A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women

by Siri Hustvedt

  Knausgaard’s journey into femininity is not parody or transvestism. His is not the world of Rabelaisian carnival or cross-dressing or the liberating joy that may arrive while playing at being the other sex, nor do his adventures mimic the famous fairy tale in which the man and woman change places for a day. She goes out to plow the fields, and he stays home with the children. The moral of the story is that the man, who had derided woman’s work as effortless, discovers that it requires an agility and skill he lacks. No, Knausgaard’s minute descriptions of domestic life, the potato peeling and diaper changing, the hostile feelings he bears toward the children he loves, and his rage at being trapped and suffocated by household responsibilities, belong to nothing so much as the woman’s narrative. Indeed, Knausgaard’s scrupulous details of domestic reality summon the eighteenth-century English novel, Richardson’s Clarissa in particular, and, as in Richardson, these homely particulars are dignified, even ennobled, as part of a singular, human story.

  In an essay for Slate, Katie Roiphe argues that the very same catalogue of housewifely chores and the misery that goes along with it would not have had the same critical impact had My Struggle’s author been a woman. Roiphe is quick to point out that this would be true for both male and female reviewers. She does not undermine Knausgaard’s achievement. She is a fan. Rather, she is pointing to a contextual problem. What if it were a woman moaning about motherhood and its frustrations, a woman filled with resentment about preparing dinner and doing the laundry, or a woman wishing she could just be alone for a while and write? Isn’t this what Knausgaard longs for a good part of the time, a room of one’s own and the freedom to write? If the thousands of pages of My Struggle are testimony to anything, it is that the man did find time to write.

  But what if a woman were doing the griping? Roiphe doesn’t say this, but the beaten-down housewife is a stock figure. Although the joys and satisfactions of domesticity were romanticized well into the twentieth century, that angel of the house has had her wings clipped. Wasn’t she, the restless, white, middle-class housewife, ably described by Betty Friedan? Her isolation was, of course, in part due to her privilege. Women working at menial jobs to support their families never had the luxury of being bored in their own homes. To those who insist that it is Knausgaard’s great artistry that saves him from the banal, Roiphe counters that no matter how artistic, the hypothetical Carla Olivia Krauss, writing the same work, would never have been taken as seriously. In fact, Carla Olivia Krauss would disappear.

  When a man becomes housewife, when he lives a story that has traditionally belonged to women alone, is that story new or old? Let us be frank. Any and every story sinks or swims in the telling, but still it is fascinating to think of My Struggle as a narrative of what Simone de Beauvoir famously called “becoming a woman.” We know our narrator is a man because he worries about the manly. He will not use a rolling suitcase. It smacks of the feminine. He suffers from premature ejaculation, not a womanly complaint. The writer’s father is described as a man of irrational, erratic whims and sudden explosive tempers, a petty tyrant who used his patriarchal power to humiliate his son, a boy who lived in a state of permanent alert under his progenitor’s mastering gaze.

  In Scandinavia, the expectation that men should participate in domestic and family life is greater than anywhere else in the world. Paternity leave is widespread. But more than that, one can feel a difference in the way women and men move and talk and carry themselves in these countries. There is a palpable sense that women have more power than they do in other places. In Norway, women have had the right to vote since 1913. As a writer, I am treated differently in Scandinavia. Journalists seem less eager to reduce my work to my sex or my autobiography than do journalists in France and Italy, for example. In the United States, it has also become more common for fathers to take care of their children, at least more than they used to. Knausgaard’s epic may have foundered in France because the spectacle of a morose, diaper-changing, dinner-cooking dad has little traction in that still vigorously macho culture.

  By cultural standards, My Struggle is, in fact, a highly “feminine text,” attentive to the nuances of feeling that accompany ordinary domestic life. And ordinary life, I must add, is not lacking in drama. The scene Knausgaard describes near the end of the first volume of his six-volume work when he and his brother clean their dead father’s house encrusted with filth is among the most powerful passages of fiction I have read in years. I thought to myself, this is cleaning as an excursion into metaphysical horror. Everyday domestic reality, long the province of the novel, is hardly benign. I have always thought that the simple act of gathering eight adults at a dinner party and asking each person to share the story of his or her family’s life would quickly reveal that sickness, murder, suicide, drug addiction, violence, imprisonment, and mental illness may be harrowing, but they are startlingly close to all of us.

  What does it mean in light of all this womanly, domestic stuff that Knausgaard does not regard women as literary competition? Is it fear? Is it the anxiety or the “disturbing apprehension” that reading and writing, which he himself construes at some deep level as feminine activities, can be redeemed only if women are excluded from literary history and the real battle of the books takes place among men? Is Knausgaard, as man and as text, an example of the psychic journey the psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin explicates in her book The Bonds of Love? She argues that for some boys, not all, the need (common to, but different in boys and girls) to separate from the all-powerful mother of early childhood metamorphoses into contempt for her and for other members of her sex. Or is it a scorn for what is so overwhelmingly feminine in Knausgaard himself, that soft, hurt, feeling core of the personality, which he explores with singular courage in his writing?

  Isn’t it also true, however, that this girl-woman self must be actively countered by the boy-man self, that because this woman’s narrative is actually a man’s narrative, the danger of womanliness is all the more ferocious? I am not sure, to be honest, but I suspect these questions turn on the many anxieties involved in this particular literary phenomenon. Writing as a man, something I have now done a number of times, has made me deeply sympathetic to male fears of emasculation. Furthermore, men are not alone in their resistance to those qualities coded as feminine. Many women adopt a masculine posture, depending on where they find themselves in the world.

  A woman physicist, for example, is masculinized by her choice of work, while a male novelist is necessarily feminized by his. As a purveyor of feeling and sentiment, his masculinity is already compromised, and if he takes up that most feminine of feminine subjects, the drudgery of staying home with the kids, he has traveled far from the Lone Ranger mythos of his sex. And yet, the stubborn fact that Knausgaard is a man, and a heterosexual one, toughens and enhances not only his author persona but his text, which we are meant to accept as an autobiographical mirror. This is an illusion, of course. No text mirrors phenomenological reality. Nevertheless, an attractive tension is established between the rugged, handsome, masculine figure of the novelist pictured on the book’s cover and his feeling, feminine subject matter. Unlike other novelists who populate their fiction with characters who are not themselves, figments who reside exclusively in the world of the novel, the Knausgaard in the world and the Knausgaard in the world of the book are supposedly one and the same.

  A woman novelist, on the other hand, is in double trouble. If she writes imaginary stories, such soft stuff is made all the softer by her female identity, and if she writes about her own experience in a memoir of domestic life, about the trials of having and caring for babies and children, about boring encounters with fellow parents at the daycare center or nursery school, about her peevish irritations and grievously lost independence, she may well vanish without a trace or be relegated to the ghetto that is woman’s writing. Then again, she may not. The reception of fiction is fickle. If publishers could recognize success in manuscript form, publishing would be a very different business. />
  Because I write fiction and nonfiction and have an abiding interest in neurobiology and philosophy (still mostly male disciplines), I embody the masculine/feminine, serious/not-so-serious, hard/soft divide in my own work. When I publish a paper in a science journal or lecture at a conference in the sciences, I find myself on male terrain, but when I publish a novel, I stay squarely in female land. The audiences at public events vary accordingly, from about 80 percent male in the sciences and philosophy to exactly the reverse at a literary reading or event. This gendered geography becomes the context for one’s work and for its perception. Where exactly does competition come in?

  Undisguised competition in the form of verbal sparring, one-upmanship, and the blow-by-blow dismantling of a paper are common in the sciences and philosophy, and they are certainly not unheard of in the humanities. I once gave a lecture on trauma and literature at the Sorbonne in Paris, and the questions came hard and fast once I had finished speaking. I loved it. For one thing, in these worlds, knowledge counts. The more you know, the better off you are, and I revel in the lively combat of ideas that takes place in these sequestered but intense worlds of the intellect. Further, I have learned a lot from such robust encounters. I have had my mind changed by them. Fighting about ideas is fun, and if you really know your stuff, instant respect may be granted and offers to share papers and perhaps engage in an email dialogue soon follow. Knowledge and thinking well with that knowledge have power. Implicit schemas and prejudice are not eradicated. Women sink from view in these worlds, too, as my story of the woman desperately seeking a little room for her words illustrates, but in the right circumstances, a brilliant, scintillating paper or lecture can break through the schemas and become a gorilla pounding on the window.

  Writing novels does not rely on this kind of knowledge. Some brilliant novelists are strikingly erudite and others are not. Erudition is not what makes a work good, as novels by the likes of Lionel Trilling and Edmund Wilson and others have demonstrated so clearly, and, although the idea of the best and the biggest and the hottest and the hippest is omnipresent in popular culture, literary and otherwise, doesn’t dog-eat-dog competition in the world of novels seem a little odd? What does that competition involve? Every writer longs for recognition and praise, but every writer must also know that the prizes and congratulations on hand are often ephemeral. Writing a novel is not like solving Fermat’s theorem. The right solution in a novel is the one the novelist feels is right, and if the reader agrees, a match has been made. And this may be part of the problem. If literature is finally about “taste,” if there is no ultimate mathematical “proof” of superiority or inferiority, it may become all the more important to guard against the harpies and succubi lurking in the form itself. That said, competition exists in all enterprises, and competition creates envy and bitterness, global features of every subculture, scientific and artistic.

  Competition can be lively play, a kind of mental dance or sport that invigorates its participants. Evolutionary psychologists advance the idea that women are not competitive or are less competitive than men, but this thought makes me howl with laughter. Where have these people been living? Are they blind to female ambition not just in the present but throughout recorded human history? This fantasy of competitive males and coy females requires a retreat to a foggy evolutionary past of hunter-gatherers on the savanna, the details of which must be left to guesswork. The idea that sexual selection has shaped literary culture is a neo-Darwinian notion of dubious merit. And yet, the idea of the promiscuous male mating right and left with any female in sight and the discriminating female lives on, despite the overwhelming evidence that far too many species violate this supposedly ironclad rule for it to remain standing.

  I have no idea if Knausgaard was making a Darwinian reference to competition during his interview with me. He may have been. I love Darwin as a thinker and as a writer, and I do not dispute that we are evolved beings, but the neo-Darwinism of evolutionary psychology is a suspicious hybrid of Darwin and computational theory of mind, a hybrid that was in vogue in Norway some years before our meeting, due to a much-watched, much-discussed, wildly popular television show that the writer may well have seen or heard talked about. In this thinking, male competition is used to explain a long list of sex differences due to selected traits. Although it may be comforting to explain a need to be alone and free of the burdens of childcare or a fierce desire to punch out other male writers in the literary arena as a genetically determined trait, the weaknesses of this theory are many, and they have grown weaker with every passing year. Nevertheless, even stupid ideas can have power, and they infect perception. To look another writer in the eye and soberly declare that she and every other woman on the planet who ever lived are “no competition” (with the possible exception of Julia Kristeva) is a striking comment at the least.

  The game, then, according to Knausgaard, belongs to men, and it is here that the story becomes truly sad for both sexes, it seems to me. In his lucid, mordant article “Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame, and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity,” Michael S. Kimmel writes, “Men prove their manhood in the eyes of other men.” Male status, pride, and dignity revolve around what other men think. Women don’t count. Kimmel quotes David Mamet, a writer who has depicted all-male worlds more than once: “Women have, in men’s minds, such a low place on the social ladder of this country that it’s useless to define yourself in terms of a woman.” From this blinkered perspective, men ignore or suppress all women because the idea that they might be rivals in terms of human achievement is unthinkable. Facing off with a woman, any woman, is necessarily emasculating.

  “Homophobia,” Kimmel writes, “is the fear that other men will unmask us, emasculate us, reveal to us and the world that we do not measure up, that we are not real men.” This statement could, in fact, describe the ongoing terrors and humiliations of My Struggle. In the oddly hermetic, paranoid world of the heterosexual white man, the dirty secret, according to Kimmel, is that the anointed demigod does not feel all that powerful. Instead, he is beset by anxieties, feelings born of keeping up an untenable position, a kind of ongoing false self. Such are “the feelings of men who were raised to believe themselves entitled to feel . . . power, but do not feel it.” The man who rolls, rather than carries, a suitcase is in peril of becoming the weak woman or the swishy guy. He is taking a trip into the scary, polluted territory of women and gays, where the real man’s manliness might be exposed as a flimsy front.

  The irony is that the underbelly of white male power, of the clubby, self-congratulatory, back-pounding, pugilistic posing is extreme vulnerability. Every human being is capable of being wounded. If the feelings that result from the inevitable cuts and scrapes every person accumulates in the course of a lifetime are understood as “feminine,” then it seems to me we have all become terribly confused. The difference between male and female vulnerability may be that in a woman this quality fits into our perceptual schema more easily than it does in a man.

  But humiliations are regularly visited upon women because women are not regarded as competition and are treated as ghosts in the room. Further, when they are elevated to the position of serious rival, when the she-gorilla raps on the window and full attention is directed at her, the response can be joyful and welcoming, but it can also be vicious. A brilliant, young, beautiful neuroscientist I met at a conference told me the story of her public humiliation at the hands of an eminent, much older male colleague. I suspect this man couldn’t bear the idea that a formidable intellectual threat to him had arrived on the scene in such a comely female package. His gratuitous cruelty in front of a large audience was too much for her. She cried. Tears, however understandable, fit perfectly into those implicit schemas that guide our perception. Women can’t take it. They break down. My purely practical advice: Don’t get excited. Don’t raise your voice. Bite back. Bite back hard, but never cry.

  Knausgaard does a lot of crying in My Struggle. His tears are not only
“unmanly,” they subvert the strong stoicism that permeates Norwegian culture. I know. I grew up with it. You had to have a damned good reason to cry—death of a loved one, a terrible accident that left you bleeding and maimed, agonizing illness, and even then, such a display was approved in private, certainly not in public. When My Struggle was published in Norway, it was as if a grown man had stripped naked, walked to the town square, and mounted a bench in order to wail and blubber in full sight of his fellow citizens. And in Knausgaard’s case, it was made worse by the fact that the public was privy to the reasons, not always so grave, for his sobbing. A ban on tears can be hard on a sensitive child. I know about that, too, and I was a girl. Karl Ove Knausgaard knows about it because he was a sensitive little boy, and that may be even harder. Dignity and stiffness must rule the Norwegian soul. Norway used to be a culture of perpetually dry eyes. And yet, Knausgaard’s Knausgaard, the hero of his immensely long personal saga, is a veritable swamp of lachrymosity. Such are the ironies of the literary world.

  When I look back at the “no competition” remark, I suppose I should be offended or righteously indignant, but that is not at all how I feel. What I feel is compassion and pity for a person who made a remark, no doubt in earnest, which is nevertheless truly silly. Thousands of pages of self-examination apparently did not bring him to enlightenment about the “woman” in himself. “It’s still in me.” It is not enough to notice that a feminine text by a man and a feminine text by a woman are received differently or to call attention to numbers that represent sexual inequality in the world of letters. It is absolutely essential that men and women become fully conscious of what is at stake, that it is blazingly clear to every single one of us who cares about the novel that there is something at once pernicious and silly at work in our reading habits, that the fate of literary works cannot be decided by a no-competition clause appended to a spurious homo-social contract written under the aegis of fear, that such a clause is nothing short of “insane.”