Reading Note:
Saved
29 July 2015
For a number of years, my old friend Fossil Darling used to spend a few hours every weekend walking a dog, a yellow lab nicknamed Lula, in Central Park. The dog belonged to neighbors who were either too busy or too infirm to keep up with Lula’s puppydog enthusiasm, a trait that in her case was unaccompanied by brains. Afterwards, Fossil would call me up and regale me with delightful anecdotes of the day’s outing — delightful to him. I winced whenever he described Lula’s raptures in the muckier margins of the Lake, and his own delight at being covered with muck when Lula returned to his side and shook herself off. At first, I suspected that Lula had bitten Fossil, and infected him with her idiocy. Later, I suspected that it was the other way round.
I’ve been reminded of Lula by Karl Ove Knausgaard, the principal character in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle 3: Boyhood. In addition to the dramatically foreshadowed career as a writer who will not have left the world as he found it, Karl Ove is something of a strange duck. As he himself will tell you, tell anybody; just try to keep him from shouting it, he is very good in school, or at school. He’s only second best at math, but he’s best at all the other stuff. When his mother forbids comic books in the fourth grade, he reads library books instead, many of them classics that most kids won’t read until they have to, in college.
This learned and literate persona is at odds with the Lula side of his personality. If I remember My Struggle 2 correctly, Karl Ove will grow up to play soccer well enough for other players to want him on their teams, and presumably he is not inept as a child; but he seems to lack the gifts for every other kind of sport, as well as for defending himself in schoolyard fights, even though he is taller than most of the boys. And when he takes to mischief, the reader reflexively murmurs, oh, no…
But before we get to the mischief, we must understand two things about Karl Ove. First, he has an ogre of a father. To put it another way, the father has serious anger management issues. From time to time — there’s no predicting when — the father is overcome by a hostile, suspicious spirit that fills his eyes with a menacing gleam. All too often, these spells coincide with some sort of lapse or misbehavior that Karl Ove has tried hard to hide. These efforts at concealment, however, invariably alert the father’s radar. The physical aspect of the ensuing ordeal is usually limited to twisting Karl Ove’s ears and pulling him about the house, but child abuse does not require broken bones. The sound of the man’s “heavy step” upon the stair strikes almost as much fear into the reader’s heart as it does Karl Ove’s.
The other little detail is Karl Ove’s Christianity. This is, quite literally, the saving of him. There are, to be sure, aspects of meekness in Karl Ove’s makeup. He is naturally sympathetic, and one suspects that the lack of “strength” that allows other boys to pin him to the ground is more a lack of interest in fighting; I can’t recall an instance of Karl Ove’s trying to pin down anybody else. And it takes less than nothing to make Karl Ove cry. His eyes don’t shed so much as they hemorrhage tears. But then, one sick day, Karl Ove reads a book “published by a Christian company,” and is transfigured by the tale, which concerns a boy whose father has died and who must support his mother by foraging, a necessity that exposes him to the hateful attentions of a gang of bullies.
Not only did they hound and beat up this boy who was so different from them, they swore and stole as well and the inequity of this gang’s successes, in the light of the constant setbacks suffered by the honest, loving, and upright protagonist, was almost impossible to bear. I cried at the unfairness of it, I cried at the evil of it, and the dynamics of a situation whereby good was suppressed and the pressures of injustice were approaching bursting point shook me to the core of my soul and made me decide to become a good person. From then on I would perform good deeds, help where I could, and never do anything wrong. I began to call myself a Christian. I was nine years old, there was no one else in my close vicinity who called himself a Christian, neither Mom nor Dad nor the parents of any of the other kids … and of course no young people, so it was a fairly solitary undertaking I initiated in Tybakken at the end of the seventies. I began to pray to God last thing at night and first thing in the morning. When, in the autumn, the others gathered to go apple scrumping down in Gamle Tybakken I told them not to go, I told them stealing was wrong. I never said this to all of them at once, I didn’t dare, I was well aware of the difference between group reactions, when everyone incited each other to do something or other, and individual reactions, when each person was forced to confront an issue head-on with no hiding place in a deindividuated crowd, and said to each one that apple scrumping was wrong, think about it, you don’t have to do it. But I didn’t want to be alone, so I accompanied them, stopped by the gate, and watched them sneak across the age-old fields in the dusk, walked beside them as they scoffed apples on the way back, their winter jackets bulging with fruit, and if anyone offered me anything I always refused, because dealing was no better than stealing. (283-4)
Am I alone in finding this passage hilarious? It’s as though Woody Allen had become a sainte nitouche. The self-preserving self-satisfaction is too innocent to be unattractive, but it is ludicrous all the same, never more so than at the moment when, having been punished for something by his father and boiling with thirst for revenge, Karl Ove asks the What-Would-Jesus-Do question and decides to forgive. This could be intolerably cloying, but Knausgaard knows how to capture the ridiculous angle. I would perform good deeds … and never do anything wrong. Over time, the scope of bad deeds narrows down to the use of swear-words, which Karl Ove shuns, at least until the incident in the garbage dump with the beer bottle and a black beetle (299).
Nevertheless, piety does put a stop to lighting fires in the woods and dropping stones on passing cars. Karl Ove is simply not cut out for a life of crime. He is the one who always gets caught, and, childish delusions notwithstanding, he is incapable of dissembling. When a particularly large stone connects with the roof of a sedan, buckling it but just missing the windshield, Karl Ove is transfixed by the enormity of what he has done. As always, he is immobilized by panic. Rooted to the ground, he is quickly accosted by the furious driver, and of course he gives his actual name and address. By the same token, he does not tell his parents what has happened; he keeps hoping that the driver will forget to call, and in fact so much time goes by that he begins to think that he may have gotten away with it. So they hear it from the driver first. What a cluck this kid is! Only Jesus can keep him out of trouble.
***
There is a je ne sais quoi about My Struggle — a lightness of touch, an air almost of inconsequence, of causes without effects — that one might associate with a book about childhood, especially a book about childhood in a relatively poor country (albeit one on the verge of reaping great oil wealth) on the edge of the habitable world. Electronic appliances and automobiles aside, it could all be taking place in the 1880s. But I attribute this simplicity to something else, to a tremendous resistance on Knausgaard’s part to the vernacular of Freud. What’s missing from My Struggle is what I think Tom Wolfe called the “hydraulics” of Freudian theory — pressures: the repressions, the suppressions, the expressions, explosive or neurotic, of psychic forces. Even the simplicity is a mirage; what’s missing is not complexity but mechanism, the if-then necessities that make machines work the way we want them to. If Karl Ove suffers from abominable conceit, then his friendship with happy-go-lucky Geir is not necessarily doomed. Human beings remain unpredictable except in one respect: they display an all but overwhelming desire to get along with their nearest and dearest, whether they understand them or not. Even when no one is really being “good enough.” It is a hard world, but it is obstinately sociable. Much of what Knausgaard presents is what we have lost to therapies and devices.