Reading Note:
50% More!
25 June 2015
Even more baldly than in Book 1, the suspense in Book 2 of My Struggle depends on regressions. Something is about to happen — the author/narrator, Karl Ove Knausgaard, say, is about to find out how his wife feels about his having extended his “time-off” hour at a local café, leaving her to care for the two children and to do everything else around the house, by more than doubling it — but a hinge pivots, and the narrative slips back to an earlier time, suspending the abandoned moment.
The hinge in my for-instance is a Russian woman, a neighbor from hell, whom Knausgaard espies in his apartment building’s elevator as he’s on his way home to face the music. We are on page 105. At this particular moment, Knausgaard is the father of a little girl; the son in the stroller and the little girl who likes to be carried, in Book 2’s opening pages, have not yet been born. We have already had two regressions since then. Now, without so much as clearing his throat, Knausgaard launches a description of his horrid early encounters with the Russian woman, who would get drunk and play Eurodisco at top volume in the middle of the night. At that time, Knausgaard’s wife, Linda, was still pregnant with their first child. That time becomes this time, and there is a leisurely account of an evening that the Knausgaards spend going to the movies, to escape the racket in the building. Well, the Russian woman turns off the music as they’re leaving, but they decide to go out anyway; it will be one of their last changes for a night out alone.
On page 119, a paragraph begins, “Then, in the days before Christmas, all went quiet downstairs.” The narrative stays in the time frame but slips its referents. Christmas festivities are described, and attention gradually focuses on Knausgaard’s Norwegian friend, Geir, a writer who had already established himself in Stockholm when the narrator decided that he, too must leave Norway, and his first marriage with it. Now, on page 130, we drop back to that point in time. Twenty-five pages later, I’m still on that plane. I’m still waiting to find out (a) if the Russian woman continued to persecute the Knausgaards with her disco and (b) what Linda had to say when Knausgaard came home, an hour-and-a-half late, from his time-off in the café, reading, or in any case thinking about, Dostoevsky. I’m not sure that I’ll ever find out.
If Knausgaard were not a very good writer, of course, all the temporal manipulations in the world would do his sprawling epic no good. But they serve a practical purpose. Reading all these episodes from the past, we know, roughly, how things are going to wind up for Knausgaard. We know that he’ll become a family man with a modern family man’s problems. On page 155, Knausgaard has not even met his future wife, but I know she’s there. As are the three children, Vanja, Heidi, and Jon. Thus large-scale suspense, which can have one resolution only (how will it end?), is replaced by multiple small-scale uncertainties (what about the Russian madwoman?) that linger not in the distance behind us, where completed stories lay, slowly fading out of memory, but in the distance ahead, where they sparkle invisibly like so many unopened Christmas presents. It is a bizarre form of opulence.
***
As in Proust, there are reflective set pieces that unspool almost completely outside the adjacent time-line. On his first day in Stockholm, for example, before he has met up with Geir (who is going to put him up for a few days), Karl Ove buys a used copy of Hölderlin’s poems, and kills time by reading them in an alley. This reminds him of his uncle Kjartan, a Communist and something of a saint; when Karl Ove was a boy, he heard Kjartan speak enthusiastically about Hölderlin. After several pages of this further but quite minor regression, there is a break in the text, and then:
Although much had changed in my life since then my attitude to poetry was basically the same. I could read it, but poems never opened themselves to me, and that was because I had no “right” to them; they were not for me. (142)
This is tantamount to admitting, and then describing, a weakness for kinky sex: how can you not be gripped by such a confession, coming as it does from a successful — now, as you hold a translation in your hands, even more successful — novelist? Hey, even he does not get poetry! But we must read more closely. Knausgaard elaborates on the “right” to read poetry, and how to deal with the lack of it (there are three options, sketched in tickling detail), but he does not explain what it means for a poem to open itself. How could he, he might object, when it has never happened? But what might it be like, and how does he know it isn’t happening? These are classic adolescent anxieties that I file under “50% More.” Why? Ascoltami.
A story raged through boarding school like a virus: scientists had discovered that uncircumcised men experienced 50% more pleasure having sex. Yes, 50% more! (This was a time of ever more wonderfully effective cleaners, from detergent to toothpaste.) Most of us were unfamiliar with the pleasures of sex, at least with another person: we had not got that far. We certainly weren’t prepared to interrogate the science behind this electrifying assertion. We were more than prepared to assume that sex with another person that ended in orgasm was 100% pleasant for everybody. Sex was like an automobile, equipped with standard transmission and standard everything else. Because we were Americans born at a certain point in time, almost all of us were circumcised, not just our Jewish classmates. We were dismayed to “learn” that our sexual pleasure had already, prior to any actual enjoyment, been slashed in half. The more mathematical among us would have counseled that it was cut by only a third — great.
The trouble is, much of what we learn in high school is misinformation of this kind. It is neither right nor wrong; it is only simplified to the point of inarguability, and no sooner do we apprehend it than it sinks into the foundations of our becoming-adult worldview. Only later, when we’re in our fifties, do we begin to see that, indeed, everything we learned in school was wrong. It begins, innocently enough, with actual changes in the world: Karachi is suddenly no longer the capital of Pakistan. (When did that happen?) This leads to more penetrating re-evaluations: Why was Bonn of all places ever the capital of West Germany? Finally, assuming that our minds are still working, we get round to questioning the really unhelpful stuff. What precisely does it mean for a poem to open itself to a reader?
There is no point to telling high school students that poetry, literature, everything — that everything in life reflects what you bring to it, because high school students have nothing to bring. All they have is childhood, and the evidence of childhood cannot be destroyed quickly enough. A poem does not open itself to a reader: a reader opens the poem, by listening to it. This can be difficult because life is full of noisy distractions, many of which originate in our busy minds — but that is the only real difficulty. How do you know when you have opened a poem? You know when it gives you pleasure. That is all there is to it.
The easiest, and also the most delightful, way to open a poem is by following a congenial writer’s account of the pleasures that he or she gets from it. This is what Helen Vendler does, academic drag notwithstanding. This is also what Karl Ove Knausgaard does when he complains about life: he is really sharing the pleasures of complaint.
During those Christmas festivities that I mentioned above, Knausgaard inserts a remark made by Geir that acts both as literary criticism of his books and as recognition of his books’ literary reception. “Easy for you to say, that is. You can spend twenty pages describing a trip to the bathroom and hold your readers spellbound.” (124) This is true. What accounts for it? How does he do it? I have a hunch, but I’m keeping it to myself, at least until I finish Book 2.