Karl Ove Knausgaard

Knausgaard’s Selflessness

By Joshua Rothman

April 20, 2016

 

Five volumes in, there’s still a temptation to redeem Karl Ove Knausgaard from egotism—to find, in his multi-volume autobiographical novel “My Struggle,” some subject other than Karl Ove's life, some theme profound enough to justify these thousands of pages. Earlier this month, in an essay on the fifth volume in The New Republic, Ryu Spaeth argued that “My Struggle” is “actually a commentary on contemporary life in the West, a sweeping novel of ideas in the tradition of Thomas Mann and Fyodor Dostoevsky.” Other critics have likened Knausgaard to Proust, whose novel wasn’t just a life story but a philosophical meditation on aesthetics, time, and selfhood. The final volume, it’s thought, will reveal the novel’s grand intellectual design.

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle” is described as a solipsistic epic. In fact, it’s about openness to the world.Photograph by Martin Lengemann / laif / Redux

I’m sympathetic to these readings of the book, but something in me resists. When I tally up the pleasures and surprises “My Struggle” has given me, I find that they have little to do with intellectual subjects. The book isn’t really about politics, aesthetics, or the nature of society. Instead, “My Struggle” has pushed me to think more about my own self, and, in particular, my emotions. It’s reacquainted me with the vividness of feelings. It’s a sentimental education.

Volume five of “My Struggle,” which is called “Some Rain Must Fall” in the U.K. edition, covers a difficult period in Karl Ove’s life—his twenties, more or less. As it opens, he is nineteen and entering the Writing Academy in Bergen; by the end, he has published a well-received novel. The years leading up to that success, however, are unhappy and sometimes unhinged. Karl Ove spends years laboring over a few terrible pages of fiction (helpfully reprinted, in full, by Knausgaard). He falls in love, has his heart broken, gets married, cheats, and gets divorced. He drinks too much and becomes a petty thief and vandal. He works long hours at a mental institution and on an oil rig in the North Sea. He also commits two shocking acts of violence—one against himself, the other against someone he loves. They seem to issue from a misery so unbearable that those ordinary woes can’t account for it.

In previous volumes, we’ve watched a younger Karl Ove struggle to absorb his father’s dark energies. In the new volume, his dad is no longer abusive—he’s started a new family in another part of Norway—but he’s become suicidally alcoholic; his darkness has turned inward. Karl Ove, having long wished his father dead, is now driven nearly crazy by the fact that the man is actually dying. It’s Karl Ove’s anxious mixture of fear, sadness, guilt, and anger that makes “My Struggle” seem, at times, Dostoyevskian: he feels, and sometimes acts, like a murderer. (Early in the volume, when he learns that a murder has taken place in his neighborhood, he imagines himself as a killer on the run.) Even so, reading this fifth volume, I felt more acutely than usual that I was rooting for Karl Ove. The novel is affecting not just because of his sadness but because of his determination, often foiled, to wring his father's poison out of his life—his only hope for achieving a semblance of happiness and sanity. “I had to get rid of him,” Knausgaard told Andrew O’Hagan, in a 2014 interview. “That has been my project—to get rid of his presence inside of me.”

Mental anguish of the sort Karl Ove experiences emanates not just from other people but from their echoes in one’s own life and personality. Such anguish can feel formless, like an atmosphere; it’s helpful, therefore, to give it a metaphorical shape. For Karl Ove, the metaphor is one of enclosure. He feels locked in a cage no matter where he is. Claustrophobia, like all feelings, has a rhythm. When Karl Ove discovers some experience that gives him psychic space—when he stumbles upon a place where “the world opens,” as he often puts it—he looks around in wonder and asks himself, How long can I stay?

The answer, always, is not long. In the new volume, Karl Ove dates a wholesome and happy young woman named Gunvor. She is levelheaded and confident, thoughtful and easygoing, comfortable and loving with her family—from his perspective, practically an extraterrestrial. Gunvor shares her open world with Karl Ove. Still, he knows it will never be his; eventually, he ends the relationship. Looking back over all five volumes, it's striking how much of Karl Ove’s life has been spent auditioning routes to freedom. He’s tried music, drinking, sex, but those experiences end too soon. In the latest volume, longer-lasting alternatives present themselves. At the university, Karl Ove studies literature and begins to read history and criticism. Reading these books, he can feel “something being opened up”:

My whole world consisted of entities I took for granted and which were unshakeable, like rocks and mountains of the mind. The Holocaust was one such entity, the Age of Enlightenment another. I could account for them, I had a clear image of them, as everyone did, but I had never thought about them, never asked myself what circumstances had made them possible. . . . As soon as I started to read Horkheimer and Adorno’s book Dialectic of Enlightenment, of which I understood very little, something opened, in that things which could be viewed in one way could also be viewed in another, words lost their force, there was no such thing as the Holocaust, for what the term indicated was so incredibly complicated, right down to the comb in the pocket of the jacket in the pile of jackets in the warehouse, it had belonged to a little girl, the whole of her life exists in the term “the Holocaust.”** **

Other “big concepts,” Karl Ove continues—“evil, indifference, guilt, collective guilt, individual responsibility, mass man, mass production, mass extinction”—were similarly “opened” by his reading. “The world was relativized, but also more real,” he writes. “Lies or misunderstandings or deceit were inherent in notions of reality, not in reality, which was inaccessible to language.” It was possible, in short, to discern a gap between the ideas we have about reality and reality itself. This is an intellectual realization, of course; it’s a kind of skepticism. But Karl Ove also suspects that it could have personal significance. He spends much of the fifth volume pursuing a writerly intuition about the space between ideas and reality. That gap seems like it could, somehow, become a way out of his closed-off world. But the exact method of escape remains, for the most part, elusive.

When Andrew O’Hagan, during that 2014 interview, asked Knausgaard whether writing “My Struggle” had been “therapeutic”—whether it had helped him “conquer the fear” of his father—Knausgaard said no. He went on:

It’s nothing like that to write, I think. To write is much more about becoming free of everything, becoming free of what you know. Regarding my father, I had this opinion of him, and I had to free myself from that opinion. You can do that in writing if you write about yourself—you know, these ecstatic moments when you are kind of selfless. . . . Then, you are free, then you can write about everything. . . . I wanted to get away from the conceptions of people in my life, of what really happened, and my understanding of my life. I had to get all that away, and to try to recreate it, but as chaotic as it really is.

When I first watched this interview, I got stuck. How exactly did the process of “becoming free of what you know” differ from therapy? After reading the fifth volume, I think I see the difference. Knausgaard, in writing “My Struggle,” hasn’t conquered his fear of his father; he’s done the opposite and recreated it. He’s made it more real within his own mind, more “chaotic” than, for a long time, he considered or allowed it to be. In doing so, he’s brought himself back to life. That’s because, in addition to recreating that fear, he’s recreated everything else—beauty, sadness, frustration, anxiety, innocence, openness—which, despite its richness, was hidden beneath the “rocks and mountains of the mind.”

This is a familiar way of thinking. The most painful parts of our lives can be easier to deal with when they’re converted into ideas. A father who was an alcoholic, who died of drinking, who was unhappy and made others so—that kind of “clear image,” shorn of spontaneity, randomness, complexity, and ambiguity, can help us to move on with life. It also has a cost: the maintenance of such an idea requires us to simplify what we know and who we are. Pain can freeze us; eventually, we need to unfreeze. From this perspective, “My Struggle” is a thaw. We’re captivated because we’re watching a person of unusual sensitivity and intelligence get reacquainted with his life and himself. The broad success of the book suggests that many of us—frozen, in our own ways—long to do the same.

The style of “My Struggle” has often been described as solipsistic. It’s said to capture one person’s impressions of the quotidian, the banal, the everyday. And yet it might be more accurate to describe Knausgaard’s style as disinterested, non-conceptual, or free. His writing is highly personal, but it’s also selfless. He writes about himself, but without recourse to the static ideas from which selves are made. Knausgaard writes beautifully about landscapes, and he describes his inner life the way he describes a landscape, simply noting, with tender exactness, what is there. Using the same flat tone, he will describe the green mountainside, the tea in a cup, the feeling of fear. The inner and outer landscapes are united. He’s invented a new kind of narration: he chronicles the minute details of his own existence, but not from the perspective of himself.

The goal of such a style is to be at one with the world. Late in the fifth volume, Karl Ove interviews a Norwegian poet and novelist named Rune Christiansen. The interview goes well. “When I left to catch the bus to town it felt as if everything was within my reach,” Knausgaard writes, “I was onto something important, all I had to do was stretch out for it.”

This was a vague feeling, nothing on which you could build, but all the same I knew I had something there. In the mist, in the darkness of the forest, in the dew drops on the spruce needles. In the whales that swam in the sea, in the heart beating in my breast. Mist, heart, blood, trees. Why were they so appealing? What was it that enticed me with such power? That filled me with such enormous desire? Mist, heart, blood, trees. Oh, if only I could write about them, no, not write about them but make my writing be them, then I would be happy. Then I would have peace of mind.** **

The novel imagines a kind of ultimate freedom—a spiritual freedom based in radical openness. It’s expansive and impersonal, yet still human; it’s concrete, anti-ideological, and, above all, emotional. Beyond, alongside, or perhaps within the quest to know oneself, there’s a quest to know the universe.

Joshua Rothman, the ideas editor of newyorker.com, has been at The New Yorker since 2012.

THE NEW YORKER