My Struggle (Book 1) by Karl Ove Knausgaard

It would be folly to make grand pronouncements about the entirety of My Struggle before having read all six volumes, indeed before the whole work has even appeared in English. One never wants to be in the position of the undergraduate laying claim to the entire edifice of Dante’s Divine Comedy or Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, having only just hung his coat up in the entryway. But there is value, I think, in noting how an author “works up” his material and themes—even if we expect that, in a truly inspired work, we are due for a reversal and transformation of these early footholds.

In this spirit, I want to look at only a few quotations from the first book of My Struggle, which I hope will indicate what Knausgaard is up to, and why we should care:

• “There is no one who does not understand their own world.” 
• “I had no history.” 
• “By then I am on the outside looking in. Inside, I don’t have a chance.” 

I could have chosen any number of variations on these sentiments, and a number of additional themes besides: death, family, art and reality, alcoholism, the feeling of being different from other persons, the banal seductions of narcissism, and so on. Alternately, one could speak of the great set-pieces which dominate the novel: a long replay of an adolescent New Year’s Eve, or the preparations for a family member’s funeral. Lastly, there is the remarkable joining of the jagged, non sequitur recollections that Knausgaard is seemingly just toggling through.

There is no plot to speak of, but the assemblage is less random than it feels in the reading. The entire point of the New Year’s Eve episode, it would seem, is that present experience, while one is “in it,” is always looking in the wrong place. From page 56 to 144, Karl Ove (as we will call the central character) has no idea about the oncoming, defining disaster of this epoch of his life, namely his parents’ divorce (page 166). Perhaps this episode will come to attach itself to some other meaning as the book goes on: already there is a horrible irony in the effort Karl Ove goes to hide alcohol from his family...

The main question I have about the narrative at this point is how interested Knausgaard is in motivation. For example, in Remembrance of Things Past, Proust takes great care to outline the mechanisms of desire, jealousy, habit, association, the ambitions and disdains relating to class, the Oedipus complex around the maternal goodnight kiss, hypochondria, and so on. Each of these is an explanation, something we can point to in answering the question why [does a character do such and such]? Balzac, Wagner, Zola, Eliot, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Racine—the great line of Proust’s forebears—all have their own bank of motivations and drives. We will have to see how Knausgaard stands in this respect, in future volumes.

“There is no one who does not understand their own world.”

In the most obvious sense, this is plainly wrong. At the least, it is what in the philosophy of Hegel functions as a speculative remark: we have to re-learn what terms like “understand,” “own,” and “world” mean. Because one wants to immediately retort: children don’t understand their world. But what we learn is that children don’t have a world of their own, or to the extent that they do, then this cul-de-sac of ignorance and exclusion is well-understood.

Much of Karl Ove’s task is putting things in their right place. This has a few different iterations, some small (which house are we going to call “the house of the bottles,” for instance), but the very large thing to be put into place is his father, and even how his father put things in their place, organizing his life:

I was eight years old that evening, my father thirty-two. Even though I still still can’t say that I understand him or know what kind of person he was, the fact that I am no seven years older than he was then makes it easier for me to grasp some things... The meaning of his days was not concentrated in individual events but spread over such large areas that it was not possible to comprehend them in anything other than abstract terms. “Family” was one such term, “career” another. 

Over and over in the story, Karl Ove finds that he cannot “read” his father, that he is opaque, that he is transgressing the partitions and categories Karl Ove has built around him, diverging without invitation from an earlier impression. As in Proust’s insistence that no room is a priori habitable, but only acquaintance and immersion silences the clocks, softens the footfall, lowers the ceilings, and so on, “understanding one’s own world” is really a procedure of ignorance and limited perspective, not of cognitive grasping or curiosity:

As your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning. Understanding the world requires you to take a certain distance from it… At length we bring it within the scope of our senses and we stabilize it with fixer. When it has been fixed we call it knowledge. 

In Proust, of course, this procedure primes us for recognition scenes, the coming-upon a well-known quantity in an unknown aspect, or the unexpected union of two “separate” characters (or places) in a disturbing identity. For Knausgaard, however, the point seems to be more a matter of scale and regulation. He wants to keep a distance, to monitor proximity and intensity, as in his curious image of time as a boat in a lock. To understand something is to be at a safe distance.

“I had no history” 

That must be it, I thought, and closed my eyes briefly to rid myself of the feeling that I was an idiot, which this train of thought had produced, since it was so obviously based on an illusion. I had no history, and so I made myself one, much as a Nazi party might in a satellite suburb. 

My Struggle is, obviously, titled after Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. When Knausgaard compares himself to the Nazis in the above passage, however, he is not invoking the embattled destiny of a Volk, but rather how deracinated and belated he feels. The Nazis conjured by this analogy and by the book’s title are not trying to resurrect a past, to summon up primal associations, but are almost pathetic. Defeat is something that, hopefully, if you move far enough away from, people will not associate you with, and you can work without that baggage. And so Karl Ove has cut himself off from his past, from his family, striving for equilibrium and the lowering of tension.

It is curious for the writer of an extraordinarily detailed, multi-volume memoir to proclaim that he has no history, and moreover, no interest in his personal past:

I remembered hardly anything form my childhood. That is, I remembered hardly any of the events in it. 

Now I had burned all the diaries and notes I’d written, there was barely a trace left of the person I was until I turned twenty-five. 

And while I spent a lot of time thinking about the past then, almost a morbid amount of time… the past is now barely present in my thoughts. 

Again, we have to learn to read “I had no history” as a speculative remark. Karl Ove has a history, a past, a memory, and so on. But wants to not have these things, for memories to no longer stir up anything or intrude. (In this sense it is the opposite of le temps retrouvé. The author of My Struggle would prefer le temps perdu.) When Knausgaard discusses the book as his only way of dealing with the past, the point is not to “exorcise his demons” or some such traumatic-cathartic approach; he is very explicit: writing is about breaking down, in the sense of chewing, making manageable. In writing about his father, Karl Ove stresses that the obstacle was the proximity of the subject; in discussing the art of Rembrandt, it is the “distance between reality and the portrayal of reality... this interlying space”; writing is about “the there itself” of writing, not (as in a traumatic confrontation) “what actions are played out there.” And it is true so far that history, the past, is useless clutter. There is simply nothing to do with it but set to work on it, scrubbing it away.

“But by then I am on the outside looking in. Inside, I don’t have a chance.” 

“On the inside” has two meanings in the novel. One is: to be included, invited, generic, a familiar, part of a crowd; the other meaning is almost the opposite: the smoldering trap of one’s own private self-mistrust, the perspective of falsity and inevitability that keeps one at a distance from the first meaning.

The first meaning is the dullness of a zero-degree of egoism, embodied by the adolescent Karl Ove, which the author Knausgaard is at the furthest distance from. In the past tense: “I wanted to be one of those at the center of things, I wanted to be invited to their parties, go out with them in town, to live their lives.” But in the present tense: “I do not want anyone to get close to me, I do not want anyone to see me.”

To be inside is to be “a focal point,” someone to whom “people paid attention.” At the same time, Karl Ove is afflicted by how his speech impediment must sound to others, how he looks, how his opinions sit in the hand.

Being on the inside also turns out to have a secret terror: Karl Ove is worried that if he gets drunk, he will slip into the world of those he detests, “allow it to swallow me up whole and no longer be able to see the difference.” This guardedness and analysis prompts a painful self-consciousness: “All spontaneity vanished ... My awareness of the situation was too acute, and that put me outside it.” In this sense, the imagination of the attention of others turns into the scrutiny Karl Ove imposes on himself. He remains socially “outside” because he is always “outside” in sense number two:

As a rule I was always aware of how I looked, of how others might think of what they saw… It had never happened that the eyes that saw me meant nothing at all, or that the surroundings I was in were as if expunged.” 

The other meaning of “inside”/“outside” is the difference between spontaneity, the present, awareness, the unprotectedness of responding and feeling, as compared to retrospection, dissection, judgment, and shame.

I didn’t care anymore. But there had been days when I had cared, days when I had been on the outside and had suffered. Now I was only on the outside. 

There is a nightmarish compulsion built into this second meaning, reminiscent of Saint Paul: “For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I.”

How could we have been so stupid? It wasn’t what I had wanted, in fact it was the very last thing I had wanted... Yet that was precisely what I had done. 

It remains to be seen, of course, what Knausgaard is going to do with these questions.