So Much Longing in So Little Space

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  – Well, well, I said. – So this is where he lived.

  – He had his studio down there, the woman said. – It was torn down, but it’s been rebuilt to look the same as it was.

  I tried to picture him, lying on the bed, standing in front of the window, sitting and drinking with his friends in the next room, one of those liquid evenings that there must have been so many of. The quarrel with Tulla Larsen which ended with him waving a pistol about and accidentally shooting himself in the finger.

  But all I could see was the room here and now, so museum-like and looking rather contrived, since the authenticity wasn’t a result of life being lived here but rather of time standing still. The film crew walking around filming, Joachim standing there and looking around.

  – I’m not really much in favour of a biographical approach to art, he said.

  – Me neither, I said.

  – But here we are.

  – In Munch’s house. And I’ve touched Munch’s overcoat!

  – I think the beach from Melancholy is down there, Emil said. – Though there’s some contention about it, it might also be from a beach a little further down.

  – Well, let’s go down there, then, Joachim said. – And see if we can find the Melancholy beach.

  * * *

  * * *

  A few minutes later we were standing on the beach, next to a boulder that was larger than the others, discussing whether or not this was the Melancholy rock.

  – If it had been here, there should have been forest there, Joachim said, pointing inland. – As far as I remember?

  – But that pier out there seems right, I said. – And the line of the beach fits. They could have cut down the forest since then, no?

  – Well, sit down then, let’s see!

  I sat down on the rock, supported my chin on my hand. I couldn’t keep from smiling.

  – That’s not melancholy! Joachim said.

  – I know, I said. – But it isn’t easy to be melancholy with so many people watching. Try it yourself!

  Joachim sat down, chin in hand, a doleful look on his face. The beach curved away behind him, ending at the jutting pier, but it was much shorter, entirely lacking the depth of the painting.

  – It isn’t here, I said. – Let’s try the next one!

  * * *

  * * *

  We approached the next cove from the forest, and I recognised the beach and the sea between the tree trunks: it was from here that so many of his pictures had been seen. And when we got down to the beach, we saw that its curving edge resembled the shoreline in Melancholy.

  It felt very peculiar. The experience was rather like the feeling one sometimes gets visiting a childhood haunt, how shockingly small everything seems. I thought about a time a few years ago when I drove to my grandparents’ house in western Norway together with my own children. The roads were much narrower than I remembered, the distance was shorter, and the place that in my memories was one of the centres of the world in reality lay on its very periphery. And then the two main rooms in the house, which in my recollection were vast halls, full of objects and things happening, but in reality were tiny and rather wretched.

  It wasn’t just that this forest was so small, whereas in the paintings it was The Forest, and that the beach was so commonplace, while in the paintings it was practically mythological, it was also that the forest and the beach were so shockingly concrete, and seemed to reject the images in my mind.

  The present is so powerful because it is the only thing that exists, all the rest is simply notions we have, which in themselves have neither form nor shape nor weight. When I stood in my grandparents’ rooms, the present with one blow knocked down all memories, although there were hundreds of them, spanning more than twenty years.

  And yet it would be a big misunderstanding to think that whatever has no form, no shape and no weight – in other words, our thoughts, feelings, notions, ideas, memories, mental images – always dissolves in the presence of the reality of the now. One could also argue the opposite, that reality is something we have learned how to see, that it appears in and affirms an image we have beforehand. Of course, it isn’t that simple either, but the fluid zone between the world in itself and our image of it is what painting explores, that is its core activity. That we still remember Munch, and that his art is still alive in our culture, is because he went further in exploring that territory than most of his contemporaries.

  But in what way is his art still alive? The actual pictures exist in actual places – most of them in museums – in the same way that the motifs they depict exist in concrete places. But it isn’t in the realm of the concrete that they live on, it is in our notional world, in the minds of each and every one of us.

  * * *

  *

  Some weeks before Christmas I saw that a picture by Munch had been put up for sale on a Swedish auction site I sometimes visit, it was a portrait of a woman from 1904, one of the many thousands of prints he had made in the course of his long life. It had never struck me before that one could actually buy a picture by Munch. A painted version of The Scream had been sold in 2012, it went for more than 120 million dollars. But there were so many of the prints, and they weren’t original in the same way as the paintings, so they were within financial reach, this one cost roughly the same as a six- or seven-year-old Volkswagen Golf.

  I enlarged the image on the screen. The portrait was very simple, it seemed almost to have been drawn with a single line, and it was beautiful. I thought, damn it, I’ll place a bid. Then I thought, come on, Munch on the wall, what kind of people have that? Old men and women belonging to the bourgeoisie, rich people who have either inherited the picture or bought it as a status symbol. But what kind of status did it give? Nothing I wanted to identify myself with, in any case.

  In many ways I experienced the world in the same way I did when I was twenty, it was as if identity changed much more slowly than life, it crept forward like an oil tanker, and I was the tanker, while the small speedboats and cabin cruisers which surrounded it on all sides were the events it related to. When I was twenty, bourgeois life was the worst thing imaginable, it had to be transgressed in every conceivable way. The ideal, which was never articulated, not even vaguely thought out, lay fairly close to the life of a band on tour, or how I imagined this to be. Long nights of drinking, music and a steady stream of girls, the hedonism balanced by a radical, alternative and burning political conviction. This was childish, but as I said, it was a twenty-year-old’s idea of life. And it was still with me, usually repressed, in the sense that I never thought through where I had ended up in life, what I did and why, what kind of values this expressed, but sometimes, perhaps if I read an interview with a band or came across a novel where that kind of existence was described, I might feel a wild and untamed urge to drink and go to ruin, just travel to some city, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Berlin, London, and go on a drinking spree. Write a little, perhaps, but mainly just live. Take the ferry to Poland and drive down through Europe, stay in cheap hotels in ever-changing towns, drink, drink, drink.

  The odd thing was that I felt like that, like someone who really lives that way, even though absolutely everything in my life represented the very opposite. I had a property with three houses on it and a garden I loved to be in and tend, and I had also bought the neighbouring house and the garden belonging to it, so that most of my spare time during the summer half of the year was spent keeping it all in order. I had four children and tried to raise them properly, I didn’t tolerate swearing and put my foot down on slovenliness or disorder whenever it appeared. The house was full of toys and school things, stuffed animals and iPads, and when I drove the children to and from school, it was with the sound of their horrid commercial pop hits streaming from the speakers. I made it a point of honour to keep the house tidy, and to make sure the children went to school properly dressed, did their homework and behaved poli
tely to grown-ups. That I failed on all scores is a different matter. But apparently none of this left any trace on my identity, there I was still a twenty-something-year-old man who wanted to be a writer, and who only accepted what in one way or other could be considered alternative in life.

  There was no way I could hang a picture of Munch on my wall.

  But oh, how beautiful it was.

  And it was alive, after more than a hundred years her gaze was still alive.

  Buying this picture, wasn’t that actually a way of not giving a damn?

  Yes, it was. That would make me someone who didn’t give a damn about anything.

  It felt good.

  * * *

  * * *

  Two days later, ten minutes before the auction closed, I placed a bid. Only one other bid had been registered, and it was low. Sometimes you could pull off a coup on this kind of site, I knew that, occasionally fantastic pictures go almost unnoticed there, so that you can get them at even less than the asking price.

  A few minutes passed, then I was outbid.

  So some bastard was out there who also wanted the picture.

  I placed a new bid.

  It might just be that the other bidder didn’t want the picture as strongly as I did, and that my new bid, arriving so quickly that it signalled ruthlessness, or so I felt, would frighten him or her away.

  But no. A counter-bid ticked in immediately.

  I waited a little while to give the bastard hope, let him or her sit there and fill up with joy at having succeeded, at having acquired the picture, and then, when there were only a few minutes left, I placed a new bid.

  Ha!

  After only a few seconds the bastard raised his bid. At the same time the deadline was extended. The price of the picture was already higher than I had decided beforehand that I was willing to pay, but this was no longer about money, it was about winning, crushing the other bidder, whoever it might be.

  And finally, after a new round, it went quiet.

  The picture was mine.

  * * *

  * * *

  Over the next few days I thought occasionally of all the other things I could have spent the money on. A fantastic holiday which the children would remember for the rest of their lives. Or redecorating the house, the children were big now, but not all of them had their own room yet, they would soon need one. Instead they got a little picture on the wall. A fruit press so that we could make juice from the apples and pears in the autumn, I had been thinking of that for a long time but hadn’t bought one since the expense seemed unnecessary, it was too much money for something that would only be used once a year. And besides, it would make us even more bourgeois.

  At the same time I visited the website and looked at the picture several times a day. I had worked on Munch’s pictures for a whole year, leafed through the volumes with his paintings countless times, and was also familiar with the book containing his collected graphic works. Many people, especially artists, considered Munch a greater graphic artist than painter, that his greatest talent lay there. He could capture a motif with few means, while also intensifying it, often almost brutally, or coarsely. This picture wasn’t like that, on the contrary it was delicate, a woman’s head drawn with a few lines, her gaze and thereby her presence remarkably alive.

  It didn’t say who she was, so it was probably a model. The title was Head of a Woman. It was dated 1904, by then Munch was already moving away from Symbolism and entering the long phase during which he lived within his art, and his pictures were like one long story about the place where he had taken refuge, and in all imaginable forms from brief notes and messages to epic works.

  This is to mythologise him, the solitary artist. And few artists in Norway have been more mythologised than Munch. He did it himself while he was alive, tying together his work and his life through suffering, and that notion still stands even though every single art historian who writes about him emphasises again and again that this is a myth, that he wasn’t solitary at all but was in touch with people all over Europe, and that he was an entrepreneur in relation to his own career, which he painstakingly and intelligently built and managed, and that it wasn’t his genius that found expression in paintings like The Scream or Vampire, but rather the spirit of the time, and that he was just one of many who gave expression to it.

  All of which is true of course.

  There is something about painters that causes myths or notions to spring up about them easily, perhaps because what they create is without language, the spaces they produce are without concepts, and these spaces, always enigmatic, must be explained. Since the 1960s most tendencies within the humanities have been towards the non-individual and de-centred, from structuralism, which was exclusively concerned with a work’s internal coherence, to post-structuralism and postmodernism, feminism and postcolonialism, but despite more than fifty years of theorising about the aesthetic, social and political contexts of art, the Great Artist is still a dominant figure in the public sphere, both historically, through the continual recycling of the divinities of modernism and pre-modernism, such as Manet, Monet, Cézanne, Picasso and Pollock, and for that matter Munch, exhibited in ever new contexts and combinations at the great museums, and now, with the epithet ‘the world’s greatest living artist’ alternating between Hockney, Kiefer, Richter and a handful of others.

  This is so not only because our reality has been so commercialised, I think; the urge to canonise seems almost inherent to the human condition, as a way of assembling valuables, creating places where they become visible. Homer is one such place, Aristotle and Praxiteles are such places, and of course it isn’t true only of men, Virginia Woolf, Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir are other such places, where something important is concentrated and becomes visible and possible to relate to. All artists wish to be raised to that level – those who deny it are either lying to themselves or to us – but if one gets there, as Munch did, only one side changes, the side facing outwards, towards others, while the side facing inwards, towards art, remains the same. Perhaps the painting before painting has grown, in the sense that there are more prior notions about what something is or should be, and especially about what has worked before, that have to be combated, but the practice itself is unchanged: the canvas, the brush, the colours.

  * * *

  * * *

  What is admirable about the late Munch is that he succeeded in breaking down all notions of his own greatness as he worked, and that he managed to break with the formulas he had been successful with previously, so that in every picture he began anew, from scratch: this tree, this forest, these colours. One of the last pictures he painted was Painter by the Wall, it dates from 1942 and depicts a man standing on a ladder painting the wall of a house. It has nothing to do with Munch’s inner life, it is a scene of everyday life that just happens to occur where he is, and which he paints. He doesn’t even paint it particularly well, but quickly and carelessly. The painter’s body is hardly more than a couple of brushstrokes, and the background just a little hastily raked-up green signifying grass and shrubs and some yellow and red-brown shapes indicating flowers. In the background there is a red barn, it lends depth to the picture and draws the viewer in, in the simplest way imaginable.

  We can’t get much further from the distorted fearful face and the mood dominating his most famous painting, The Scream. There is no doubt about what The Scream expresses, nor that it is a painting of the highest order, it is up there with van Gogh’s corn fields and Picasso’s Guernica. But a house painter on a ladder one fine day in the garden? The Impressionists elevated motifs such as this by capturing the moment in all its fullness and in that way tying the familiar and the everyday, that with which we are most intimate, to what lies just beyond the everyday and which one can sense on a summer day: that in the world which doesn’t care about us, which doesn’t care about anything, which merely exists, and which merely exi
sts always – the eternal. There is nothing eternal about Munch’s painter as he stands there on the ladder with a body made up of a couple of brushstrokes of white and beige, no eternity in the garden around him or in the barely glimpsed sky. No inner meaning, nor any meaning extracted from the external world – just a carelessly rendered scene of everyday life, verging on the insignificant in every direction.

  Is this where sixty-four years of experience as a painter had brought him?

  In a certain sense it was. Munch knew perfectly well how to paint a man on a ladder in a way that was photographic, realistic and anatomically correct – the studies he drew of the human body as a young man in Paris are technically perfect – he also knew well how to paint a man in a garden on a summer day impressionistically, and he presumably also knew how to paint the man on the ladder in a Munchian way. When he chose not to, it was because none of those techniques would help him accomplish what he was after. On the contrary, they would stand in his way.

  But what was he after?

  It can’t have been much. It wasn’t to create great art, it wasn’t to paint a masterpiece, it was simply to capture the essence of this little scene. The essence of the house painter, which is the vertical arc of the body ending in the lifted hand holding the brush, the essence of the ladder, which is the slightly rickety horizontal steps, the essence of the flowers and the grass, which is their yellow and green colour. Munch must have been happy seeing the painter standing there, and he must have been happy painting him, for that is what the painting expresses, joy at the scene unfolding. Perhaps he also remembered another garden with a red building in the background which he once painted joyfully, in his youth?