My Struggle: Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgård

autobiographical. In contrast to my own prose, which constantly leaned toward the emotional and evocative, Handke’s prose was dry and unsentimental. When I started writing I’d been trying to achieve a similar style, if not dry, then raw, in the sense of unrefined, direct, without metaphors or other linguistic decoration. The latter would give beauty to the language, and in a description of reality, especially the reality I was trying to describe, that would be deceitful. Beauty is a problem in that it imparts a kind of hope. As a stylistic device in literature, a particular filter through which the world is viewed, beauty lends hope to the hopeless, worth to the worthless, meaning to the meaningless. This is inevitably so. Loneliness beautifully described raises the soul to great heights. But then the writing is no longer true because there is no beauty in loneliness, not even in yearning is there beauty. But while it may not be true, it is good. It is a comfort, a solace, and perhaps that is where some of literature’s justification lies? But if that’s the case, then we are talking about literature as something else, something unto itself and autonomous, valuable in its own right rather than as a depiction of reality.