-Black Country; New Road, Basketball Shoes

We, the adoring public, demand a sacrifice as compensation for our gaze. We aren’t so much called to listen as we are evoked from arcane shadows. Outside the circle of the artist’s sacrificial pyre, we lie in wait, spectral faces brought into underlit contrast by the flickering flames. Our presence is overpowering, and our attention is fleeting. Artists struggle to mine something out of themselves and hold it aloft long enough for us to inspect. For all the naive souls who have cried out that they would give anything to create something that could draw our gaze, if only for a moment, there is a man we see standing next to them, cracking a malicious grin. “Anything?”

I am one of the specters who haunts Karl Ove Knausgaard. He chanted my hungry gaze into existence over the course of several thousand pages of his exegetic self-portrait, My Struggle. Now I bark and snap out beyond his sacrificial altar with the rest of my pantheon of demanding spirits, ravenous for every word that he puts to the page, every book release and reading and signing and literary art performance and interview with Jeremy Strong and all the rest of the artifacts that he gives to the public. The newest hunk of meat that he’s thrown to us, whether in religious ecstasy or disgust, is The School of Night. In it, he depicts the contract between the artist and the public that scaffolds an artist’s career. Perhaps the book itself is this contract. My copy of the contract was printed by Penguin Press, a subsidiary of Penguin Random House and translated by Martin Aitken who also translated the final volume of My Struggle for Archipelago books. The cover of that particular contract that Knausgaard drafted has a beautiful painting of a sunrise by Edvard Munch on it. On the cover of The School of Night, Knausgaard’s newest contract, there is a reproduction of an eerie painting called Dead End by a Swedish artist named Mamma Andersson. The top of my contract’s jacket is starting to ripple and tear a bit. This makes me a bit anxious that I’m not taking proper care of it, shuttling it everywhere I go in a backpack. It’s sort of a prized possession for me because, like any binding contract, it has Knausgaard’s signature in it. His flourish, if not taken down in his own blood, was presumably written with a hand cramped beyond mercy as a Hadean assistant passed him the next book in a stack of five hundred such contracts. Signing away his soul again and again to the adoring public.

Knausgaard throws a lot into the cauldron in The School of Night, but there are two main substrates that he’s trying to mix. The first is the macabre mythology surrounding Christopher Marlowe’s magnum opus, The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus. The second is photography and the mechanical reproduction of the image. These seem unrelated at first, but end up hermetically wedded together by the end of The School of Night. This thematic mixture occurs as Knausgaard meditates over and over on the first photograph ever taken: a picture from the 1860s of a deserted Parisian boulevard. You should look it up if you haven’t seen it before, it’s called Boulevard du Temple, taken by Louis Daguerre, the eponymous inventor of the daguerreotype. It really does feel like a cursed image, even with no context. On a first glance the daguerreotype seems to depict only the architecture of an empty space, but after a moment one can see a lone figure on the sidewalk, his lanky frame bent at the waist and his leg raised up on a stool or a bench. The man breaks the strange inhuman illusion of this photo. Because it turns out that the street isn’t actually empty at all, the mechanical action of the camera just left all the people out. Daguerre took the photo during rush hour when hundreds of people were out in the street, but the camera’s slow averaging of moments over a stretch of time removed any trace of humanity from the final plate. While it might seem empty, the photo is actually haunted by a hoard of ghostly pedestrians. Thousands of preterite passed over in the first photographic depiction of mankind, left out of posterity due to the erratic unpredictable motion of their lives. All except for one man. The solitary individual on the street that day who stood still long enough for his soul to be forever captured by Louis Daguerre, leg raised in a posture of shoeshine, or perhaps in triumph at the conquest of the uncaptured world, the unleashing of chaos that would spill forth into our world from that moment on. Here’s the Mephistophelian monologue that Knausgaard delivers on the subject in The School of Night after two characters discuss the photograph:

> “We live in a world of mirrors now. Like Narcissus and Echo, we’ve been cut off from real life. Haven’t you noticed how everything’s becoming more and more the same? More and more indistinguishable? It’s not just the logic of monopoly capitalism that’s at work. It’s the logic of the mirror too. The repeated image of ourselves. We’re living in a loop.”

Outside of The School of Night Knausgaard summarized the connection of this photograph to Marlowe’s Faust story well. During a Q&A on his press tour for the book he said, “I saw there was a man in the photo…and I said to myself…that’s the Devil.” The audience laughed when he said it. The line was admittedly delivered with pretty good comedic timing, but it was clear from his face that Karl Ove was not joking. He stared forward, a troubled and serious understanding in his eyes. This insight haunted him while he wrote The School of Night. I think he truly believes that the man in Daguerre’s photograph is the Devil. And the Devil’s presence in the first photograph was personal for Knausgaard. Perhaps it makes sense why this would be so personal. If the Devil is the one man willing to harness an unnatural attention long enough to allow himself to be imprinted onto the photographic plate of history, then he and Knausgaard have much in common. In My Struggle Knausgaard talks at length about the power of habit and intense trance-like repetition to create true literature. He learned from Proust that dedication and habit matter above all else–beyond any concerns of form or structure or even plot. While the world bustles and moves around, the writer sits in contemplation, depicting the world around them and, ultimately, themselves. They do this at the expense of all else while death’s bright light slowly seers their image into the external world. For many great artists who have had their work committed to the historical record, art is ritual, and everything else lives in the periphery.

Knausgaard acknowledges that there is a narcissism latent in that ritual. To forsake the external world, the social, to explore the internal world. It’s necessarily self-involved to be willing to transgress against all social norms and evoke the gaze of an audience. To help explore this vice that lives in the core of art and self-depiction, he taps into art history. Self-portrait is a motif throughout The School of Night. There are profound passages contemplating Edvard Munch’s smoke-and-shadows Self-Portrait with Cigarette (1895) and its occult influences, as well as Albrecht Dürer’s Self-Portrait (1500) where he depicts himself in the likeness of Christ in front of a jet black background. Depiction, generally, is a contentious point throughout The School of Night, for more reasons than just  the fact that it can serve narcissistic impulses. In the past, Knausgaard has extolled the role of mimesis in the formation of western literature and culture at large. Here he weaves in the history of technology and the occult to perhaps give us an origin mythos for the modern narcissistic culture in which we find ourselves. Our obsession with reflection and self-depiction has grown exponentially and been catalyzed by technology. Knausgaard asks, if the first subject of a mechanically reproduced image was the Devil himself, what does that mean for the medium? If, at each new epoch in art and artistic reproduction, Mephistopheles was there under contract to bleed away all that was human, how much have we now given over to him in this age of hyper-accelerated mimetic generation? Can we stop him from erasing us in the blinding averaging that comes with mechanical depiction?

The Devil himself in The School of Night, a Dutchman named Hans, is curious about the interplay of technology and art. He brings Kristian, our narrator/protagonist/Dr. Faustus stand-in into a strange occult world that, more and more resembles a cabinet of curiosities, or a wunderkammer to use Hans’ term. In this wunderkammer cabinet of history, Christopher Marlowe is allowed to write Shakespeare’s best plays as much as he is allowed to study the works of Cornelius Agrippa and spy for the British government against France. In the cabinet is also London’s Masono-Kabbalistic architecture system where Agrippa is again mentioned by name studying alchemy. But for some obscure reason Georg Trakl must be pseudonymized into a poet named Paul Becker who wrote a fictitious book called Parmenides’ Secret concerned with Greek initiation rites that the real Trakl only perhaps alluded to in poetry. The existence of the Antikythera mechanism seems to be depicted to help connect Ancient Greece to the modern technological world as well. Knausgaard, in his role as curator of the wunderkammer is able to highlight these esoterica for us, drawing our eye around history’s strange refuse pile. Then, beyond the fragments of history and literature that Knausgaard chooses to depict, in the world of The School of Night itself, there are strange mechanical curios and devices both in Hans’s home and studio. A pair of mechanical turtles are guided around the studio by flashlights. A set of taxidermied rats move through a maze via an intricate system of circuits and feedback loops. These may seem like odd literary inventions on Knausgaard’s part, but feedback-controlled autonomous turtles and rats were real precursors to the modern computer. Imitations of the organic in search of ways to model our thoughts. The maze-running rats were created in the fifties by Claude Shannon, the pioneer of information theory and computer science who is now probably best known for lending his name to the generative AI model Claude (no, it’s not named for Claude Monet, that would apparently be either too flagrant or too optimistic).

The main attractor around which Hans’ Mephistophelian ramblings and pseudo-art projects revolve is the same attractor that sits at the root of western literature according to mimetic theory: the libidinal mapping out of desires from organic schema into synthetic perversions. It’s what drove the alchemists to seek the philosopher’s stone—what drove Dr. Frankenstein to choose banal anti-life in place of death’s true but unfeeling absence. Heretical mockeries of the world created by people stunted in their attempts to create. They represent art at its most banal: depictions that cheapen the world to parody rather than trying to convey the beauty inherent in being a thinking creature that inhabits this world.

> “The point was that the rat possessed memory. It could remember things, and learn from experience. So whenever it went the wrong way, it would go back and try a different route. What [Shannon] did there was massively important for what’s happening today.”

Indeed.

We have to be careful here. There are even more threads of occult intrigue twisted into the Gordian knot of twentieth century technology. Labyrinthine fractals of information where better minds than mine have been lost forever. There is a hubris that pulls a certain type of mind into these wormholes. It’s the type of mind that’s willing to forsake the external world for an internal world of the ideal. Maybe the Neoplatonists and the Manicheans and the Gnostics and the twentieth century cyberneticists obsessed with feedback all followed the same esoteric warrens–tunnels already carved into the rocky medium of history, waiting for them before they were every teased by the notion that there is more out there beyond what we can sense. Perhaps these are the same tunnels that called to Christopher Marlowe and Edvard Munch and Knausgaard himself as they sought to fill their work with the world itself. Certainly these miners have been able to etch their names into the stone and live in history, artists and scientists and philosophers who have become illuminators of the arcane timeline that lives underneath linear Whiggish history.

But even if art can momentarily take us out of time and connect the constellations of history for a brief second, in the world of Marlowe and Mephistopheles, gravity always wins. No sacrificial scapegoat will ever keep the audience at bay permanently. Mechanical, linear time will reassert itself. No matter how history is cut-up and rearranged in an effort to freeze time and bring it to us in Fauvist glory. Our gaze is a fickle thing and it can be revoked in an instant. The clock will strike.