This is the structure that Knausgaard transforms. Within the frame of My Struggle, the current life of the narrator, Karl Ove, is itself part of the story and we are even told exactly how long it takes for him to write the six volumes. He begins to work on the first volume at 11:43 p.m. on February 27, 2008, and he completes the last volume at 7:07 a.m. on September 2, 2011. To be sure, the beginning and end of the narration cannot be dated with such complete precision, but what is important is the ambition to situate his writing as part of an ongoing life. We learn in detail about how his work on the book is interrupted by childcare, practical worries, relationship troubles, and personal anxiety. All these things belong to the subject matter of the book itself. The struggle is not only to recover the past, but also to grasp hold of and engage with the life that continues.
Knausgaard thereby reveals a difficulty that Proust tends to conceal. If you focus only on the distant past (as Marcel does), it is relatively easy to gain a new appreciation of your life, since you can transform the past into an object of contemplation that no longer makes any direct demands on your engagement. You can dwell on details you previously overlooked, absorb the impact of events you did not understand at the time, and even feel a surge of nostalgia for things you did not enjoy when you first experienced them. Indeed, the sense that all these things are irrevocably gone can make them appear more precious than they actually were. Your nostalgia, then, can come to shelter you from the demands of a life that still has to be lived. It is telling that In Search of Lost Time ends with Marcel withdrawing from the world to write his book. His life is effectively over and the only thing that remains for him is to tell his story. Of course, Marcel still has to live, but we are supposed to forget about this in favor of an immersion in the past. The few times we catch a glimpse of him in the act of narration, it is the image of someone who has reduced his engagements to a minimum and apparently places no value on his current life: “I, the strange human who, while he waits for death to release him, lives behind closed shutters, knows nothing of the world, sits motionless as an owl, and like that bird can only see things at all clearly in the darkness.”63
In contrast, the structure of My Struggle looks like a deliberate inversion of the one that shapes In Search of Lost Time. While Marcel’s book ends with him becoming an author through the decision to write the story of his life, Karl Ove’s book begins with him already being an author who decides to write the story of his life and ends with the declaration that he is no longer an author after the completion of his book. “I will enjoy, really enjoy, the thought that I am no longer an author,” are the last words of My Struggle, followed by a separate page with two sole sentences that address his wife and children: “For Linda, Vanja, Heidi, and John. I love you.”64 Where Marcel ends by retreating from life into literature, Karl Ove ends by retreating from literature and turning toward life. This is not a strict opposition, since Marcel retreats into literature to understand and appreciate life, while literature is an essential part of Karl Ove’s ability to understand and appreciate life. Nevertheless, the way he transforms the ending of In Search of Lost Time indicates the challenge Karl Ove poses to himself. The retreat into writing is supposed to lead back into his actual life and not out of it. He explicitly wants to change and become a better person in his daily existence. In addition to recovering the past, his task in My Struggle is to keep faith with what he is seeing and living now—not years later when he is looking back on it.
Moreover, he has to confront the difficulty of appreciating his life and sustaining his deepest attachments. Loving his wife and children is not something that can be accomplished once and for all; it is an act of devotion that has to be sustained every day and one that can always fail, with joy giving way to tedium, loving care compromised by indifference or frustration, and the sense of wonder lost in deadening habit. The aim of My Struggle is not to purify one from the other, but to confront the daily, interminable battle between them. This is why we find the narrator in the midst of life, rather than at a remove from life as in the case of Marcel. Karl Ove is never at rest, and even when he retreats to the writing desk he is caught up in the practical engagements of everyday life. The engagements may be painful or passionate, tedious or elevating, but the point is to make them all glow in their concreteness.
Thus, at different intervals in telling the story of his life, Karl Ove moves from recounting the past to depicting himself at the time of writing. Within the space of a sentence, we can pass from a young Karl Ove in action to his older self recollecting the events several decades later. The first time this happens is early in the first volume, when we learn about his current life situation on the evening in February when he begins to work on the book. After an immersive description of one night when he was eight years old, Knausgaard looks up from his desk and speaks to us in ipso tempore—at the very moment of writing:
As I sit here writing this, I recognize that more than thirty years have passed. In the window before me I can vaguely make out the reflection of my face. Apart from one eye, which is glistening, and the area immediately beneath, which dimly reflects a little light, the whole of the left side is in shadow. Two deep furrows divide my forehead, one deep furrow intersects each cheek, all of them as if filled with darkness, and with the eyes staring and serious, and the corners of the mouth drooping, it is impossible not to consider this face gloomy.
What has engraved itself in my face?
Today is February 27, 2008. The time is 11:43 p.m. I who am writing, Karl Ove Knausgaard, was born in December 1968, and I am accordingly, at this moment, 39 years old. I have three children, Vanja, Heidi, and John, and I am married for the second time, to Linda Boström Knausgaard. All four are asleep in the rooms around me, in an apartment in Malmö, where we have now lived for a year and a half. Apart from some parents of the children at Vanja and Heidi’s nursery we do not know anyone here. This is not a loss, at any rate not for me, I don’t get anything out of socializing anyway. I never say what I really think, what I really mean, but always more or less agree with whomever I am talking to at the time, pretend that what they say is of interest to me, except when I am drinking, in which case more often than not I go too far the other way, and wake up to the fear of having overstepped the mark. This has become more pronounced over the years and can now last for weeks. When I drink I also have blackouts and completely lose control of my actions, which are generally desperate and stupid, but also on occasion desperate and dangerous. That is why I no longer drink. I do not want anyone to get close to me, I do not want anyone to see me, and this is the way things have developed: no one gets close and no one sees me. This is what must have engraved itself in my face, this is what must have made it so stiff and masklike and almost impossible to associate with myself whenever I happen to catch a glimpse of it in a shopwindow.65
This is not only the night when he begins to write the book; it also marks the degree zero of his project. The man who looks at himself here is someone who can barely recognize himself. He has withdrawn from the world, but by the same token he has disowned his life and lost hold of himself. The writing of My Struggle is an attempt to reverse this process, to turn him back toward his own life. He who never says what he really thinks and really means will now do so for thousands of pages. And he who does not want anyone to see him, who does not want anyone to get close to him, will now expose himself and make his life visible for anyone to see. This is not to say that he has a hidden kernel of identity that is independent of others and ready to be revealed at will. On the contrary, the difficulty of owning his life is that he is inseparable from the way he is acting in the world. Even withdrawing from others is a form of being with them, and seeking to leave the world behind is itself a way of being in it. To own his life is to acknowledge this dependence, to recognize—for better and for worse—that he is attached to what he sees.
The project of owning his life, then, begins with a literal self-reflect
ion. He sees his face in the dark window and has to grapple with what has happened to him. In a way, all of My Struggle can be seen as an attempt to answer the question he asks here: “What has engraved itself in my face?” He descends into the past to recover his life, but also to be able to engage the present and the future.
Consequently, he has to confront what Proust calls “embodied time” (temps incorporé). Embodied time designates how we carry the past with us, even when we are not aware of it or in control of how it affects us. This embodied time is for Proust the very condition of writing an autobiography. Because the past is inscribed in our bodies, we have the chance of reconnecting to our former selves, recalling not only what we did but also how it felt and thereby retrieving a genuine sense of our lives. For the same reason, however, our connection to the past is tenuous. We may never gain access to many of the experiences that are stored in us and—even when we do—the meaning of the past is never given in itself but refracted through our current sense of self and our projections of the future. Moreover, if our memories are embodied it means that they can be damaged or effaced by what happens to the body. The duration of the past is not secured by an immaterial soul, but depends on the retention of time in a frail and material body.
Thus, when Marcel discovers the importance of embodied time, he is haunted by an awareness of all the factors that may eradicate the memories that are retained in his body: “I felt the present object of my thought very clearly within myself…but also that, along with my body, it might be annihilated at any moment.”66 The discovery of embodied time inspires him to write In Search of Lost Time, but it also marks the precariousness of his project. At the end of the last volume, on the verge of beginning to write, Marcel worries about how brain damage or various accidents may prevent him from composing his autobiography. And indeed, before starting to work on his book, Marcel falls down a staircase and suffers from a memory loss that heightens his anxiety over not being able to write. “I asked myself not only, ‘Is there still enough time?’ but also ‘Am I still in a sufficiently fit condition?’ ”67 In pursuing the implications of embodied time, Marcel is thus finally led to the dead body, which underlines the finitude of the lived time to which he is devoted. “After death,” he writes on one of the last pages, “time leaves the body, and the memories—so indifferent, so pale now—are effaced from her who no longer exists and soon will be from him whom at present they still torture, but in whom they will eventually die, when the desire of a living body is no longer there to support them.”68
While the problem of the dead body appears only at the end of Proust’s novel, it is foregrounded from the beginning of My Struggle. Like Proust, Knausgaard wants to evoke the depths of time in our lives; how we go far beyond our physical location in space by bearing the past with us and projecting ourselves into a future. It is this distention of time that allows us to have a history and a lived experience. Yet in Knausgaard there is a strong parallel awareness of how the dimension of lived time—with its hopes and fears, hidden riches and emotional upheavals—depends on a material body that will remain after the distended life has expired.
Thus, with a remarkable incision, the first sentences in the first volume of My Struggle force us to witness the very transition from a living to a dead body:
For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops. Sooner or later, one day, this pounding action ceases of its own accord and the blood begins to run toward the lowest point of the body, where it gathers in a small pool, visible from the outside as a dark, soft patch on ever whitening skin, as the temperature sinks, the limbs stiffen and the intestines drain….The enormous hordes of bacteria that begin to spread through the body’s innards cannot be halted. Had they tried only a few hours earlier they would have met with immediate resistance, but now everything around them is still, as they delve deeper and deeper into the moist darkness. They advance on the Havers Channels, the Crypts of Lieberkühn, the Isles of Langerhans. They proceed to Bowman’s Capsule in the Renes, Clark’s Column in the Spinalis, the black substance in the Mesencephalon. And they arrive at the heart. As yet, it is intact, but deprived of the activity for which its whole construction has been designed, there is something strangely desolate about it, like a production plant that workers have been forced to flee in haste, one may imagine, the stationary vehicles shining yellow against the darkness of the forest, the huts deserted, a line of fully loaded cable-buckets stretching up the hillside.
The moment life departs the body, the body belongs to the dead. Lamps, suitcases, carpets, door handles, windows. Fields, marshes, streams, mountains, clouds, the sky. None of these is alien to us. We are constantly surrounded by objects and phenomena from the realm of the nonliving. Nonetheless, there are few things that arouse in us greater distaste than to see a human being caught up in it, at least if we are to judge by the efforts we make to keep corpses out of sight. In larger hospitals they are not only hidden away in discrete, inaccessible rooms, even the pathways there are concealed, with their own elevators and basement corridors, and should you stumble upon one of them, the dead bodies being wheeled by are always covered. When they have to be transported from the hospital it is through a dedicated exit, into vehicles with tinted glass; in the church grounds there is a separate, windowless room for them; during the funeral ceremony they lie in closed coffins until they are lowered in the ground or cremated in the oven.69
For a novel that is so devoted to the first-person standpoint, it is striking to begin with a view of life that only can be given from a third-person standpoint. No one can experience the moment of death that Knausgaard describes. We can infer it when we observe another body at the moment of death, but when it happens to ourselves we are gone. And yet we belong to this body that is not under our command. We are altogether dependent on our body—cannot exist without it—but our body is not dependent on us. After we are gone it can remain as an object in the world, indifferent to our absence. Presumably, this is why the dead body is so uncanny and tends to be hidden away. The dead body reminds us that we are not only in the world but also of the world, made of materials that will degrade and decompose.
The materialist reminder runs throughout My Struggle. Specifically, Knausgaard employs a bifocal vision, where every existential phenomenon is seen both in its own right and as dependent on a physiological machinery. The paradigmatic example is the heart, which is the major and apparently conventional metaphor in My Struggle. The heart in Knausgaard is explicitly a metaphor for the living principle of his existence, expressed most forcefully in the intuitive experience of love. “The heart is never mistaken,” is the phrase he employs repeatedly, to explain his life-changing decisions. The heart in this sense designates his deepest and most intimate sense of self. At the same time, the heart is treated not metaphorically but literally. As in the opening paragraph quoted above, Knausgaard repeatedly lays bare the heart as a physical mechanism that is utterly indifferent to his sense of self. The heart beats and then it stops beating, whether he wills it or not. The dissection of his heart becomes not only an intimate confession but also an exploration of his own biological-material constitution, as though he were opening his heart in both a romantic and a surgical sense.
Knausgaard thus pushes the notion of embodied time to a stark conclusion. Looking at pictures of himself as an infant, he asks:
Is this creature [his infant self] the same person as the one sitting here in Malmö writing? And will the forty-year-old creature who is sitting in Malmö writing this one overcast September day—in a room filled with the drone of the traffic outside and the autumn wind howling through the old-fashioned ventilation system—be the same as the gray, hunched geriatric who forty years from now might be sitting dribbling and trembling in an old people’s home somewhere in the Swedish woods? Not to mention the corpse that at some point will be laid out on a bench in the morgue. Still known as Karl Ove.70
Both the tenuous connections and the ultimate fragility of embodied time are here underscored, as he makes vivid the radical changes of his body across a lifetime. In composing his autobiography, Karl Ove has to reckon with physical decomposition and is haunted by the absolute termination of his life that will have taken place when his body is transformed into a corpse.
Thus, Knausgaard persistently reminds us of the automatic functions of our bodies, the decaying matter that we are made of, and the geological time that dwarfs the span of our existence. Yet this materialist perspective does not serve to diminish the importance of our lives. The fact that the duration of your existence is but a speck on the scale of geological time does not mean that it is insignificant. Likewise, the fact that your first-person standpoint—the unique experience of your life—depends on a set of physical properties does not mean that it is an illusion. It only means that your life is finite.
Such finitude does not devalue your life, but is an essential part of why it can matter and take on significance, against the backdrop of its possible dissolution. “Death,” Knausgaard writes in the final volume, “is the background against which life appears. If death had not existed, we would not have known what life is.”71 Death is the background against which life can light up as something cherished and irreplaceable, but it is also the background that can extinguish all light: “Death makes life meaningless, because everything we have ever striven for ceases when life does, and it makes life meaningful, too, because its presence makes the little we have of it indispensable, every moment precious.”72
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