My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  * * *

  If we say that our present culture was founded in the seventeenth century, in the sense that all the elements that characterize our age appeared for the first time in that century, then two particular portal figures flank its door: Hamlet and Don Quixote. The creators of these figures, Shakespeare and Cervantes, died in the same year, and their understanding of the human condition, as radically dissimilar as they might appear in respect to each other, form two poles in the way we understand ourselves. In their day, the absolute, familiar to them under the name of the divine, was drawn increasingly closer to the relative, which is to say the interhuman domain, the social world. Hamlet doubts, and seemingly finds doubt to pervade everything. Don Quixote does not doubt, he believes, but what he believes in, and what he sees, since it fills his vision, is not real, belonging not to the world but to fiction. He sees sheep, aims his lance and attacks, imagining he sees an army of enemies. He sees a windmill, aims his lance and attacks, imagining he sees a giant. Don Quixote is a hero in a world without heroes, or in a world where heroes and the absoluteness of their lives belong to the pseudoworld, irreconcilable with the relative reality of the quotidian. Don Quixote is a comic hero. Hamlet is a hero too, but for the opposite reason, he doubts and relativizes in a world of absolutes. Hamlet is a tragic hero. Don Quixote sees the old world as if for the last time. Hamlet sees the old world as if for the first time. Through them we see ourselves, for our culture is founded on doubt, and our scope extends from the relative reality of the quotidian to the skies of our grandest conceptions. Hitler eliminated doubt and lowered the skies of our grandest conceptions to the relative reality of the quotidian, which is to say he inserted fiction into material reality and made reality a play, binding the individual to the mask.

  As early as 1934, the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas wrote the following about Hitler and Hitlerism:

  The body is not only a happy or unhappy accident that relates us to the implacable world of matter. Its adherence to the Self is of value in itself. It is an adherence that one does not escape and that no metaphor can confuse with the presence of an external object; it is a union that does not in any way alter the tragic character of finality.

  This feeling of identity between self and body, which, naturally, has nothing in common with popular materialism, will therefore never allow those who wish to begin with it to rediscover, in the depths of this unity, the duality of a free spirit that struggles against the body to which it is chained. On the contrary, for such people, the whole of the spirit’s essence lies in the fact that it is chained to the body. To separate the spirit from the concrete forms with which it is already involved is to betray the originality of the very feeling from which it is appropriate to begin.

  The importance attributed to this feeling for the body, with which the Western spirit has never wished to content itself, is at the basis of a new conception of man. The biological, with the notion of inevitability it entails, becomes more than an object of spiritual life. It becomes its heart. The mysterious urgings of the blood, the appeals of heredity and the past for which the body serves as an enigmatic vehicle, lose the character of being problems that are subject to a solution put forward by a sovereignly free Self. Not only does the Self bring in the unknown elements of these problems in order to resolve them; the Self is also constituted by these elements. Man’s essence no longer lies in freedom, but in a kind of bondage … Chained to his body, man sees himself refusing the power to escape from himself. Truth is no longer for him the contemplation of a foreign spectacle; instead it consists in a drama in which man is himself the actor. It is under the weight of his whole existence, which includes facts on which there is no going back, that man will say his yes or his no.

  This is man at one with himself, unified and whole. It is man as the one. Levinas, who became the philosopher of the other, turned in this reasoning as much to Heidegger as to Hitler, according to the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who cites the passage in his book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. For it is here, in the human construed as the one, at one with itself and its body, with no division between the being of the I and its ways of being, that Heidegger and Hitler come together, Agamben believes, where all anthropological distinctions – between spirit and body, sensation and consciousness, I and world, subject and properties – are abolished.

  Dasein, the Being-there who is its There, thus comes to be placed in a zone of indiscernability with respect to – and to mark the definitive collapse of – all traditional determinations of man.

  The relative in our existence – all that may be chosen – is bound to that which is not relative but absolute and unambiguous, which in the case of the I is the biological body. Thereby the I approaches its “it,” where all voices fall silent and the darkness of the undifferentiated prevals, and this movement toward life’s absolute, its “it,” is what makes it possible to separate the Jewish from the German, for the important distinction between they and we was drawn in the body, in race, which is to say in the immutable, whereas all other distinctions, such as those of language, thought, and culture, which may be learned and adapted, moderated and discussed, were absolutely invalid. Everything was pressed in toward the body, everything gathered in the body, and the final consequence of the human being at one with itself, which we tentatively call the monophonic human, at one with itself and shoulder to shoulder in unbroken series, for the next was not the other but the one again, the final consequence of this turning of the I toward the body, which is uniformity and unvariedness, was the extermination of the Jews, in which the Jew was body and limbs only. By the time they arrived at the extermination camps and were bundled from their cattle wagons they were no one. Deprived of their civil rights, deprived of their human rights, deprived of their names. They were the “it.” On leaving the wagons, they were ordered to strip. Those then herded toward the gas chamber, which in Treblinka was situated on a small hill, were without citizenship, without name, without clothes. They were the naked human, without anything but its body, in the midst of what Agamben calls “bare life.” What emerges before us in this image, which is not a metaphor, but an actual event, is what a human being is, and what it becomes. The human being, naked and bare, is this not the true and authentic human? The natural human, the human as a biological creature, as it is beneath the cloak of civilization and culture? If we imagine a world without language, without countries, without names, we would all have lived a life such as this, naked, nameless bodies in a nameless world, until death came and transformed the naked body into a corpse to be cast into the world of the dead, which is the world of decomposition and erosion. Such a life would take place in the very midst of the world, among its trees, waters, fells, and dales, upon the soil of the earth and beneath its sky, and yet it would be a life lived outside. Outside what? Outside the human world. For it is this that emerges before us in the image of the naked human; it is outside the law, outside the social world, outside the name. Only then, in that absence, are we able to see the nature of the law, the social world, the name. The law regulates violence among like kind, according responsibility for it to the individual, moreover at the same time institutionalizing it for the purposes of self-preservation in the police and military. The social world regulates the community; in it, all those it comprises are gathered in groups of greater and smaller we’s, both formal and informal; and the name guarantees the individuality of the individual in the community of the all. If a person stands outside the law, they may be killed. If a person stands outside the social world, they are no one. If a person stands outside the name, they are a number. The Jews who were not immediately killed in Auschwitz were identified by a number tattooed on their forearm. But the matter is not so simple that we may say the Jews could be killed because everything belonging to the human domain was taken away from them, that civilization was negated in them and their fate, for the forces that took them there, outside the community of the human, were forces within that community
, which is to say within civilization, our we. The bringing together of the I and the being of the body, drawing the human closer to the “it” of the I, thereby removing it both from history and from the moment, masks the human in uniformity and sameness, the play, which has always represented the possibilities of man, no longer a play but life itself, the way it unfolds. This bringing together occurred in parallel with, and was perhaps only possible by virtue of, a similar movement toward the it within the collective; the we, too, was drawn toward the it, which is to say the number. In bureaucracy the human is a number, and in the mass the human is a number. This dehumanization of the we, whereby the other may be reduced to a number, is necessary in war if the enemy is to be killed, and it is necessary in the administration of large numbers of people even now, for a modern state without statistics is unthinkable, but in Hitler’s Germany the state became a total entity, the we merged completely with the state, they were one and the same, and in much the same way as the I was bound to the body and possessed no space of its own outside, the we was bound to the state and possessed no space of its own outside, and in much the same way as this made it possible to push the Jewish I into the “it,” reducing it to body alone, it also made it possible to push the Jewish we into the “it,” reducing it to number alone. Neither the I of the body nor the we of the state contained any singular you. It was for this reason that millions of Jews could be sent to the gas chambers before the eyes of everyone, without anything happening other than that they looked down, they looked away, for what was there to see? There was nothing to see. They saw nothing, they heard nothing, they said nothing. The it of the body: undifferentiated. The it of the we: undifferentiated. Outside the language they were driven into the terrain, along the unmistakable track, and became, in undifferentiated night, ash.

  Nowhere does anyone ask after you, for “you” does not exist.

  * * *

  It’s evening already. I’m on my own at home, Linda and the children are still in Corsica with Linda’s mother. Heidi has lost a front tooth there, she told me proudly on the phone. I’m looking forward to seeing her smile when she comes home. John has got a new air bed in the shape of a crocodile and fell and hurt his knee, as far as I could make out from his incoherent and breathless report. Vanja didn’t want to talk on the phone, but she cried when I said goodbye to them on the train platform and walked away, and she’s never done that before. Since they left, four days ago now, I’ve spent every day and evening writing, watching Shoah into the night, apart from yesterday when I read Sereny’s book about Treblinka. Shoah doesn’t get to me, either because I’m keeping a distance or because it works through insight rather than feelings. Which isn’t entirely true because suddenly, out of nothing, a scene made me weep, a single stab of empathy, and that was it, I carried on watching as before. Sereny’s book, which almost paralyzed me the first time I read it, left me unmoved too. But that’s when I’m awake. When I’m asleep, I dream about it.

  Earlier today I was sitting on the balcony, smoking and looking out over the rooftops as I always do. The sky was pale blue, typical for May, and the usual sounds rose from the city below: the rumble of buses, the squealing of brakes, the hum of tires moving over the road surfaces, an occasional shout. On the roof of the apartments opposite some Polish builders have a project going, they’ve been there for months now, putting in roof terraces and converting the loft space into living units. Suddenly a child laughed somewhere. It was such a joyful laugh, so overwhelming and gleeful and utterly abandoned to the delight of the moment that I felt it too. I smiled, and got to my feet to see where it was coming from. It sounded like a young child, maybe three or four years old. There was a man’s voice in there too, and I imagined it was a father tossing his child into the air, again and again. But there was no one there when I looked down into the street below, no one in the parking spaces, or outside the garage. Then there it was again. I guessed it had to be coming from the little passage connecting the pedestrian street with the street behind our building, and that they were hidden from sight by the building in between. I sat down again, poured myself some tepid coffee from the thermos, and lit another cigarette.

  Part 2

  When the alarm clock rang it was still dark outside. I turned it off and got up. Linda lay still in bed, her face on the pillow almost completely obscured by her hair, which spread out in all directions. It was half past four, and my whole body ached with tiredness, I had lain awake for so long before I fell asleep. That seldom happened; if there was one thing in my life that worked it was my sleep. I was what they call a sound sleeper. I could sleep on the floor without any problem, and with children screaming a meter away from me, it didn’t make any difference; if I was asleep, I was asleep. Once I had thought it was a sign that I wasn’t a real writer. Writers slept badly, had ravaged faces, at the crack of dawn they sat at the kitchen table staring out the window, tormented by their inner demons, which never rested.

  Who had ever heard of a great writer who slept like a child?

  To think that was a bad sign, I reasoned. Because tomorrow my third book was coming out. Reviews in all the newspapers.

  I grabbed the clothes I had laid out the night before and padded into the bathroom to shower. The sight of them triggered a fit of nerves. My hand holding the showerhead shook with unease as I clambered into the bath. I turned on the water and shivered as the hot jets hit skin which had just emerged from the warm depths of the duvet and would have preferred to stay there. But then, after only a few minutes, everything changed, and getting out of the shower was what would make me shiver.

  After the thrum of the shower, everything was silent. Not a sound from the streets outside, not a sound from our apartment or the apartments below. It was as though I was meant to be alone in the world.

  In the harsh light I rubbed myself down with a large towel, and once my skin was relatively dry I wiped the steam off the mirror and put styling gel in my hair and deodorant under my arms while observing my reflection, which slowly became less and less sharp as the water molecules, or whatever they were, attached themselves to the glass again.

  I donned my Ted Baker shirt, which stuck to my still-damp shoulder blades and would not hang straight at first, then I got into my Pour jeans with the diagonal pockets, which usually I didn’t like, there was something so conventional about them, all Dockers trousers had slanting pockets, but on a pair of jeans there was so much else working against the Dockers look that they actually looked good, for then it was the jeans style that was being challenged and as a result a kind of tension grew, not much, but in a world where all denims looked identical, it was enough to make these just that little bit different.

  I wiped the floor with the used towel and draped it over the side of the bathtub, went into the kitchen, put on the kettle, spooned some Nescafé into a cup, and looked out the window while waiting for the water to boil. The window faced east and a patch of something brighter in the distance had begun to emerge from the darkness. Impatiently I lifted the kettle before the water had started to bubble, and the crescendo of noise was interrupted and replaced by a soft murmur as the coffee rose inside the cup, at first a golden brown from the powder, visible as an earthy clump at the bottom, until over the next few seconds it completely dissolved and the surface became an impenetrable black with some lighter-colored froth at the edges.