My Struggle: Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgård

I had thought about none of this while I had been writing, neither the manufacture of reality, representation, nor my father’s integrity, everything took place intuitively, I began with a blank page and a will to write, and ended up with the novel as it was. In that there lies a belief in the intuitive that is as good as blind, and from that basis a poetics might be derived, and an ontology too, I suppose, since for me the novel provides a means of thinking radically different from that of the essay, the article, or the thesis, because reflection in the novel is not hierarchically superior as a pathway to understanding, but coordinate with all the other elements in it. The room in which it is conceived is as important as the thought itself. The snow falling through the darkness outside, the headlights of the cars gliding past on the other side of the river. This was perhaps the most important thing I learned at university, that practically anything at all can be said about a novel or a poem, and what is said may be as likely as it is plausible, but never exhaustive, perhaps not even important, since the novel and the poem are always entities in their own right, singular and existing as they are, and the fact that what the novel or the poem says cannot be said in any other way makes them essentially mysterious. The world is mysterious in exactly the same way, and yet we tend to forget this all the time, always giving precedence to reflection whenever we look at it. What doe...

Death doesn’t finish anything. Faulkner: “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past”