Gotham Diary:
Rubens?
20 June 2014
There are many good reasons for not running out, the moment I finished reading Karl Ove Knausgaard’s first volume of My Struggle, and buying the second, but the best of these is the respect that I have for the integrity of Book I. What Happens Next? When I was agonizing about whether to take the plunge into Knausgaard, I worried that suspense would be a problem, because only the second volume of the translation is available in paper, and the latter three volumes haven’t appeared in English at all. The other curious thing is that I expected My Struggle to be a long, wearying read.
Instead of the one-damn-thing-after-another, blow-by-blow account of the novelist’s life that the lazier reviewers had led me to fear, I found an extraordinarily articulated narrative in which almost everything that Knausgaard had to say was gathered up and placed within one of two massive frames, each occupying the bulk of one half of the book. I don’t feel that I’ve read a big book; I feel, rather, that I’ve been to see two very large and complicated pictures. The first frame could be labeled “New Year’s Eve, 1984,” and the second, “A Shroud for the Dead Father.” There are clusters of only apparently miscellaneous narrative on either side of the first frame, and the second is preceded by a rather lovely account of a day shortly preceding (we’re not told by how much) the birth of Karl Ove’s first child, an event that followed the death of his father by about five years, by which time he had made a new life for himself, with a new wife, in Sweden.
I am not going to indulge in a close reading of either frame, but a bit of running commentary about the first, and simpler, one will not be amiss.
My Struggle opens with an episode illustrative of the child Karl-Ove’s difficult relationship with his father. He is eight at the time. We learn that he is wary rather than watchful, too tense sometimes to be entirely attentive. This split, as it were, is then taken up in a portrait of the author as, himself now, a father. The droll account of his contradictory feelings about children in the house is kept sharp enough to avoid sentimental or pitying responses in the reader, and this, too, is essential introductory material, because it assures us, by its very nature, that Knausgaard is capable of writing about his “intimate” life (but is that really what he’s doing?) without buttonholing or breathing down our necks. He writes, as I wrote yesterday, like an old friend, someone who by definition knows how far to go and how much distance to keep — so that the distance itself is eloquent. The reader has every reason to expect that, however unpleasant the individual stories might be, Knausgaard himself is not going to be a disagreeable companion. The book that follows has the character of a long, ruminative walk.
On page 38, the first frame is mounted. The author is sixteen, and newly enrolled at a gymnasium in Kristiansand, a port at the southern end of Norway. (A map of Kristiansand and its environs would have been most welcome, but it didn’t take long to get the lay of the land from Google Maps.) On page 57, the frame is labeled. Karl Ove and his best friend, Jan Vidar, “sit down” to figure out how they’re going to be invited to a New Year’s Eve party. Jan Vidar was a classmate of Karl Ove’s before the latter’s move to the gymnasium; Jan Vidar himself now goes to technical college, where he’s learning to be a baker. Whenever I read Book I again, I will be interested to note the nuances with which the author notes the breach in the friendship caused by this divergence in careers; at this point, it is hardly felt by the boys themselves. Karl Ove feels excluded at the gymnasium, so his loyalties have not been tested. Nonetheless the fault lines are apparent — the fault lines that demarcate people who work with their minds apart from everyone else. The events of the New Year’s Eve, as they unroll, are pregnant with doom — the doom of Karl Ove’s hold on his childhood.
On page 67, after one of the space breaks that mark off the narrative units — the lowest-key device imaginable — Knausgaard writes, “Getting drunk required careful planning” — planning that Karl Ove has already learned his drinking may unravel. He now tells us about the second time he got drunk, which I point out only because it is the first of many shifts in time frame. It also leads directly to a broader reflective account of Karl Ove’s early love life, in which a budding love affair is retailed. (Again, I beg reader to remember the image of the old friend. An old friend would know how to make this hyperfamiliar but awkward material interesting. Knausgaard does, too.) It is only on page 85 that we return to the run-up to New Year’s Eve — and for two pages only!
Now the excursus about Karl-Ove’s hopeless rock band begins. It is funny and horrible, like all the best adolescent literature, and it might very well stand as a short story. I had the vague feeling that I had momentarily put down My Struggle and picked up a magazine. Creating this impression is one of Knausgaard’s great skills. He does not change his tone of voice, but he deals with facts differently. The New Year’s Eve story into which everything else is set reads like a documentary: we did this, then we did that; what a hassle. The rock-band episode, on the contrary, reads like a history, not so much an annals as an appreciation of a part of one’s life. But the two lengthy tangents in the New Year’s Eve frame are composed to enrich the foreground narrative. Knowing all about the rock band, not to mention our hero’s erotic attainments, makes the party that Karl Ove winds up stuck with far less unbearable for the reader.
We return to New Year’s Eve from the rock band story on page 99. Karl Ove’s parents are preparing for their own New’s Year Eve party, a gathering of relatives. Knausgaard takes a page to make some general remarks about his parents’ house and his family, concluding with the motif of his “mixed emotions” about his father. When the grandparents arrive, we’re told a bit about them — just enough to make the grandmother’s reappearance in the second half of the book very upsetting. Finally, on page 111, Karl Ove sets out on the big night’s adventures, which will involve transporting bags of beer bottles, without being noticed, to another part of the Kristiansand metroplex. We almost immediately learn that Karl Ove has an Elmer Fudd problem with the letter “r,” but aside from that, the young peoples’ party finally gets going and stays going. It is as deeply unsatisfying as any sixteen year-old’s pursuit of the high life could be. And, because an old friend is telling you about it, you chuckle sympathetically on every last page.
This story about one night, with its preparations and its immediate aftermath, occupies a significant portion of a book that is widely, but erroneously, assumed to be a shapeless “dear diary.” There is, in this first book of six, no sense whatsoever of an autobiography. There is no question about Knausgaard’s having learned from Proust, among others, how to cover massive spaces with coherent blocks of narrative and reflection. Beyond that, however, the two writers have little or nothing in common. Their agonies as little boys are so different that they hardly seem to belong to the same species. But that is how it is with childhood horrors. We might well remember Knausgaard’s title, which is not “My Life” but My Struggle. Accent on both.
***
My feeling about Knausgaard’s frames is difficult, because it creates a conflict. On the one hand, I believe that Knausgaard is a post-courtly writer. What do I mean by this? What I mean most is that whereas courtly novelists — Balzac, Turgenev, Proust, Henry James, and even, if with characteristic perversity, Flaubert — base their fiction on observation. Nobody is better at this, or at any rate more devoted to the technique, than James; observing others is all his characters to. I call this courtly because, as Norbert Elias allows in a footnote to his study, The Court Society, (page 106), it exploits and develops a skill developed in the courts, where observation was of vital concern to courtiers
Courtiers almost desperately needed to see through the masks of others, not to discover what they “really felt” — no one was interested in anyone’s “real feelings” until Rousseau came along — but what they intended to do, as well as how good their chances might be of accomplishing their goals. Elias quotes a piquant passage from Saint-Simon, piquant to us because Saint-Simon, sensing a chill in another courtier’s attitude towards himself, simply withdraws his claims upon the other man’s attentions as soon as he is sure that the chill is not accidental or inadvertent. He is not interested in why there is a chill. Because he already knows: there must have been a shift in the triangle linking Saint-Simon, the other courtier, and the complex of money and power that is the heart of every court.
In Henry James, too, everyone is after money and power. Otherwise Charlotte and the Prince would have married and lived happily ever after in gilded poverty.
Knausgaard is not in this sense an observer, and what he wants to talk about is his screwups. It is impossible to imagine a courtly reader’s taking any interest in his work.
And yet, what do the massive narrative frames of My Struggle bring to mind but the great Renaissance and baroque cycles of wall-paintings and tapestries. Why does Peter-Paul Rubens’s set of twenty-four pictures about the career of Marie de Médicis, of all things, haunt the afterimage of my reading of Knausgaard?
I am obliged to suppose that awe is the only explanation.
Bon weekend à tous!
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