his struggle and his shame - on karl ove knausgaard

"The smiles, the friendliness, the admiration I encounter when I sign books is unbearable, not because it isn't well meant or honest, but because it is on false premises. Deep down, I have to reject it." 

Early in the final volume of My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgaard writes about his daughter Vanya going on a fun run.  He and another father run alongside their daughters and every time Vanya stops, her friend waits up.  But near the end of the run, the other little girl trips and falls, grazing her knee.

And instead of stopping to help, Vanja runs past, so that she can come in first.  “While she, the little girl who had stopped and waited for us along the way, sat bleeding on the ground!” writes Knausgaard.

           

The other father cannot believe it, and Karl Ove blushes with shame.  “They could understand a four-year-old not being able to show empathy with a friend her own age,” he writes.  “But the idea of a nearly forty-year-old man being equally incapable was naturally beyond their imagination.  I burned with shame as I laughed politely.”  

“On the way home I told Linda what had happened," he continues. "She laughed like she hadn’t laughed in months.  ‘We won, that’s the main thing!’ I said.”

This atrocious confession is only one of many such confessions in My Struggle.  But the tension between the audacity to write it, and the shame Knausgaard continues to feel even while confessing, somehow compels you to keep on reading. 

Volume 6, the longest and most ambitious of his books, is mostly about the fallout of having published Volumes 1 and 2. An uncle threatens a lawsuit. His wife Linda has a nervous breakdown. Having written in stark terms about their marriage in Volume 2, Knausgaard now goes on to inflict further damage in writing about her mental breakdown. And yes, he continues to be ashamed of himself. "To write these things you have to be free," he says, "and to be free you have to be inconsiderate to others.  It is an equation that doesn't work.  Truth equals freedom equals being inconsiderate ..."

I'm still trying to wrap my mind around this. Maybe it's habit - that feeling that I was getting to the heart of something which I experienced while reading his earlier books.  Maybe if I keep on reading I can get to the heart of truth and the nature of shame. Or maybe Knaugaard’s act of writing, and my act of reading, is the act of questioning shame.

Over lunch with a couple of friends last week, we talked about this. One friend felt that Knausgaard's appropriation of Hitler's title was too loaded.  She said he demanded too much of his readers.  Rachel Cusk, she reasoned, has also written autofiction but hers was a mere trilogy in three slender volumes.

Another friend made a different observation.  She hadn't found it an effort to read My Struggle. In fact, she found Rachel Cusk heavier going, and although she initially thought she had read only three of  Knausgaard's six volumes, later she realized she had actually read more.  Because the writing moved so briskly and she had been engrossed, she hadn't realized how much of it she'd read.

Over these last several days, after finishing 3600 pages, I'm asking myself what has been so fascinating about all the exhaustive detail.  He writes about his children, feeding and bathing them, taking them to daycare. He writes about meal preparation.  He writes about books.  But while he does this, he connects you to his inner life.  In between all the exhaustive detail, he dives so deeply into his innermost thoughts and his shame. 

But in the middle of Volume 6 he switches up the mood, devoting several hundred pages to an extraordinary analysis of Hitler's early life. He juxtaposes passages of  Mein Kampf with passages from Jack London, Karl Marx, Stefan Zweig and Sigmund Freud as well as the memoirs of Hitler's one and only friend Kubizek.

His thoughts on the gap between Hitler's inner and outer selves are fascinating. Evidently Hitler was unable to recognize his mediocrity as a painter; he was so proud, so stubborn that he found it impossible to hold himself up to serious scrutiny. It was typical of Hitler to blame his teachers for his own weaknesses. When, for instance, he decided he wanted to play the piano, he scorned the finger exercises.  This was about art not about practice!

"Self-insight," writes Knausgaard, "is the ability to apply the outer perspective to the inner, it is the presence in the ego of the voice or gaze of the indefinite other, and if that is prevented, then the two will be unconnected, there will be no accommodation within the ego, which then will be left to its own devises, and this abandonment means that interaction with, and understanding of, others essentially becomes an external phenomenon, occurring outside the I, without empathy, without involvement of the inner self, which is empathy's first and to all intents and purposes only condition."

This analysis makes me wonder about Knausgaard himself, and his own capacity for empathy.  He has stripped his psyche bare for all to see. There is no mannerism.  There is no mask. He even lets us see him  when he does put on the mask - as he prepares to give a reading and tries on outfits in front of the mirror.  But loyalty to his wife Linda and protection of her privacy is also sacrificed. He lacks the moral instinct to put her privacy ahead of his writing.  Naturally he's full of shame. We always feel ashamed when we act out of selfishness rather than empathy.  It's an old fashioned quality empathy, but Knausgaard is missing it.

"What is living?" he asks. "It is doing things and being at the center of the world.  If you are deprived of that, of acting, doing , being at the center of the world, a distance develops between you and the world, you observe it but you are not part of it, and this estrangement is the start of death.  Living is being greedy for days, no matter whether they are good or bad.  Dying is being weary of days, when they no longer matter or cannot matter because you are no longer inside them, but on the outside."

When I first read that I thought to myself YES.  But since then I've had several conversations with colleagues at the bookstore and with my son - about compassion.  The compassionate narrator has not made an appearance in most books that have been published of late.  If I think about it - only Lincoln In the Bardo stands out as compassionate.  And after all, compassion is what makes you feel warm towards your characters.  It makes you feel warm towards the world because it allows you to feel empathy.

Knausgaard's hunger for life and truth is compelling. I'm no longer sure it is admirable. I'm trying to decide.  My bullshit detector tells me that yes, I am in the hands of a reliable narrator with him.  I love his lack of artifice. I want to trust that lack of artifice.

As Werner Herzog has it, "The only distinction between me and you is that I can articulate [my dreams]. And that is what poetry or painting or literature or film making is about ... and it is my duty because this might be the inner chronicle of what we are."

I love those words - the inner chronicle of what we are.

 But I return to the story of Vanya on her fun run.  The lack of empathy disturbs me. Yeah - he's won. Is that really the main thing?