My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  The Name and the Number

  Some months ago I received an anonymous threatening letter in the mail, it was written to my brother, so what I got was a copy, though my brother wasn’t mentioned by his actual name but by our mother’s maiden name. Yngve Hatløy, it said. The sender no longer considered him worthy of the name Knausgaard and had given him another name instead. I myself had been deprived of a name entirely, being mentioned throughout by my profession only, albeit sarcastically. “The storyteller,” that was me.

  The writer of this letter stated the following:

  How bitter the thought that an abortion in 1964 could have given so many people a simpler life in 2010. We would have been spared the Hatløys. And your father would have been alive today.

  Yngve was born in 1964. The contention that everything would have been better if Yngve had been aborted then, and that Dad would have still been alive if that had happened, was not only conveyed to Yngve. The writer also wrote to Yngve’s daughter, a child. The book I have written is the reason we are no longer worthy of the Knausgaard name. I am not, my brother is not, our children are not.

  Great is the power of the name.

  The strange thing is that names have always been an issue in our family. When my father was young he experimented with different spellings of his name, writing his first name with an i or a y, an å or an aa. I’ve seen this in books and papers he left behind. Later, he took another surname and was known by it for the last ten years of his life. My mother took my father’s surname when she married but subsequently reverted to her maiden name. So when I was eighteen both my mother and my father had different surnames to the one my brother and I shared.

  * * *

  When I began writing this novel I did so with the intention of writing about Dad, and since the nature of fiction is to make what applies to one person apply to all, in the sense that a certain dad becomes “Dad,” a certain brother becomes “brother,” and a certain mom “Mom,” I used his own name. At first his original family name, then his assumed family name. After a time I sent the manuscript to those concerned. My father’s family, represented by my father’s brother, threatened to take me to court and stop the novel coming out if the names weren’t changed. I did as they wanted, changing the names of my uncle, his family, and everyone else on my father’s side. But I couldn’t change the name of my father. If I called him, say, “Georg Martinsen,” then it would no longer be my father I was writing about, the way he was to me, a body of flesh and blood that was also my own flesh and blood, because the name is the only element of reality that can exist unchanged in the novel, everything else is a reference to something, a house or a tree, not in themselves a house or a tree; only the proper name can be the same in the novel as in reality. I could change the names of everyone else, but not his. It was also because I was writing about myself and my own identity: who would I become if my father was someone called Georg Martinsen? What effect would that have on my own name and identity? So I refused. On the day of the publishing house’s annual press conference I had met with the publishing director, Geir Berdahl; he had written a letter to my uncle and itemized all the changes we had made in the novel on his insistence. The final point stated that my father’s name would not be used. The evening before, the culture editor at the Bergens Tidende had called Berdahl, apparently they knew each other from some earlier time, he had got wind of the issue and my uncle threatening to take the matter to court. I had been incautious and mentioned it in an e-mail to a person I knew well who was employed by that newspaper, who had then passed it on. This was the situation when Berdahl read his letter to me. Until then I had refused to give up my father’s name. But at that point I felt I could stand firm no longer; on the other side of the door of the office in which we sat, the room was filling up with journalists, and I was so scared of the consequences of what I had written that it seemed to me the only possibility I had was to say OK, you can send the letter, I’ll change my father’s name.

  But I could not change it. I could not call him by any other name. So I solved the problem by not using his name at all. Neither his first name nor his surname appears in the novel. In the novel he is a man without a name.

  * * *

  When I see the names of those I grew up with, they bring back to life not only the entire landscape there, and all the days and evenings we spent running around in it, filled with autumn’s heavy darkness or spring’s gossamer light, but also the individuals they were. Geir Prestbakmo, Karl Martin Fredriksen, Dag Lothar Kanestrøm, Marianne Christensen, and, later, Per Sigurd Løyning, Arne Jørgen Strandli, Jan Vidar Josephsen, Hanne Arntsen. In each case the names represent them and the time in which I knew them, and is a kind of capsule in the mind in which all sorts of things, important and unimportant, are stored. But that is what their names are to me. To those people themselves the same names are perhaps something else entirely. Whenever they speak or write their names they are referring to themselves. This “self” is something apart from what everyone else sees when they present themselves, it is the inside of the seen, full of thoughts and emotions to which no one else has access, the inner life as it unfolds from birth until death.

  A name is intimately connected with this secret and particular self; so entwined are the name and the individual’s sense of identity, in fact, that one thinks of the name as belonging to the self, even if it was not given with that purpose in mind, there being no need for a person to refer to themselves by name in order to know who they are, but in order to represent what they are to others. Instead of saying “that little crybaby with the buck teeth” they said “Karl Ove.” And since the proper name points both inward and outward at the same time, it is an exceptionally sensitive thing. There is a remnant of magical thought in the fact that the word is what it refers to, or may awaken it. I am my name, my name is me. If anyone abuses it, they abuse me. The most basic form of teasing among children is for the teasers to twist the name of their victim, knowing full well that doing so strikes at the very core of who they are. One of the biggest social blunders a person can commit is to admit to not knowing the name of the person they are talking to, for although one might be perfectly aware of who they are, and recognize their face, their dialect, their gestures and expressions, and can recall any number of situations one might have experienced together, it doesn’t help; if you can’t remember the name, you can’t remember her, since without a name she is no one.

  The vast majority of the people we see are nameless, all those sitting behind us on the bus or the subway train, those who pass us on the street or stand in line in front of us at the supermarket checkout. We know each has a name, because everyone has, we just don’t know what it is. In the event that one of them becomes our friend, he or she is then moved from the nameless masses into the sphere of the named, by whom we are all most closely surrounded. Yet there is another sphere outside that one, comprising names known by everybody: the famous. We say of any member of this group that he or she is a name. Such a name cannot merely be taken, but is something bestowed, which can only happen by virtue of a person becoming particularly prominent in some way. Anyone who runs, cycles, or skis fast enough may thus be bestowed with a name, anyone who sings beautifully enough, or who is sufficiently good at playing the guitar, anyone excelling in their field, the history of ideas, for instance, and anyone graduating to any important position in society. Such a name does not primarily represent the person themselves, but rather their achievements or role. Yet as soon as a person’s name has become public because of some achievement, curiosity is at once aroused as to what else that name represents: the private self. It is a characteristic of our time that public selves have increasingly come forward to present to us their private selves, which thereby have become public too. This is not to say that we are witness to a degeneration of the public sphere, as is often suggested, but rather to a wholly necessary regulatory mechanism in any media society.

  Apart from material necessities, the most import
ant need of any human being is to be seen. Anyone who is not seen is no one. The worst punishment in old Nordic culture was to be proclaimed fredløs, which is to say cast out from society, forbidden to associate with others. If such an outcast ever showed themselves in public they would be shunned, perhaps even killed; the outcast was a nobody, and it meant nothing whether they lived or died; but why kill a person as long as they could merely be shunned? We strive to be seen. Yet to be seen can involve a number of things; in a peasant society, being seen would be something else entirely compared to a media society. Whoever is seen in a media society is seen by all. And when being seen means being seen by all, it gives rise to an impossible craving, since being seen by all is the preserve of the few. When the few display not only what makes them prominent and which is unreachable for the vast majority of us, in other words their public personalities, but also their private personalities, which are not unreachable but by contrast are an embodiment of the ordinary, the sphere in which all of us live, the public personality is then no longer unreachable, no longer merely an object of admiration and desire, but a person with whom we can identify, and the gap between ordinary private life, in which the name denotes the individual and nothing else, and public life, dissolves almost completely: essentially, they are just like us. We see ourselves in them, and this is another way of being seen. In this there is security, for while the desire to be seen is great in all of us, it is countered by an equal force pulling in the opposite direction, which is the desire to be like everyone else. To be like everyone else is to be one among the crowd, and to be one among the crowd is to be safe. As humans have experienced throughout their existence, in any flock facing danger the important thing is not to be seen, not to attract attention. To be seen is vital, but not to be seen is vital, too. Nothing feels more perilous to us than to be exposed to the attention and gaze of others. By opening up the private side of their name, the ordinariness shared by us all, a person becomes both a part of the community and one of the select few seen by all.

  The notion that to be seen is to be seen by many, in the media, as a name with a particular aura, has become so prevalent that almost everyone I know has begun to treat their name as something that not only denotes who they are, replete with meaning beyond their control, but also as an advertisement of their own idea of who they are, setting up profiles on Facebook and furnishing their name with a certain air by inserting it in certain contexts, not unlike the way in which a brand is built up or a pop star constructed. To be surrounded by media doesn’t just mean that we look at images of other people in other places and in that way keep ourselves abreast of what is going on in the world, it also has an effect on the way we see ourselves and seeps imperceptibly into our identities, which gradually recalibrate toward the expectation of an observing “everyone” or “all,” eclipsing the particular gaze in the particular situation, where everything is tangible, with all the consequences that implies with respect to the image we hold of ourselves.

  While the expectation of being seen by some specific other – the neighbors, for instance, or what Tor Jonsson called “the village beast” – may be shut out physically by lowering the blinds, or dealt with by going away, the expectation of the abstract other, the all of society, is impossible to eliminate, since it lives inside us and is something to which we continually relate even in our innermost dwelling spaces, which we furnish to satisfy that expectation, the kitchen, formerly a place in which to prepare and eat food, now being done up at huge expense to look like a showroom despite hardly ever being seen by others. This inner all, whose flame is kept alive by the presence of TV screens in every room and which ensures that we are always seen and are somehow held under our own surveillance, means also that we begin to resemble each other more, it being the same god to which we submit and to whose requirements we adapt ourselves in a system of social control far subtler than that imagined by Orwell in his famous dystopia.

  * * *

  The name has always occupied a space between the concrete and the abstract, the individual and the social, but when it begins to be shaped and charged with meaning in places removed from the physical world, in that way entering the world of fiction, albeit unseen by the majority, at the same time as this fictional world is expanding and taking up an ever greater part of our lives – the TV screens are now not only in our own rooms, but also on the walls of our trains and under the luggage bins of our planes, in the waiting rooms of our doctors’ offices and the halls of our banks, even in the supermarkets, quite apart from our carrying them around in the form of laptop computers and cell phones, in such a way that we inhabit two realities, one abstract and image-based, in which all kinds of people and places present themselves before us with nothing in common but being somewhere other than where we are, and one concrete, physical, which is the one we move around in and are more palpably a part of – when we arrive at a point where everything is either fiction or seen as fiction, the job of the novelist can no longer be to write more fictions. That was the feeling I had: the world was vanishing because it was always somewhere else, and my life was vanishing because it too was always somewhere else. If I was to write a novel it would have to be about the real world the way it was, seen from the point of view of someone who was trapped inside it with his body, though not with his mind, which was trapped in something else, the powerful urge to rise out of such fusty triviality into the clear, piercing air of something immeasurably greater. Ascent was art, fiction, abstraction, ideology; confinement was in the world of things and bodies, the material soon-to-be-rotting universe all of us comprise. That was the idea, or the urge: reality. And the sign of such reality, its only transferrable component, was the name. Not as dream or image, but as the sign of the individual human. I was of course aware that the novel, being composed of signs, could not be reality itself, but merely invoke reality, and that the reality it invoked would be just as abstract as the one from which I was trying to escape; and at the same time I knew too that what the novel can do, and which perhaps is its most important property, is to penetrate our veils of habit and familiarity simply by describing things in a slightly different way, for example by being insistent with respect to some particular state of affairs, let’s say describing a child’s pacifier over a whole page, whereby the real child’s pacifier would subsequently present itself differently, in that its pacifying – that aspect of it that makes us see only its function and not its form, which is quite sensuous in its combination of soft, droplet-shaped rubber with the hard plastic of the grip, this blend of nipple imitation and toy, created to satisfy the cravings of the child, who likes both to suck and to chew, and to look at and grasp objects with bright and simple colors and rounded forms – would thereby be modified, or by juxtaposing things not normally juxtaposed, since it was not reality that had vanished, but my attention toward it. I could not relinquish my grip on it, this was my intuition, or my explanation of the fundamental lack of meaning I felt in my life, and it may well have been just another explanation, another theory, in itself abstract, but it did not feel that way, and if there’s something I’ve learned to trust over the course of the forty-two years I have lived, it is my feelings. In the novel I began to write, the authentic names were therefore the key. I was aware that a number of people could not be named, since they would not wish to be associated with the events I was going to describe, my uncle being one, and I had no problem at all giving up those names, although for a short time I resisted when one of them didn’t want to be in the book in any way at all, not even under another name, because at that point I had no idea how the novel was going to be received, viewing it simply as an experiment in realism that would reach only a very small number of interested readers and be hurled against the wall out of sheer boredom and frustration by anyone else who might venture into its pages. I was, however, totally against changing the names of those in the next most immediate sphere, those I played with as a child, for instance, or went to gymnas with. The whole point of the novel was t
o depict reality as it was. A growing-up shaped by the boy who lived here and did this, the girl who lived there and did that, the boy I heard about at that particular time, the girl I kissed that Friday night, not shrouded in literature’s pall, not ingeniously illuminated in prose’s darkened studio, but described in full daylight, swathed in reality. I wanted to get to what was raw and arbitrary about that reality, and to that end the name was essential. Obviously, reality would be altered into something else in the process of being depicted, but my hope was that what was fantastic about the phenomenon itself, the fact of existing alongside a certain collection of people where everyone knew each other or had heard of each other, in a certain period of time in a certain geographical area, and where basically anything at all could happen, but where things eventually turned out according to reality’s own exactness and precision, that some of this, the starry luster of growing up, familiar to us all, would shine through the literary form. Every name that went from being real to being fictional weakened that feeling and pulled the novel into the shimmer of enfeebled reality it had been written to engage against. Geir G. said it didn’t matter to the reader, he or she wasn’t going to connect the names with anyone anyway and wouldn’t know if it was authentic or not. But the authentic is a timbre, impossible to imitate.

  * * *

  In a novel the name works like a face: on the first encounter it’s new and unfamiliar, but spending even a short time in its presence you start associating certain characteristics with it, then gradually, if it remains near to you over time, a history, eventually an entire life, in that the faces with which you’re familiar absorb all that you know about them without you necessarily being aware of the fact; in the case of an old friend walking toward you, that knowledge is patent, melted into the face, each and every aspect that to you comprises “him” or “her.” In the best instances the name of a character in a novel is so precise as to summon something essential to the epoch, and in exceptional cases may even become an emblem of the universally human. The inauthentic life of Emma Bovary, the ruthless ambition of Lucien Sorel, the loss of meaning felt by Hamlet, the ideological unyieldingness of Brand. The Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann points out in an essay how the literature of our own time strikingly comprises no such names. Don DeLillo is one of the best novelists of our time, yet how many recall even a single name among his many characters? Bachmann writes that Thomas Mann was the last great conjurer of names: Hans Castorp, Adrian Leverkühn, Tonio Kröger, Serenus Zeitblom. These are names that sponge up characteristics and meanings that belong not merely to the individuals they denote, but also to the culture of which they are a part. Thomas Mann was the last great bourgeois novelist; together with Marcel Proust he marks the end point of an entire epoch, perhaps also, and certainly in the case of Proust, its consummation. In no other work of the bourgeois period does the name play so great a part as in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Here the name is no longer an instrument by which to achieve some particular effect, and no mere furnishing of the novel’s interior; rather it is a major theme, and thereby it loses its innocence. However, this loss of innocence occurred not only in Proust’s novel; while Proust was working on In Search of Lost Time, in Paris, Kafka was writing his novels and stories in Prague, and in them the name has changed radically; he called his main character Josef K, or more simply K. The abbreviation of the name removes everything that the name usually brings with it, the individual and the local, which thereby become plain in its absence. The individual and the local are what we can identify with, a name inspires first and foremost a form of intimacy, and when the intimacy of the name is gone, our intimacy with the character is gone too and the character is left surrounded by uncertainty and mystery: the name in Kafka is an antiname. At the same time, the character bearing the name leaves a very clear and definite impression, he is a “someone” rather than a “no one.” The reduction is by no means arbitrary, the particular things that vanish with the name, everything that binds the character to others and itself, and to places, represent his history. If history is gone, only the moment remains, and what is a human being in the moment? What is a character without its history? What is this something we sense, this impression of another human, when it is unattached to action or origin? The question is not entirely adequate in light of what goes on in Kafka’s prose; this we see if we compare it to that of another, slightly earlier author, Knut Hamsun, who in his first novel also writes about a person without history or home, who exists in an environment to which he is fundamentally unattached. Hamsun’s character is nameless, but this does not mean that he is an antiperson, merely that his name is not given. The difference between Hamsun’s unnamed and Kafka’s antinamed character is palpable and determines how the two novels are read. Hamsun’s urge toward individuality was great, occasionally immense, and what he opposed most of all in his first phase was literature’s reduction of the individual, the unique never being allowed to be simply unique, but always a sign of something general and universal, and that the two were connected by means of formulas and schemata. “A man who deals in horses, for example,” he wrote in his manifesto From the Unconscious Life of the Mind, “A man who deals in horses is nothing else but a horse dealer. He is a horse dealer in every word. He cannot read a folktale or speak of flowers or take an interest in cleanliness; no, he must always brag, always pat his wallet, curse like a barbarian, and smell of the stables.” Literature as Hamsun saw it was simple, schematic, structural, cohesive, harmonious, explained, whereas the life he saw around him was complex, unsystematic, incohesive, arbitrary, unharmonious, unexplained. How could the writer transport the language out of the system into life as it was lived? This was the question Hamsun posed in Lillesand in the autumn of 1890. It was a confrontation with realism or an attempt toward a new, truer realism, and what he did to that end was to remove all categories he found establishing particular connections and which in themselves steered the reader’s understanding of the character: so no childhood, no parents, no native soil, no friends, no environment, no history – and no name. He was striving for the unique, and sought therefore to move toward the now, the world prior to meaning, prior to interpretation, which is to say toward the forever as yet unexplained. If the name is the character’s face in the novel, then the character in Hamsun’s novel ought to be faceless, yet he is not; his “I” is so strong, so willful, and brings together so much in its being that it becomes like a name itself, with which the reader quickly becomes intimate, though without at any point becoming ensnared in the emblematism Hamsun so despised. He wanted the character not to be representative of time or epoch, but of itself, and if there was any semblance of representation in that it was of the unique human. Kafka’s design in removing origin, history, and environment from his character was almost the exact opposite; what he endeavored to demonstrate was not the individual’s uniqueness, its development and individuality, but the forces by which it was constrained and governed, not in terms of the near, the personal, and the intimate, but of the common and the general, in which they appear quite as faceless as his main character. The K is like a blindfold. Josef K, we say, and think not of a certain person’s character, the way we do when we say Othello or Odysseus, but of a certain state, dim and obscure, labyrinthine, unfathomable, faceless.