Sameness and Selfhood in Agota Kristof's The Notebook

Abstract

Sameness and Selfhood in Agota Kristof's The Notebook Amit Marcus The term "narrative identity" or, in its more conservative version, "narrative unity,"1 suggests that the structure of a narrative or a story is homologous to that of human identity. The connections between narrative and identity, emphasized by scholars such as Alasdair Maclntyre (1984) and Paul Ricoeur (1992), are based on elements that constitute both phenomena, such as temporality, events, characters, and perhaps even authorship.2 Yet these connections are also based on a more specific affinity, which Ricoeur has called "discordant concordance,"3 a unity created by the combination of heterogeneous elements. Both narrative and self-identity are formed and developed as a result of a constant vacillation between sameness (idem) and selfhood (ipse). Sameness implies stasis, namely permanence in time, whereas selfhood implies dynamics and variability in the course of time, Ipie-identity (or selfhood), Ricoeur contends, "involves a dialectic complementary to that of selfhood and sameness, namely the dialectic of self and the other than self' (1992: 3). Some degree of sameness is indispensable to any kind of identity, whether narrative or other, such as the identity of an object. On the [End Page 79] one hand, a mathematical or idealized conception of identity implies complete stasis. This conception of identity is the foundation of Parmenides' belief that being is one, unified, and identical to itself, and that therefore neither movement nor change exist. Thus changes in the course of time are not a necessary condition for every kind of identity. On the other hand, selfhood implies more than "the spatio-temporal continuity of the object" (Parfit 203). According to Derek Parfit, personal identity is based on psychological connectedness, the holding of particular direct psychological connections between subject X today and the same-but-other subject Y yesterday (206). Two examples of psychological connectedness given by Parfit are "direct memory connections" and "the connections which hold between an intention and the later act in which this intention is carried out" (205). It follows that the annihilation of selfhood jeopardizes not identity in general but merely personal identity, further specified by Ricoeur and MacIntyre as narrative identity. Both MacIntyre and Ricoeur believe that it is not order but, on the contrary, fragmentation that is imposed on human action, and that human intelligibility depends on an analysis which shows how separate actions are connected to each other.4 Both point out the susceptibility of narrative identity to diffusion and dissolution if selfhood takes over sameness or, in other words, if the discordant features of narrative and self-identity overpower the concordant features. And both argue that this dissolution, if uncritically accepted, is hazardous to human culture and morality. In what follows, I shall argue that the theoretical discussions of narrative identity ignore the threat posed by a radical shift to the pole of sameness, stasis, and stagnation. Similarly, most contemporary fictional works "lend themselves to postmodern aesthetics and politics" concerning the undermining of the autonomous subject, "the fostering of multiplicity, [and] the interrogation and dissolution of certainty" (Schofield 2003). In opposition to these tendencies, though without underestimating their value, I shall explore the possibility of sameness taking over selfhood in the constitution of self-identity and narrative. I shall briefly examine some techniques by which such narrative identity is formed, and deal with some of its implications for both self and [End Page 80] narrative. The novel chosen for this purpose is Agota Kristof's The Notebook(Le Grand Cahier, 1986). Before discussing the novel, however, I wish to clarify the general cultural-historical factor and the specific literary factor which cause the asymmetry between the two facets of identity. The general cultural factor is reflected in MacIntyre's and Ricoeur's reliance on the concepts of "narrative unity" and "narrative identity" as a reaction to extreme doubts about human agency and the foundations of ethics. MacIntyre, and to some extent Ricoeur, believe that modern culture has lost its way because it has unwisely succumbed to theoretical trends that valorize relativism, transience, and fragmentation, or, in other words, because it has radicalized selfhood at the expense of sameness. Referring to Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities as...