on the value of karl ove knausgaard
“Are you disappointed?” the tall Norwegian asks, his straight lips hidden as he speaks from behind a paper coffee cup.
This is Karl Ove Knausgaard, the acclaimed but polarizing author of, most notoriously, the six-volume, 3,600-page autobiographical opus My Struggle, the fifth installment of which has just appeared in English–and he is talking about his hair.
It is around 2 p.m. on an overcast April 21st in the Crystal Room of the Lafayette Hotel, and Mark Dellas and I have stolen the Norseman for an hour or so before the reading he’ll give at Kleinhan’s tonight, closing out the Just Buffalo BABEL series season. “Are you disappointed?” he asks, and those three words, the first to pass between us, carry the same quality that’s propelled his work, particularly My Struggle, to international acclaim–into the hands of one ninth of the adult population of Norway, into 22 languages, spring-boarded off the tongues of tastemakers like Lorin Stein and Zadie Smith, and now onto the stage at Kleinhan’s, where he’ll read before a broad cross-section of Buffalo’s literary community, many of whom, readers and writers alike, are giddy to meet him, climbing up the slow signing lines nervous as champagne bubbles to breach and pop in his presence.
I mean, in other words, that Karl Ove Knausgaard is famous. He is famous in a way not often achieved (or sought) by writers, whose book jacket photos slip from the minds of all but the most enamored readers; writers become their words, which efface their images. Our literary “celebrities” are the exceptions, and they are few: we have Jonathan Franzen’s glasses, so famous in their own right that they were stolen and held for ransom; we have Salman Rushdie’s angled eyebrows and aerodyne nose, giving the appearance of a plump and self-satisfied chickenhawk, the smirk immortalized by a fatwa; we have Hemingway’s bare chest and David Foster Wallace’s bandana. Recently added to the list is Knausgaard, famous for his prose, digressive and persistent and engrossing, but also for his look–the straight heavy brow that can lift suddenly, lightening an entire room; the sharp but edgy attire; those gray-blue eyes so sensitive but unsparing and that, any reader thinks, must see everything; and then of course his ever-present cigarette, and his long, steely, backswept hair. The hair, in fact, is what first drew Dellas to the man–the writing hooked him later–and he couldn’t help remarking on the shorter cut when we met. Knausgaard’s response was, like his writing, direct and aggressively vulnerable. But, like his writing, it opens up vast spaces for the reader–in this case the observer–to fill with symbols, innuendos, memories. Is he mocking his own celebrity? Is he mocking us? Is it a defense, is he preparing to talk about his books, something he knows that I know he hates? (“I don’t want to meet their eyes,” he says of an encounter with fans and journalists in Book Two, “I don’t want to see them, I want to escape from this hell, because I’m a prisoner there…there is no worse fate than being subjected to praise.”) Or is he prompting me into considering every possible meaning and inflection his unplumbable intelligence might intend, just as in his own books he considers every possible meaning and inflection the people he encounters might intend? Or am I trying to be like him, or like my idea of him, having lived in his writing for a week now?
I decide that he is just making conversation.
He doesn’t make very much of it, though, after the photo shoot begins. His discomfort is obvious, relatable, and thrilling to watch. His writing plunges into uncomfortable moments just like this–I think of his New York Times Magazine essay about traveling through North America, in which he finds himself totally unable to call down to a small-town hotel reception desk to inform the staff that he’s plugged the toilet, or of his burning shame in Book Two when he has to ask a boxer at a flat party to break down a bathroom door, behind which his own pregnant wife is trapped.
Knausgaard, in slim jeans and a blue button up that comes untucked when he takes off his brown leather jacket, rocks back and forth slightly on the balls of his feet; he is incredulous when Dellas asks if he would like to light a cigarette indoors, and then waves away his suggestion that we seek permission from the staff; he smokes with measured breath, careful to ash off the backdrop beneath his feet, and holds his coffee in a grip like a claw, one finger below the cup and one hooked over the rim.
“A lot of work, four children,” Dellas says, snapping away.
“No, it’s not,” Knausgaard says, despite the fact that he’s written literally hundreds of pages on the agony and embarrassment and boredom of parenthood, despite the fact that he knows I know this. It is as if one of those scuffed metal shutter doors that cover storefronts after hours in the seedier parts of any city has descended between him and the camera lens. At least, that might be what he hopes.
“All my adult life I have kept a distance from other people,” he says early in Book Two, “it has been my way of coping, because I become so incredibly close to others in my thoughts and feelings of course, they only have to look away dismissively for a storm to break inside of me.” But there are demands on artists like Knausgaard, and today, Dellas and I are those demands incarnate, smiling, and making small talk.
He is coping, then, and coping very well, later that night at the bar underneath Kleinhan’s, where a “VIP” line snakes to the stairs, filled with fans clutching copies of Books One through Five, their names spelled in block capitals on Post-It notes stuck to the covers. Knausgaard stands in a dark simple suit jacket, over a cocktail table covered in black cloth, the aging but agile fjords of his face shadowed dramatically by a dim recessed light in the ceiling. He’s not only more distant than before–he’s in control of the distance, and I see Knausgaard the Celebrity effacing Knausgaard the Writer, who had so mercilessly exposed Knausgaard the Man–who is, of course, nowhere in sight.
I approach the table with my books. To Aidan, with all my best! This followed by an indifferent swoop-and-dot symbol, a signature designed for speed and efficiency, unlike any of the letters in any of his names. There is nothing like recognition in his eyes. I am disappointed, my ego inflamed, and I wish I could not feel my heart so hollowly beating as I walk away from the table. We both had spoken so effusively, so unguardedly, earlier that day in the Lafayette lobby. But after I’ve tranquilized my pride I can see that the lighting, the mediating table, the whole statue act, is necessary.
Because in my mind I can see him still, in the lace-white light of the Crystal Room, lift his cigarette one time too many, up just past his belt, and look down to find it burnt to the filter. He is, for two thirds of a second, paralyzed; he does not know what to do with the useless butt, and he wants to take and light another for the same reason as everybody else who’s ever smoked–he wants something to do with his hands. But he will not, because he cannot. It would involve presumption, interaction, awkwardness, confusion, renegotiating the unspoken terms of this relationship, photographer to subject.
I watch from a suitable distance and see all this run through his head, as if he is reading it in the ash. When his eyes come up they meet mine, and we both risk the slightest of smiles.
Click.
“I kept journals when I was a teenager,” Knausgaard tells us during the question-and-answer period of the BABEL reading, “but I’ve burnt them.” The room is agitated with laughter, not only because most of us can see ourselves in the sentiment, but because it’s a strange statement coming from a writer whose career to date has been defined by the methodical and unsparing exploration of his past.
But this is only one jarring moment in what’s been a very strange night for fans of the author as well as for fans of the reading series. While BABEL speakers run from ironic or reserved to gregarious and spontaneous, none has been anything like Knausgaard, who takes the stage and proceeds after one ambiguous quip (“Thank you for the beautiful introduction,” he says to Barbara Cole, Just Buffalo’s Artistic Director. “I think it is much better than anything I have written.”) to read his latest essay from printed sheets, pacing the edge of the stage with more effort than ease, as if climbing toward some meaning he’s yet to discover, looking up only once or twice, and never at his audience. The essay–with a title, “On The Value Of Literature,” that’s as confoundingly broad and unexciting as anything in T.S. Eliot’s collected prose–spans observations on medieval emotional states, Freud’s impact on our self-image, and the possibility of Nazi-like “mass manipulation” of our country’s “almost entirely visual culture,” a line with an acute political resonance this election season that even he doesn’t recognize until after he’s spoken it. Again surprising because it’s more self-aware and manipulative than My Struggle (“perhaps you are now waiting for the turning point to come,” he says, as if directing his words back into the essay, without even a glance to acknowledge our laughter), the essay also manages to offer a few conflicting statements about his life as a writer and about the subject the title promises.
His understanding of the writer-reader relationship has to do with desire, approaching even Salvador Dalí’s descriptions in his only novel Hidden Faces of a sadomasochistic, a totalizing and cerebral love, one that eliminates impurities through annihilation of the lover and beloved. Knausgaard in his essay calls narrative “a voice to which we submit in such a way that we ourselves vanish.” Readers find this in his writing–whether in the compelling essayistic passages, like the meditation on death that opens Book One, or in the volume, the hyperrealistic granularity, the immediacy with which he presents his recollections. Really–one can’t read 3,600 pages, pages often enough evoking boredom, offense, discomfort, irritation–as in, to pick just one example, a 200 page stretch detailing the adolescent machinations involved in sneaking a plastic bag of beer into an ultimately underwhelming New Years Eve party–without “submitting,” even “vanishing.”
But then, irreconcilable with his last statement, he says that in reading, “Our emotions are awakened. Not to fulfill some external purpose, but so that they can be acknowledged.” This, too, is the experience of reading his works.Consider his open-heart retelling of his wife Linda’s pregnancy–of his restlessness and resentment in the lead-up, then his obsession, of the distance he felt when Linda “totally disappeared into herself” and into her pain and her purpose, and finally the calm after the birth, when “Around us everything was still, around us everything was dark, but we were there, the midwife, the trainee, Linda, and me, and the little baby, she was the light.” What father doesn’t see himself in some part of this? If you have mourned, lusted, been ashamed, or wished for more than the world can offer, you will see yourself in Knausgaard’s prose. Some of the most passionate readers are drawn to Knausgaard, as to other great writers, because they see themselves–because they feel “acknowledged.”
But the contradiction is left unresolved; literature does both these things. “What is a work of art if not the gaze of another person?” he asks in Book Two. “Not directed above us, nor beneath us, but at the same height as our own gaze. Art cannot be experienced collectively, nothing can, art is something you are alone with. You meet its gaze alone.” But the question is what happens in that moment of contact. Literature acknowledges the reader; literature annihilates the reader. Both statements are true, but even together they don’t capture the “value” of the form.
Form, it seems, is the value of the form. “Literature is as tentative as life itself, and meaningless and diverse,” Knausgaard recites from his essay. So the difference between life and literature must lie in form, the rigor to which the raw materials of life are subjected, and thereby made into art; and even though all possible “forms” will be imperfect and insufficient, it is through them that literature “every now and then…‘clusters’ into meaning which illuminates the community.”
The title of the work that will define Knausgaard’s career, My Struggle, does acknowledge its own reference to the infamous Mein Kampf by Book Six–“eleven hundred pages, and nothing is going on in it,” he says with a modesty natural but cultivated–which contains a (very) long meditation on Hitler. While the title may be intentionally and shamelessly provocative, that doesn’t make it any less honest, and apt. The books are filled with human struggles–Knausgaard’s struggle to write well, the struggle to be a present and attentive father, the struggle to bury his own father, the struggles of a lousy teenage punk band. The title is singular, though, not a name for the congeries of “struggles” it contains, but an announcement of the project’s very nature. As he discovers in Book Two, “what all writing was about was writing.” Therefore what all reading is about is reading. The significance lies in that these are gerunds, verbs frozen into nouns–Platonic ideas of actions–perpetual struggles. Reading and writing are struggles for life itself.
Even if we’ve not all felt this so intensely, readers resonate with Knausgaard’s words in Book Two: “Everyday life, with its duties and routines, was something I endured, not a thing I enjoyed, nor something that was meaningful or that made me happy…I longed to be away from it. So the life I led was not my own. I tried to make it mine, this was my struggle, because of course I wanted it, but I failed, the longing for something else undermined all my efforts.” This is a universally human condition, ambivalence between fleeing from the life that’s insufficient and penetrating it to find the surfeit that we can sense inside.
As Knausgaard’s “novelistic enterprise” demonstrates, what we remember changes from minute to minute, what we write is calcified with the final period’s placement, and what events have just now passed are irrevocably lost. Flux, fixity, and oblivion. Where is the real life we seek in any of this? The seeking itself is as close as we can come. It is in reading Knausgaard’s thousands of pages, or Tolstoy’s, or Anne Enright’s, or Frank Stanford’s, in this desirous ritual tango of recognition and obliteration, that we feel ourselves in motion, driving toward that thing we seek, not reaching it and knowing we are not reaching it, but like Achilles and the tortoise only dividing the distance infinitely, but achieving sometimes those luminous moments when we are at our least indifferent and our least complacent and at our most sensitive and awake and we are close, because we are in pursuit, which is the best we will ever know. We achieve this in the joyfully serious encounter with art; or we achieve it in making art, some of us. For these, not even encountering art, not even the Romantic sublime, not even the ennobling sacrifices and rewards of family life can ever be enough. As Knausgaard recalls in Book Two, “We went on long walks beneath the beautiful mountains, and everything was great, everything was as it should be, yet not good enough, I longed to be back where I had been, I ached for it, the maniacal, the lonely, the happy place.”
This is not really a “place,” but a state of motion; and not the fits and starts of undisciplined expression, but the sustained and concentrated motion of form, which approaches stillness-in-motion: the gerund. Lonely, perhaps, but connected through form to all that has ever been and all that will come into being.
Knausgaard says all this more beautifully from Kleinhan’s stage. The value of literature, he finally says, “consists in its endeavor toward the light, not in the light itself, and this is because we are not human beings, but endeavors to become human beings.” It is in this endeavor that the best writing can become, as he says, a gaze that meets the reader’s. Silently, it asks, “Are you disappointed?” We meet the gaze and risk a watery smile, answering, Thank you, yes.
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