PENGUIN BOOKS
SO MUCH LONGING IN SO LITTLE SPACE
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s first novel, Out of the World, was the first ever debut novel to win the Norwegian Critics’ Prize, and his second, A Time for Everything, was widely acclaimed. The My Struggle cycle of novels has been heralded as a masterpiece wherever it has appeared, and the first volume was awarded the prestigious Brage Prize.
Also by Karl Ove Knausgaard
A Time for Everything
My Struggle: Book 1
My Struggle: Book 2
My Struggle: Book 3
My Struggle: Book 4
My Struggle: Book 5
My Struggle: Book 6
Home and Away: Writing the Beautiful Game (with Fredrik Ekelund)
Autumn (with illustrations by Vanessa Baird)
Winter (with illustrations by Lars Lerin)
Spring (with illustrations by Anna Bjerger)
Summer (with illustrations by Anselm Kiefer)
PENGUIN BOOKS
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Published simultaneously in the United States by Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC and in Great Britain by Harvill Secker, an imprint of Penguin Random House Limited 2019
Copyright © 2017 by Karl Ove Knausgaard
English translation copyright © 2019 by Ingvild Burkey
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Originally published under the title Så mye lengsel på så liten flate. En bok om Edvard Munchs bilder in Norway by Forlaget Oktober in 2017.
This book was published with the financial assistance of NORLA (Norwegian Literature Abroad).
This book was written following Karl Ove Knausgaard’s collaboration with the Munch Museum on the exhibition Towards the Forest – Knausgaard on Munch, Oslo, May 6–October 8 2017.
Credits for paintings appear on this page.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Knausgêard, Karl Ove, 1968- author. | Burkey, Ingvild, 1967–translator.
Title: So much longing in so little space : the art of Edvard Munch / Karl Ove Knausgaard ; translated from the Norwegian by Ingvild Burkey.
Other titles: Sêa mye lengsel pêa sêa liten flate. English
Description: London : Harvill Secker ; New York : Penguin Books, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018057501 (print) | LCCN 2018058011 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525504900 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143133131 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Munch, Edvard, 1863–1944--Criticism and interpretation. | BISAC: ART / Individual Artists / General. | ART / Criticism & Theory. | LITERARY CRITICISM / European / Scandinavian.
Classification: LCC ND773.M8 (ebook) | LCC ND773.M8 K6313 2019 (print) | DDC 759.81--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018057501
Version_1
For Sissel
Contents
About the Author
Also by Karl Ove Knausgaard
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
One
Two
Three
Notes
Paintings
Sometimes it is impossible to say why and how a work of art achieves its effect. I can stand in front of a painting and become filled with emotions and thoughts, evidently transmitted by the painting, and yet it is impossible to trace those emotions and thoughts back to it and say, for example, that the sorrow came from the colours, or that the longing came from the brushstrokes, or that the sudden insight that life will end lay in the motif.
One picture I feel this way about was painted by Edvard Munch in 1915. It depicts a cabbage field. The cabbages in the foreground are roughly executed, almost sketch-like, dissolving into green and blue brushstrokes deeper into the background. Next to the cabbage field there is an area of yellow, over that an area of dark green, and over that again a narrow band of darkening sky.
That is all, that is the whole painting.
But the picture is magical. It is so charged with meaning, looking at it I feel as if something is bursting within me. And yet it is just a field of cabbages.
So what is going on with this painting?
When I look at its colours and shapes, which are so radically simplified that they suggest a landscape more than they represent it, I see death, as if the painting intended a reconciliation with death, but a trace of something terrible remains, and what is terrible is the unknown, that we don’t know what awaits us.
But Munch’s painting doesn’t really say anything, doesn’t give form to anything other than cabbages, grain, trees and sky. And yet death, and yet reconciliation, and yet peace, and yet a trace of something terrible.
Is it simply that the line of the field leads inwards, towards darkness, and that dusk is descending in the sky above?
Perhaps. But many have painted fields, many have painted dusk, without attaining what this painting so calmly radiates.
Munch was around fifty years old when he painted Cabbage Field. He was known as a painter of the inner life, of dream, death and sexuality. He had gone through a life crisis, after that he withdrew from social life, and he no longer sought out pain when he painted, he turned outwards, he painted the sun. And that isn’t hard to understand, everything begins anew when the sun rises. Darkness yields, the day opens up, the world once again becomes visible. Over the next thirty years he painted what he saw there, in the visible world. But the visible world is not objective reality, it appears to each individual as seen by them, and Munch’s great gift lay in his ability to paint not only what his gaze took in, but also what that gaze was charged with.
There is a longing in this painting of the cabbage field, a longing to disappear and become one with the world. And that longing to disappear and become one with the world fulfilled the painting for him, fulfilled for him the act of painting. That is why this painting is so good, what disappears re-emerges in what comes into being, and if the disappearance ceased for the painter as soon as he finished the painting, it is still represented in the picture, which fills us again and again with its emptiness.
Cabbages. Grain and forest.
Yellow and green, blue and orange.
ONE
Edvard Munch painted all his life, from his teenage years, when he produced small pictures of potted plants and interiors, portraits of family members and exteriors near the place where he grew up, until he died at Ekely, eighty years old, surrounded by his works. The constant activity which painting was for him can be divided into different phases, the first being his apprentice years, during which he painted himself into tradition, initially by producing youthfully clumsy landscapes and portraits, followed surprisingly quickly by confident and good paintings, culminating in a qualitative break which was also his first masterpiece, The Sick Child, in 1885–6. He was twenty-two years old. The second was the period up to 1892, when he painted in many styles and was clearly searching for a way to give expression to what he had within him; the canvases from this period include everything from realis
tic harbour motifs to classically Impressionist street scenes. The third phase is the one we think of as ‘Munchian’ – this is when he painted Melancholy, Vampire, The Scream, Evening on Karl Johan Street, Death in the Sickroom, Puberty, Anxiety, Madonna, Jealousy. The fourth phase began around the turn of the century, when he abandoned symbolist language and thinking and took his by then distinctive style and method into something else, less literary and more painterly, even as he returned to painting earlier motifs at regular intervals up until his death in 1944.
Of course there are no walls between these phases. Throughout his career, for example, he painted full-length portraits that are hardly affected by developments in the rest of his work, and he continually painted self-portraits up until the end, which belong among his best works. The long final phase itself contained a number of periods which it is possible to delimit, such as the vitalistic period, when he painted naked men and bathers, horses and labourers, or the monumental period, when he worked on various public art commissions, of which the mural The Sun in the assembly hall of Oslo University remains a high point.
To divide an artist’s productive life into phases is a way of handling it, and this feels especially important in Munch’s case, since the works he is now remembered for are almost exclusively paintings dating to a particular period, numbering some ten to fifteen paintings out of a total production of more than 1,700, so familiar by now that they have become emblems of themselves and therefore almost impossible to see as anything other than that. The style refers to Munch, and Munchian refers to the style, in a circular movement that closes the paintings off to the viewer, shutting us out. That movement belongs to modernity, the age of reproduction; along with van Gogh’s sunflowers and Monet’s water-lily ponds, Picasso’s Guernica and Matisse’s dancing women, Munch’s The Scream is perhaps the most iconic image of our time. This means that the picture has invariably already been seen, so it is no longer possible to see it as if for the first time, and since so much of what Munch invested in this painting had to do precisely with alienation, with seeing the world as if for the first time by creating a distance of non-familiarity, it is clear that The Scream is in a sense ruined for us as a work of art.
But Munch as an artist is not ruined. His production was so huge, and so little of it has been exhibited, that it is still possible to approach his pictures with fresh eyes. And by not focusing exclusively on his masterpieces, by not stopping at them but rather seeing them as stations along a more than sixty year long continual search for meaning, a continual exploration of the world through painting, full of failure, fumbling and banality but also of wildness, audacity and triumph, perhaps The Scream too will come into its own as a work of art, that is to say, be seen as something oscillating between the ridiculous and the fantastic, between the perfected and the unfinished, the beautiful and the ugly, painted in a small town on the world’s periphery, at the junction between the old and the new, at the very dawn of the era which would become our own.
* * *
*
As a person Munch was emotional, nervous and self-absorbed, and as an artist he was lucky, in that he was noticed at the very beginning of his career and was helped in ways that fairly quickly locked him into painting, which at first was as much a way of being seen as a way of seeing, and which eventually became a way of life, the only one he knew. He never did anything other than paint, he never held a job, he didn’t found a family, and he hardly spent any time on the practical matters which a life is usually full of. So in many ways Munch’s life was extreme – extremely monomaniacal, extremely dedicated, extremely solitary. But it was in no way heroic, it was as much a matter of hiding or fleeing from the world and its challenges as of renouncing security and accepting the cost of creating something unique. Munch may have lacked a basic human quality, that of becoming attached to other people, of living in a close relationship to others. Reading biographies it becomes clear that he had a great fear of intimacy, and just as clear why: he lost his mother when he was five years old, and he lost his older sister, to whom he was very attached, when he was thirteen. His father died when Edvard was twenty-five, his younger brother when he was thirty-two, and in a sense he lost even his sister Laura, who became seriously mentally ill at an early age. If to this series of losses one adds an acute sensitivity and a distant, at times religiously confused, partly kindly and partly brutal father figure during his youth, one ends up with a child, a teenager and a grown man who is so afraid of losing that he deals with it by simply not acquiring. In time, Munch would assiduously avoid places within himself that might prove painful, it became a life strategy. When his mother’s sister, who had been almost a mother to him, died towards the end of his life, he didn’t attend the funeral but witnessed it from a distance. He stood outside the churchyard wall, looking in.
How important is such information when we look at his pictures? This is a crucial question in regard to Munch’s art, but also in regard to art generally. There is obviously a connection between an artist’s personal experiences and his or her works, but it is rather less obvious what this connection might consist of. Did Picasso paint the way he did because of his relationship to his parents, because of the circumstances in which he grew up, due to his unique inner life? To claim this would be an absurd reduction of Picasso’s oeuvre, and completely insensitive towards the problems he set out to resolve as he faced a blank canvas. The same is true of authors, whose biographies naturally play a part in the writing of their books, but in ways that can seldom be traced back directly – think of Hermann Broch’s novel The Death of Virgil (1945), for example, or a film like Solaris (1972) by Andrei Tarkovsky, to mention two distinctive works of the previous century in which biographical elements play a minimal role in understanding or experiencing them but which are nevertheless personal in the sense that it is difficult to imagine them having been created by anyone other than Broch and Tarkovsky.
A work of art is like a point in a system of three coordinates: the particular place, the particular time, the particular person. The more time has passed since the creation of a work, the more apparent it becomes that individuality, the particular person’s experiences and psychology, plays less of a role than the culture in which it found expression. I am sure that a well-informed and competent reader in the Middle Ages would have been able to distinguish between different book illustrators of that time, and that the differences between illustrators were perhaps even considered essential, while for us, at least for me, the style expresses one thing and one thing only: the medieval.
An example nearer to our time might be the work of Norwegian author Dag Solstad, which extends from the 1960s until today and in which the literary aesthetics of successive decades always resonate, so that in Patina! Green! we hear the tone of the 60s, in September 25th Square the tone of the 70s, in High School Teacher Pedersen’s Account of the Great Political Awakening that Has Swept Our Nation the tone of the 80s, in Shyness and Dignity the tone of the 90s, in Armand V. Footnotes to An Unexcavated Novel the tone of the 2000s. What is interesting is that Solstad’s own, original and highly idiosyncratic voice is also present throughout these five decades, one need only read a sentence or two from any one of these novels to ascertain that he wrote them. When Patina! Green! was first published, it was that voice which stood out clearly, while the novel’s air of the 1960s was in the background, almost unperceived. Now its 1960s-ness is the first thing we notice, and Dag Solstad’s voice is more in the background.
This is so because we see the world without being aware of our way of seeing it, those two things are often one and the same to us. It feels as if we are living in an unmediated reality, and when someone mediates it for us, which is what artists do, they often portray it in ways that correspond so closely to our own perception of reality that we confuse them too. This applies to what we pay attention to and consider essential, it applies to notions we hold about people and the world, it applies to the use of language and imager
y. If we look at a daily TV newscast from 1977, for example, we notice at once the clothes, which are different in ways that often make us smile, and the hairdos and the spectacles. We notice the way people express themselves, which seems stiffer and more formal than what we are used to now, and we notice the unbelievably parochial and innocent news coverage. But back then, in 1977, no one noticed any of this. The tone of the 1970s didn’t exist, because everything and everyone belonged to the 70s, everyone shared the style of clothing, the hairdos, the design of the spectacles, the manner of speech, the field of interest. All of this is part of a shared space, it is what we call the zeitgeist, the spirit of the time, which is also what we express ourselves through. A poor novel will express only this, regardless of whether it relies on personal experiences and perhaps describes events that the author has actually lived through, and after some years it will have no other value than as a document of the time.
That culture is seen as nature, and that judgements and notions which are arbitrary and time-bound are unconsciously perceived as timelessly true, falls within the rhetorical concept of doxa, and it was underlying notions such as these that Roland Barthes charted and described in his book Mythologies. When I studied at university in the early 1990s, this was the dominant thinking, French philosophy held the ascendancy in academia, and this has influenced my view of time and art, presumably also in ways I myself am unaware of. To me, the most important theorist by far was Michel Foucault, in particular his book The Order of Things, which felt like a revelation when I read it for the first time. Yes, that’s how it is! I thought then, and I still think so. And of course what I am writing here, both the way I write it and the thoughts I express through it, are also a part of the zeitgeist, also belong to notions that I now feel to be true, for this is what reality looks like to me, so it is highly likely that this too will one day express merely the time- and place-specific.
So Much Longing in So Little Space Page 1
