My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

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  All these currents through the centuries, and everything they brought with them, which can be seen as the dissolution of the local, were for the good. But with it all, in the midst of the human domain, came a shadow, something not for the good. Societal structures change, urban centers balloon, the young pack their belongings and leave for the city to seek their fortunes, and this goes on everywhere. One by one they have made the decision, but together they form a mass, each becomes another face in the flow, on their way to and from the factories, where they perform tasks that can be performed by anyone, or to and from their rooms, which are as good as identical. Smoke pours from the factory chimneys and settles in clouds upon the cities and towns, the streets are full of people, many are poor, and in the districts they inhabit, which are occasionally slum-like, hunger ensues, and the deepest hardship. Hunger is nothing new, nor the sense of powerlessness in its presence, but in previous times it was something inflicted from the outside, in the shape of floods, droughts, or cold, whose forces were ascribed to fate or to the heavenly powers, and as such were a part of man’s given circumstance. This new circumstance, this new hardship, comes from people themselves, and thereby fate and the heavenly powers are drawn into the human domain, which in a way has taken on their responsibility: illness need not be fatal, it may be cured by human intervention, epidemics can be prevented, famine need not decimate a population, there being more efficient ways now to cultivate the land, making it possible to increase food production to the extent that there is now a safety margin, reinforced by a hugely improved infrastructure that means humans are no longer as dependent on local conditions. Poverty is no longer down to the heavenly powers, but to the people. This culpability cannot be isolated, cannot be attributed to this or that person or a particular group of persons, nor may it be localized to any particular place, for the consequence not only runs over from the actions of the one into those of the all, it also runs over from the local into the global, the invention of the spinning wheel being one example, basically a local occurrence, an idea conceived by a small number of individuals somewhere in England, quite innocuous on its own but with shattering consequence for all corners of society, its ramifications felt throughout the Western world, where the same thing occurs, the population explodes, the cities swell, work becomes mechanized, the market turns global – all these processes apparently unstoppable, unmanageable, incalculable, happening seemingly on their own. The blame for poverty, need, sickness belonged to no one, it was contained in the system, and if its consequences were to be prevented or modified, the system itself had to be identified and changed.

  This was what Marx and Engels did: they identified the system, anchored it in history, and oriented it toward a utopian future. But a system is not human, it has no face, and “all” is by no means an unproblematic quantity, not even when divided into classes. There is no doubt that poverty and need were structurally determined, the work of a large societal group benefiting a small societal group, because if “all” is primary, “all” in the sense of a class of people living under the same circumstances and conditions, which is to say defined on the basis of what is common to them, their sameness, if it is the good of this “all” that matters, their common conditions that must be improved and changed, measured statistically in terms of average life expectancy, average child mortality, average income, average working hours, average living area, average food consumption, which are the parameters employed in Das Kapital to show and account for the inhuman conditions under which the working class lived, if the circumstances of the one are of secondary importance, then it is the good of the community that counts, the individual workers construed as a class or sum, and all atrocities that later took place in the name of communism, whether under Lenin, Stalin, or Mao, are a consequence, however unpredictably brutal, of that thought. The collectivization of agriculture was meant to benefit everyone, any hardship suffered by the individual in that context was of secondary importance. The same is true of the relocation of intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution.

  How can the idea of a society in which everyone is equal and enjoys the same rights lead to the Gulag? Was the indignation Jack London felt on seeing the extreme poverty of the London slums misguided? Are we not to feel solidarity with others and try to help them in their need?

  When hardship rises above a certain level it becomes unmanageable for the individual: even if London or Marx had spent their entire time working for the improvement of the slums and had donated their last pennies to the cause, their efforts would have been little more than a drop in the ocean. The poverty, violence, and need they saw were structural and could only be tackled and managed structurally. The premise of Marxism was that society’s enormous problems, with large numbers of the population living in deplorable conditions, had to do with the distribution of social assets; as such the solutions it proposed were materialistic in nature. The issue consisted not of the forms of mass production, but of who controlled the means of production, which was not only determinative of inequality in terms of economic opportunity and huge differences in living standards, but also the alienation of the individual, which was a function of the extent to which the individual could dispose of his or her own labor. The idea was that a radical upheaval in the conditions of production would precipitate an equally radical upheaval of social conditions, evening out all economic inequalities and ensuring equal distribution of privilege, making each individual equal. However, if the main problem of industrialism was not the distribution of material wealth but was instead concerned with the reduction of the human, in a staggering process of shrinkage toward the material that all but appropriated the life of the individual, Marxism’s solution was not utopian at all, but a continuation of the nightmare by other means.

  Marxism was also a matter of identity in which the association of the I with the we lay not in the local dimension, following geographical boundaries, but in the new working class, which by the middle of the nineteenth century had spread throughout the Western countries, and the aim was for the revolution, the process of overturning the “they” and incorporating them into the “we,” to span the world. The communist I located itself between the international we of the workers and the national they of the bourgeoisie, for while the wealth of the ruling classes knew no bounds, the self was certainly more constrained – it is by no means coincidental that the swelling I of the Romantic age, the genius and unrivaled human, emerges at the start of the nineteenth century, at the very outset of industrialism: people are becoming increasingly numerous and more alike, the unique and the local are diminishing, the concept of the mass human appears, and as if to counter this threat to the individual the grand I steps forth. The Gothic horror fiction of the same period concerns this very theme.

  E. T. A. Hoffmann, who sensed more clearly than most the depths of the collective nightmare, wrote about automata so human in their appearance one could fall in love with them, and moreover about doppelgängers; Bram Stoker wrote about a person unable to die; Mary Shelley wrote about a scientist who created a human. The gripping fear of sameness encroaching upon the unique is the same fear of the inhuman encroaching upon the human, of nonlife encroaching upon life. Boundaries create distinctions, distinctions create meaning, and it is for this reason man’s primeval fear is of the undifferentiated: in the domain of the undifferentiated everything is erased. To consider the unprecedented emphasis placed by the Romantics on the singular I, to which concept its construction of the genius belongs, as a way of compensating for the absence of God from the world, as well as of facing the increasing pressure of a growing sense of undifferentiation, is perhaps speculative, though not without justification; the work of Stoker, Shelley, and Hoffmann, expressions of their age, are about the boundary between the human and the nonhuman, and consider the distinction to be under threat. These two great shifts of identity in the nineteenth century, toward the unique in the one instance and the undistinguished all in the other, were mutu
ally exclusive, an impossible equation. Not the I and the we in themselves, but the perspectives on the human each entailed. The construal of man in terms of the mass, with its accentuation of sameness, arises out of the external and is conveyed by the external’s language, which is the language of mathematics and the natural sciences, whereas the construal of man as unique and grand arises out of the internal I and its language. The signficance of the national is part of the same identity complex, where the concepts of nation and people not only constrain and make manageable the we, but also aggrandize that we in their turning toward history, which is consistently heroic. As such it is a direct reply of sorts to the dissolution of the structures of the local, the heroic occurred here rather than there, within a people from whom we descend, so belonging to us, as opposed to something that occurred there, among them.

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  The grand I of the Romantic age reinforces the name. The mass human of industrialism reinforces the number. The opposition has always existed; the line of motion from teeming, crawling life to the two named humans is all about this: differentiation, distinction, the accordance of meaning. The function of the sacrifice is of a different quality, not undermining the collective, not turned toward the individual, as in the case of the name, but establishing difference within and according meaning to the collective as a whole. But the function of the sacrifice changes too. The primitive nature of Abel’s offering and Cain’s fratricide, expressing in a single image the violence that issues from sameness, becomes cultivated and complex in the story of Abraham’s offering of his son, there no longer being anything absolute about either the sacrifice or the God to whom it is offered, since God rejects the offering, and what’s a rejected sacrifice worth? There are many signs that primitive cultures initially sacrificed humans, but later substituted animals, though not just any animal, they were always domesticated and thereby proximate to man’s daily life. The story of Abraham seems almost to express that very transition. But there is more to it than that. There is no explicit involvement of the collective here, only Abraham, his son, and their God. God, the almighty creator of the universe, its very gestalt, who in demanding human sacrifice has demanded the inhuman, and Abraham, willing to sacrifice his son, thereby placing something else, God’s name and honor, higher than death, and in that way overcoming death by not allowing it to be the ultimate end. Something in life is greater than death, therefore life may be sacrificed. Had he killed his son, he would have done so out of love – for God, but also for his son. When God rescinds the command and Abraham aborts this sacrifice of his dearest to the highest, his son thereby living on, another love arises, that between father and son, not concentrated in any pillar of fire, the very flash point of life and death, but spread out over endless days, so much time that it is continually being erased, and so near as to hardly be noticed, for in his son a father sees himself, and in his father a son sees himself, what belongs to one and what to the other is not always easy to say, and he who was below will one day be above, and he who was above will one day be below.

  The story of Abraham’s sacrifice of his son is one of the strangest in the Bible, not only because it is so unfathomable, for all mythological narratives are unfathomable, but because it departs from the absolute, generally a fundamental of mythic and religious narratives, a departure that is not merely peripheral to the story but which manifests itself at its very center. God is an absolute being, the sacrifice an absolute action. But here the sacrifice is not an absolute action, it is rescinded. God’s command to Abraham is a test, and the locus of significance is displaced, shifted from the sacrifice itself to the willingness to sacrifice, which is to say from the connection between the human and the divine to the human. Sacrifice is never merely a loss, for something is always gained by sacrifrice, so what did Abraham lose when the command was rescinded? What he lost was the absolute, and triumph over death. In other words, he lost the uttermost meaning of life. What then did he gain? What he gained was the innermost meaning of life, his son’s life, properly inalienable, but this in a world where “properly” conceals itself in the open and is not given like the offering, but instead must be taken. It is a conquest too, of human worth, as the Old Testament is a narrative on the same subject. That the relationship between the divine and the human is so ambivalent, the worldly weight of the mortal earth, pulling the divine toward the terrestrial amid the whirling sand and dust of the antiabsolute, which may also be seen as the opposite, the endeavor of the trivial toward the hallowed, forever halted in midflight, rescinded, half workday, half festival, half man, half god, petty at one moment, almighty the next, is what makes Judaism a religion of doubt, hesitancy, and postponement – and of ambivalence, for the forces of the opposite are always present too, in the symmetry of this clearest image of revenge: eye, eye, tooth, tooth.

  If, with Girard, one considers the narrative of the life and teachings of Christ to be the consummation of the long story that is the Old Testament, it is in this respect particularly that the line of progression comes to an end, for what the New Testament means above all is the discontinuance of the notion of vengeance, the end of uncontrollable violence. Turn the other cheek, says Jesus, and this is the symmetry of the good, the one no more faced against the other, but turned toward his neighbor, which is to say that the other is no longer construed as a threat or danger, but as a part of the self.

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  The New Testament scene that measures up to the story of Cain and Abel, or that of Abraham and Isaac, is when Jesus stands up to the crowd as they are about to stone a woman accused of adultery. For Girard this scene is the conclusive curbing of the forces of mimetic violence. Jesus finds himself in the scapegoat’s position, the one surrounded by the all, but instead of being destroyed by them he turns to face them, dispersing the crowd by means of a single utterance. Stoning is the manifestation of retribution and based on duplication, both ritual insofar as stoning is employed in all such cases of transgression, and individual insofar as everyone takes an active part. What Jesus says to them is simple: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” By that utterance he redirects responsibility for the act of violence to each and every one of them as individuals, and the collective dissolves. There is no all, only the one, responsible for his or her own actions.

  But the good, and solicitude for one’s neighbor and the dissolution of violence in forgiveness is indeed good, is not an expression of civilization, but of something radically different. The good does not solve the problem of violence, it is not instrumental in the way civilization’s laws and institutions are instrumental, but the very opposite, a socially solvent force. The antithesis of violence is not the good, but the social. That equation does not work out, for violence exists within the social, embedded in the differences inherent to the domain, but it is the best we can do, and the violence on whose basis Girard construes his notions of taboo and ritual, the violence within, which tears the community apart from the inside, is something we control, the systems we have established deal with it, and it no longer poses any real threat to us. The control of such violence was made possible by transferring responsibility to the individual, in turn leading to the disintegration of our knowledge of the collective, for this was no longer neeeded, but with the huge population swell that occurred toward the end of the nineteenth century, flooding at the tidelines of the new structures of industrialism, came its violence, unprecedented in scope within that system – at no point in our world history have so many been systematically oppressed as at the close of the nineteenth century – utterly out of control, yet deriving from a single point, in itself insignificant and innocuous, the assassination of an archduke by a lone fanatic, sparking first regionally, a crisis in Austria-Hungary, then nationally, then internationally, and in the space of weeks the whole of Europe was at war, a war no one wanted and no one needed, profoundly destructive at every conceivable level, with no one able to prevent it, its avoidance beyond the scope of any single
individual, and the violence it brought with it escalated out of all control. People who otherwise cooperated and collaborated, whose interests and goals were shared, destroyed each other with such attention to detail, such savagery and in such numbers as to eclipse all previous wars – and at last, when it was all over, it had taken eight million people with it. It was a storm of destruction impossible to command, as if it were taking place outside the domain of the human, and yet it was not, these were the very forces of human nature manifesting themselves, the same forces of which ancient cultures had been so fearful, for if they found form they would reproduce themselves and spread, and threaten to destroy everyone and everything entirely. This was the violence within, violence among like kind, but on a whole new scale and with new, serially manufactured weapons that redefined death in its image: serially manufactured, industrial.

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  The Hitler we know was created by World War I. Nothing he became or did afterward can be explained without reference to that background. The war became a home to him; he did not apply for leave until he had lived in the trenches for two years, not because he was ineligible but because he didn’t want to.

  When Germany capitulated in November 1918 he was receiving treatment at a military hospital in Pomerania. He was shattered by the news. He wanted to fight until the last, anything else would destroy the foundation of everything he believed in. When the peace came, without defeat in battle, he saw it only as an act of faithless villainy. This is how he describes it in Mein Kampf: