The End (My Struggle #6)

by Karl Ove Knausgård

Ulysses has become the myth of the difficult book, eight hundred pages about a single day, Freud is associated with the subconscious, with stretching out on a couch and talking about your childhood, and with jokes about cigars and trains going through tunnels, Husserl is Heidegger’s forerunner, Heidegger himself a Nazi. The fact that Joyce writes about this, the way culture’s every expression is broken down to live among us only barely understood, as misconstruals, assumptions, half-truths, myths and surmisals, bits of this and fragments of that, as if to show that culture is this, the human and living is that, God but a shout in the street, is perhaps ironic in view of he himself becoming the very epitome of literary elitism and obliviousness to the world, though quite understandable given the fact that in order to get there, in order to penetrate into this, he had to shun that same quotidian culture’s ways of communicating.