‘My Struggle: Book 5,’ by Karl Ove Knausgaard
MY STRUGGLE
Book 5
By Karl Ove Knausgaard
Translated by Don Bartlett
624 pp. Archipelago Books. $27.
Almost 600 pages into this, the fifth volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s monumental “My Struggle,” the 28-year-old would-be novelist finally secures a book deal. He has been writing for a decade with immense seriousness and little success. At one point he reprints a few overwrought paragraphs, which he once hoped would form the beginning of a novel. “This is what I had,” he writes. “Two years’ work. I knew every sentence by heart.”
From an author renowned for his immense fluency and productivity, this account of his early travails is startling. As we know from many thousands of subsequently published pages, Knausgaard’s dam will break, and in this volume we see the very moment it happens, catalyzed by a conversation overheard in a cafe. “Excited, I made notes. . . . In my room, a few hours later, I began to write. . . . I continued through the night.” Soon enough, Knausgaard has a draft, and an editor in Oslo agrees to publish it. Enthusiastically reviewed, he finds himself about to appear on national TV. The host confesses that he hasn’t had time to read it. “On the cover it says the book’s about male shame. Could you say a few words about that, do you think?” Knausgaard demurs. “ ‘I didn’t write the blurb,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know it was about shame until I saw it.’ ”
Shame, of course, will turn out to be Knausgaard’s great theme. “My Struggle” is punctuated by any number of embarrassing or uncomfortable revelations, from the author’s sexual interest in a 13-year-old girl to his troubles with premature ejaculation. This volume takes him from the age of 19 until the dissolution of his first marriage 14 years later, a period of binge drinking, social awkwardness, band practice and writer’s block, in which the only real constant is his literary ambition. “If I was at the bottom,” he writes, “I had to rise. If I accepted that I belonged down there, in the terrible abyss of immaturity and ineptitude, I had failed.” He ends the TV interview “a little indignant, all I had done was write a novel, you would have thought I had killed someone, judging by his questions.”
Knausgaard’s defensive reaction to the interview feels significant. His compulsive self-revelations seem designed to provoke — and perhaps also foreclose or short-circuit — negative moral evaluation. Shame and publication are strangely knotted together throughout the books of “My Struggle,” shame that pre-exists publication but that seeks in it some kind of release or repetition. Book 1 begins with the death of the author’s father, a violent alcoholic who ruthlessly mocked his sons and sometimes beat them. “It wasn’t the pain I was afraid of, it was him, his voice, his face, his body, the fury it emitted,” Knausgaard later writes. The sudden absence of a man whose physical presence caused such terror has occasioned the release of this torrent of words, but also haunts it. Daddy has been replaced by the reading public: distant, scornful, sitting in judgment.
The ego that permits the bad son to write with such seriousness and at such length about his own formation is a sharp weapon when turned inward. The young Knausgaard’s experiences of public abjection are the flip side of a vanity that will not allow him to accept the standards lesser people apply to themselves. He must be the most isolated, the most rejected, the biggest failure. “I had felt I was . . . someone who carried thoughts no one else had and which no one must ever know. . . . No one could take loneliness away from me.” As a precocious 19-year-old at a writing school in Bergen, he takes criticism badly, reduced to juvenile provocation by the negative appraisals of the other students. When drunk, he is out of control, capable of violence. His self-hatred becomes literal self-laceration. Prompted by a girlfriend’s friendliness to his brother, he stumbles to a bar toilet and repeatedly scores his cheeks with broken glass. For many other self-cutters, it’s important to hide the traces. Not Knausgaard. Out on the street, his Carrie-like appearance provokes shock and fear. Waking the next morning, he sees what he’s done to his face: “I had ruined it. I looked like a monster.”
Monstrosity, the possibility that he is definitively — and visibly — aberrant or unnatural, haunts Knausgaard in all of these volumes. He almost badgers the reader into telling him not just that he is a bad person, but that he ought to have kept quiet about it. There is something libidinal about this insistence, a species of pride that makes him into a sort of inverted Coriolanus, the stoic warrior who refuses to show his war wounds to the crowd. “My Struggle” is an ecstatic display of woundedness, a platform on which the author can bleed in public.
Early attempts to understand “My Struggle” tended to see it as an unmediated stream, either an artless outpouring or an attempt at radical transparency. For the reader, Knausgaard’s transgressive self-exposure is a guilty pleasure that shares something with the culture of social media and reality TV, and to this extent both these readings have some merit. But Book 5 seems both more controlled and traditional in form than much of what’s gone before, following the conventions of the bildungsroman to tell the story of an unhappy young man who becomes a writer. Frequently bleak, it is also knowing and often extremely funny. His account of reading Celan’s “Death Fugue,” in its entirety, to a girl who’s come over to apologize for sleeping with his brother induces a sympathetic embarrassment that is almost exquisite in its intensity. This is writing that is neither artless nor naïvely transparent.
With only one more book to appear in English, it has become clear that “My Struggle” is a highly literary work, in the sense that its author makes choices, shapes his material and leaves out many things in telling his story. Knausgaard’s own account of the origin of “My Struggle” concerned a rejection of the fictionality of fiction, a state of crisis in which he needed to abandon the mimetic straitjacket of the novel to achieve authenticity as a writer. As he wrote in Book 2, “just the thought of a fabricated character in a fabricated plot made me feel nauseous.” This disgust for the traditional procedures of fiction, in which “voice” is always a pure performance, safely distant from the writing self (never make the mistake of thinking that I, Dostoyevsky, am Raskolnikov, or that I, Nabokov, am Humbert Humbert), is a challenge to Anglophone literary convention, but is far more common in, say, France, where the tradition of autofiction has been an established object of critical inquiry since at least the 1970s. For those of us who have found “My Struggle” addictive, and want to claim it as a serious work, its shameful nakedness feels important, a kind of writing that asserts the raw value of the “thoughts no one else has and which no one must ever know.” As Knausgaard puts it here, “What emerged from this was myself, this was what was me.”
Hari Kunzru’s new novel, “White Tears,” will be published next year.
No comments:
Post a Comment