Total Recall

Periodista:: James Wood
Publicada en:
Fecha de la publicación:: 13/08/2012
País de la publicación:

Walter Benjamin, in his great essay “The Storyteller,” written in the nineteen-thirties, argues that classic storytelling is structured around death. It is the fire at which listeners warm their hands. But these days, he suggests, that hearth is cold and empty. Benjamin notes that death has disappeared from contemporary life, safely shuffled away to the hospital, the morgue, the undertaker. Instead of the news of death, there is just news—the “information” that we get so easily in newspapers. “If the art of storytelling has become rare, the dissemination of information has had a decisive share in this state of affairs,” Benjamin writes. I sometimes think that the old leather couch Tolstoy kept in his study would be a good symbol of the mortal pulse that Benjamin was talking about. Tolstoy’s mother had given birth to him on this couch. She died when he was nearly two years old. Most of his thirteen children—five of whom died in childhood—were born on it, too. Was it not possible that one day he might lie on that same piece of furniture, and die there? It would be hard to write in such a study while oblivious of death as a life rhythm, of life as a death cycle.

A fair amount of contemporary prose seems to have been written by people who, like Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, refuse to accept that they will die; there is a puerile or evasive quality in many new novels (not to mention movies), especially in America, where infinite information promises to outlive us, and dazzle down the terminality of existence. Are there serious contemporary writers who remind us of our mortality? The forty-three-year-old Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard is certainly one. His long, intense, and vital book “My Struggle” (Archipelago; translated by Don Bartlett) is so powerfully alive to death that it sometimes seems a kind of huge, ramshackle annex to Benjamin’s brief thesis.

“My Struggle” is not really a novel but the first book of a six-volume autobiography that is now notorious in Knausgaard’s native country. The Hitlerian title (“Min Kamp,” in Norwegian) refers not only to the usual stations of the bildungsroman but also to two fierce battles. One is with the author’s father, a morose and distant schoolteacher who left the family when Knausgaard was a teen-ager, and then drank himself to death. The more pervasive struggle is with death itself, in which writing is both weapon and battlefield. Writing promises to rescue moments from the march of time, but serious writing also lays bare, examines, dramatizes—and, in this sense, seems to prolong—that death journey.

Early in “My Struggle” (which was published in Norwegian in 2009), Knausgaard introduces his immediate context: it is March, 2008, just after eight in the morning, and the Norwegian novelist sits at his desk in his Stockholm apartment, “listening to the Swedish band Dungen and thinking about what I have written.” This narrator (named Karl Ove Knausgaard and, apparently, indistinguishable from the real-life author) is in his late thirties, married with three children; he has just dropped two of them off at their nursery. He refers to a previous marriage, and to “that uncontrollable, unproductive, often degrading, and ultimately destructive space where I lived for so many years.” When he came to Stockholm from Norway, he spent, at first, a lot of time thinking about this troubled past, “which meant that I not only read Marcel Proust’s novel À la recherche du temps perdu but virtually imbibed it.” Now, however, that destructive time is hardly ever in his thoughts. He writes, “I believe the main reason for that is our children, since life with them in the here and now occupies all the space,” and goes on:

For, while previously I saw time as a stretch of terrain that had to be covered, with the future as a distant prospect, hopefully a bright one, and never boring at any rate, now it is interwoven with our life here and in a totally different way. Were I to portray this with a visual image it would have to be that of a boat in a lock: life is slowly and ineluctably raised by time seeping in from all sides. Apart from the details, everything is always the same. And with every passing day the desire grows for the moment when life will reach the top, for the moment when the sluice gates open and life finally moves on. At the same time I see that precisely this repetitiveness, this enclosedness, this unchangingness is necessary, it protects me. On the few occasions I have left it, all the old ills return.

So he cherishes the stability and the repetitive banality of his existence, but he chafes at these things, too, because “the ambition to write something exceptional one day,” an ambition that “has kept me going for the whole of my adult life,” is threatened by the busyness of his routine:

Inside, it is a question of getting through the morning, the three hours of diapers that have to be changed, clothes that have to be put on, breakfast that has to be served, faces that have to be washed, hair that has to be combed and pinned up, teeth that have to be brushed, squabbles that have to be nipped in the bud, slaps that have to be averted, rompers and boots that have to be wriggled into, before I, with the collapsible double stroller in one hand and nudging the two small girls forward with the other, step into the elevator, which as often as not resounds to the noise of shoving and shouting on its descent, and into the hall where I ease them into the stroller, put on their hats and mittens and emerge onto the street already crowded with people heading for work and deliver them to the nursery ten minutes later, whereupon I have the next five hours for writing until the mandatory routines for the children resume.

He feels that he is racing against time, that it is slipping away from him, “running through my fingers like sand”: “Soon I will be forty, and when I’m forty, it won’t be long before I’m fifty. And when I’m fifty, it won’t be long before I’m sixty. And when I’m sixty, it won’t be long before I’m seventy. And that will be that.” Knausgaard apprehends everyone else’s mortality, too: “Until now, I thought, observing the crowds circulating in the concourse below. In twenty-five years a third of them would be dead, in fifty years two-thirds, in a hundred all of them. And what would they leave behind, what had their lives been worth?”

About halfway through this book’s four hundred and thirty pages, Knausgaard reflects, rather like Walter Benjamin, on the hiddenness of death. On the one hand, it is all around us, as pictures and horrifying news—but this is death as a concept, death without a body. On the other hand, actual death, “that which belongs to the body and is concrete, physical and material, this death is hidden with such great care that it borders on a frenzy, and it works, just listen to how people who have been involuntary witnesses to fatal accidents or murders tend to express themselves. They always say the same, it was absolutely unreal, even though what they mean is the opposite. It was so real. But we no longer live in that reality. For us everything has been turned on its head, for us the real is unreal, the unreal real.” After a break in the page, Knausgaard announces, “I was almost thirty years old when I saw a dead body for the first time. It was the summer of 1998, a July afternoon, in a chapel at Kristiansand. My father had died.”

This prolonged précis, necessary because of the large scale of his project, demonstrates some of the strengths and weaknesses of Knausgaard’s book. There is a flatness and a prolixity to the prose; the long sentences have about them an almost careless avant-gardism, with their conversational additions and splayed run-ons. The writer seems not to be selecting or shaping anything, or even pausing to draw breath. Cliché is not spurned—time is falling through Knausgaard’s hands “like sand”; elsewhere in the book, the author tells us that falling in love was like being struck by lightning, that he was head over heels in love, that he was as hungry as a wolf. There is, perhaps, something a little gauche in his confessional volubility. But there is also a simplicity, an openness, and an innocence in his relation to life, and thus in his relation to the reader. Where many contemporary writers would reflexively turn to irony, Knausgaard is intense and utterly honest, unafraid to voice universal anxieties, unafraid to appear naïve or awkward. Although his sentences are long and loose, they are not cutely or aimlessly digressive: truth is repeatedly being struck at, not chatted up.

Above all, this is a kind of writing that accommodates variety—narrative and essay, the concrete and the theoretical, the general and the metaphorical (that image of our lives like boats in a lock, waiting for the sluice gates to open). As in Proust, we get surprising and vivid shifts when we move from reflection to example (that quick narrowing, from thinking about the sociology of death to an actual corpse, the author’s father). There is something ceaselessly compelling about Knausgaard’s book: even when I was bored, I was interested. This striking readability has something to do with the unconventionality of “My Struggle.” It looks, at first sight, familiar enough: one of those highly personal modern or postmodern works, narrated by a writer, usually having the form if not the veracity of memoir and thus plotted somewhat accidentally, concerned with the writing of a book that turns out to be the text we are reading. In addition to Proust’s “À la Recherche du Temps Perdu,” Rilke’s “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge” may stand behind Knausgaard’s book: Malte is a Danish poet living in Paris, and he describes in detail, as Knausgaard does, the experience of viewing his father’s corpse, and his urge to write. Closer to home, in the same year that Knausgaard published “Min Kamp,” the Norwegian writer Tomas Espedal published “Against Art,” a complex, and clearly Rilkean, novel about the struggle to write, presented in the style of an author’s notebook or diary.

But “My Struggle” is stranger than these strange books. Knausgaard seems unable to leave anything out. In interviews, he has said that almost ten years after the death of his father, and with two novels to his name, he felt compelled to unburden himself of his past, of all his family stories, to get everything about his life on paper. He wrote rapidly, between five and twenty pages a day, and he ends the sixth volume of his autobiography (not yet translated into English) with the relieved declaration, as if now self-annulled, “I am happy because I am no longer an author.” In Norway, nearly half a million people have read the book, and it has generated a great deal of extra-literary commentary. Knausgaard’s family fiercely objected to the portrait of the author’s grandmother, and threatened to sue both the publisher and the writer.

The first half of “My Struggle” is densely ordinary. As a teen-ager, Knausgaard is no Malte Laurids Brigge. He’s a regular Norwegian, who goes to school in Kristiansand, tries to get drunk as often as possible, falls in love with one of his classmates (“It was as though I had been struck by lightning”), and plays in a crappy band. Most writers would get through this banality as quickly as possible, but not Knausgaard. A description of a New Year’s Eve party, to which the teen-age writer attempts, with great difficulty, to transport some beer, occupies (admittedly with a few substantial divagations) something like seventy pages. “Getting drunk required careful planning,” it begins. “Alcohol had to be procured safely in advance, a secure place for storage had to be found, transport there and back had to be arranged, and parents had to be avoided when you got home.” Yes, that would seem to cover all the bases.

When Karl tells us about how much he liked playing the guitar, and how much he liked the equipment, he lists all of it:

I also loved all the accessories guitar-playing involved, the fuzz box, the chorus pedal, the leads, the plugs, the plectrums, and the small packets of strings, the bottleneck, the capo, the lined guitar case and all its small compartments. I loved the brand names: Gibson, Fender, Hagstrøm, Rickenbacker, Marshall, Music Man, Vox, and Roland.

A cup of tea gets the same treatment:

After a while I picked up the teapot and poured. Dark brown, almost like wood, the tea rose inside the white cup. A few leaves swirled and floated up, the others lay like a black mat at the bottom. I added milk, three teaspoons of sugar, stirred, waited until the leaves had settled on the bottom, and drank.
Mmm.

Everything is tagged, logged, diligently invoiced: “We went out that night, with three girls he knew, and I borrowed his deodorant, Old Spice.”

After a few hundred pages of this, I started to grumble: I understood that this was “My Struggle,” but did it also have to be my struggle? David Mitchell’s captivating novel “Black Swan Green” has crossed this territory (roughly: the hideousness of a Northern European adolescence in the nineteen-eighties) with greater liveliness and comedy than Knausgaard summons. And if we must have hundreds of pages of autopsied minutiae, then let them be as well written as the last two enormous volumes in Adam Mars-Jones’s unfinished project in novelistic micro-realism.

But Knausgaard’s omnivorousness proves anything but accidental. Again, the banality is so extreme that it turns into its opposite, and becomes distinctive, curious in its radical transparency. The need for totality that brings pages about playing the guitar, about drinking tea, about wearing his Doc Martens and listening to his Walkman, about how his brother, Yngve, has always thought the music of Queen unfairly underestimated, about the name of the band that he later formed with his brother (named, rather wonderfully, Kafkatrakterne), also brings superb, lingering, celestial passages, like the one in which Knausgaard cannot sleep, and paces his apartment. While his heavily pregnant wife, Linda, is in bed, he looks out the window, and sees a group of people standing outside a concert hall; watches the police raid a porn video store farther down the street; talks to his wife (who has woken up); and then flicks through a book of Constable paintings. And suddenly he is in tears, arrested by “an oil sketch of a cloud formation from September 6th, 1822,” and unable to explain his reaction. What is he feeling? “The feeling of inexhaustibility. The feeling of beauty. The feeling of presence.” He has always been unsettled by paintings, but has never found it easy to describe his experience of them—“because what they possessed, the core of their being, was inexhaustibility and what that wrought in me was a kind of desire. I can’t explain it any better than that. A desire to be inside the inexhaustibility.” The moment he looks back at the Constable sketch, “all my reasoning vanished in the surge of energy and beauty that arose in me. Yes, yes, yes, I heard. That’s where it is. That’s where I have to go. But what was it I had said yes to? Where was it I had to go?”

Knausgaard has his own artistic commitment to inexhaustibility—a prosaic rather than a painterly one, which manifests itself as a kind of tiring tirelessness. But it can be as vivid, in its way, as those clouds by Constable. He wants us to inhabit the ordinariness of life, which is sometimes visionary (the Constable sketch), sometimes banal (the cup of tea, the Old Spice), and sometimes momentous (the death of a parent), but all of it perforce ordinary because it happens in the course of a life, and happens, in different forms, to everyone. He notices everything—too much, no doubt—but often lingers beautifully. There are long, sublime descriptions of what it is like to experience the awakening of spring after a Nordic winter; of how a regular day elapses in Stockholm (he patiently watches the crowds coming and going); of the random human activity in a Norwegian airport; of the experience of reading Adorno; of buying fish at the market with his grandmother, when he was a boy. He gives thanks to trees, for existing: “These motionless, foliage-laden, air-bathing beings with their boundless abundance of leaves. . . . For whenever I caught sight of them I was filled with happiness.” And to cranes: “There were few things I found more beautiful than cranes, the skeletal nature of their construction, the steel wires running along the top and bottom of the protruding arm, the enormous hook, the way heavy objects dangled when being slowly transported through the air, the sky that formed a backdrop to this mechanical provisorium.” At the fish market, he sees a crateful of live crabs: “From the top they were dark-brown like rotten leaves, underneath yellowish-white bones. . . . It was a marvelous adventure that they came from the deep, and had been hauled up here, as all live fish had.”

The plenitude of detail that clogs the first half of the book makes its second half morbidly compelling, and is crucial to the memoir’s power. For in this section Knausgaard and Yngve receive the news of their father’s death, and travel to their grandmother’s house, the place to which he retreated as his alcoholism consumed him, and where he died. They find a shocking scene of decrepitude and decay, which Knausgaard records in lucid litanies of fact. There is mold and urine everywhere, and excrement on the sofa. Bottles, and bags filled with more bottles, are strewn about: “Most were plastic 1.5 liter bottles and vodka bottles, but there were a few wine bottles as well.” There are piles of rotting, odorous clothes. The bathrooms are appalling. At the weak center of this mortal anarchy is the grandmother, who reeks of urine, and who appears to be losing her mind. She has clearly been not just the enabler of her son’s drinking but an eager co-conspirator, and, though dazed and sometimes incoherent, is also obviously desperate for a drink. It was she who found her dead son, sitting in a living-room chair. But she can’t remember if it was morning or evening when she did so. Knausgaard notes, “Her detachment was as hard and lean as the body in which it resided.

Knausgaard could have mentioned the Randy Newman song “I Want You to Hurt Like I Do”—it is the operating principle of this section’s immersive lyricism. He and his brother clean every inch of this hellish place, and the reader is forced to share the experience, room by room. The process—with time-outs for some longish digressions and flashbacks—stretches across about a hundred pages, and proceeds like this: “We took Jif for the bathroom, Jif for the kitchen, Ajax all-purpose cleaner, Ajax window-cleaner, Klorin disinfectant, Mr. Muscle for extra difficult stains, an oven-cleaner, a special chemical product for sofas, steel wool, sponges, kitchen cloths, floor rags, two buckets and a broom. . . .” And so on. By the time it is over, we have cleaned that house with these brothers; the experience is extraordinarily vivid and visceral and moving. Of course, it is also the narrator’s tide of mourning that we are being drowned in: we experience this housework as the necessary transference that it is. The labor of our reading merges with the labor of Knausgaard’s writing, which is the very labor of grief. A complicated grief, too: horror, recoil, regret, shame, indifference, relief. Above all, the habitual, fortifying Knausgaardian honesty: “But Dad had got what was coming to him, it was good that he was dead, anything in me that said otherwise was lying.”

In the course of this Augean task, Knausgaard has a moment of Proustian retrospect, prompted not by tea and a madeleine but by the smell of Klorin (the Scandinavian equivalent of Clorox): “The smell of Klorin and the sight of the blue bottle took me back to the 1970s, to be more precise, to the cupboard under the kitchen sink where the detergents were kept. Jif didn’t exist then. Ajax washing powder did, though, in a cardboard container: red, white, and blue. It was a green soap.” Could anything be more prosaic? Yet Knausgaard pauses to think aloud at this moment, and wrings a distinctively flat, rigorous poetry out of the Klorin and the Ajax. He thinks about regression, and how one used to stand in front of the bathroom mirror while holding a mirror behind one’s head, and see the receding dance of images—“becoming smaller and smaller as far as the eye could see. But what happened behind what the eye could see? Did the images carry on getting smaller and smaller?”

Gradually, he seizes his elegiac theme. Isn’t this, he asks, the fate of everything we once knew and experienced? All the sounds and smells and tastes reappear, but now nostalgically, “utterly irresistible, as indeed everything you have lost, everything that has gone, always does.” He dwells on some of these lost sensations: the smell of grass “when you are sitting on a soccer field one summer afternoon after training, the long shadows of motionless trees, the screams and laughter of children swimming in the lake on the other side of the road,” the salt in your mouth when you swim, the rocks you climbed as a kid, the taste of a particular energy drink. None of this has changed, he writes, and all the objects and palpabilities of childhood are still available to you:

You could still buy Slazenger tennis rackets, Tretorn balls, and Rossignol skis, Tyrolia bindings and Koflach boots. The houses where we lived were still standing, all of them. The sole difference, which is the difference between a child’s reality and an adult’s, was that they were no longer laden with meaning. A pair of Le Coq soccer boots was just a pair of soccer boots. If I felt anything when I held a pair in my hands now it was only a hangover from my childhood, nothing else, nothing in itself. The same with the sea, the same with the rocks, the same with the taste of salt that could fill your summer days to saturation, now it was just salt, end of story. The world was the same, yet it wasn’t, for its meaning had been displaced, and was still being displaced, approaching closer and closer to meaninglessness.

Once again, it is important to quote at length in order to convey a sense of the author’s loping play of mind. But also because the passage holds a key to this long book. Knausgaard’s world is one in which the adventure of the ordinary—the inexhaustibility of the ordinary as a child once experienced it (“the taste of salt that could fill your summer days to saturation”)—is steadily retreating; in which things and objects and sensations are pacing toward meaninglessness. In such a world, the writer’s task is to rescue the adventure from this slow retreat: to bring meaning, color, and life back to the soccer boots and to the grass, and to cranes and trees and airports, and even to Gibson guitars and Roland amplifiers and Ajax. And that is why, I think, Knausgaard finds it necessary to see his father’s corpse twice. The first time, he goes with his brother to the undertaker’s chapel. His father seems still to be alive. Outside, someone is mowing the lawn, and the expectation that the noise will waken the corpse is so strong that he can’t help recoiling. The second time, he is alone, and his father is becoming a thing, an object. This appears to bring the author some consolation:

Now I saw his lifeless state. And that there was no longer any difference between what once had been my father and the table he was lying on, or the floor on which the table stood, or the wall socket beneath the window, or the cable running to the lamp beside him. For humans are merely one form among many, which the world produces over and over again, not only in everything that lives but also in everything that does not live, drawn in sand, stone, and water. And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor.

These are the concluding sentences of the book—placid, plain, achieved. They have what Walter Benjamin called “the epic side of truth, wisdom.” Mourning, for Knausgaard, involves an acceptance that we are all things in the end, and that, like things, even the people we have known and loved and hated will slowly leak away their meaning. Death and life finally unite, married in their ordinariness.