My Struggle: Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgård

What does it mean to write? First of all it is to lose oneself, or one’s self. In that it resembles reading, but while the loss of the self in reading is to the alien I, which, by virtue of being so obviously apart from the reader’s own singular I, does not seriously threaten its integrity, the loss of the self in writing is in a different way complete, as when snow vanishes into snow, one might think, or any other monochromism with no privileged point, no foreground or background, no top or bottom, only sameness everywhere. Such is the nature of the written self. But what is this sameness of which it is comprised and within which it exists? It is the singular language of the self. The I comes into being in the language, and is the language. But the language is not the property of the I, it belongs to all. The identity of the literary I resides in the choice of one word rather than another, but how poorly held together and centered that identity is. In a way it resembles the one we have in dreams, where the conscious self distinguishes just as little between us and what constitutes our surroundings and experiences, and our I is in effect deposited inside a room in which the green bench to our left is quite as central to who we are as the wriggling fish to our right, or the Neptune-like figure rising out of the water that at that same moment floods the floor beneath the sky across which a red biplane passes.