If the world of literature is a great big desert, it is speckled with clear oases of meaning and insight that stand out to any observer against the static visual background of the desert sands. Most all of us have seen at least one. I’ve visited many of these literary oases. I’ve drank deeply and relaxed in their shade and packed up my saddle bags with their bounty, ready for each long journey to the next. But after reading the novel that is the life of Marcel Proust and now the novel that is the life of Karl Ove Knausgaard my understanding of the whole desert has changed. Now I think that the oases, splendid though they are, are not so brightly contrasted against the hinterland of literature. These oases are features of the landscape just the same as every single grain of sand that makes up every single dune between them is a feature of the landscape, beautiful in their own right and unique and individual. One can’t make their way through this desert desperate to reach some new oasis over every peak in the horizon, falling into despair at every mirage. One has to become a true nomad, at home everywhere in this desert at once, filled with the deep meaningful reality of the warmth of the sun on one’s skin, the crunch of thousands of years of erosion beneath one’s feet, thankful and enraptured by the impossible infinity of beauty that spans between every footprint on the journey.
Karl Ove captured that feeling when he mentions the difficult social interstices of life:
“Why do I organize my life like this? What do I want with this neutrality? Obviously it is to eliminate as much resistance as possible, to make the days slip past as easily and unobtrusively as possible. But why? Isn’t that synonymous with wanting to live as little as possible? With telling life to leave me in peace so that I can…yes, well, what? Read? Oh, but come on, what do I read about, if not life? Write? Same thing. I read and write about life. The only thing I don’t want life for is to live it.”
How sad that I’ve spent so much time even mapping this process into the microcosm of reading itself.
Karl Ove writes of these moments of serene beauty that have come into his life and unearthed deep important emotions which are impossible to convey. And he has performed a phenomenal feat of literature in being able to point them out to us, even if he knows that language can never be true reality, it can only gesture towards it, invoke a reality that it can never obtain but that we can understand all the same. He does this by exposing so many of the threads that connect each of us together, ironically, by delving deeply within himself. His sprawling autofiction represents an experiment, and with it a thesis that claims that an understanding of the particular is all that we can have. Any extrapolations to the general are outside of the art itself. Within the bounds of the novel there is only the particular, general or universal be damned.
He recognizes what this experiment says about how he views the world. The only direction to go is inward. By expressing the deepest parts of himself and unearthing as much from himself as he can psychologically muster, he is attempting to show us the shape of the social world. And he does this by explicitly eschewing it. He understands the importance of the social connections that tie all of us together, our societal taboos, our family relations, our schema for building together as a society, and he turns his head away from them so that he can dig into the fresh soil of the earth where no connections exist. He essentially sets out to create the most socially unacceptable piece of literature available to him. In doing so he highlights the strange hyperreality that our social world has created. He shows us the strange world of images that holds up Nazi values for the view of a society whose entire social fabric is crafted around the crater left by the Nazis. He shows us the value of true freedom and the importance of the individual, impossible to turn into a mere statistic through science or capitalism or bureaucracy or Naizsm or liberal democracy. And he is fully aware of the isolation that comes with this freedom. He casts himself as The Tramp, Chaplin’s protagonist who is buffeted by the forces of modernity in an effort to expose its structure to an audience through one of the only tools an artist has: comedy.
But then, Karl Ove of course also casts himself as a Nazi if not literally as Hitler himself (visual comparisons of Chaplin to Hitler at this point are the onus of the reader) by titling his own autobiography/memoir/autofiction/novel “My Struggle.” This can be read in so many ways, but a fundamental read of the title that comes through in volume 6 is tied with the criticisms that the book levels against the modern world. In a world where people have become their society and the society has become its images it becomes impossible to critique any element of it without critiquing the whole. To be against capitalism must mean that one is against democracy. To be against neo-liberalism must mean that one is against every single good in the modern world. But this is of course untrue. It is the voice of the ego faced with a heroic dose of a personality-altering drug or the voice of Saruman speaking through an infected Theoden saying, “if I die then we die, there can be no host without me.” These are the words of an infection. At a certain point though, why tiptoe around difficult distinctions between host and parasite? Extreme sickness calls for extreme considerations for a cure. And Karl Ove uses an immense personal grammar of literature, philosophy, and art history to diagnose our modern world as just that: sick. It ails and spits venom at all critique that is leveled against it so, after a certain point, the only answer one can give is to put up their hands and say “if criticism of the modern world makes me reactionary then call my autobiography ‘My Struggle.’”
In opening up that angle of the book he frees himself to spend roughly 400 pages writing about the life of Hitler as he reads him in the original Mein Kampf as well as through the lens of several biographies. This reading centers on the individual, but as one would expect from Karl Ove, the focus is expanded organically to encompass almost the entire psychological history of 20th century literature, art, and philosophy. He shows us through characteristic empathy how this man fell victim to the chaos within himself and failed to let the world flow through him and into his art. All along the way he begs us to understand the critical idea that, if there is no innocence to the character of Hitler, if he is nothing other than the other or the “they” to us, then there is no evil to the individual of Hitler. If we read him as a pure caricature of evil then we are doomed to misunderstand how evil originates and misdiagnose it when we see it. We must see him as an individual who was made up of a series of choices that were made with free will at every step. Some of those choices may be more understandable with context, but what’s important above all is that they were just that, choices. This helps us see him as he was seen by the people who let him rise to power. He was not separate from us. He was us. And if we can see the symptoms in our society that could cause a level of remoteness in someone who comes from our midsts that is so great as to lead them to atrocity, then we have an obligation to remove that remoteness, to choose authenticity and the importance of the individual. To move to the New Testament’s understanding of free will and the insight gifted to humanity by Christ that we are, every one of us, constituents of one great big “I” and not mindless statistical pawns in a mutated and half-understood “we.” To move to wily Odysseus who resists the Sirens’ syncretistic call of the mythological. To move toward freedom and the importance of artistic expression.
That’s what Karl Ove does with his life and his art. He models his work after the experiments performed before him by Proust and Joyce. The 20th century is there, bubbling and broiling right at its roots before it is decimated by Hitler and Nazism and everything that reaction to them has bred since. He calls to Modernism longingly through the veil of Postmodernism and joins its giants in their deep dive into the material. I think he has shown that their experiments have survived the impossible destruction of meaning brought on by the Holocaust. He has shown that the boundaries between I, you, we, and it have been forever altered by it. But he’s shown that literature can still have a place within mankind, social or not.
Like Proust he’s captured time itself in the sprawling space that his novel will forever take up on my shelf. But to me it will represent Time more than it represents Space, because both of these stories take place within the mythology of the Self. And Karl Ove himself says:
“Our myths see us in terms of time. The enlightenment sees us in terms of space.”
And my final note to cement his sublation of his life and novel into the stream of Time. His final sign off for My Struggle reads:
“Malmö, Glemmingebro,
February 27, 2008-September 2, 2011”
Compare with Joyce’s sign off in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:
“Dublin 1904
Trieste 1914”
And accept my invitation to look at one of my favorite new personal oases in the hinterland of literature as I sit on this plane and grin, looking back on reading the introduction to my Penguin Centennial edition of A Portrait, written by none other than Karl Ove Knausgaard himself. The Tramp dancing in and out of my life.
