"The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities." ~ Don Dellilo, White Noise
Breaking down Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle into its component parts leaves an impression of pointlessness to the potential reader. The series of six books proceed as follows:
Knausgaard has a knack for describing the hopelessly mundane. One can see this clearly in a particularly Knausgaardian example from Book 6:
"I got up and went to the bathroom for a piss. My urine was light-coloured, almost completely clear, and I was reminded of my father's, which I had seen whenever he had forgotten, for some reason or other, to flush in the morning. It had been dark yellow, almost brown. How frightening was that. I had connected the color with his mind. And with masculinity. My own pale, almost colorless, urine was feminine, his dark urine masculine. His temper was also masculine. My terror was feminine."In a scene that would not make it into any other novel, and certainly not one considered to be "great literature", we run through precisely what makes My Struggle as engaging to read as it is. First, Knausgaard describes the simple human action of waste excretion; in and of itself putrid and uninteresting. What keeps the prose moving, however, is how the base act of urinating sparks an inner monologue in the author. The color of his urine connects to the memory of his father, which in turn connects to the inner world of Karl Ove's fear of his father, which in turn reveals Karl Ove's hatred of himself. The novel makes apparent what Josef Dietzgen would call the nature of human brain-work. A constellation of words and concepts connect to one another sparking off new combinations that lead to old preoccupations.
These preoccupations torture Knausgaard. They range from the nature of truth, morality, nationalism, fascism, art, and, most frequently, death. They are the thoughts that forcibly bubble up in the brain of those who have a rich inner life. It is exactly this inner life that Knausgaard is interested in examining. He begins the first book of the series with a discussion of a self-portrait of Rembrandt:
"One can hardly be closer to another human soul. For as far as Rembrandt's person is concerned, his good habits and bad, his bodily sounds and smells, his voice and his language, his thoughts and his opinions, his behaviour, his physical flaws and defects, all the things that constitute a person to others, are no longer there, the painting is more than four hundred years old, and Rembrandt died the same year it was painted, so what is depicted here, what Rembrandt painted, is this person's very being, that which he woke to every morning, that which immersed itself in thought, but which itself was not thought, that which he went to sleep to, in the end for good."He is consumed with the desire to know somebody, to understand what goes beyond the surface. The knowledge of which is kept prisoner, guarded behind the lock and key of the happenings of everyday life.
Knausgaard extends this relation of the outer and inner self to his own children. Of his young daughter Vanja he writes:
"I had never seen her filled with such light. She was glowing with happiness. I knew that neither Linda nor I would be able to say anything to make her react like that, and I understood with the immediate clarity of an insight that she was not ours. Her life was utterly her own."Although Knausgaard is intimately connected to Vanja and spends nearly everyday with her, he still cannot peer inside into her inner light. This motif is repeated when he later describes trying to comfort his wife, Linda, during Vanja's birth:
"When we stood under the shower, holding each other, there were new contractions, she leaned forward and hung on to a rail on the wall as the sound I had heard for the first time in the night before was emitted again. I stroked her back, but it felt more like an insult than a comfort. She stood up and I met her eyes in the mirror. Our faces looked drained, completely vacant, and I thought: we're in this all on our own."There is a grim disappointment that hangs behind Knausgaard's observation: there will always be a separation between another and oneself. The novel functions as a lengthy investigation into that split.
My Struggle is notorious for the way in which Knausgaard laid bare a cavalcade of intimate, private moments between himself, his friends, and his family. He describes in meticulous detail his father's alcoholism, his wife's battle with bipolar disorder and hospitalizations, his youthful romances, his embarrassing stints with premature ejaculation; he talks to the reader about how much he hates Sweden, the country he's lived in with his family for a decade, about how his wife neglects doing any housework, about how he fell out of love with his first wife. Many consider his writing immoral. Knausgaard goes so far as to share a diary entry written by his deceased father in the throes of alcoholism and depression:
"Sunday 11 JanuaryHis uncle, Gunnar in the novel, goes to the press detailing how much of what was written in the first novel was untrue. He claims that he has witnesses who can attest to the historical forgeries. Knausgaard is sure that everything he wrote is truthful. He knows that the novel would not work if it was not true. It has to be authentic.
Had a feeling when I woke up it was going to be a bad day.
I was right!"
Must it be true? Ramping up to the boyhood narrative of Book Three, Knausgaard writes about memory. He says:
"Memory is not a reliable quantity in life. And it isn't for the simple reason that memory doesn't prioritize truth. It is never the demand for truth that determines whether memory recalls an action accurately or not. It is self-interest that does. Memory is pragmatic, it is sly and artful, but not in any hostile or malicious way; on the contrary, it does everything it can to keep its host satisfied. Something pushes a memory into the great void of oblivion, something distorts it beyond recognition, something misunderstands it totally, something, and this something is as good as nothing, recalls it with sharpness, clarity, and accuracy. That which is remembered accurately is never given to you to determine."It reads like a direct response to Gunnar's accusations. Yes, perhaps some things are not factually true, but this is how I remember them. If the timeline given in Book Six is to be believed then it is quite possible that the disclaimer is placed there to put Knausgaard's mind at ease for what becomes a four hundred and fifty page novel about him fearing his father. I believe it to be more than that. Knausgaard is not a cynical writer; this is his honest take on memory, on how his mind recalls the past. Theodor Adorno, a German philosopher and literary critic, wrote that "memories cannot be conserved in drawers and pigeon-holes; in them the past is indissolubly woven into the present"[1]. Of course not everything in My Struggle happened. One would be hard pressed to believe that anyone writing dialogue to fill thousands of pages would be getting everything correct.
The point is that the past leaves a trace on our psyches, one that provides the shape to our personal histories. In a short essay titled A Note Upon the Mystic Writing Pad, Sigmund Freud illustrates how memory functions in the brain using the example of a children's toy: the titular Mystic Writing Pad. The Mystic Writing Pad is a device which allows the user to write notes on a kind of wax paper using a stylus of any sort. This writing can be swiftly erased by a pull of the double-covering sheet of the wax pad, thus providing its "mystical" quality. What was once physically there vanishes, much like how one moment in time passes into the next. This alone does not make for an analogy of the brain's capacity for memory. What evokes a comparison for the human psyche is that if one pulls back the celluloid and peers beneath the clean surface every single impression and stroke of the pen can be seen. Each trace is permanent, but not directly visible to the user. The similarity to the unconscious mind becomes clear: memories cannot be pulled wholesale from the unconscious, but rather sit festering beneath the murk of the preconscious and conscious surface [7].
People make impressions on us that last a lifetime. Knausgaard was afraid of his father, and, as such, his memories of him are dripping with anxiety. He relates a story of eating breakfast as a child while his father was home:
"There was a bowl of cornflakes in my place, with a carton of milk beside it. Dad wasn't there.There is nothing in this retelling that would suggest any reason for Karl Ove to be afraid of his father. All that we see is a father walking around a house while his child helps himself to some cereal. For Karl Ove, this is a scene of immense tension and dread. He sees his father as unstable, capable of exploding at any second over anything, even something as innocuous as needing to replace spoiled milk. Peering back through the veil of memory Knausgaard reanimates the childlike fear of a parent's wrath. A forgettable event for his father, his idiot boy slurping down sour milk, is one imbued with profound feeling for Karl Ove.
Had he gone to his study to get his things together?
No. I heard him moving in the living room.
I sat down and poured milk over the cornflakes. Dipped the spoon in and put it to my mouth.
Oh my God.
The milk was off, and the taste of it, which filled all my mouth, caused me to retch. I gulped it down because at that moment my father came across the floor. In through the doorway, across the kitchen, over to the counter, and leaned against it. He looked at me and smiled. I took another spoonful from the bowl and put it to my mouth. The mere thought of the taste made my stomach turn. But I breathed through my mouth and swallowed it after only a couple of chews.
Oh, yuk.
Dad showed no signs of wanting to leave and I continued eating. If he had gone to his study I could have emptied the dish into the bin and covered it with other rubbish, but as long as he was in the kitchen, or on the first floor, I had no choice."
Upon looking at a collection of old childhood photos, Knausgaard opines:
"They are voids; the only meaning that can be derived from them is that which time has added. Nonetheless, these photos are a part of me and my most intimate history, as others' photos are part of theirs. Meaningful, meaningless, meaningful, meaningless, this is the wave that washes through our lives and creates its inherent tension."Here he is expressing a key tenet of the My Struggle series: through living one's life one amasses a breadth of experiences, which one promptly forgets, being pushed out by newer, fresher experiences. The older experiences then find themselves tucked away into the recesses of one's mind only to be brought back to the surface in the form of vague intonations and unclear outlines. Gunnar, after reading these experiences of Knausgaard's life, eviscerates Knausgaard claiming that he is both a simpleton and a coward out to ruin his father's legacy at the behest of Knausgaard's mother. He fails to recognize that the character of Karl Ove is just that: a character in a novel, an impression of the author's self put to words.
In Book Six, Knausgaard assures the reader that what he wrote in books One and Two are true. He later qualifies his claim, saying that he had written them as truthfully as he could. Not long after, he returns to this obsession with truth stating that Book Four was the least truthful of all, and, in fact, was riddled with lies, primarily because he was suffering the murderous gaze of lawyers and public scrutiny. To Knausgaard, truth provides the structural pillar on which My Struggle rests. If not for his honesty the novel could not possibly work, it would be nothing more than half-hearted ramblings and disinterested fakeries. The novel does work because Knausgaard provides the reader with the distinct feeling that the content perhaps may not all be true, but the spirit of it must be.
Many find the philosophical taciturn of formal epistemology rather dull. It always seems to be missing what a person is grasping at when they seek out truth. My Struggle has Knausgaard retreating into his inner life as a means of finding truth. In doing so he always comes up short, never quite being able to overlay his feelings of the world inside himself to the concrete, physical world around him. In his Theses on Feuerbach, Karl Marx says that "the question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth — i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question" [18]. Truth for Marx is a process, a means of applying concepts to reality and seeing if they match up.
Truth is also bounded by time. History is just as much a determinant of truth as anything else. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, one of the most influential philosophers of the nineteenth century, wrote that "as far as the individual is concerned, each individual is in any case a child of his time: thus philosophy, too, is its own time comprehended in thoughts" [8]. Concepts do not float down from the heavens and impart themselves into the consciousness of men, they are wrought through action and later reflections on those actions. "The theoretical is essentially contained within the practical; the idea that the two are separate must be rejected"[8]. The German existentialist Martin Heidegger takes it a step further claiming that "Newton's laws, the principle of contradiction, any truth whatever—these are true only as long as Dasein [being] is. Before there was any Dasein, there was no truth; nor will there be any after Dasein is no more" [10]. Truth exists only for as long as there are people capable of apprehending it. What good are Newton's laws if there is no substance capable of recognizing them?
Even in the realm of mathematics, a domain many might assume to be untouched by the grotesque baseness of material life, truth developed historically. It wasn't until the 18th century that the Arabic numeral symbols were generally adopted—it was a direct result of the development of early capitalism: the old Roman numeral system was too complex to easily perform written calculations on the fly as it required the use of an abacus [19]. A faster system was necessary to keep up with the enhanced circulation of commercial goods. The ancient Greeks point to ancient Egypt as the birthplace of geometrical investigations. The Egyptians would manipulate rope and perform calculations based on those manipulations to determine the dimensions necessary for building structures, the quantity of land swept away in a flood (a practice performed for adjusting land taxes), how many acres would be given to a particular crop, etc. When thinking more conceptually, the Egyptians would dissect shapes into triangles and rearrange them into rectangles for easier calculations, this too stemming from their predilection of using ropes [4]. A similar practice can be found in ancient India; in fact, the earliest textbook of Indian geometry bears the very title The Art of the Rope[20].
Pythagoras, the first true mathematician, rose onto the scene only after the initial spread of coinage in the seventh and sixth centuries. The peculiar way in which coins quantify the world provides the essential scaffolding for further quantifiable abstractions. Pythagoras is also believed to have himself been the main promulgator of coinage in Kroton, his home after his emigration from Samos around 540 B.C.[20]. Man's physical place in the world conditions the concepts that form from his interactions within it.
Language itself, the medium through which Knausgaard communicates in My Struggle, is incapable of escaping the grasp of history. Friedrich Engels in a fragment entitled The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man traces the development of language to the necessity of cooperation in early pre-human survival [5]:
"The development of labour necessarily helped to bring the members of society closer together by increasing cases of mutual support and joint activity, and by making clear the advantage of this joint activity to each individual. In short, men in the making arrived at the point where they had something to say to each other. Necessity created the organ; the undeveloped larynx of the ape was slowly but surely transformed by modulation to produce constantly more developed modulation, and the organs of the mouth gradually learned to pronounce one articulate sound after another."As children we are presented with a language that seems to be fully formed, something that feels static and timeless. What we do not know, and only later come to find, is that this language took centuries to develop and that these developments took place in concrete reality. Ludwig Wittgenstein writes that "our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses" [22]. We wander through this city blind, groping around for clarity and insight from streets cobbled together generations prior.
Deep into Book Six, Knausgaard laments:
"What was the difference between reality and our perception of it? Did reality exist, was it beyond our reach?"Ludwig Feuerbach penned that the leaf on which a caterpillar ambles is, for him, a world, "an infinite space"[6]. In a letter to G. H. Schaller, Baruch Spinoza constructs a rather simple scenario to illustrate a similar point: a man takes a rock off the ground, throws it with great enough power to suspend it in the air for quite a while, and, as it flies through the air, the rock is imbued with consciousness. We then consider what the rock might be thinking about as it rises up into the air. Would it not then seem to the rock that she is willing her passage up to the heavens? We know that the rock is misinformed, but the rock has no idea [21]. Spinoza's quick example, of course, fails to take into account what the stone might think once it inevitably stops, and is met with the horror of absolute permanence.
Immanuel Kant investigates the boundaries of perception in his Critique of Pure Reason using a juxtaposition between physically having one hundred "talers" (Prussian dollars) and merely thinking one has one hundred talers. Kant writes, "A hundred real talers do not contain the least coin more than a hundred possible talers. For as the latter signify the concept and the former the object and positing of the object, should the former contain more than the latter, my concept would not, in this case, express the whole object, and would not therefore be an adequate concept of it. My financial position is, however, affected very differently by a hundred real talers than it is by the mere concept of them (that is, of their possibility)" [13]. Kant's point is that each concept represents the abstract notion of one hundred talers, but the latter (the imagined talers) only in a purely abstract form: it cannot go beyond that which is there (unlike the thought of the physical talers, in which one could have more coins in their pocket than originally assumed). Kant is here refuting the classical "ontological proof of God", that being the mere thought of God (of an infinite being) is proof of his existence. In the appendix to his doctoral thesis [17], Marx attacks Kant's satisfaction with that setup:
"If somebody imagines that he has a hundred talers, if this concept is not for him an arbitrary, subjective one, if he believes in it, then these hundred imagined talers have for him the same value as a hundred real ones. For instance, he will incur debts on the strength of his imagination, his imagination will work, in the same way as all humanity has incurred debts on its gods. The contrary is true. Kant's example might have enforced the ontological proof. Real talers have the same existence that the imagined gods have. Has a real taler any existence except in the imagination, if only in the general or rather common imagination of man? Bring paper money into a country where this use of paper is unknown, and everyone will laugh at your subjective imagination."Marx is not championing the side of the ontological proof, but rather showing the faulty logic of Kant's proof by contradiction. Reality is conditioned by practical action, and as human beings that action is conditioned by interactions with concrete, corporeal beings. Marx is saying that it is foolish to believe that practical reality does not in some sense take into account the collective thoughts of others; Kant's thought is distinctly solipsistic and leads him to accepting his own socially conditioned thoughts (the value of a taler) as an uncontested fact.
A further example of this idea can be seen from the history of Rembrandt. He was considered by many to be stingy and foul tempered, and would often be rather cruel to his students (although some claim this is anachronistic). As a means of getting back at their harsh master, his students would paint gold coins on the floor of the studio knowing full well Rembrandt would not be able to resist bending over to try to pocket them. And he would do so, again and again, always falling for the same trick. David Markson ingeniously remarks in his novel Wittgenstein's Mistress[14]:
"The coins having only been coins until Rembrandt bent over."For Rembrandt, the coins really were coins, it was only until that internal determination butted heads with external reality that they evaporated into farce. And so for Knausgaard the way he writes his history in My Struggle really is real, but in a different sense.
In the 1995 film Just Cause, Sean Connery, who plays a retired lawyer, finds himself opposite an interrogation table from Ed Helms, playing a psychopath. Connery repeatedly lies to Helms as he fears he could become the target of Helms' psychotic fury. Helms, trained in the art of truth-detection, is incensed and cries out that Connery is a liar. Connery immediately rebuffs him, "Well, don't my lies tell you as much about me as my truths?"[12]. Knausgaard's reality, at least the one portrayed in My Struggle, is constructed almost entirely of half-truths and lies. Characters are forgotten, their names eventually misremembered by Karl Ove later on in the narrative. Karl Ove drunkenly cuts up his face not once, but twice, both instances feeling more like expertly placed plot beats in a narrative than actual occurrences. And yet at no point does the reader get the feeling that Knausgaard is really lying---meaning that the lies themselves reveal the truth of Knausgaard's character (it being the character of the author or the character of Karl Ove makes no difference).
There are quite a bit of eccentricities in Karl Ove's character that seem odd at first sight (or, more accurately, odd that he relates them to the reader): his preoccupation with being considered effeminate by his peers, his fear of masturbation, his overwhelming obsession with women he barely knows, and his oddly consuming Norwegian nationalism. These are no doubt facets of Knausgaard's personal history, but as they fly by the reader as the novel progresses one wonders why someone would paint themselves in such a light, barring of course the obvious explanations of a simple masochism or a religious devotion to exposing inner truth. Book Six puts these disparate points into focus with a nearly five hundred page essay on Hitler and Mein Kampf.
Knausgaard quotes from a biography of Hitler written by Hitler's childhood friend, August Kubizek:
"Hitler suddenly grips his arm excitedly and asks him what he thinks of the slim blonde girl walking arm-in-arm with her mother along the boulevard.Hitler would become infatuated with a woman at the drop of a hat. An all consuming love that made him weak in the knees and completely dominated his thoughts when out on the town. He would create rich fantasies of him and his love marrying, having children, and being happy. Knausgaard's young life as related in Book Three and Book Four share exactly the same characteristic. Books Four and Five also have Knausgaard admitting to the reader that he did not masturbate until he was about nineteen years old, he had been too afraid. It just so happens that Kubizek recalls that Hitler, too, did not masturbate. We find Knausgaard in Book Six fed up with his bourgeois lifestyle:
I am in love with her, Hitler says.
It transpires that he has never spoken to her."
"If only I'd had a really profligate, sleazy past in the docklands of Buenos Aires, lived at the bottom like a crab and gorged myself shamelessly on everything I came across, preferably killed someone with a rock to the head, as Rimbaud may have done and, like him, fled to Africa and made a living as an arms smuggler, yes, anything but this, on a hotel balcony in the Canary Islands with two small children and a pregnant wife sleeping on the other side of the sliding glass door, and all that this loaded the future with in terms of propriety and responsibility."No one should be surprised to find the same sentiment in Hitler's Mein Kampf [11]:
"Why couldn't I have been born a hundred years earlier? Say at the time of the Wars of Liberation when a man, even without a ‘business', was really worth something?!"Knausgaard discusses hearing the language of immigrants in a public park he frequents:
"I had no idea what the difference consisted of, for it was so big that their language to me sounded like so much coughing and spitting, and the letters of their alphabet looked more like bushes in the desert than writing, but I had an idea that everything surely had to be impenetrable to begin with, and while it might gradually open up as the language became understood, it could never be as self-explanatory as it was to us, and presumably never become possible, nor therefore desirable, to embrace. For culture's greatest role comprised the way it worked between people, its tissue of collocations, accentuations and self-imposed constraints was so fine and complex that most within the culture were familiar only with the particular shadings that concerned his or her own layer of society, and possessed only superficial knowledge of the others."Language could be learned, but the culture cannot. And now Hitler [11]:
"But it is scarcely conceivable fallacy of thought to believe that a Negro or a Chinese, let us say, will turn into a German because he learns German and is willing to speak the German language in the future and perhaps even give his vote to a German political party."Again we see that it is possible that one "outside the culture" can learn the language, but they can never identify themselves with the Völk. As Hitler ages he has a predilection for young girls; Knausgaard writes extensively of the embarrassment he felt having sexual feelings for a thirteen year old student when he was an eighteen year old grade school teacher. The comparisons continue, but there is no point continuing the exercise.
Is the claim then that Karl Ove is Hitler? Not exactly. In fact Karl Ove and Hitler are really quite different: Karl Ove does not share Hitler's fanatical hatred of the Jews, he has a robust sexual life (Hitler was thought by many of his close friends to be some flavour of asexual), he believes in milquetoast liberal democracy, and he does not think that "miscegenation" is the sign of a nation-state's deterioration. A conversation Karl Ove has with his friend Geir will help clear things up:
"[Karl Ove]:‘I suppose you're going to tell me it was you who came up with the My Struggle title as well?'Knausgaard uses this small exchange to provide a look into the workings of memory, a man's brain does not have thoughts bifurcated into a section labeled "my thoughts" and an opposite section labeled "others' thoughts". Before the Mein Kampf essay really gets going, Knausgaard provides a further clue to prove the validity of this idea:
[Geir:]‘Well, now you mention it.'
‘Seriously?'
‘It was in a sentence you said, my struggle, and I said there you go, there's your title. That's how it was.'
‘Shit.'
‘It's how you work. Your head's this simmering pot, everything goes into the soup."'
"Unwrapping [the two volumes of Mein Kampf] and standing with them in my hands filled me with distaste, to say nothing of the near-nausea that came over me when I started reading the first volume and Hitler's words and Hitler's thoughts were thereby admitted to my own mind and for a brief time became a part of it [emphasis added]."The written word, unlike any other medium, forces the language of the author into the mind of the reader. Paintings provide a visual which requires interpretation, music can mean many things to many different people, and films provide the distance of both the visual interpretation and the recognition of actors reciting lines (a clear and obvious other). A text drills one's thoughts directly into the head of another. Knausgaard's obsession with the internal subject interacting with the external world meets its apogee with this revelation. The genius of My Struggle is nestled precisely in this formulation. In the same way that Karl Ove reads Hitler and finds his life taking a similar shape, so too does the reader's life begin to resemble that of Karl Ove's, and by extension, Hitler's as well.
There is no doubt that Knausgaard manufactured parts of his life to fit some of Hitler's idiosyncrasies, but it is just as important to recognize the fact that little would have to change about many people's lives to resemble Hitler's. His early life is not at all remarkable; the beats would resemble that of any failed artist. Knausgaard does a smug, Brechtian wink at the audience when he catches himself writing the word "cunt":
"After writing this, I added the word ‘cock', so that the sentence instead began ‘If I write the words "cunt" and "cock"…', and the reason I did this was because it struck me that ‘cunt' could arouse suspicions that I might be a woman-hater, a misogynist, perhaps even afraid of women, having chosen that particular word, as if it were the most readily available, and in that way I might infelicitously be associated with Hitler – infelicitously because it might look like I was not aware of the fact, that I was blind to it, and around this point, my presumed misogyny and fear of women, a highly intricate web might then be spun out of whatever other indications might be discovered as to my lack of social intelligence, my sad and lonely life, and what I wrote about blood and grass, and all sorts of other things besides, could all be clustered around one single point of identification: Hitler."No further proof should be necessary to show Knausgaard's intentions. He knows that he is making himself out to be Hitler, and he knows that the audience knows as well.
One gets the distinct feeling that Knausgaard is at his most honest when he is searching for meaning through his prose. He stands on his balcony in Malmö, watching the urban sprawl pulsate with human activity, and thinks:
"In the same way that the heart does not care which life it beats for, the city does not care who fulfills its various functions. When everyone who moves around the city today is dead, in a hundred and fifty years, say, the sound of people's comings and goings, following the same old patterns, will still ring out. The only new thing will be the faces of those who perform these functions, although not that new because they will resemble us. I threw the cigarette end on the ground and drank the last drop of coffee, already cold. I saw life; I thought about death."What good is having a life when it ends? How can one wrench something out of existence? These are questions which inevitably rattle around in the heads of every person willing to turn inwards. Man's great power is the power to think teleologically, the ability to posit an event before it happens, to imbue the non-existent with meaning. This is a direct import of our historical development, our evolutionary relationship to labour. In Chapter 13 of the first volume of Capital, Marx wonders at this phenomenon [15]:
"A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman's will be steadily in consonance with his purpose."The search for meaning is intimately tied up in the psychology of the human brain. Hegel provides a similar, but slightly different take [9]:
"The means is higher than the finite purposes of external purposiveness: the plough is made honorable then are immediately the enjoyments, which it procures and which are the purposes. The tool lasts while the immediate enjoyments pass away and are forgotten. It is in their tools that human beings possess power over external nature, even though with respect to their purposes they are subjected to it."Not only do we think teleologically from our need to labour, but how we labour alters our capacity for teleology. We think before we act, and our actions inform our further thinking.
Knausgaard thinks himself into an existential spiral and feels himself bereft of meaning; it pains him greatly. Prior to his father's death, he took refuge in the Heideggerian concept that death itself provides meaning. It is a phenomenon which could only be "understood existentially" [10], this experience being perhaps the most sublime of all. When his father dies he wavers:
"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."Even death is devoid of meaning. Soon after, Knausgaard marvels at the patriotism of Ernst Jünger. Here was a man willing to fight for what he believed in. Knausgaard cries out:
"Who would not wish to be a part of something greater than the self? Who would not wish to feel their life to be meaningful? Who would not wish to have something to die for?"
The feelings of emptiness that pervade these excerpts, and much of My Struggle, should not be ridiculed (even when wrapped in Knausgaard's signature pathetic whining). These are feelings felt by millions of people all of the time. These are also feelings of a distinctly historical nature. The philosopher and cultural theorist Walter Benjamin, in his essay On the Concept of History, developed a theory of how time has been experienced historically. He grouped perceptions of time into two camps: "homogenous, empty time" and "messianic time" [2]. Homogenous time represents the time of the modern day, one haunted by the mechanical clock. Every second is quantified and accounted for—the world is devoid of mystery. Messianic time, on the other hand, represents the time of the ancients, a time awash in infinite possibility:
"Surely the time of the soothsayers, who divined what lay hidden in the lap of the future, was experienced neither as homogenous nor as empty. Whoever keeps this in mind will perhaps have an idea of how past time was experienced as remembrance: namely, just the same way. It is well-known that the Jews were forbidden to look into the future. The Torah and the prayers instructed them, by contrast, in remembrance. This disenchanted those who fell prey to the future, who sought advice from the soothsayers. For that reason the future did not, however, turn into a homogenous and empty time for the Jews. For in it every second was the narrow gate, through which the Messiah could enter."A similar variation of this idea can be seen in Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle in which he places the experience of time into three major categories: cyclical time, irreversible time, and commodity-time [3]. Cyclical time is that which was experienced by early human civilizations, time moved with agricultural cycles; it was long and flowed seamlessly, but not in any given direction—it turned as if it were a great wheel always returning to the same starting point. Irreversible time begins at the first instance of the medieval chronicle. Time now progresses on the page from left to right and with it comes the concept of "progress", the idea of a forward march. Eternity becomes a long collection of chunks of time, men of the Renaissance view more time as a way to collect more knowledge, the advent of early capital sees the advent of a "universal history", a time shared by all. Commodity-time is defined thusly:
"The time of production, commodity-time, is an infinite accumulation of equivalent intervals. It is the abstraction of irreversible time, all of whose segments must prove on the chronometer their merely quantitative equality. This time is in reality exactly what it is in its exchangeable character. In this social domination by commodity-time, ‘time is everything, man is nothing; he is at most the carcass of time' ([Marx,] Poverty of Philosophy)."Benjamin recounts that during the July Revolution a collection of revolutionaries began simultaneously and independently shooting the clock towers of Paris as if in an attempt to revolt against this new sense of time. Wittgenstein's Tractatus contains within it the spirit of messianic time [23]:
"Death is not an event in life. Death is not lived through. If by eternity we mean not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then to live eternally is to live in the present. In the same way as our visual field is without boundary, our life is endless."
Under the weight of an incalculable sea of empty time, Knausgaard flees into the self, and into the world of myth. In Book 6 he moans:
"When we closed the door on religion, we closed the door on something inside ourselves as well. Not only did the holy vanish from our lives, all the powerful emotions associated with it vanished too."Here Knausgaard wishes to turn back the clock, to return to a simpler time when the world was draped in mystery. He speaks of a desire to bring forth the "heroic", the "beautiful", and the "charismatic" from the annals of history. (But what was so heroic about being a German peasant in 1312? Or a Persian trader in 480 BC? He can't say. Only vaguely mythic gesticulations will suffice.) What Knausgaard refuses to acknowledge is that these are historical myths which were created by real, concrete men who inhabited physical space and passed their lives submerged in time. Feuerbach says of the religion of the Greek's that "for just as involuntarily, as necessarily, as the Greek was a Greek, so necessarily were his gods Greek beings, so necessarily were they real, existent beings"[6]. For Knausgaard, the Greek gods are abstractions that inhabit beauty and the majesty of human imagination; for the Greeks, they were real actors who shaped the world. In the Grundrisse, Marx details exactly the phenomenon that Knausgaard is struggling with:
"It is well known that Greek mythology is not only the arena of Greek art but also its foundation. Is the view of nature and of social relations on which the Greek imagination and hence Greek mythology is based possible with self-acting mule spindles and railways and locomotives and electrical telegraphs? What chance has Vulcan against Roberts\&Co., Jupiter against the lightning-rod and Hermes against the Credit Mobilier? All mythology overcomes and dominates and shapes the forces of nature in the imagination and by the imagination; it therefore vanishes with the advent of real mastery over them…[emphasis added]"We cannot return to the ignorance of the Greeks or that of the ancient Jews who believed that Methuselah really did live 969 years.
The beauty of reading My Struggle is seeing this dialectic play out. Capital has wrought an entirely new psychology, one which requires man to forcibly retreat into myth to provide his life meaning. But this myth is hollow---it no longer has the power for us that it once did for the ancients. Marx and Engels spoke on this transformation in The Communist Manifesto[16]:
"[The bourgeoisie] has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers."Although many might ambiently feel the results of this historic transformation, it is rarely often laid so bare. What was once holy melts away. Men no longer chatter about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Now they calculate how many transistors can fit inside of a CPU. Theodicy has been sequestered to the domain of the stock ticker; multithreaded quantitative easing processes have become the cherubim which attend to Capital, the lord God almighty, Adonai.
Knausgaard's response is to then focus on what he can see in front of him. The gorgeous dance of steam emanating from the rich blackness of a cup of coffee. Words pirouette. They skip and twirl on the page. A man pisses into the toilet, his penis is bit by a beetle, he touches a woman and immediately ejaculates in his pants; a man goes to school, to work, to his grandparents' house; a man has children, he mutilates himself, he towers over his father's corpse. A life is lived and passes into the cavernous pit of time. It echoes softer and softer until it cannot be heard again. One exists and then one does not exist; the beauty lies in the cracks, the moments one finds the external melting into the internal.
The circle is finally squared on a final reflection of Linda's hospitalization:
"The story of last summer, which I have just told, looks different now, I know, from the way it really was. Why? Because Linda is a human being and her unique essence is indescribable, her own distinctive presence, her nature and her soul, which were always there beside me, which I saw and felt quite irrespective of whatever else was going on. It didn't reside in what she did, it didn't reside in what she said, it resided in what she was.Knausgaard looks into the eyes of another and sees life.
It resides in what she is."
[1] Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia
[2] Walter Benjamin, The Concept of History
[3] Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
[4] CH Edwards Jr., The Historical Development of the Calculus
[5] Friedrich Engels, The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man
[6] Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity
[7] Sigmund Freud, A Note Upon the Mystic Writing Pad
[8] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of Right
[9] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic
[10] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
[11] Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
[12] Just Cause. Directed by Arne Glimcher, 1995
[13] Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
[14] David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress
[15] Karl Marx, Capital
[16] Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto
[17] Karl Marx, The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature
[18] Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach
[19] JM Pullon, The History of the Abacus
[20] Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology
[21] Baruch Spinoza, Letter to G. H. Schaller dated October, 1674
[22] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
[23] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus