Since these religious ideas are so familiar—and supposedly profound—they are likely to be taken as a guide to Knausgaard’s work. Yet that would be a mistake. Throughout My Struggle (and particularly in the final volume) there are numerous statements or small essays that appear to present the philosophy of the book. Many of them are in conflict with one another or internally contradictory and to take them at face value would be to miss almost everything that is important in them. Knausgaard is a tremendous essayist, but his particular talent is to allow his essays to emerge as part of the narrative. The theoretical reflections exist on the same plane as the practical actions; they reflect how someone thinks and feels at a particular time rather than expressing the perspective of someone who is outside the narrative and in control of its meaning.
To understand the philosophical poetics of My Struggle, then, we must attend to what happens in the narrative alongside the many and often contradictory statements of intent. The view that our secular lives are soulless and banal—that we need to be saved from our time-bound existence—belongs to the tendency to disown his life. While this tendency persists throughout My Struggle, the very writing of the book goes in the opposite direction. Far from regarding his life as soulless or banal, the writer of My Struggle depends on the faith that there is enormous significance and depth in the experiences of a finite life, worthy of being explored down to the most subtle nuances and emotional reverberations. The aim is to attach himself more deeply to his life, rather than transcend it. From this perspective, it is Augustine’s mystical ecstasies that are soulless and banal, since they seek to leave the world behind in favor of an eternal presence where nothing happens. What is profound in Augustine is not the ascent to heaven but the descent into time and memory. It is the latter, descending movement that Knausgaard follows in his practice as a writer.
The key issue here is time. By using the first person like no one before, Augustine dramatizes what it means to be torn apart by time. Even his abstract philosophical speculations in the Confessions are marked by his concrete existence as he is longing and languishing, seized by hope or fear, elated by an insight or frustrated by an impasse. Accordingly, when Augustine pursues his philosophical analysis of time-consciousness in the Confessions, he also makes his readers feel how the problem of time is an intimate, personal concern. The investigation of time is itself a temporal activity and Augustine foregrounds the effort to articulate his own arguments, as an ongoing line of thought that at any moment may be broken. Likewise, when Augustine analyzes the work of memory, he does so by descending into “the caves and caverns” of his own memory, exposing the ways in which the integrity of his self is breached by a past he cannot fully recover.49 Moreover, as Augustine is writing his Confessions, he is still vulnerable to change and this drama becomes a part of the book itself. Intensifying the sense of his own vanishing presence, Augustine even highlights the fleeting time in which he composes his text: “Consider what I am now, at this moment [in ipso tempore], as I set down my confessions.”50
The same turn toward his own passing presence is pursued by Knausgaard in My Struggle. “Today is February 27, 2008. The time is 11:43 p.m.” we read early in the first volume, as he records the night when he begins to work on the book.51 A couple of pages later we learn that six days have passed for Knausgaard at the time of writing, as we find him at his desk again: “It is now a few minutes past eight o’clock in the morning. It is March 4, 2008. I am sitting in my office, surrounded by books from floor to ceiling, listening to the Swedish band Dungen while thinking about what I have written and where it is leading.”52 These explicit marks of time recur throughout My Struggle, returning with a particular frequency in the final volume, when he is trying to complete the book. “I am sitting all alone as I am writing this. It is June 12, 2011, the time is 6:17 a.m., in the room above me the children are asleep, at the other end of the house Linda is asleep, outside the window, a few yards out in the garden, angular sunrays descend on the apple tree. The foliage is filled with light and shadow.”53
These apparently simple observations encapsulate the poetics of My Struggle. Knausgaard’s writing develops a careful attention to the time and place where he finds himself. The fundamental form of such attention is the turn toward what is happening at this very moment—trying to capture life as it unfolds right now. The aim is to slow down the experience of temporality, to dilate moments of time and linger in their qualities. This movement does not yield a stable presence but, on the contrary, a stronger sense of how the present moment is ceasing to be and has to be held in memory, as it opens onto a future that exceeds it. By instilling this sense of transience, Knausgaard seeks to awaken his own attention and the attention of his readers. He wants to counteract habit: to prevent himself from taking his life for granted and see the world anew. This attempt to break with habit—to deepen the sensation of being alive, to make moments of time more vivid—is necessarily intertwined with a sense of finitude. It is because his life is finite that he cannot take it for granted and his desire to linger in a moment is animated by the awareness that it is passing away. Indeed, the sense of transience is an essential part of the radiance of the moment itself. Seeing the world anew is inseparable from the sense that the world you see anew is finite. It has not always been, it will not always be, and therefore it must be seized before it vanishes.
The moments of rapture, then, are always marked by their own finitude. For example, in the third volume Knausgaard gives an extraordinary account of his first love, at the age of seven. This is his earliest recorded experience of how the world can light up because of his attachment to what he sees. “Inside me,” he writes, “there suddenly existed a new sky under whose vaults even the most familiar of thoughts and actions appeared new.”54 This new sky is Anne Lisbet, with her thick, light-blue jacket, white cap, and dark, fierce eyes. One afternoon, as they play together in the forest, they pretend that he is a sailor who returns to her after a long separation. They run toward each other and, as she embraces him, his world is transformed:
My heart was racing, for I was not only standing at the bottom of a forest with the sky far above me, I was also standing at the bottom of myself and looking up into something light and open and happy. Her hair smelled of apples. Through the material of her thick padded jacket I could feel her body. Her cold, smooth face against mine, almost glowing.55
This experience of standing at the bottom of himself is the experience of being attached to what he sees, bound to the world through the love for another. As autumn turns to winter, his love for Anne Lisbet makes him absorb every shifting nuance of what happens:
When the snow began to fall we wandered around searching for suitable places to jump from, slide down, or dig holes in. Her hot, red cheeks then, the gentle but distinct smell of snow that changed so much according to the temperature, but that was everywhere around us nevertheless; all the possibilities that existed. One time the mist hung between the trees, the air was thick with drizzle and we were wearing waterproof clothing that was so frictionless on the snow that we could slide down it like seals. We climbed to the top of the slope, I lay on my front, Anne Lisbet sat astride me, Solveig astride Geir, and we slid down on our stomachs all the way to the bottom. It was the best day I had ever experienced. We did it again and again. The feeling of her legs clamped round my back, the way she held my shoulders, the howls of delight she gave when we picked up speed, the fantastic somersaults when we reached the bottom, rolling around with our legs and arms entwined. All while the mist hung motionless amid the wet, dark green spruce trees, and the drizzle in the air lay like a thin film of skin on our faces.56
The sense of possibility that is felt here (“all the possibilities that existed”) pervades every moment of bliss in My Struggle. The moments are not self-contained or timeless. On the contrary, their excitement resides in a sense of futurity, opening up ways of feeling and acting that were not possible befor
e. By the same token, the moments are fragile. His love for Anne Lisbet makes him receptive and elated, but also torn by a sense of imminent loss. “The most contradictory feelings coursed through me. One moment I was on the verge of tears, the next my chest was bursting with happiness.”57 This pain of bliss will recur in all the moments of happiness in My Struggle. The more attached he is to what he sees, the more vulnerable he is to bereavement. But this agony is also part of what enlivens and deepens his experience. If he could not lose his proximity to Anne Lisbet, he would have no sense of the miracle of being close to her. There would be no urgency to absorb the situation, to enhance his attention to what happens, to strive to retain what he is feeling, since nothing of value could be lost.
Knausgaard’s writing is at its most powerful when it strains to capture this relation between attachment and loss, receptivity and vulnerability. The second time he falls in love, at the age of sixteen, winter is on the verge of turning into spring and the upheaval takes place in him as much as in the landscape around him:
Few things are harder to imagine than that a cold, snowbound landscape, so marrow chillingly quiet and lifeless, will, within mere months, be green and lush and warm, quivering with all manner of life, from birds warbling and flying through the trees to swarms of insects hanging in scattered clusters in the air. Nothing in the winter landscape presages the scent of sun-warmed weather and moss, trees bursting with sap and thawed lakes ready for spring and summer, nothing presages the feeling of freedom that can come over you when the only white that can be seen is the clouds gliding across the blue sky above the blue water of the rivers gently flowing down to the sea, the perfect, smooth, cool surface, broken now and then by rocks, rapids, and bathing bodies. It is not there, it does not exist, everything is white and still, and if the silence is broken it is by a cold wind or a lone crow caw-cawing. But it is coming….it is coming….One evening in March the snow turns to rain, and the piles of snow collapse. One morning in April there are buds on the trees, and there is a trace of green in the yellow grass. Daffodils appear, white and blue anemones too. Then the warm air stands like a pillar among the trees on the slopes. On sunny inclines buds have burst, here and there cherry trees are in blossom. If you are sixteen years old all of this makes an impression, all of this leaves its mark, for this is the first spring you know is spring, with all your senses you know this is spring, and it is the last, for all coming springs pale in comparison with your first. If, moreover, you are in love, well, then…then it is merely a question of holding on. Holding on to all the happiness, all the beauty, all the future that resides in everything. I walked home from school, I noticed a snowdrift that had melted over the pavement, it was as if I had been stabbed in the heart. I saw boxes of fruit under an awning outside a shop, not far away a crow hopped off, I turned my head to the sky, it was so beautiful. I walked through the residential area, a rain shower burst, tears filled my eyes.58
This is an apparently romantic account of vitality, where the overflowing emergence of spring mirrors the upsurge of love. The barren, frozen landscape is flooded with glowing colors and released by animated movement, pulsating both in nature and in the teenager who finds himself attached to what he sees. Yet the sense of vitality is inseparable from a sense of finitude. The life that emerges has not always been (it is coming to be) and will not always be. The experience of beauty is therefore a stab in the heart, and he is seized by the desire to hold on to everything that will not last: “Holding on to all the happiness, all the beauty, all the future that resides in everything.” Seized by this desire, he has the sense of seeing beauty for both the first and the last time. Seeing the beautiful for the last time, his experience can be all the more radiant, all the more intense, because he is on the verge of losing what he loves. The sense of finitude, however, is already at work in his experience of beholding something as beautiful for the first time. The colors of the world are alight and at the same time they already bear their future fading within themselves. Indeed, the anticipated fading of the colors is part of what makes them glow. When he is seized by the colors of the world, the sense that they will fade is part of what makes the colors absorbing, part of what compels him to pay attention to their qualities and linger over their beauty.
The distention of time—how every moment trembles on the verge of the past and the future—thus appears in the light of secular passion. Distention is not only the negative condition of loss but also the positive condition of wonder. Only someone who is torn open by time can be moved and affected. Only someone who is finite can sense the miracle of being alive.
V
Knausgaard’s great predecessor is the modern writer who explored the experience of time more deeply than any other: Marcel Proust. Knausgaard recalls that he not only read Proust’s In Search of Lost Time “but virtually imbibed it,”59 and My Struggle bears the imprint of many passages from Proust. The influence is already visible in the basic form of the project. In Search of Lost Time devotes seven volumes, stretching over more than three thousand pages, to a man recollecting his life. My Struggle apparently follows the same model, devoting six volumes, also stretching over more than three thousand pages, to a man recollecting his life. While Knausgaard transforms the Proustian project in an important way—to which I will return—it is illuminating to dwell on what he learns from Proust.
The protagonist, Marcel, is himself in the process of learning throughout In Search of Lost Time. From early childhood he wants to become a writer, but he is plagued by doubts about his talent and not until the end does he discover what the subject of his book should be, namely, his own life. Rather than a transcendent topic of writing, which has always left Marcel’s imagination blank, it is “this life, the memories of its times of sadness, its times of joy”60 that he comes to see as the basis for his book. “The greatness of true art,” he declares, “lies in rediscovering, grasping hold of, and making us recognize…this reality which we run a real risk of dying without having known, and which is quite simply our life.”61
Accordingly, Marcel emphasizes that his work will be devoted to “the thing that ought to be most precious to us,” namely, “our true life, our reality as we have felt it.”62 This is why he can dwell on the experience of falling asleep for more than thirty pages, or seek to distill every nuance of an erotic touch, a flickering memory, an awakening sensation. Through the power of his prose, he wants to sharpen our perception and refine our senses. The aim is not to transport us to another life but to make us genuinely experience the life we are already living. And as Marcel understands, to achieve this aim we must transform our relation to time. If habit tends to deaden and dull our experience, it is because it reduces the impact of time on our senses. Even though every day is different and there is no guarantee that there will be another one, habit makes us feel as though our life has been all the same and will continue indefinitely. Thus, when we get used to seeing something we love, we tend no longer to notice its details or marvel at its existence. Likewise, when we get used to living with someone we love, we run the risk of taking him or her for granted and no longer appreciating the unique qualities of the beloved.
The key to breaking habit is to recall that we can lose what we love. Far from devaluing life, the dimension of loss is part of what makes it emerge as valuable. We may know that we are going to die, but the role of art is to make us feel what that means and thereby intensify the commitment to our life. Accordingly, when Marcel comes to narrate his own life, he is all the more attentive to the impact and nuances of his past experiences. Even many events that were unremarkable or unhappy return with a luminous quality in his memory, since they appear as irreplaceable in the light of loss. The value of a past experience may thus be enhanced when it is infused with the pathos of being lost, just as the value of a current experience may be enhanced by the sense that it will be lost.
Yet Marcel pursues his insight only in relation to a distant past and
not in relation to his ongoing life as he is writing. In Search of Lost Time ends with the revelation that leads Marcel to become an author and to write the book we have been reading. Nevertheless, we never learn under what circumstances Marcel is writing the seven volumes, how much time it takes, and what he is struggling with as he is trying to complete the book. To be clear, In Search of Lost Time is not Proust’s autobiography. It does not tell the story of Proust’s life but is the autobiography of the fictional character Marcel, who within the frame of the novel writes the story of his life. We know that Proust worked on In Search of Lost Time for more than thirteen years and was unable to finish the book before his death, struggling to enter revisions in the galley proofs up until the end. Within the frame of the novel, however, we do not get to witness an analogous struggle on the part of Marcel as the supposed author of the pages we are reading. We have no sense of what his daily life is like as he is writing, or what happens to him during the years it takes to compose his autobiography. All his efforts are devoted to giving meaning and significance to his past, not to his ongoing life.
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