Threshold experiences in L'Analphabète, by Agota Kristof

Abstract

In the autobiography L'Analphabète, Agota Kristof revisits some periods in her life, marked by a most surprising writing experience: the author, of Hungarian origin, abandoned her mother tongue to write in French, the language of the region where she went into exile, in Switzerland. Apart from this linguistic diaspora, the author portrayed in this short text the most fundamental phases of the artistic journey marked by the principle of denial: she is the foreigner, the exiled, the writer suddenly rendered illiterate, seeking, through learning a language, with which she never had contact, the recovery of her writing and her own split identity. These periods, analyzed in light of Walter Benjamin's concept of threshold, as explained by Jeanne-Marie Gagnebin and João Barrento, and having as their guiding thread their relationship with reading and writing, can offer us a vigorous reading of the work, in order to recover the importance of rites of passage in a context of war, exile and social exclusion.