My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  Handke wrote, “The people left the grave quickly. Standing beside it, I looked up at the motionless trees: for the first time it seemed to me that nature really was merciless. So these were the facts! The forest spoke for itself.” I wrote, “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.” That was beautiful, it was something, whereas what it described was nothing, empty, neutral, as hopeless as it was merciless. Handke did not lie, or at least he made the greatest efforts not to. I was lying. Why?

  When I looked at a tree, I saw that it was blind and arbitrary, an entity that had come into being and would die, and which in the meantime was growing. When I looked at a net full of flapping, silvery fish, I saw the same thing, something blind and arbitrary that came into being, flourished, and would die. When I looked at photos from the Nazi extermination camps, I saw people in the same way. Limbs, heads, bellies, hair, genitals. It had nothing to do with the way I considered them, what I saw was the way these people were viewed at that time, which made it possible for so many to have known about those atrocities and even to have taken part in them without raising a finger. That it was possible to see things in that way was frightening but did not make what was seen any less true. It could be taken as nothing, and all thoughts that sought meaning in the world would have to relate to that zero point. I looked at a tree and I saw meaninglessness. But I saw life too, in its pure, blind form, something that simply existed and was growing. The energy and the beauty of that. Death was indeed nothing, a mere absence. But just as blind life on the one hand could be viewed as a force, something sacred and – well, why not – divine, and on the other hand as something meaningless and empty, death too could be seen in that same way, its song too could be sung, it too could be infused with meaning and beauty. This was what made German National Socialism so infinitely significant to us, a mere two generations having passed since the Nazis were in power, and under their reign of terror, modern in every respect, all three of these perspectives prevailed at once: life as a divine force, death as beautiful and meaningful, human beings as blind, arbitrary, worthless. This aspect, which prior to Nazism belonged to art and to the sublime, became a part of the social order. Handke’s mother was a young woman when all that took place, and after describing her childhood years, in Austria between the wars in relative poverty and ignorance, when her wish to learn something, anything, was considered utterly unrealistic and undesirable, Handke sketches out the new mood arising in and around National Socialism, with demonstrations, torchlight parades, buildings festooned with new emblems of nationhood, and writes, “The historic events were represented to the rural population as a drama of nature.” Of his mother he states that she continued to have no interest in politics, since “what was happening before her eyes was something entirely different from politics. ‘Politics’ was something colorless and abstract, not a carnival, not a dance, not a band in local costume, in short, nothing visible.”

  Nazism was the last major utopian political movement, and it showed itself in nearly every way to be destructive, it has made all subsequent utopian thinking problematic if not impossible, not only in politics but also in art, and since art by its very nature is utopian, it has languished ever since, self-examining and suspicious, something of which Handke’s novel and nearly all novels by authors of his generation are an expression. How can reality be represented without adding something it doesn’t have? What does it “have” and what does it not “have”? What is authentic and what not authentic? Where is the line between what is put on and what is not put on? Does a line even exist? Is the world anything more than our conceptions about it? Language has no life of its own, is not itself alive, but invokes life, and the primal mise-en-scène of this, the very source of creative literature, is found in the Odyssey, when Odysseus and his crew moor on the Oceanus River after visiting Circe, and Odysseus offers a sacrifice to the dead on the shore. The dark blood drains darkly away into the pit, and the dead souls flock around it. He sees young girls in bridal dress, young warriors in bloodstained armor, and old men, their screams are terrifying, and the fear runs through him. The first person he recognizes is Elpenor, who died during their stay with Circe and was left unburied. He speaks to Tiresias the soothsayer, who tells of the future, and then Odysseus’s own mother drinks of the blood, she recognizes him and tells him how she died. Odysseus wishes to embrace her and approaches three times, yet three times she escapes him, like a dream or a shadow. She tells him her sinews no longer keep flesh and bone together, the funeral pyre having turned her body into ash, and all that is left is her soul, which wanders about. Literature invokes the world as Odysseus invokes the dead, and regardless of whatever way it does this, the distance is always unbridgeable, the stories always the same. A son loses his mother three thousand years ago, a son loses his mother forty years ago. That one of these stories is fiction, the other fact, does nothing to alter their fundamental likeness, both are made manifest in language, and in that perspective all of Handke’s efforts to avoid the literary become futile, there is nothing in his depiction of reality that is more real than Homer’s. Nor is that what he seeks to do.

  Handke endeavors to write about a human being, his mother, without invoking her, without giving her blood in such a way as to make her manifest as something reminiscent of her previous, living form, in other words denying her the fictional life that might connect up what is dead, her existence in the past, with what is living, the mind of the reader. What the language invokes instead is what surrounded her, the shapes in her life, and although her identity, that which was particular to her, becomes visible in this way, it does not speak to us. Moreover, what is invoked by the language is not something found on the other side of some unbridgeable abyss, for these shapes are in themselves of the language in a certain respect, though not in a wholly literal sense. In this way Handke manages to achieve what he presumably set out to, which was to represent reality in a truthful manner. Another way of doing the same thing might be to remove the narrator entirely and simply present the reader with the documents in which the mother was mentioned or which concerned circumstances of which she was a part; in that case the relationship between reality and its representation would be as good as congruent. The “as if” of art, the abyss that separates it from reality, would then be removed completely. Or, more correctly, would merely be sensed as the will that tracked down the documents, gathered them together, and arranged them in a certain order. Of course, the reader might regard that order as manipulative, since in reality the documents were arranged horizontally, in various archives, in different locations, and even a chronological principle would represent an intrusion and create effect: the last entry in the medical journal is followed by the postmortem report, and the reader wipes away a tear.

  The important thing for Handke was to describe his mother without traducing her, which is to say without intervening in what was singular to her, out of respect for her integrity. To me this was not a good thought at all, since I had written about a similar set of events in my own life and had done so in a way that was almost diametrically opposed to Handke’s, reaching continually toward affect, feeling, the sentimental in contrast to the rational, and dramatizing my father, allowing him to be a character in a story, representing him in the same way as fictional characters are represented, by concealing the “as if” on which all literature depends, and thereby traducing him and his integrity in the most basic of ways, by saying that this was him. I had said the same thing about all the novel’s characters, but only in the case of my father had I done so in a way that failed to show consideration to him and the person he was. He had been dead for more than ten years, but that only made it possible, it didn’t justify it.

  I had thought about none of this while I had been writing, neither the manufacture of reality, representation, nor my father’s int
egrity, everything took place intuitively, I began with a blank page and a will to write, and ended up with the novel as it was. In that there lies a belief in the intuitive that is as good as blind, and from that basis a poetics might be derived, and an ontology too, I suppose, since for me the novel provides a means of thinking radically different from that of the essay, the article, or the thesis, because reflection in the novel is not hierarchically superior as a pathway to understanding, but coordinate with all the other elements in it. The room in which it is conceived is as important as the thought itself. The snow falling through the darkness outside, the headlights of the cars gliding past on the other side of the river. This was perhaps the most important thing I learned at university, that practically anything at all can be said about a novel or a poem, and what is said may be as likely as it is plausible, but never exhaustive, perhaps not even important, since the novel and the poem are always entities in their own right, singular and existing as they are, and the fact that what the novel or the poem says cannot be said in any other way makes them essentially mysterious. The world is mysterious in exactly the same way, and yet we tend to forget this all the time, always giving precedence to reflection whenever we look at it. What does it mean to “walk”? Is it putting one foot in front of the other? Yes, it is. But describing the motor function, the putting of one foot in front of the other, says nothing about what it feels like to walk, of the difference between walking uphill and down, walking along a stone jetty or up a flight of stairs, across a lawn or on the mossy earth of the forest, barefoot or in boots, and even less about the feeling of watching others walk – the pedestrians bustling across the square on a Saturday morning, the lone man striding through snow-covered fields or a person you’ve known for a very long time, the way their entire character seems to be contained in the way they walk when they come toward you. You see it at once, here “he” or “she” comes. In that unique pattern of movements is all that you know and have experienced about that person, though not as separate, clearly divided parts, what you see is in a way the sum of that person, what they “are” to you. They come walking, you see them, and that’s it. One could delve deeper into this, for example scientifically, in which case it’s all about muscles and sinews being deployed in a particular way so as to make it possible to put one foot in front of the other, the way the blood runs through the arteries and veins, the gases it transports, the cells and cell walls, the mitochondria and the strings of DNA, not to mention the impulses that race through the nervous system, sent on their way by a will or a wish for movement in the form of chemistry and electrical discharges in the brain, which then begs a whole series of questions. What is will? What is a wish? What is a motor impulse? What form does it have? If it is chemistry, then what is the connection between the various chemical reactions and what we know as will, or the urge to do something? These impulses do not belong to the conscious mind, but to deeper-lying and considerably older parts of the brain, unchanged through millions of years right back to the time our first and most distant ancestors emerged into the world, like the apes in almost every respect apart from their hip sockets and the length of their arms, as well as a few more physiological peculiarities that made it possible for them to do what no other animal until then had been able to do, and which none other is able to do to this day, which was to walk upright on two legs. Walking upright on two legs is what above all distinguishes us as a species. This property characterizes not only our physical but also our mental reality, since we orient ourselves in the world of thought as if it were topographical, a landscape through which we walk, from the depths of the subconscious to the sky of the superego, one political utopia farthest to our left, the other farthest to our right; some thoughts are nearby, either easy to grasp or hard to see because we are right up close, some thoughts we need to reach for, others are higher up and can only be made our own by the greatest, most alpine of efforts, while others are low and grubby, close to the ground and to the earthly.

  As a writer you can go that step further or, as Lawrence Durrell describes the process of writing novels, set oneself a goal and walk there in your sleep. The act of “walking” is inexhaustible; however, literature’s job is not to be exhaustive but to construct the inexhaustible, at least it is for the kind of literature that aims to represent reality and our ever-changing, fluctuating reactions to it. The trees that are, to put it in the manner of Rilke, and we who pass by it all, like changing breaths of wind. The forest speaks for itself, Handke writes, there is an abyss between us and it, but if nature’s mercilessness appears threatening, it is not because it is turned away from us, as it can appear when we look at it, in its almost dreamlike remoteness, but because its muteness and blindness exists in us all. Merciless is the beating heart. Odysseus tried to build a bridge across the abyss, between what was culture and what was nature in his being when he spoke to his heart and beseeched it not to beat so hard. The abyss is inside us. I saw it the first time I stood in front of a dead body. I didn’t understand it, but I saw it and knew. Death is not the abyss, but exists in the living, in the space between our thoughts and the flesh through which they pass. In the flesh, thoughts are a kind of intruder, conquerers of a foreign land, who leave it just as quickly again the moment it becomes inhospitable, which is to say when all movements cease and all warmth seeps away, as it does in death.

  But it wasn’t simply a dead body I saw back then. The dead body was my father. My vague notion of what death was constituted only an infinitely small element in the barrage of thoughts and feelings that consumed me. In front of me lay the person who had created me, his body had made mine, and I had grown up under his supervision, he was the single most important and influential person in my life. The fact that he was dead did nothing to alter that. Nothing was concluded that afternoon in the chapel in Kristiansand.

  * * *

  After speaking to Yngve I took the elevator down to the basement and walked through the damp bunker-like passages in which the ceiling lights futuristically came on by themselves one by one as I proceeded, and reached the laundry room at the exact moment the display on the last of the machines changed from one minute left to zero. I transferred the wet clothes into the tumble dryers, and stuffed the last of the dirty ones into the washing machines, sprinkled washing powder into the little trays, and switched them on, and a second later the machines rumbled and spluttered into life. I stood for a moment, watching their drums revolve, the way the clothes inside became more and more saturated and were slung against the glass, wrenched from sight, slung against the glass, my thoughts wandering to the worst possible scenario, a court case. I saw myself in my mind’s eye arriving in a taxi, the blitz of photographers as I left the building, the headlines in the newspapers, KNAUSGAARD THE LIAR, SHAMBLES, SHOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN PUBLISHED, ADMITS LYING, KNAUSGAARD RAPED ME, because I understood all too well that proceedings of that kind would kick up all sorts of other accusations, and that an autobiographical project in which I also wrote about others opened the floodgates for just about anything to be said about me by anyone at all. On its own terms, I wasn’t anticipating the novel making any major impact, and neither were the publishers, ten thousand copies were being printed to start with, that was a lot, though no more than my previous novel, but if there was going to be a court case, sales no doubt would rocket. It would be a scandal then, dirty and sensational, and all kinds of shit would be dug up about me. In my thoughts, I sat in the witness box, which for some reason I imagined to be a kind of desk not unlike the ones we’d had at school, on a low platform in the middle of a packed room, answering the most provocative and insinuating questions imaginable. The first was why had I written the novel in the first place. Why had I used people’s real names instead of concealing their identities, as was the practice in novels running close to real events, and had been for as long as the genre had existed. Why real life? What was the point? At first I found myself unable to answer and shifted uneasily in the chair, stuttering and stammering much a
s I sometimes had onstage, most recently in Munich, where many of the small audience that had found its way there had got up and left, something that consumed me with shame whenever I thought about it. But what was the point of wallowing in thoughts of weakness and wretchedness, I thought to myself, and looked up at the ground-level window just below the ceiling, through the cracked pane of which I glimpsed the asphalt outside.

  Why not fight back? I straightened my shoulders, and there, in the midst of all the journalists and inquisitive onlookers, perhaps a hundred in total, I began to speak, vividly and full of insight, about the relationship between truth and the subjective, literature’s relationship to reality, delving into the nature of social structures, the way a novel of this kind exposed the boundaries to which society adhered but which remained unwritten and were thus invisible insofar as they were melded into us and our self-understanding, and how they for this reason had to be breached before they could be seen. But why did they have to be seen, my defense lawyer asked. There is something all of us experience, which is the same for all human beings, I replied, but which nonetheless is seldom conveyed apart from in the private sphere. All of us encounter difficulties at some point in our lives, all of us know someone with a drinking problem, mental issues, or some other kind of life-threatening affliction, at least this is the case in my experience; every time I meet a new person and get to know them, some narrative like this will eventually come to the surface, a tale of sickness, decline, or sudden death. These things are not represented and thereby seem not to exist, or else to exist only as a burden each of us must bear on our own. But what about the newspapers and the media, the defense lawyer then asked. Surely there’s enough death and sickness there? Of course, I said, but there it is presented as facts, described from a distance as a kind of objective phenomenon. The ripple effect of such cases, the impact on the individual and the next of kin, is ignored or briefly referred to as something external. Moreover, it has to be something spectacular to be written about. What I’m talking about is day-to-day life. The metaphor for that is death. Death is present in all our lives, firstly in the shape of something that happens to someone we know, then, eventually, to ourselves. People die in droves every single day. It’s something we don’t see, it’s kept from us. We don’t like to talk about it either. Why not? It touches the very depths of everyone’s existence. Why do we suppress that? It’s the same with aging and human deterioration. If you get too old to look after yourself you’re put in an institution, hidden away from everyone. What kind of a society are we living in, where everything that is sick, deviant, or dead is kept from sight? Two generations ago, sickness and death were both very much closer to us, if not a natural part of life then at least unavoidable. I could have written an article about all this, but it wouldn’t have said much because arguments have got to be rational, and this is about the opposite, the irrational, all the feelings we have about what it means to confront what has withered away into death, and what that actually is. I remember the first time I saw real sickness, my maternal grandmother was in the final throes of Parkinson’s disease, and the sheer physical frailty and human suffering was an enormous shock to me because I had no idea it existed in that way. I knew there was sickness, but I didn’t know it was like that. I had a similar experience the first time I worked in an institution for the mentally deficient, I was stunned by what I saw, all those deformed bodies and crippled minds, why had I not known that this too was part of the human experience? It had been kept out of the way, but why? It made me think about what physicality actually is, what it means, the animal or biological, material nature of the human body and its absolute closeness to the world, in contrast to the world picture and self-understanding that comes out of our reflections as to who we are and what kind of terms we exist under, not just in the limitless amounts of scientific research we produce, but also in the limitless amounts of news stories and programs we read and watch, in which this perspective is absent. What I was trying to do was to reintroduce a closeness, trying to get the text to penetrate that whole series of conceptions and ideas and images that hang like a sky above reality, or cling to it like a membrane enclosing the eye, to reach into the reality of the human body and the frailty of the flesh, but not in any general way because generality is a relative of the ideal, it doesn’t exist, only the particular exists, and since the particular in this case happens to be me, that was what I wrote about. That’s how it is. It was the only goal I had, and that’s the reality of the matter. Some people are of the opinion I had no right to do what I was doing because in doing so I was involving other people besides myself. And this is true. My question is why we conceal the things we do. Where is the shame in human decline? The complete human catastrophe? To live the complete human catastrophe is terrible indeed, but to write about it? Why shame and concealment when what we are dealing with here is basically the most human thing of all? What’s so dangerous about it that we cannot speak of it out loud?