tongue, Yasemin Yildiz draws attention to what she calls our ultimately post-monolingual condition. Relying, among others, on Derrida’s argument⁴⁶ about the impossibility of “assimilating” or “owning” a language, she considers how the writings of bilingual authors subvert the assumptions surrounding the idea of monolingualism (such as the sense of “origin”, “true identity”, “natural belonging”, and “true affective attachments”). She suggests that the native tongue is always an “aggregate of differential elements”.⁴⁷ The plot of Le Grand Cahier addresses the problematic status of the mother tongue explicitly. Sometimes, the grandmother (the mother’s mother) gets drunk, and during these temporary states of delirium, she speaks a foreign language which the twins do not understand. This is most probably a Slavonic language since it enables the grandmother to communicate with the “new foreigners” (i.e. the Soviet Army) who invade the village. However, the uncanniness (or else, the inherent heteroglossia) of the twins’ mother tongue, is thoroughly repressed in their “manly”, professedly monolingual notebook, which is supposed to obey only the Law of the Father.⁴⁸

For Julia Kristeva, the psychoanalytic process enabled the translation of childhood memories into a foreign language. “Without such an experience”, says Kristeva, “a foreign language would be merely a second skin, artificial and mechanical”.⁴⁹ As for Kristof, she burnt her own childhood diary to erase her memories, rather than to translate and assimilate them into the new language.⁵⁰ This physical annihilation of the diaries endowed Kristof with an agency to complete what trauma had initiated: it encrypted memories into a place beyond language. The transfiguration, translation, or assimilation of these memories into the new language has been equally resisted by

45 The quotations are translated from an interview that Kristof gave in Hungarian in 2006. See http://

hvg.hu/kultura/20060915agotakristof/. Accessed 19 April 2011.

46 Derrida, Jacques. Monolingualism of the Other or, The Prosthesis of Origin. Translated by Patrick Mensah, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1998.

47 Yildiz, Yasemin. Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition. New York, Fordham University Press. 2012, p. 205.

48 At the beginning of her carrier, in order to avoid any possible confusion with Agatha Christie, Kristof wanted to borrow the family name of her grandmother of Bohemian origin, Zaik (see: Yotova, Rennie.

La Trilogie des Jumaux d’Agota Kristof, Gollion, Infolio, 2011, p. 9.). Her (just like the twins’) mother, did not speak a language that was completely “one”. Yet, Kristof eventually abandoned the project of assuming a pseudonym: it is her father’s name Kristof, and her given name Agota that eventually appear on the cover page of Le Grand Cahier.

49 Cited in Rice, Alison. “Francophone postcolonialism from Eastern Europe.” International Journal of Francophone Studies, vol. 10, no. 3, 2007, p. 315.

50 Durante, Erica. “Agota Kristof du commencement à la fin de l’écriture.” 2007. http://www.revuerecto verso.com/spip.php?article19. Accessed 28 April 2011.

Kristof, and her French has become precisely what Kristeva calls an artificial second skin, covering aching wounds. In Kristof’s own words: “Il y a des gens qui croient que l’écriture, ça ressemble à une psychoanalyse, qu’elle vous guérit, qu’il y a le Bonheur au bout. Moi, je peux vous dire que c’est faux. Plus on écrit, plus on se rend malade. […]

Et pourtant c’est une nécessité. […] Même si je n’étais pas publiée, je continuerais.”⁵¹ Writing is no cure, but rather a symptom, a kind of addiction, a relentless return to the point where pain is located. Thus, even if it threatens to dislocate the symbolic subject in Kristof, the loss, or more precisely, the abandonment of the mother tongue is a constitutive loss which keeps her at the process of writing. This empowering sense of loss is probably the same as the one that informs the twins’ Hungarian-inspired use of the active voice.