My Struggle: Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgård

The face is the other, and in its light we become. Without that face we are no one, and if we are no one we are dead, and if we are dead we can do as we please. With that face, which sees us and is seen by us, we cannot do as we please. The face puts us under an obligation. This is why God says lift it up.

Yet all we have to do is to look up to grasp it, for above us is the sun, blazing, the same sun that blazed for Cain and Abel, Odysseus and Aeneas. The fells before our eyes are of similar dizzying age. That we are but the latest in a line of ancestry reaching back thousands of generations into the past, emotionally the same as them, for the heart that beat in them beats also in us, is a perspective we are unable and unwilling to take upon ourselves, for in it our uniqueness is erased and we become merely a locus of feelings and actions, much as water is the locus of waves, or the sky of clouds. We know each cloud to be unique, each wave to be unique, yet we see only clouds, only waves.

Death is the gateway to the land from which we come and to which sooner or later we must return. It lies beyond language, beyond thought, beyond culture, and cannot be grasped but merely glimpsed, for example by our turning toward the mute and blind in ourselves.

What did Hitler do when he withdrew into himself as a young man? He saw no one, and no one saw him. Not even as an adult did he attach himself to any you; when he was seen, he was seen only by a crowd, by the mass of an all, and the same was true when he wrote: Mein Kampf contains an I, contains a we, contains a they, but does not contain a you. And his face fell. Lift it up.

Bruno Latour puts it in his book We Have Never Been Modern,

We are constrained by this darkness of flesh and brightness of eye, by the insensitive beating of this simple heart, by the air inhaled and exhaled by the dismal gray twins that are these lungs, we are unthinkable without them, yet they live within themselves and do not know us, for they know no one, and the muscles cannot tell if their twitching occurs in someone dead or someone alive.

How can the idea of a society in which everyone is equal and enjoys the same rights lead to the Gulag? Was the indignation Jack London felt on seeing the extreme poverty of the London slums misguided? Are we not to feel solidarity with others and try to help them in their need?

The grand I of the Romantic age reinforces the name. The mass human of industrialism reinforces the number.

When God rescinds the command and Abraham aborts this sacrifice of his dearest to the highest, his son thereby living on, another love arises, that between father and son, not concentrated in any pillar of fire, the very flash point of life and death, but spread out over endless days, so much time that it is continually being erased, and so near as to hardly be noticed, for in his son a father sees himself, and in his father a son sees himself, what belongs to one and what to the other is not always easy to say, and he who was below will one day be above, and he who was above will one day be below.

Only someone who stands outside the social world knows what the social world is; to those within it, it is like water to a fish.

Hitler rejects the singular you, and stands outside the we, and yet he longs for it, and it is this longing his audiences sense when he speaks, the longing for the we being the very foundation of the human, swelling in times of crisis, swelling in chaos, as it did in the Germany of the 1920s, and in Hitler it burns fiercely indeed. There is no need to listen to what he says, his audience were oblivious too, but to the way he says it, the emotions by which he is filled, this is what they react to, this is what they feel, and they drink it up like water. Oh, this longing for community, this longing to be equal, this longing to belong. The simplest is the truest, and this is the truth of Hitler, his longing to be a part of the we touches something deep within

He was human, the people around him were human, his party comrades were human. This is not the same as to say they were good, for the bad and the brutal too are human.

Hitler is clearly a damaged individual, presumably by a process that began in his childhood and which because of some innate dynamic became reinforced in his youth and early adulthood, but that part of him that is damaged, which is the ability to approach and be close to another, the ability to empathize with another, which is to say to see the other in himself, himself in the other, has placed him outside himself, alienated him from his own emotional life, which is to say that an unbridgeable divide has opened up between his emotions and his understanding of his emotions, whereby he has been deposited outside the sphere of the social. The damage was in the times, and many of those who suffered it became artists, for in art the divide could be bridged.

What was it about Hitler’s speaking that awakened such emotion? That he came across as honest and genuine was important here, a person at long last who presented the unvarnished truth, unlike other politicians.

I’m listening to Midlake, The Courage of Others, I’ve listened to it every day for months, and the last time I drove out to the house and listened to it in the car, the mood of Kubizek’s book spread through me like a memory, as if it all stemmed from my own life. In a way it does, the books I’ve read are as inseparable a part of my history as everything that’s ever happened to me.

We are used to it always being the others, always the not-us, whereas Hitler was one of us, he pursued his will from within us, from our own European culture, and he did so as the leader of a community big enough not just to start a world war but to keep it going for five years, until twenty million human lives had been lost and the genocide of six million people had very nearly been completed, against which everything else simply pales.

The biological perspective was superordinate to the individual, the human being as a body came before the human being as a person, and the properties of the individual were unimportant, for regardless of how good and unselfish a Jew might be, regardless of how hardworking and innocent, he or she was nonetheless guilty by virtue simply of being a Jew. In this way, the individual Jew was absolved of guilt, he or she being unable to do anything about it, whereas the Jews collectively were condemned, associated with a whole range of properties they could never escape, and without having any say in the matter. This is exactly how we have always regarded animals, which are condemned to expressing themselves by way of the properties of their species, a relationship they are unable to escape, a cat or a rat always at first being a cat or a rat and only then perhaps the cat or the rat. To conduct court proceedings against a cat or a rat would be meaningless, for they possess no guilt, are mere expressions of their species, without a say in the matter, a concept such as morality would be equally meaningless when applied to their lives. In the event of their doing

As such, advertising is indeed related to beauty and charisma: we may want complexity and knowledge, but in the final analysis other, simpler, more immutable forces prevail.

The silence described by the Polish railway official interviewed in Shoah is telling. That silence was the extermination of the Jews. The sound of the human suddenly ceasing to exist, the stillness that cloaked the landscape in which it had echoed only a moment before. The occasional rush of wind in the trees, a faint hammering in the distance, the sounds of emptiness. How was it possible that so many people, more than a thousand, could fall so silent? Where were they? That stillness is the stillness of the void, descending when what was no longer is, and it is this that makes what took place so impossible to comprehend, for the extermination of the Jews is that which is not. Indeed, it is nothing.

They bowed their heads, they looked away as if it was not happening. So it was in Norway, so it was in Germany, so it was over the entire continent. It was not happening, or only barely so. No one knew what was going on. No one saw. It scarcely happened. And then it was over. Then we realized that what had taken place had not been inconsequential at all, but the opposite, something so extreme and so huge in scale that nothing like it had ever happened before.

If we are far away, looking at it from high above, we see simply a mass of bodies – limbs, heads, eyes, hair, mouths, ears – man as the creature he is, the human being in terms only of its biology and materiality, and this was what made it possible to incinerate those people, and what their incineration moreover revealed, as if it were some new perspective on the human, our worthlessness, our interchangeability, life rising up in a well. Human life as a cluster of mussels clinging to rocks in the sea, human beings as beetles and vermin, man as a shoal of writhing fish brought gasping to the surface in nets. If, however, we stand up close to each individual, so close as to hear each name as it is whispered, to look into each pair of eyes, where the soul of every human is revealed, unique and inalienable, and listen attentively to the story of a day in the life of each and every one of them, a day in the company of loved ones, families, and friends, an ordinary day in an ordinary place, with all its joy and delicacy, envy and curiosity, routines and spontaneity, imagination and boredom, hate and love, then the opposite becomes apparent, the one, not as I, but as the I’s necessity. Which is you.

no, that moment shocks in a different way entirely, since in its very monumentality, its invocation of God, and, in that, its overwhelming beauty, it betrays our human truth in favor of divine truth. In that moment, God dies. Not because he has abandoned them, but because the divine belongs to the very perspective that made the Holocaust possible.

What is particular about the Holocaust is the opposite of what we have made it. What is particular about the Holocaust is that it was trivial, proximate, and local. The Holocaust was families being singled out and made to assemble. It was trains leaving the ghettos in Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Latvia – all countries under Nazi control – trundling through Europe, coming to a halt at tiny stations outside Polish villages, Treblinka, Sobibor, Auschwitz, Belzec, where those inside were bundled out if they came from the east or instructed to alight if they came from the west.

think it would be correct to say that what happened was not inhuman at all, but human, and that this is what makes it so terrible and so closely bound up with our own selves and our human lives that in order to see it, and thereby take command of it, we must remove it and place it beyond ourselves, outside the boundaries of the human, where it now stands, sacrosanct and inviolable, mentionable only in certain, meticulously controlled ways. But it began in a we, and came together in an I, who concentrated its essence into a book, from where it swelled into the social sphere, unfathomably silent in its seeping pervasion, thought morphing into action, a tangible, physical presence in the world we inhabit, questioned by none of those involved, but carried out and done.

Decent humans distanced themselves from all of this, but they were few, and this fact demands our consideration, for who are we going to be when our decency is put to the test? Will we have the courage to speak against what everyone else believes, our friends, neighbors, and colleagues, to insist that we are decent and they are not? Great is the power of the we, almost inescapable its bonds, and the only thing we can really do is to hope our we is a good we. Because if evil comes it will not come as “they,” in the guise of the unfamiliar that we might turn away without effort, it will come as “we.” It will come as what is right.

I am you. Jesus said, Your neighbor is like you. The consequence of that idea, so wildly radical, is that Hitler is worth as much as the Jews he ordered to be unprecedentedly to death and incinerated. Genet said, Your neighbor is you. From this too there is no exception, not even in the case of someone such as Adolf Hitler. We are opposed, and rightly so, to everything he stood for. Hitler is our antithesis. But only in respect to what he did, not in terms of the person he was. In that, he was like us. Hitler’s youth resembles my own, his remote infatuation, his desperate desire to be someone, to rise above the self, his love for his mother, his hatred of his father, his use of art as a space of great emotions in which the I could be erased. His problems forming relationships with others, his elevation of women and his anxiety in their company, his chastity, his yearning for purity. When I watch him on film, he awakens the same feelings in me as my father once did. In that too there is likeness. He represented conservative middle-classness in so many respects, and this too I know, it is the voice, trembling with indignation, that says you are not good enough. He also represents the defiance of conservative middle-class values, the young lad sleeping until midmorning, refusing to look for a job, wishing instead to write or paint, because he is something more and better than the others. He was the one who opened a we and said you are one of us, and he was the one who closed ...

In practice this means we live in a society which on the one hand has made the utopian and the revolutionary impossible, and which moreover resists any real change to its system on the basis that it is as good as it can get, certainly better by far than the alternatives, all of which degenerated into systems of escalating inhumanity and ended in disaster, but which on the other hand renews itself so swiftly and with such radicality as to be essentially revolutionary, leading directly toward the utopian, construed as the next place. That passage occurs as if in secret, because it is fundamentally undemocratic, for although it affects every one of us, the decisions made along the way are made by the individual.

The consequence of this is that there is no longer anything bigger than ourselves, no longer anything to die for, and therefore no longer anything at which to stop in veneration. But to clone an animal, to manipulate human DNA, to create a new creature, is no minor matter. To split the atom is no minor matter. It is to exceed a boundary never before exceeded, it is to intervene in the very constituents of life, though we are ignorant of its origins and have always through all time considered it to be a gift and a mystery, something inviolable. That mystery is not solved by our manipulations, but its boundary is violated.

But who protects the inviolability of human life when understood not in terms of the individual, but in terms of the collective life, the all? Previously it was religion and the laws of religion. But what about now, with religion gone? The state? The state is an instrumental entity, a more or less pragmatic steering mechanism of the community, whose success is largely measured in terms of gross national product and rates of unemployment, and because science is instrumental too, and its pushing back of the boundaries profitable, there is little motivation for the state to legislate to the effect that life be held sacred and that its boundaries remain unviolated. We have

We hold the absolute at bay, firstly by leveling down the bigness of our existence, that which has to do with the very boundaries of life and materiality, to the commonplace, addressing the issues that concern us all, the great collective, mankind, only in the quotidian; secondly by ritualizing the absolute in an unreal world of images: death is to us not the physical death of the body, but the figurative death, as it occurs in images, in the same way as violence is not physical violence, but figurative violence. Heroism is no longer a possibility, there being no arena for it, those arenas have all been shut down, for the heroic belongs to the bigness we do what we can to shun, yet in the world of images, which any one of us may enter at any time, the heroic lives on: entire worlds and societies have emerged in Internet gaming, where anyone can pick up a machine gun and venture out into the world to shoot the enemy for a few hours. Practically all the films we watch are about exactly this: heroism, violence, death. And the people we watch carry out these heroic deeds in our name, in our place, are all physically beautiful or charismatic, or both. Indeed, that world, growing and expanding with every year that passes, celebrates all the worlds we otherwise reject.

Only remoteness can make such an act possible, since in remoteness consequence ceases to exist, and the question we must ask ourselves is not what kind of political opinions this person held, nor if he was mad, but more simply how such remoteness could ever arise in our culture. Did he feel a yearning for reality, for an end to relativity, for the consequences of the absolute?

The values in our sky of images are Nazi values, though everyone says differently. Beautiful bodies, beautiful faces, healthy bodies, healthy faces, perfect bodies, perfect faces, heroic people, heroic deaths, the same images prevalent during Nazism, the only difference between theirs and ours being that we refrain from letting them loose on reality, but keep them there, in the domain of the unbinding, and say it is not the value of the image that counts, but the value of the human, which is different. Yet the gap between them is so vast, and the rush of the authentic, which here is fictitious, so compelling, that someone sooner or later is bound to bring the sky down to earth and let it apply here.

There, in that system, his hatred was absolute. But when something encroached upon it and entered the space between his own I and his convictions, a space which, besides whatever passageways there may have been within it that were unfamiliar to him, was quite empty, his hatred did not apply. His hatred applied to the others. In that space was the memory of his mother, for instance, and that it had remained so strong becomes plain to us in the fact that every Christmas, the time of his mother’s death, he would descend into silence and dejection, as he did in 1915 at the front, and in that space too were the Jewish doctor, Bloch, and this ten-year-old girl, therefore his kindness to both. To Bernhardine’s eyes he could maintain no remoteness, she was real, in that space together with him.

Remoteness is the opposite of authenticity, and it is not the yearning for authenticity that is the problem, but the remoteness that gives rise to

It was not the absolute values of Nazism that led them to war, for birth and death, homeland and belonging are characteristic of all people and all peoples, it was the utopia of the one and the same. It was the fall of the name into the number, it was the fall of the differentiating into the undifferentiated.

Don Quixote is a hero in a world without heroes, or in a world where heroes and the absoluteness of their lives belong to the pseudoworld, irreconcilable with the relative reality of the quotidian. Don Quixote is a comic hero. Hamlet is a hero too, but for the opposite reason, he doubts and relativizes in a world of absolutes. Hamlet is a tragic hero. Don Quixote sees the old world as if for the last time. Hamlet sees the old world as if for the first time. Through them we see ourselves, for our culture is founded on doubt, and our scope extends from the relative reality of the quotidian to the skies of our grandest conceptions.

That this should happen to me was actually pretty damned idiotic and unbelievable. I had never gone looking for trouble in my life, as far as possible I tried to be kind and friendly and polite and decent, I just wanted everyone to like me, that was all, and here I was, in such a storm of aggrieved people and lawyers, not through ill fortune but following a reasonable response to an act I had committed.

What was the difference between reality and our perception of it? Did reality exist, was it beyond our reach? For perception-less reality was also a perception. What did the moods and impressions these names evoked mean? They meant nothing. But neither did our lives, if we took away our perceptions of them.

But if it was true that I was hiding, what was I frightened of? I was frightened of other people’s judgments of me, and to avoid this I avoided them. The thought that anyone would like me was a dangerous thought, perhaps the most dangerous one for me. It never occurred to me, I didn’t dare think it. I didn’t even think that Mom might actually like me. Or Yngve or Linda. I assumed they didn’t, not really, but that the social and family bonds we were entangled in nonetheless meant that they had to see me and listen to what I had to say.

What kind of person is shy with his own children? And what does it do to the children? Getting really close to Heidi, which I did this evening when she suddenly placed her soft cheek against mine and smiled, was too much to endure. I walked faster and almost ran down the narrow asphalt path beneath the tropical trees, the wind from the Atlantic gentle and fresh against my face and the lights from our holiday center glowing far ahead of us in the falling dusk.

The conflict between what we know and what we don’t is played out in all art, that is what has driven it over the centuries, and that situation is never fixed, never stable, because the moment we find out something new, something else new appears of which we know nothing.

I woke up in a bad mood. I always did, but as long as I had the critical first half an hour in peace, got a cup of coffee down me, and smoked a cigarette, it passed of its own accord.

In the bus going home Vanja slept with her head in Linda’s lap while Heidi sat limply on mine dozing. Her little body registered all the bus’s jerks and jolts as at first we drove from traffic light to traffic light through the town, then onto the motorway along the coast where the blazing sun hung above the dark blue sea. Happiness isn’t in my nature, but happy was how I felt. Everything was light and airy, my emotions were lofty and uncomplicated, the mere sight of a bulging wire fence or a stack of worn tires outside a garage opened my soul, and a rare warmth spread through my insides.

What effect does happiness have? Happiness erases. Happiness erodes. Happiness overflows. All that is difficult, all that usually hinders or limits us, disappears inside happiness. In the long term it’s unbearable because there is no resistance in happiness, if you lean against it, you will fall.

Stephen outdoes Bloom in everything, but not in this. Leopold has nothing of Stephen’s yearnings and aspirations, he doesn’t want anything else, he’s at home. Leopold is a complete person, Stephen Dedalus an incomplete person. Only Stephen can create, for to create is to want everything, to create is to want to come home, and the whole person doesn’t feel that unrest, that urge, those yearnings. Hamlet, like Stephen, is a son and actually no more than that. It is his father’s death that triggers his crisis and his mother’s desertion that keeps it alive. Hamlet has no home. Jesus wasn’t a father either, but a son, and he had no home. Hamlet, Stephen, Jesus, Kafka, Proust were all sons, not fathers. So there was something about being human that they didn’t know and perhaps didn’t know about either. But what was it? What is it to be a father? Being a father is a commitment, so it is possible to have children without being a father. But what are you committing yourself to? You have to be at your post; you have to be at home. Yearnings and aspirations are irreconcilable with this because what you hunger for is limitless and what home does is set limits. A father without limits is no father, but a man with children. A man without limits is a child, that is, the eternal son. The eternal son takes or gets, he doesn’t give, and he takes or gets because he isn’t whole and he isn’t his own person.

I had written the passage about her father’s funeral straight after it happened and had promptly forgotten it. I remembered it then because she had called for help at the airport and was doing so again now. At the time I had taken it literally, she wanted help carrying John, but when I reread the passage it was impossible not to think of something else, something greater, a cry from her inner being, to me, I had to go to her rescue. I had to put everything aside, she was in distress, I had to help. I hadn’t done that, I had lost my temper and was embarrassed. When she screamed in the night I thought I should help her. I hope I can, I hope I am good enough. I hope I have learned.

It has been an experiment, and it has failed because I have never even been close to saying what I really mean and describing what I have actually seen, but it is not valueless, at least not completely, for when describing the reality of an individual person, when attempting to be as honest as possible is considered immoral and scandalous, the force of the social dimension is visible and also the way it regulates and controls individuals.

This mixture of the highest and the lowest and most basic that literature can be is typical of the writer milieu, and it’s hardly surprising, there are few areas of life where people invest so much of themselves to gain so little.

No friends. No social life. Only his job, evenings at home. The occasional trip to his parents in Kristiansand over the weekend. When we moved there he was thirty-eight. He must have felt he was a prisoner in his own life. And he must have been lonely. When I think of him, he is like a kind of shadow.

He wrote that Dad’s father had been quick-tempered and moody, and ruled his son with an iron rod, often boxing his ears and not letting him go out. He also wrote about one incident when Dad had been beaten up by some kids his age and left lying on the ground, bleeding and with a split lip. Reading that, I thought he had never had a chance. Something had been broken inside him at a very young age. This is a dangerous notion because no one apart from ourselves has responsibility for what we do, we are humans, not creatures subject to forces that drive us here and there without offering any resistance. Unless of course being under the sway of others is part of the human condition, and being a good person is the same as being a lucky person.