My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  Oddly, Leonardo’s paintings seem quite apart from that sensation. They are masterworks of course, but at the same time too saturated in a way; their vital sense is that of harmony and clarity, his technique of rounding shapes, allowing them to glide off into their surroundings without losing substance and solidity in the process, may have something to do with it, but also the regularity of his compositions, so perfect as to lose all tension and become … well, rather lazy. Leonardo’s paintings are never arresting to me in the way his notebooks are arresting. I suppose it has to do with the simple fact that as a painter he belonged to a tradition and saw things with the eyes of that tradition, painted with its techniques, whereas as an anatomist, biologist, physicist, geologist, geographer, astronomer, and inventor he was forging his own path. “The tears come from the heart and not from the brain,” he suddenly writes. Or, in one of his many strange prophecies, “Men will come out of their graves turned into flying creatures; and they will attack other men, taking their food from their very hand or table. (As flies.)” That tone, that temperament, which is not without wildness and which is quite as unpredictable as it is exact, is wholly absent from his paintings, with one remarkable exception: Lady with an Ermine. I bought a poster of it on a trip to Italy with Espen more than ten years ago, it’s on the wall in my living room now and I still haven’t tired of looking at it. The motif is simple, a young woman holding a white-coated stoat, an ermine, to her chest; the animal is looking the same way as she, right of picture, and her right hand rests against its back. It’s a disturbing picture. Why, I don’t know, but the background is completely black, there is nothing else but this woman and this animal, and perhaps what is disturbing about it lies in this very juxtaposition. The woman’s face is sharper than any other of Leonardo’s female faces, and the hand that rests on the animal’s spine is thin and bony, slightly out of proportion to what we can see of the rest of her body, slightly too big, and while the model he hired may actually have had big hands, our gaze is nevertheless drawn toward it in such a way that along with the head of the animal it forms the focal point of the picture. The hand, placed there to soothe and comfort, makes plain to us the animal’s unease. Its rather bony appearance emphasizes its physiological aspect, a rare occurrence in Leonardo’s paintings, which are nearly always more immersed in their colors and forms, their saturatedness, and together with the animal’s intensely nonhuman presence, seemingly outside the sphere of the woman’s attention, it appears almost as if her body splits in two before our eyes, one part belonging to the physiological, biological, bestial, the fingernails on her hand, for instance, corresponding with the claws of the animal’s foot, the animal’s eye the same color as the woman’s eye, the other part belonging to the human, that which has to do with her serenity, the fact of the animal being outside her consciousness, her mind concerned with something else, perhaps with what she is looking at, perhaps with something within herself, but whatever it is, she is serene. Her dress, the pearls around her neck, her hair band, these things belong to that sphere, outside of which is the animal. Part of what is disturbing about the painting lies in the exactness with which the animal is depicted, quite unlike other animals in Leonardo’s paintings, his lions, for instance, his horses and lambs. The ermine is neither biblical nor mythological, it doesn’t belong to the battle or to any idyll but is there in its own right, as this one, particular animal. One might imagine this to be themed in the shape of fauns, half human, half animal, or a Pan figure, or perhaps centaurs, mythology is full of all sorts of creatures existing in the space between human and animal, but that would have made the picture an illustration, and this is precisely what Leonardo shuns here, the illustration of a thought or notion: the picture is the thought.

  His anatomical sketches exhibit nothing of this, although the encounter they represent, of art and the body, is the same as in Lady with an Ermine. Perhaps this is because in the sketches the two aspects are compounded, the sketches representing the body in themselves, whereas the painting exists in the space in between. Of course, the difference between the drawing and the drawn is quite as big in both cases, but when it comes to sketches of the human body, an enormous number have been produced since Leonardo’s time, and what was then a new phenomenon is now so common we no longer see it as a phenomenon at all, or even as drawings done by a certain artist, they are merely a part of the anonymous flood of textbook illustrations and instructions in which we paddle for the first time in childhood and never really step out of again, where everything that exists and occurs is conveyed by diagrams, like the elements of the molecule, the chlorophyll production of trees, the orbit of the planets around the sun, or the components of the inner ear. It was most certainly different for Leonardo, he draws everything like it was for the first time, and so new and controversial is the practice of drawing the inner human body from the study of corpses that he feels the need to defend himself in the introduction to his anatomy notes, swiping at a fictitious you who claims there is more to be had out of watching the dissection itself than studying one of the drawings:

  And you, who say it would be better to watch the anatomist at work than to see these drawings, you would be right, if it were possible to observe all the things that are demonstrated in such drawings in a single figure, in which you, with all your cleverness, will not see nor obtain knowledge of more than some few veins, to obtain a true and perfect knowledge of which I have dissected more than ten human bodies, destroying all the other members, and removing the very minutest particles of the flesh by which these veins are surrounded, without causing them to bleed, excepting the insensible bleeding of the capillary veins; and as one single body would not last so long, since it was necessary to proceed with several bodies by degrees, until I came to an end and had a complete knowledge; this I repeated twice, to learn the differences.

  And if you should have a love for such things you might be prevented by loathing, and if that did not prevent you, you might be deterred by the fear of living in the night hours in the company of those corpses, quartered and flayed and horrible to see.

  What Leonardo is pleading here is the utility value of simplification in a world unfamiliar with the diagram. His fictional opponent believes it better to watch the dissection as it takes place, since the dissection itself is closer to reality, whereas Leonardo holds that reality, in this case the body, is too complicated and is best understood when conveyed by means of a drawing, which brings out its essence; ten corpses were required before he knew enough about the blood vessels to be able to draw them. The line of progression is from the chaos and confusion of reality to the order and functionality of the diagram, but also from the truth of the particular instance, local and tangible, this particular body, to the truth of all instances, the universal and general, all bodies. Leonardo’s drawings are not diagrams, he does not simplify what he sees, but rather endeavors to depict what he sees as accurately as possible, but in order to do so he must isolate the individual parts so that they may be presented more clearly, and as such he both removes himself from and steps closer to the reality he depicts, a progression that resembles a law: the closer you get to a true picture of the physical world, the more remote it becomes.

  What makes Leonardo’s anatomical drawings so interesting is that they are there at the very outset of that progression, or are perhaps even its instigation, at the same time as they are there too at another point of intersection, that between art and science.

  What exactly is going on when a painting such as Lady with an Ermine generates all manner of emotions and moods, opening itself to the beholder, who more than six hundred years on cannot help but find it dense with meaning, while a picture of the inner body drawn by the same artist at much the same time is experienced as something neutral, a fact closed upon itself, apart from the vague impression it gives of the age in which it was produced, over which the artist has absolutely no control?

  Art is what the institution deems to be art, that is a tenet of modernism, but
such a distinction is of no use here, because although we might consider the anatomical drawings to be art, this says nothing of their radical distinctness vis-à-vis Lady with an Ermine, which so plainly is something else entirely. Nor is it helpful to suggest that one has more quality than the other, or that one is reductive, the other not, because such reduction is conspicuous too in Lady with an Ermine, the pure black of the background removing the motif from its context, and only its core elements, the female subject’s upper body and the wriggling animal, being depicted. Yet one can stare and continue to stare at such a painting, which comes alive in the beholder’s gaze and seems inexhaustible, whereas the drawings of the inner body saturate the senses in a different way entirely, constraining our gaze and the emotions that follow on: what we see is what there is. In other words, the painting contains more. But what is this “more”? What does the painting have that the drawings don’t?

  * * *

  In Jorge Luis Borges’s renowned first collection of stories and essays, Labyrinths, there is a short story called “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” According to its narrator, Pierre Menard was a recently deceased, lesser-known French author, a symbolist and friend of Paul Valéry. The narrator wishes to honor his memory, which is already receding, and lists his few works, among them a number of sonnets and monographs, one of the latter concerning Leibniz’s Characteristica Universalis, another on the subject of Ramon Llull’s Ars Magna Generalis, which gives us an indication of where Borges is heading, before concentrating on Menard’s most important work, described as perhaps the most significant of our time, comprising the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters of the first part of Don Quixote, as well as a fragment of the twenty-second chapter. Menard did not merely copy these chapters, as anyone could have, instead he created them anew, an achievement characterized by the narrator as heroic, indisputably greater than Cervantes’s own in writing the novel in the first place. It is one thing to pen a chivalric satire and have a decrepit nobleman ride off into the villages of seventeenth-century Spain, easy enough as a Spaniard living in the seventeenth century, but quite another to do so as a Frenchman at the beginning of the twentieth century. The very premise is an improvement, the narrator opines, comparing two brief passages from the two works.

  It is a revelation to compare Menard’s Don Quixote with Cervantes’s. The latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine):

  … truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past,

  exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor. Written in the seventeenth century, written by the “lay genius” Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:

  … truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past,

  exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor. History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an inquiry into reality, but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened.

  By juxtaposing the idea of originality with that of its repetition, which is impossible and therefore naturally ranks higher than any renewal, Borges rearranges the hierarchy between new and the same, bringing the two concepts into the light. The idea that Don Quixote cannot be written again is so obvious it probably never occurred to anyone before Borges wrote his story about Menard’s fabulous achievement, and for that very reason it is significant: what we see but are not consciously aware of seeing, the invisible world of laws and rules in which we move about and by which we are governed, the time and space of the given, is our cage as well as our home. Art is what cannot be done again, Borges reminds us, and is as such akin to the miracle. That someone else by coincidence should happen to paint Lady with an Ermine exactly as Leonardo did is an impossible thought, whereas that of someone drawing the same picture of the heart or the chest or the arm with its exposed tendons and blood vessels is not. The painting has a time and a place, it is a situation encapsulated, with all its properties and details, whereas the drawings of the body are timeless and placeless. What matters in the painting is the particular woman, the particular animal, the unique and local, whereas in the drawings it is all bodies, the general and universal.

  Art is unique and local, striving always toward the unique and local, resisting everything that seeks to pull it from that trajectory. Its entire value resides in this. Even a painting by someone like Malevich, whose simple geometric figures or wholly monochrome surfaces seemingly aim toward total generality, is unique and local, for rather than being the expression of those figures in themselves, the painting is Malevich’s depiction of them, and this presence of another human being fixes the painting in time: it could not have been painted by anyone else. When this is copied, and inevitably any bold style will be absorbed by others, the art is no longer unique, it becomes less local, and anemic. Without exception the paintings of the Norwegian and Swedish Cubists pale beside those of Picasso and Léger. It is this notion of the unique that “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” is about. Art is what cannot be done again, but unlike the miracle, art extends in time and spans the generations, and it is into that temporal space Borges directs Menard when ingeniously he finds a way out of his own age and into the past without losing sight of either, enabling himself to perform the feat of making the copy original without alteration, the twentieth century’s entire mind-set going back with him and exerting its own pressure on the sentences Cervantes once constructed, altering them as if from within, because what we know always shapes what we see. So enthusiastic is Borges’s narrator about this new literary invention that he suggests the method be applied to other works, concluding with the question: “To attribute the Imitatio Christi to Louis Ferdinand Céline or to James Joyce, is this not a sufficient renovation of its tenuous spiritual indications?”

  Nothing is coincidental in Borges’s work, not even the choice of reference. The Imitatio Christi, or Imitation of Christ, is a collection of fifteenth-century texts attributed to the monk Thomas à Kempis, one of Christianity’s most widely read books, renunciant of worldly life in its standpoint and holding up the life of Christ on earth as its ideal, hence the title, primarily motivated by a quote from Matthew:

  Then Jesus said unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it. For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? For the Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father with his angels; and then he shall reward every man according to his works.

  The idea of denying oneself and living a life in imitation of another is even more radical and impossible than Menard’s, and yet this was a genuine endeavor, not in detail, obviously, though the occasional wound may well have opened miraculously in someone’s hand or side at various intervals throughout the Middle Ages, but in spirit, and this, the devotion of one’s life to another, is the greatest sacrifice a human can make. The thought of Céline or Joyce, the two great idiosyncracies of twentieth-century literature, having written such a work is of course a joke, for if anyone ever invested themselves in their writing, and if anyone were ever as oblivious to the idea of humility, it was they. Their souls would have been damaged by it.

  For us, the one true life is our own singular life, unexampled and individual, while imitation is false and submissive. In the Imitatio Christi imitation is the ideal, the possibility of withdrawing from life and devoting oneself fully to Christ being ever present, always hallowed, never anemic or strange. And while Scripture was paramount, governing people’s understanding of everything, the material as well as the immaterial, while it was the form into which everything had to fit, a dizzying system of correspondences and connections devi
sed in its name, an unparalleled instance of universalism, the body was always there, at the center of it all, the body of Christ, the flesh and blood of the Son of Man, which although dissolved in the text and in the language, was the point from which all theological abstractions radiated. This was evident not least in the relics that filled medieval churches, monasteries, and cathedrals. These were ranked according to a system based on physical proximity: first-order relics were everything that derived from the bodies of the saints or disciples – hair, nails, fragments of bone, even whole skeletons; to the second order belonged objects they had used or carried about their persons; the third order comprised things that had come into contact with them in some other way or had been stored in proximity to first-order relics. The most precious were those associated with the body of Christ and his life on earth, the holiest of all being those connected with the crucifixion: splinters of the cross, thorns of the crown, the head of the lance with which he was prodded, cloth from the garments of people who had been present, and, of course, the shroud itself. The adoration of all these objects, which could take on hysterical forms, many of them associated with miracles and healing, comprises the very core of Christianity, expressing its innermost truth and authentic nature: that God in Christ became man, was born into the human world, a living body, a person who for some thirty years lived here among us, in our world. The idea is so radical as to be impossible to take in, much less understand, other than in fleeting, emotional moments of insight. The relics opened that insight, the divine was local, could be associated with places to which one could travel and see with one’s own eyes, and with identifiable people who once, not that many generations before, actually existed. The Old Testament was local too, almost all the places mentioned in it were still in existence, and if one cared to investigate one would find that all were close to each other. The River Jordan, the Sinai Desert, the Dead Sea, Mount Gilboa, the brook of Zered, the plains of Moab. Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron, Gaza, Beersheba, Ezion-Geber, all inside an area no bigger than a Norwegian fylke. For us this sense of the local trails off into the exotic and remote, everything in the Bible takes place far away, the narrative is all about others and their country. But what if it had been about us and our country? The local aspect would then have been plain to us. Moses and the children of Israel might have come into the Setesdal, having wandered about the Hardangervidda for forty years. Moses could have received the Tablets of the Law, inscribed with the Ten Commandments, on the Gaustatoppen, and the Promised Land he was allowed to see but not to enter might have been Aust-Agder. The Lord’s speech to him about the Promised Land, following the Golden Calf incident, might have gone like this: “I will send an angel before you and drive out the Setesdalers, the Arendalites and the Frolanders, the Hisøyites and the Tromøyites. Go down to the land flowing with milk and honey. But I will not go with you, because you are a stiff-necked people.” And Deuteronomy’s magnificent finale might have been as follows: