Inadvertent (Why I Write)

by Karl Ove Knausgård

It was the incongruity between his words and the context in which they were spoken that was comical, that his sweater was tucked into his trousers created a distance to what he said, and the chasm separating death’s solemnity from life’s unceremoniousness became apparent.

that space literature explores, between something that is true and the setting in which truth unfolds. It is the space of Don Quixote, which plays out in the distance between what he imagines he is seeing and the world as it is, and it is the space of Madame Bovary, shaped by the distance between what she wishes the world were like and how it actually is.

Literature is not primarily a place for truths, it is the space w...

That is what writing is: creating a space in which something can be said.

Realistic pictorial space is stable, it obeys the same rules of depiction regardless of what happens in it, and in this continuity, which allows for a before and an after, there lies the possibility of reconciliation.

I wrote that Munch’s trust in the world must have been broken, especially by the death of his sister, and that painting for him was partly a way of articulating that loss of trust, but also an attempt to re-create faith in the world.

If the distance is great enough, the answer is yes—seen from a great distance, a life can be summed up in a single sentence—but as soon as one comes closer to life, it dissolves into an ocean of time, events, things, and people. It is still there, somewhere in the multitude, but it is no longer supreme, for in a life seen at close range there is no organizing principle.

We live in an ocean of time, where events, things, and people are continually succeeding one another, but we cannot live with such boundless complexity, because we disappear in it, and therefore we organize it into categories, sequences, hierarchies. We organize ourselves—I am not nameless, my name is such and such, my parents were like this and that, I went to school in such and such a place, I experienced this and that, by character I am like this and like that, and that has caused me to choose this and that.

All of us sum up our lives in this way, that is what we call identity; and we sum up the world we inhabit in similar ways, that is what is called culture.

That identity and our understanding of the world at one and the same time fit yet are arbitrary is, I think, the reason why art and literature exist. Art and literature constitute a continual negotiation with reality, they represent an exchange between identity and culture and the material, physical, and endlessly complex world they arise from.

For the negotiation is always personal, never—or extremely rarely—ideational or representative.

There are some fundamental rules of writing, for example that one shouldn’t psychologize when describing characters, or the related dictum “Show, don’t tell,” both of which spring from the realization that literature by its very nature always seeks complexity and ambiguity, and that monologic claims of truth about the world are antiliterary.

It wasn’t until I started breaking the rules, showing how something was and should be understood, very precisely and with no room for doubt, and describing people in psychological terms, that my writing came alive.

All language casts a shadow, and that shadow can be more or less apprehended, but never quite controlled.

and that conflict, which was fundamental, not only made necessary the categorical claims about the world and the people in it, it also undermined them completely—revealing a person who is using them to keep his head above water. The statements themselves are not necessarily untrue, but the space around them relativizes them utterly.

It wasn’t until I discovered this, that the distance of form and language created a space into which I could pour my self, where I lost ownership and control over it and where what was me was transformed into “me,” that I became a writer.

It’s strange how the event one remembers attaches itself to the moments surrounding it, which without it would have been lost, since they don’t contain anything memorable. Yet those are the moments we live our lives in, while those we remember, which we construct our identities around, are often the exceptions.

And I think that what that mood represented, the place it created within me, is one of the most important reasons that I later began to write. I wanted to enter that space again.

he is from an outlying region, he is gifted but proud and ambitious, he impatiently seeks recognition, and when his skills are discovered and he is admitted to a school of wizardry, his boasting and self-assertiveness drive him to cross the border into the land of the dead, to prove his worth to the others.

for unlike our thoughts, our emotions do not change in the course of a life, at least not in a fundamental way: joy is the same to a ten-year-old as to a seventy-year-old, as are grief, anger, jealousy, loathing, and enthusiasm.

I didn’t know that I had a strong need to be seen, I didn’t know that such a thing as a desire to be seen even existed at all. That everything I did came to have a life beyond me, essentially other than the person I was, yet still inexorably tied to me, this I had already experienced, but I had never thought about it, it remained unarticulated within me. Reading didn’t articulate it for me, it didn’t make me start thinking about it, but it let me feel it.

That’s how it was: literature was a hiding place for me, and at the same time a place where I became visible. And this, an outside place where what is inside becomes visible, is still what literature is to me. Literature and art, along with religion, are the only places I know of that are capable of establishing such an outside. Politics is inside, journalism is inside, scientific research and academic theses are inside, philosophy and social science, in fact every discipline I can think of is inside, and with the technological avalanche of recent years, tying together different parts of reality in a vast here and now, the reasons to write have not necessarily become more numerous, but they have definitely become more acute.

Obviously, I write for personal reasons, having to do with my private life, and these reasons are banal. I also write for existential reasons, concerning what it means to be, and these reasons are or can easily be perceived as being pretentious. And I write for social reasons, in that I am part of a linguistic and cultural community in which literary texts, be it poems, essays, short stories, plays, or novels, serve an important function, one that is increasingly downplayed or no longer fully acknowledged, but which as I see it is nevertheless essential.

But as it happens, writing is precisely about disregarding how something seems in the eyes of others, it is precisely about freeing oneself from all kinds of judgments and from posturing and positioning. Writing is about making something accessible, allowing something to reveal itself. Whatever it is that reveals itself may well be something already known, for there is hardly anything uncharted in the human psyche or in the world anymore, but it has to show itself unguardedly, with a kind of trust. It’s like with the hedgehogs here in the garden: there are two of them, and if I want to see them as they are by themselves, I have to sit perfectly still in a chair and wait until dusk, when they emerge from their hiding place, and if I don’t move then, they sometimes come all the way up to me, and I see not only their rotund, bristly bodies, their black eyes and black snouts, but also their way of being present in the world, their slow snuffling and shuffling, their cautiousness which at times turns into excitement and greed, even that of a slow nature. They don’t see me, I see them.

In both cases it happens inadvertently—it doesn’t matter whether it is the writer or what he is writing about that comes along inadvertently. Thoughts are the enemy of the inadvertent, for if one thinks about how something will seem to others, if one thinks about whether something is important or good enough, if one begins to calculate and to pretend, then it is no longer inadvertent and accessible as itself, but only as what we have made it into.

The thought of what others will think, of whether this is any good or not, all criticism and self-criticism, all reflection and judgment must be put aside for trust to develop. In this sense, writing must be open and innocent. But in order for something within this openness and innocence to emerge and become accessible, there have to be limitations, and this is what we call form.

That my identity, the person I am to myself, is interwoven with the world of things in such a way that it is impossible to say where one begins and the other ends, while my body is in a sense itself a thing, as finite as things and as limited, but also just as open,

It was form that allowed this insight to emerge, it was form that allowed it to be seen, it was form that made it possible to say. The rudiments of it already existed in my mind but were neither articulated nor meaningful; meaning came with form.

If every chapter of this book is written differently, employing different strategies, for example one in the form of news journalism, another formed as a catechism, a third as a stream of consciousness, the relative nature of the way we understand ourselves and others will be emphasized, at the same time creating a sense that material life is something that goes on irrepressibly regardless of the forms of language, and fundamentally independent of them: the optic may change, but not what it is looking at.