My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  Njaal hesitated. But after a moment he gripped the side of the bath, lifting first one leg then the other over the edge and into the water. His limbs were as delicate as his features, his brown eyes and fair hair, the slight blush of his skin. He was a sensitive boy, his eyes were attentive, but he was full of energy as well, and the two sides of him seemed to collide. There was a lot of Christina in him, not quite as much of Geir, at least not in any way that was immediately apparent.

  Geir had turned away from a lot of stuff, but that wasn’t to say it wasn’t still there inside him, only that it was concealed. Now and then I wondered if it was concealed from him as well, and in what way it then existed. Geir’s mother had always tried to keep him as close as possible, making him feel guilty when he wasn’t there, a possessive, dominating woman. She had been ridden with anxiety, as far as I could gather, and it seemed to me that freeing himself from her had required quite a vast effort. He had scant respect for feelings and the emotional, he hated anything that wasn’t rational, everything that said one thing and meant another, he was rational almost to the very extreme, and since he was always on his guard, always examining the reasons behind any emotion, he was a total cynic. He didn’t care what other people made of him. More than one of his friends had broken off contact with him for not making any bones about what he thought. On one occasion I’d come close to doing the same. Somehow or other I’d managed to offend him without realizing, and the next time we spoke he launched into me, going straight for my weakest point, the children, in this case Vanja. At first I didn’t realize what was happening, he was laughing and joking about her sensitivity and the problems she was going to have later in life with me and Linda being her parents. He was specific and very pointed about it, but I didn’t understand what was going on, not even after we’d hung up, apart from finding myself thinking that I didn’t want to talk to him anymore. A few minutes later he called back to apologize. He said he’d been offended and that he hadn’t meant what he said. I accepted his apology but still didn’t call him for a few days because what he said had been so cruel. He must have considered it and meant what he said in order to say it, I thought to myself, regardless of how irrational his behavior had been. But it all blew over, we stayed friends, and I’d learned something. The odd thing was that he’d said exactly that during the first few days after we met each other in Stockholm. If you offend me, you’ll never know about it, he said. He was proud and self-respecting, it might even have been his foremost characteristic. And true enough, I’d offended him without realizing, or rather I knew, but had no idea how. Then, toward the end of my first year in Stockholm, he simply left one day. Christina called a few days later to say he’d gone to Turkey. It was only half true, the fact was he’d gone on from there to Iraq, so I discovered by chance a few weeks after.

  Geir in Iraq?

  A human shield?

  Without a word to me?

  It didn’t stop me exploiting the fact to make myself interesting in social gatherings. The imminent invasion of Iraq was a matter everyone was talking about, and now I could say I actually knew someone who was in Baghdad at that very moment, and not only that, he was there to be a human shield.

  A little more than three months later, he called me. He was in Stockholm, did I want to meet up? He was buzzing with vigor when we met at a restaurant in Gamle Stan, beamingly happy, a completely different person from the disillusioned man who, sunk into despair, had left the city a few short months earlier. It felt like he’d been off in outer space and gained a completely different perspective on life as it was led on Earth; what had tormented him earlier, tormented him no more. From the war he had brought back endless amounts of data, raw material he would spend the next six years working from, and which now, as we stood here in the bathroom of a Malmö apartment this evening in August 2009, had become a finished documentary book. Not one day had he taken off from that work, as far as I knew. Every weekend, every holiday, he had worked. When I began writing my autobiographical novel, our lives had become almost parodically similar, everything was suddenly about what we were doing in our little rooms, practically cut off from the rest of the world apart from our families. I read what he wrote, he listened to me reading out loud what I wrote, but the relationship was not symmetrical, for whereas I had lived my life with the flock, reading the same books as everyone else, thinking the same thoughts, he had headed off on his own even at the age of twenty, and the knowledge he had thus acquired independently was what I drew on, to such an extent that what I was writing now would have been unthinkable without him. Even though it was an autobiographical novel I was writing. It was uncomfortable in that I had turned out to be so weak and amenable to influence, and the fact that I had been compelled to borrow from him in order to become stronger and better effectively undermined my sense of self even more. At the same time I didn’t feel inferior to him when we were together or spoke on the phone, if that had been the case we couldn’t ever have been friends. It was actually the exact reverse, it was the very fact that I didn’t need to adjust myself according to him, didn’t need to take into consideration what he might believe or think about what I said, that was the important thing. I felt ashamed with everyone I met, and by that I mean pretty much everyone, there was always something there that made me feel I wasn’t good enough, something I couldn’t live up to, or some mark I overstepped, if only in thought. The fact that I’d started to write about this, the way I actually saw myself, was madness, sheer madness, since it meant exposing myself to the only thing I was really afraid of: the disapproval of others. Without our regular phone calls I would never have managed, during them I built up a kind of defense, and my transgressions seemed almost to lose their force accordingly. So yes, his influence being as great as it was gave me freedom and independence, which were strangely and despairingly closely bound up with the opposite, constraint and dependence.

  But what is influence exactly? Parents showing the world to their child and explaining how it is ordered? An Iago whispering in Othello’s ear? And when does influence go from good to bad? Or, put differently, what is independence?

  The most shameful thing that can happen to a writer is to be caught plagiarizing the work of another writer. The second most shameful thing is for one’s work to imitate that of another writer. Being unoriginal is not shameful in quite the same way, but it is equally degrading – to call a novel unoriginal is one of the worst things a reviewer can say about it. That it is shameful for one’s work to imitate that of another writer, and not shameful, merely degrading, to write something that is deemed unoriginal, is a crucial distinction that speaks volumes of the importance we attach in our day and age to the cult of personality, how imperative it is that something may be traced back to a single, wholly independent individual, who in many respects is considered sacrosanct insofar as the distinctive characteristics he or she has developed are not permitted to occur anywhere else. The important thing is not what such a voice says, but that it says so in a way that is peculiar to itself.

  The reader, however, is unconstrained by such insistence on independence or individuality, on the contrary, literature’s entire system is based on the reader submitting to the work and vanishing within it. Admiration of, and submission to, the individual was by no means a dominant characteristic of our culture prior to the Romantic era and may be understood only as a result of a fundamental shift within the social world whereby the I took on a whole new aspect compared to just a few generations earlier. Yet the Romantic I, swelling above its banks, whose foremost feature is to be unique, is no unambiguous marker of this alteration of the I, for the very reason that it presupposed that every other I, which is to say the readers, or, as our own language would have it, the consumers, subordinated themselves and accepted their status as nonunique. The Romantic or political genius, Goethe or Napoleon, functioned in much the same way as kings always have, representing sovereign power, excess, pleasure and pomp, living their life on everyone’s behalf, and the cele
brities of our time are one extension of that. This is a mechanism of social security in that we are brought up to believe we are unique and genuinely assert our own selves whenever we utter or do something, whereas in actual fact we are as good as identical, and in order not to be crushed by that truth, which naturally would pulverize any conception of who we might be, we elevate to a superior level all those individuals who in some way stand out and excel, who go beyond what is normal, whether by running exceptionally fast, jumping exceptionally far, writing exceptionally well, singing exceptionally beautifully, or simply possessing exceptionally good looks.

  Should we wish to remove someone from such a pinnacle and return them to earth, the most effective regulatory mechanism is parody: he is not unique, someone else exists who talks like him, looks like him, behaves like him. And we laugh. Should we not only wish to remove someone from such heights, but furthermore destroy him or her, we need only to demonstrate that whatever he or she has done or said is a copy of something someone else has done or said. Identity is thus a kind of taboo because it is found all around us, though cannot obviously be named, since it refers to something else that is greater and more dangerous. In a number of primitive cultures shared identity was indeed taboo, as is shown by prohibitions on imitating another person’s gestures or voice, and through the ritual killing of twins. The frequent occurrence of the doppelgänger motif in literature during the second half of the nineteenth century, and the great horror that was attached to it, is an expression of the same thing, though almost with renewed intensity, as if the threat of the identical had come closer with the advent of the urban masses of the cities. In the century that followed this was the one great issue, the relationship between the one and the all, between authenticity and identity. It is impossible to comprehend World War I without this background, or indeed World War II, which was a direct repercussion of the first. The consequence of that enormous disaster was that the unique and the local were irretrievably lost. Or rather, they exist still, but are hidden from us and may no longer be invoked, existing no more as a value, a goal, or a utopia, which is to say as something superordinate, but only as something subordinate, in the life of the individual and in the form of a paradox: each individual I is unique and inalienable, though in exactly the same way as every other. We elevate some individuals among us but are unable to acknowledge the fact, and we are permeated by others, unknowing that this is so, or unwilling to recognize it. Yet it is in terms of influence that this becomes tangible and visible to us in its entirety, in the striking difference between acceptable influence, that which the culture deems desirable to reproduce, and unacceptable influence, that which cannot or must not be reproduced. The harmless form of influence concerns that which belongs to us all and which runs through the social and intellectual domains – if I read Foucault and am enthused by what I read to such an extent that I absorb it entirely and make it my own, beginning to think and write in the manner of Foucault, I have made no transgression, nor have I lost anything, for Foucault is of such status now that his thoughts belong to everyone, in the same way as Kant’s or Hegel’s, or for that matter Plato’s or Aristotle’s, comprising a kind of intellectual foundation, a place from which our thinking might issue, by now quite impersonal, albeit attached to certain names. Our entire world of ideas is made up of similar such places, this is what our culture is. We vanish within that culture, though without losing our identity in so doing, since our identity is formed by the culture, for instance through general conceptions of what comprises a subject, an atom, the air, or a home, expressed in every dimension of the language and the culture. The fundamental principle of that identity of which our we is comprised, and which is also the locus of what we call morality, is unoriginality, receptiveness to influence and subordination. Identity is synchronistic, which is to say complete at any given time, and yet changeable. Its borders are temporal; what was generally seen to be true two generations ago – for instance that it is acceptable to punish a child physically or that homosexuality is shameful – is no longer so, and if we were to put those assumptions forward today we would either be ignored or condemned. What applies in the area of morality applies also to science; the structuralist model of understanding that was ubiquitous in the arts during the sixties, for instance, is now invalid and no longer applicable. This we-identity is nonindividual, which reveals itself not least in the fact that the same people who in the sixties believed it was acceptable to punish a child physically, or who found homosexuality shameful, or considered the structuralist model of analysis to be an adequate tool by which to understand the various expressions of culture, no longer hold the same views, or, if they do, no longer make them public. The fact that we nevertheless think all our opinions and beliefs to be personal and individual, reached by way of our own mature consideration, completely ignoring the role played by time, is one of the most important social mechanisms of all, since without it the apparent relativity of morality and science would dissolve all imperative and we would be destroyed in a chaos of independence. This is why we cultivate independent expression in art, that which is unique and particular, and only there do we apply such a powerful mechanism of sanction as the concept of plagiarism, whereby we are able to sustain the idea of our individuality. If this had not been the case, there would have been no difference in meaning between socialization and plagiarism. All learning takes place through imitation; as children we imitate the language and behavior of our parents, as we grow up we imitate the language and behavior of our friends and teachers, and once we reach adulthood we imitate the language and behavior of those around us at that time. Nearly every instance of language uttered in the public sphere is nonindependent and unoriginal, which is to say devoid of any personal mark of the sender. The most widespread form of public language is journalism, which stands out by its very anonymity, and it is impossible to trace back the language used in any newspaper article to the individual journalist who wrote it, all is written in the same way, in the same style, and moreover they write about the same events and source information from each other without the notion of plagiarism ever occurring to anyone. They imitate each other, one article is copied from another, and this is so because it is we who are writing. The same is true of manuals and instructions for use, and dissertations, and textbooks. Only in fiction is there any expectation of a unique “I,” whose greatest and most important constraint is not to imitate, not to copy anyone else or say what they’ve said, at least not in the same way. The more distinctive a writer is, the greater he or she is perceived to be. Many people seem to think that literature has to do with the creation of knowledge, or the generation of insight, but such things are merely a by-product, something that may accompany literature or not; the most important aspect is its individuality, which lies in the inimitable tone of the particular. But this individuality is not without limit, it can occur only within the boundaries of the we; when it transgresses those boundaries, stepping outside and expressing something utterly unreasonable, it will be condemned or ignored. A writer who for instance advocates the physical punishment of children or who condemns homosexuality in our day, fifty years after these were generally accepted viewpoints, needs to be extraordinarily inventive if he or she is to be accepted, which is to say forgiven, whereas a writer who for instance denies the extermination of the Jews in the Holocaust would never be accepted or considered to be great, regardless of how exceptional a level of literature he or she might otherwise achieve. These two premises of literature, that on the one hand it should be as individual as possible, meaning it should express the inimitability of the singular I, and on the other hand that it should exist within the boundaries of the general, meaning it should express the we, are at odds with each other, since the more unique I am, the further I am from the we. The fact that Knut Hamsun could pen Adolf Hitler’s obituary and include in it the most outrageous sentence in all of Norwegian literature, we bow our heads, and the fact that Peter Handke, perhaps one of the world’s three be
st living authors, if not the best, could speak at the funeral of Slobodan Milošević, thereby disqualifying himself completely from anything that might be called the cultural majority, are two obvious expressions of the inherent opposition between the unique I and the social we, otherwise known as morality, that literature embraces. Only a writer could have penned the Law of Jante. The fact that the Law of Jante found such widespread resonance is ironic, since what Sandemose’s rules express is the very tyranny of the majority, but it is no more ironic than readers cultivating the value of the individual while collectively submitting to one. But precisely by being so closely joined to a particular individual, the voice of the best literature concerns not only the collective, as an example of an I-possibility all I’s consume, but also in fact the one, which is to say the actual person in that actual place and in that actual time, and that identity in itself bears with it an insight not found anywhere else. For this reason, literature is inalienable. Because regardless of how consumed we are by each other, regardless of how collectivist our I’s happen to be, they are in fact alone, experiencing everything alone, and that experience, that of being human, of existing in the world, cannot be expressed generally, within the horizon of the we, since in that case no we exists. A newspaper article or a TV report is always about one or more people in some other place, an experience none of us knows. A novel or a poem is also always about one or more people in some other place, but is presented in a language that renders its experience unique, and that unique experience intervenes in a completely different way in our unique existence. It is not about recognition or validation, but about truth.

  But what is the truth of our social existence? Writing about socialization and plagiarism is one thing, quite another is to witness someone mimic you in a parody, imitating your voice, your gestures, your pose and bearing, the sheer unpleasantness of that, or to sit writing in the knowledge, deep down, that what you are writing is not something you have thought of yourself, not something you have drawn from your own chest, but something you have taken from someone else, and not just anyone else, someone belonging to the great we, but someone close to you, someone you need to be able to look in the eye. The full force of the social world resides in this. Not in the superordinate structures, the great community, the we that is all of us, for these are abstractions, but in the direct encounter, one person face-to-face with another. The force is in our gaze. This is the truth of our social existence. The social world is local, it belongs to the individual, in any given situation. Indeed, every gaze is unique, it belongs to the individual, and for this, and nothing else, we are responsible. This is the truth of our social existence, and therefore it is also the truth of our morality. A morality that proceeds from the community of an all, that proceeds from we, is dangerous, perhaps more dangerous than anything else, because committing to an all is to commit to an abstraction, something existing in the language or world of ideas, but not in reality, where people exist only as separate individuals. In this sense, Knut Hamsun and Peter Handke’s morality is utterly superior to that of their critics.