My Struggle: Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgård

That’s what money bought, lots of space and distance from others. But not too much space and not too much distance. In the forests you could have as much space as you wanted and there could be miles to the nearest neighbor, but no one with money would ever dream of living there. Space and distance were valuable only if there were other people nearby who had a lot less space and lived a lot closer to each other.

“You’re the most optimistic person I know,” he said. “A depressed optimist. That’s what you are.” “It’s

The freedom that lies in laughter is quite different from that which lies in the expression of virtues, which is perhaps why Arendt doesn’t mention it, since it strives toward nothing, establishes nothing, changes nothing, distinguishes nothing, but exists simply for the moment, having no other purpose than to make it tolerable.

Wanting to believe is impossible, a contradiction in terms. Had he believed, he would not have written. But he could feel it.

And no matter Dostoyevsky’s intentions when he wrote his masterpiece, what Myshkin brings with him none of us wants, it is almost a nightmare vision. The idiot is he who gapes and laughs with those who laugh at him, his face a question mark. The idiot is the cynic’s antipode. Between them lies the choice. The cynic asks, But who will forgive? The idiot replies, I will.

Part of KOK's analysis of The Idiot - lucid and evocative. Yes, this is pretty much what that novel felt to me also.

The darkness in August is the finest darkness of all. It lacks the luminous transparency of June’s, the sheer ripeness of its potentialities, yet is quite unlike the impenetrable depths of autumn’s or winter’s darkness. What was with us before and now is gone, spring and summer, lingers on in August’s darkness, whereas what is to come, autumn and winter, is a time into which we can only peer, a time of which we are not yet a part.

Once again, KOK's descriptive language blows me away. That and the inversion of Faulkner's title. Amazing.

Never had the darkness of August felt more replete than now. Replete with what? The beauty of time passing.

I lay on my back under the covers, waiting for Linda to come in from the bathroom. When she did, and lowered herself into the bed, as if into water it seemed to me, I put my arms around her and held her tight, feeling her body against mine, her warmth, sensing her smell. “I love you,” I said. And for some strange reason I cried as I spoke the words. But I did so silently, my eyes simply filling with tears, and she knew nothing of it.

Ladybugs were among the most appealing of insects. So delicate and flowerlike in their beauty, they were the very antithesis of the monstrous. Mosquitoes could occur in huge swarms and be everywhere, there was nothing unnatural about that, but with ladybugs there was something ominous about it, as if something had gone wrong, as if something that ought to have been closed had been opened, and as I looked out over the sound, where the gigantic structure of the Öresund Bridge rose up disconcertingly near us to the south and the contours of the Barsebäck nuclear power plant were visible to the north, the blue sky above the glittering blue sea teeming with tiny black dots I knew to be ladybugs, I thought to myself: this is how the world ends.

But I could not change it. I could not call him by any other name. So I solved the problem by not using his name at all. Neither his first name nor his surname appears in the novel. In the novel he is a man without a name.

I had completely overlooked that he doesn’t actually name his dad in Vol 1!

Obviously, reality would be altered into something else in the process of being depicted, but my hope was that what was fantastic about the phenomenon itself, the fact of existing alongside a certain collection of people where everyone knew each other or had heard of each other, in a certain period of time in a certain geographical area, and where basically anything at all could happen, but where things eventually turned out according to reality’s own exactness and precision, that some of this, the starry luster of growing up, familiar to us all, would shine through the literary form. Every name that went from being real to being fictional weakened that feeling and pulled the novel into the shimmer of enfeebled reality it had been written to engage against. Geir G. said it didn’t matter to the reader, he or she wasn’t going to connect the names with anyone anyway and wouldn’t know if it was authentic or not. But the authentic is a timbre, impossible to imitate.

in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Here the name is no longer an instrument by which to achieve some particular effect, and no mere furnishing of the novel’s interior; rather it is a major theme, and thereby it loses its innocence.

Underlying this discussion is the fact that the novel opens by describing a conversation between two young men in a tower, one being Stephen, who has just lost his mother. The other, Buck Mulligan, says to him, “The aunt thinks you killed your mother,” to which Stephen replies, “Someone killed her.” The tower is the castle at Elsinore, Dublin Bay the strait between Denmark and Sweden, and Stephen is Hamlet. But Stephen is also Telemachus journeying in search of his father, Odysseus, which is to say Leopold Bloom, the Jew. And Leopold Bloom is, besides Odysseus, also Virgil when in the night he walks side by side with Stephen, which is to say Dante, through the streets of Dublin, which is to say Hell, and he is the writer Henry Flowers, who sends audacious letters on the sly to a woman whose acquaintance he has made by way of an advertisement. But he is moreover the father of a son who died, which in this universe makes him Shakespeare, father of Hamnet. And his wife is not only Penelope, who is besieged by men in Odysseus’s absence, but also Anne Hathaway, which is to say Queen Gertrude, since just after four o’clock that day she is in bed with her impresario, making a cuckold of Bloom.

“Hold on to the now,” Stephen tells himself in the library, “the here, through which all future plunges to the past,” words that contain at once a philosophy of life and a poetics. In the discussion of Plato and Aristotle there, Stephen suggests that Aristotle would have considered Hamlet’s musings on death, this “improbable, insignificant, and undramatic monologue,” to be quite as shallow as Plato’s.

The new in Joyce and modernist literature is in the weakening of the boundary between the self and the outside world, so radical that the relationship becomes near osmotic. People get bigger in a way, embracing both history and the stream of events of contemporary existence, but they also get smaller insofar as what is unique and unexampled about them, collected in the name, the person they are, becomes dissolved in it.

Or rather, no, it’s like going inside the mind of one of those sitting there and being party to the way he or she experiences the conversation, the allusions and references being even more oblique; no one explains to themselves what they already know. The names are closed to us, but not in the same way as in Kafka, where they are relieved of their

Like in Vargas Llosa’s Conversation in the Cathedral

In Faulkner the past is like a void and unclear, differing radically from Joyce’s past, which above all is the past of culture, that which is devised and created, Odysseus and Circe, Dante, and Shakespeare, a past to which one relates through the intellect, whereas the past in Faulkner’s work is nameless and without language, and may only be sensed or felt. The difference is reflected, too, in the titles. Both are intertextual, Joyce finding his in Homer, Faulkner in Shakespeare, but while Joyce uses a name, Ulysses, and brings a culture to life, Faulkner uses a phenomenon of the world, sound/noise/commotion, and another from the domain of the human, fury/rage/anger, both timeless. The name does not address the archaic, but the social.

Reading a novel after having listened to Bach’s cello suites is like leaving a sunset to descend into a cellar. The novel is the form of the small life, and when it’s not it is because it’s being deceitful and is no true novel at all, since no I exists that isn’t small, too.

To grow older is not to understand more but to realize that there is more to understand.

The human is as remote as can be without having vanished completely. Even the act of asking after you is unperformed, visible only in its negation. No one asks after you, and as such they who do not ask are presented to us. Yet they were here once, this is implied; once they asked after you. Now all there is here is a wheel, a field, a night sky devoid of stars. The terrain being empty, the emphasis of absence, means that the one entity to be named is accorded special weight indeed. The wheel that rolls “out of itself,” of its own volition.

The idea that he knew his son better than his son knew himself shifts the whole conflict away from responsibility and subjugation, or from the mechanical aspect of such responsibility, such subjugation, into something essential, unknown to those involved, who were helpless against themselves.

No matter how broken a person might be, no matter how disturbed the soul, that person remains a person always, with the freedom to choose. It is choice that makes us human. Only choice gives meaning to the concept of guilt.

In actual fact the opposite is true: only his innocence can bring his guilt into relief.

The episode makes plain three of the young Hitler’s various modes of relating to the world around him: at first he is within it, filled with unmanageable feelings of attraction and disgust, lust and shame; then he rages against it, eventually, at due distance, to analyze it. Analysis is the preferred mode, and the remoteness it requires is one of the most striking elements of Hitler’s character and cannot be underestimated.

Our internal existence is abstract, external reality tangible, and in these grand yet unrealistic designs the two aspects collide in a way he is unable to manage.

Men have come together at this place, on each side of a hypothetical line, an invisible chalk mark, in this theatrical distortion of reality in which the familiar is uprooted and life removed to its furthest limit, so relentlessly transgressed, as if they were the gods themselves, since what awaits beyond, on the other side, is death, which is to say nature.

Reading Hitler’s endeavors toward exaltation in Mein Kampf is like looking at a poor painting of a steep and splendid mountain.

I can feel a yearning for something else, and that yearning, I assume, must be felt by others, too, because surely people of the same culture cannot be so different from one another that an emotion can exist in one person only?

But the sun beats down, the grass grows, the heart pounds in its darkness.

“But the sun beats down, the grass grows, the heart pounds in its darkness.” Why did I write those words? Such language is hollow. It looks like the language of the Nazis. Yes, the sun is actually beating down, the grass is actually growing, the heart actually pounding in its darkness, but the factuality of these things is not what is significant about their linguistic expression, what is significant is what that language evokes, that the sun, the grass, and the heart are in a way elevated, made to be something more than themselves, as if somehow they become bearers of actual reality. It is the same language that says civilization is detached from our basic urges, our sufferings and the brilliance of genius, whereas the sun, the grass, the blood are connected to the authentic, whose two great expressions are war and art, as Mann wrote in 1914.

We live our lives surrounded by commercial goods, and spend great swaths of our waking hours in front of screens. We conceal death as best we can. What do we do if out of all this a yearning arises for something else? A more real reality, a more authentic life? Such a yearning would be founded on false precepts because all life is quite as authentic, and the hallowed is a notion belonging to life, not life itself.

This is the reason I write, trying to explore the connections of which I am a part, and when I feel the pull of the authentic, it becomes another connection I feel compelled to explore.

The ship was indeed gigantic, towering above the city, passengers milling on all its decks. A loudspeaker voice blared out tourist information, and the air was a glitter of flashing cameras. Something welled inside me. A shiver ran down my spine.

Everything in Ulysses is moreover always something else, not because the world is relative, but because the language through which we see it is. The transcendency of Ulysses lies in the language, it opens up a chasm in the now, which is thereby no longer epiphanic – neither isolated, whole, nor particular – and if Joyce’s portrayal of the world is true in its relativity and in its massive intertextuality, it is then cerebral and at root scholarly in its determination toward systematics and cohesion, hurtling away from physical reality and the realistic novel, much as the medieval Church Fathers detached themselves from the Bible and the concrete, action-oriented, physical reality found in it, and arced into the hugely abstract, bodiless canopy of speculation and reflection they stretched out over their lives. In that one may lose oneself, as one may lose oneself in Ulysses and the other great works of modernism, with all the intellectual enjoyment and aesthetic pleasure they have to offer, for their turning toward form and language makes them all the more works in their own right, something in themselves, at the same time as they have so plainly lost something too, for as Henry James once suggested, in art, the emotions are the meaning.

An experience is what is seen, colored by emotion. Reason ignores emotion, addressing only the mind, but to the mind the fact of endless numbers of people having lived and died before us, and the fact that we who are alive now will also soon be dead, is a banal insight, something we have known since we were five years old.

The house was set back from the road at the top of a steep meadow running down to the deep-blue fjord, whose waters lapped lazily against the shore. The trees on the other side shimmered.

And it was the same sun Turner let shine upon his picture of an ancient harbor, painted some hundred years before. Turner found his motif in Virgil’s epic Aeneid, more specifically in the story of Dido, who falls in love with Aeneas and takes her own life when he parts from her. However, it is not so much the drama of the events Turner is interested in as the place in which they unfold. His painting depicts the harbor at Carthage on the northern coast of Africa and appears markedly Romantic in both its exoticism and its rubble-strewn ruin lust, the many monumental, half-collapsed buildings that fill its canvas. At least this was what I thought the first time I saw it. On closer inspection though, I realized these were not ruins at all, but the opposite. The great chalk-white buildings of Antiquity were actually under construction, and what the painting shows is a city rising rather than falling. It’s a splendid painting.

To us the local aspect of any major event is hardly ever present, both because every part of it is focalized and because it is made to exist in all places at once.

No matter where we happened to be on September 11, 2001, we heard about or saw the same thing, the two planes crashing into the twin towers. This event was in all our minds, there was no outside – apart from the place one happened to be, physically, wherever in the world. This bipartite operation, so characteristic of our age, where something is on the one hand almost completely focalized, and on the other almost completely spread out in all directions, was of course unknown in Lorrain’s day, the technologically unsophisticated seventeenth century, when an event was for those who happened to be there when it took place. When Lorrain interprets a scene from the Aeneid, he brings it across to us in a way not unlike that of a news photographer in our day and age, as a kind of witness – the fact of the former being a fictive witness, and the latter being an actual witness, makes no difference to the form – but he shows us something more besides, which has to do with the time and space in which the event took place. The great, eventless landscape that surrounds what is going on makes it so obvious to us that it is going on only in the scene’s here and now, and that this is the most important, essential aspect of any event. Oh, how simple and plain an insight, yet it is one thing to know the nature of something, quite another to feel and experience it. How hidden the actual nature of events has become to us is something we understand only when we see something unexpected happen ...

One of the places where this aspect of the relationship between man and nature is clearest is in the work of the author Olav Duun. One of his most important books is called Menneske og maktene (published in English as Floodtide of Fate), the original Norwegian title evoking the human struggle against the tide of inhuman forces, a theme that runs throughout his work. His masterpiece, the six-volume saga The People of Juvik, is steeped in it.

endless, forever sprouting anew from dead stubs. Knowledge comes from the dead, everything we know we have learned from them. Life is the life of the one and the life of us all. Death is the death of the one and the death of us all. The sun is forever being seen for the first time, always a new pair of eyes squinting up at it, and forever being seen for the last time, other eyes closing, losing sight of it once and for all. These connections are what our myths and rituals manage and administer, and the same applies to them, they are already there for us. They are a language, a different language, and what they communicate can be communicated in no other way. In this respect the Enlightenment, resting on the idea that myth, ritual, and religion were a form of superstition, represented decay. We call the mythological view of the world unenlightened, and obviously, four hundred years after the beginning of the Enlightenment, we now know more about the material world and how it works than those who lived before that time. And not just more, but unimaginably more. But what is knowing? Throughout the Völuspá, the völva’s questions are repeated in what seems like a refrain of reluctance: Do you know enough yet, or what? Knowledge is concealed, connected to Hel, the dead and the past, out of sight, and access to it comes at a price. “Do you know enough yet, or what?” says the völva, and in that lies an evaluation of those listening in, their thirst for knowledge, at which she snee...

I saw a cruise ship thronged with people pass slowly through a sinking city, a loudspeaker voice blaring out, a glitter of flashing cameras, and was it death I saw? Indeed, and it was sublime. The sublime is everything, though now, in our fracturing world, it has become almost extinct. We live under the hegemony of constituent parts, and death, too, is under its jurisdiction. It is the death of the individual that matters, we are snatched away one by one, hidden from each other’s gaze, and only the specified death matters.

It was a smooth, pristine material without folds or stains, against which the white skin that lay like a crater in the middle with all its irregularities seemed almost obscene. When the scalpel was inserted and the section of skin cut open by the faceless surgeon under the light of a powerful lamp, it seemed as if a little ditch appeared.

In his notebooks Leonardo seems almost obsessive in his urge to delve into our physical reality, and he makes no distinction between the human and the material, the living and the dead, he wants to describe and capture it all, to understand. How come the fossils of mussels and sea creatures can be discovered at the top of a mountain? How come older people see things better from a distance? How come the sky is blue? What is heat? He attempts to describe the causes of laughter and crying, the nature of a sneeze, a yawn. He wants to know all about the falling sickness, spasms, paralysis. Why do we shiver when we are cold, and why do we sweat? What are fatigue, hunger, thirst, lust? He wants to explore our beginnings in the womb and to discover why an eight-month-old fetus dies. He wants to detail which muscles decay when we grow fat, and which become pronounced when we are thin. He wonders why the spots on the moon change when observed over time, and explains them as being caused by clouds rising from its waters, coming between the sun and those waters, by their shadow depriving them of the sun’s rays, the waters thereby remaining dark and unable to reflect the solar body. In all his observations and speculations he proceeds from what he sees with his own eye, and only that. Leonardo describes a world without transcendence, and yet it does not in any way appear closed, on the contrary, for not only is the richness of what his eye is drawn toward overwhelming, his very gaze is...

Yet one can stare and continue to stare at such a painting, which comes alive in the beholder’s gaze and seems inexhaustible, whereas the drawings of the inner body saturate the senses in a different way entirely, constraining our gaze and the emotions that follow on: what we see is what there is. In other words, the painting contains more. But what is this “more”? What does the painting have that the drawings don’t?

And Deuteronomy’s magnificent finale might have been as follows: And Moses descended from the plains of the Hardangervidda into the Setesdal and went up into the hills there, over against Valle. And the Lord shewed him all the land: from Byggland unto Evje and Åmli, from Birkenes unto Hægebostad, and all of Agder unto Arendal and the utmost sea to the south, and Grimstad and Lillesand, all the land of the south unto Kristiansand. And the Lord said unto him, This is the land which I sware unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, saying, I will give it unto thy seed: I have caused thee to see it with thine eyes, but thou shalt not go over thither. So Moses the servant of the Lord died there in the Setesdal, according to the word of the Lord. And he buried him in the Setesdal, over against Bykle: but no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.

What I know now, which I did not know then, is that there are forces inside us oblivious to good and bad, and emotions that can be so powerful as to override everything without our even knowing that we are in their grip, for the ego, the I, that thin sliver of light at the edge of our consciousness, contains our whole identity, colors our understanding of all the other forces, desires, and emotions that exist within us, much as the age in which we live colors our perception of the past, for there is no natural outside, neither in the body nor in society, and to arrive at such a place, from where we can see ourselves or the age in which we live, requires an effort, and that effort is huge, for the forces that pull on our self-awareness and on the contemporary age, drawing everything into their domain, are not gravitational, but centripetal.

The man reading about the man reading about the man reading. The line of faces which disappeared into the illusory depths of the mirror when, as a boy, I had stood in front of it holding another mirror to reflect the image. Smaller and smaller and smaller, deeper and deeper into the distance, into all eternity, for it was impossible to stop this movement, it could only become so small that it could not be distinguished from its surroundings.

Mise en abyme

For us it was anything but a fairy tale. In fact, the very antithesis. There was nothing enchanting about it, there was no magic, not so much as a hint of allure. We fell into a rhythm: out of bed at half past five when Heidi woke up, play a movie on the laptop to kill the first uneventful hours, shop for breakfast when the extortionate supermarket opened, eat, go down to the pool and swim with the children until lunch, have lunch in the restaurant there, which catered for several hundred customers and served hamburgers, sausages, and spaghetti, with waiters who hated us, then take Heidi home for a nap while one of us went with Vanja and sat in a café drinking coffee while she drew with crayons and ate ice cream.

The archaic statues, with their inscrutable smiles, were created from the same matrix, whereby the identical, nonindividual aspect is also a nonhuman dimension, and if you imagine them in front of a temple or a grave, out in the world among people and not in a museum, they must have had a formidable, intimidating effect, for the nonhuman in human form, that is death or the divine. Their time is not ours. Their place is not here. The classical statues the Greeks made some centuries later are individual through and through, with none of those frightening nonhuman qualities about them, they point neither to death nor the divine, but are wholly human.