Finished Knausgaard at 2:20
today.
It is compelling and incredibly
moving. Incredibly? well, yes, at the moment I do think
so. It weaves its web of power
over you. The death of the father
and the birth of the son's vocation as a writer. Simple as that and told with all the power inherent in the
archetype---without however resorting to any of that kind of fancy lingo or
large-type appeal.
Let's assume it is a great work and
let's imagine Joyce and Beckett and Bernhard, maybe Proust, Pessoa and Sebald,
and others in the company, being here to enjoy the party. Knausgaard creates the illusion of saying
to them all----forget the schticks and tricks, forget your special style and
angle, you should have just told the essence of the tale. But isn't that what all the writers say
in hindsight to their predecessors?
Students are already for sure writing dissertations on Knausgaard and
analyzing the craft and skill and art with which he has invented his magical
illusion of having just let the details unfold effortlessly from his
keyboard.
It caused furor in Norway for having
written so honestly about the drinking and squalor of his father and his grandmother. The worst sort of alcoholics living in
their total filth. His father died
at fifty-four if my calculations are accurate, when Karl Ove was thirty.
PAGE 329 in the FSG edition I began
to mark passages using my own filiters of course. That's when K begins to talk more directly about his desire
to write, to be a writer. Or if he
did earlier in the book I took less notice. He must have, slightly at least, because he has written one
novel by now, the one he wrote when he was in the creative writing program at
the Academy and which got turned down by a publisher.
He is now twenty-four.
Lars Iyer likes to quote this Handke line--he tweeted it
again recently and it works really well for Knausgaard: "Above all, it seems to me that the progress of literature
consists of the gradual removal of all fictions. (Handke)"
Quote
When
I was twenty-four I had a flash of insight: that this was in fact my life, this
is exactly what it looked like and presumably always would. That one's studies, this fabled and
much-talked about period in a life, on which one always looked back with
pleasure, were for me no more than a series of dismal, lonely, and imperfect
days. That I had not seen this
before was due to the constant hope I carried around inside me, all the
ridiculous dreams with which a twenty-four-year-old can be burdened, about
women and love, about friends and happiness, about hidden talents and sudden
breakthroughs. But when I was
twenty-four I saw life as it was.
And it was okay, I had my small pleasures too, it wasn't that, and I
could endure any amount of loneliness and humiliation, I was a bottomless pit,
just bring it on, there were days when I could think, I receive I am a well, I
am the well of the failed, the wretched, the pitiful, the pathetic, the
embarrassing, the cheerless, and the ignominious. Come on! Piss on me!
Shit on me too if you want!
I receive! I endure! I am endurance itself! I have never been in any doubt that
this is what girls I have tried my luck with have seen in my eyes. Too much desire, too little hope.
Unquote (329)
"I
leafed through Adorno, read some pages of Benjamin, sat bowed over Blanchot for
a few days, had a look at Derrida . . . and learned nothing, understood
nothing, but just having contact with them, having their books in the bookcase,
led to a shifting of consciousness, just knowing they existed was an
enrichment, and if they didn't furnish me with insights I became all the richer
for intuitions and feelings."
(330-331)
"
. . . I, the king of approximation, . . .was after enrichment . . . . the shadow of these sentences that
could evoke in me a vague desire to use the language with this particular mood
on something real, on something living.
Not on an argument, but on a lynx, for example, or on a blackbird or a
cement mixer. For it was not the
case that language cloaked reality in its moods, but vice versa, reality arose
from them." (331)
".
. . for thoughts, whatever good one can say about them, have a great weakness,
namely, that they are dependent on a certain distance for effect. Everything inside that distance is
subject to emotions. It was
because of my emotions that I was starting to hold things back." (332)
".
. . the crux was that he musn't notice, he musn't find out that I harbored such
emotions, and the evasive looks in such circumstances, emerged to conceal
feelings rather than show them, . . . ." (332)
"Now
Espen was as dark and brooding as Hauge.
They were poets, I thought, that is how they are. Compared to their heavy gloom I felt
like a lightweight, a dilettante with no understanding of anything, just
drifting across the surface, watching soccer, who recognized the names of a few
philosophers and liked pop music of the simplest variety." (335)
"
. . . the difference between us, which I did not want to be visible, / would
become obvious. He would be the
realistic, practical person; I would be the idealistic, emotion-driven one. . .
. along with my tendency to cry all the time . . . ." (345-346)
"
. . . because I wasn't invited to that kind of gathering. Why not, I had no idea. I didn't care anymore anyway. But there had been days when I had
cared, days when I had been on the outside and had suffered. Now I was only on the
outside." (377)
"One
of the things Tonje liked best about me, I suspected, was that I was so
fascinated by precisely that, by all the contexts and potential of various
relationships, she wasn't used to that, she never speculated along those lines,
so when I opened her eyes to what I saw she was always interested. I had this from my mother, right from
the time I went to school I used to carry on long conversations with her about
people we had met or known, what they had said, why they might have said it, where
they came from, who their parents were, what kind of house they lived in, all
woven into questions to do with politics, ethics, morality, psychology, and
philosophy, and this conversation, which continued to this day, had given my
gaze a direction, I always saw what happened between people and tried to
explain it, and for a long / time I also believed I was good at reading others,
but I was not, wherever I turned I only saw myself, but perhaps that was not
what our conversations were about primarily, there was something else, they
were about Mom and me, that was how we became close to each other, in language
and reflection, that was where we were connected, and that was also where I
sought a connection with Tonje.
And it was good because she needed it in the same way that I needed her
robust sensuousness."
(385-386)
"I
knew it wasn't true, but that was how it felt, and it was feeling that was
leading me, . . . ." (394)
"Furthermore,
my wild state always became worse for that reason, as my drunkenness was not
brought to a halt by sleep or problems of coordination, but simply continued
into the beyond, the primitive, and the void. I loved it, I loved the feeling, it was my favorite feeling,
but it never led to anything good, and the day after, or days after, it was as
closely associated with boundless excess as with stupidity, which I hated with
a passion. But when I was in that
state, the future did not exist, nor the past, only the moment and that was why
I wanted to be in it so much, for my world, in all its unbearable banality, was
radiant." (399)
"But
that light, bantering tone of theirs, which Erling and Gunnar also shared had
never been part of my nature, to put it mildly, . . . . I was / unable to dissemble, unable to
play a role, and the scholarly earnestness I brought into the house was
impossible to keep at arm's length in the long run . . . ." (419-420)
"I
saw the rooftops in the residential area stretching down the road and
remembered how I used to walk among them as a sixteen-year-old, bursting with
emotions. When everything I saw,
even a rusty, crooked rotary dryer in a back garden, even rotten apples on the
ground beneath a tree, even a boat wrapped in a tarpaulin, with the wet bow
protruding and the yellow, flattened grass beneath, was ablaze with
beauty." (422)
"Death
and gold. I turned them over in my
hand, one by one, and they filled me with disquiet. I stood there and was frightened of death in the same way
that I had been when I was a child.
Not of dying myself but of the dead." (423)
"The
day always came with more than mere light. However frayed your emotions, it was impossible to be wholly
unaffected by the day's new beginnings." (437)
Knausgaard
closes the book with a terrific passage that circles back to the opening
meditation on death and gives us this great last line: "And death, which I have always
regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than
a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that
slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor." (441)
