My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

“They didn’t want to be seen,” Linda said. “They didn’t want us there because it would’ve shown them up.”

  “The clown wasn’t there, Daddy!” Vanja said. “He didn’t go to his own birthday party.”

  The children had each been given a party hat and sat around a table drawing a picture for the clown’s birthday. They were then given a glass of soda and a hot dog and a piece of cake, which they ate in silence. They asked the staff when the clown was coming, he would be there soon, they were told. Then they played for a while, without the clown or any real enthusiasm since they didn’t know one another and despite encouragement from the staff. Vanja didn’t want to join in, she sat on Linda’s lap and kept asking when the clown would be coming and why he wasn’t there already. Finally the party was over, they trooped out, over to the stage where all the other children were sitting waiting for the clown, who did finally make an appearance, performing his standard routine with one exception, he collected the drawings from the children who had been at his party.

  Vanja didn’t understand this. How could the clown not turn up for his own birthday party?

  We couldn’t of course tell her the truth – that the pathetic tour operators didn’t give a shit about the kids and didn’t want to waste resources on them – so we said that Coco, which was the clown’s name, had been pleased with the drawings, and the cake had been good, hadn’t it?

  * * *

  And so the days passed on our package tour. Even though we disliked it intensely, both of us, something developed that we only became aware of later, when we talked about it, and the atmosphere on those evenings, sitting on the balcony reading and talking while the children slept indoors, suddenly became something we longed for and would happily experience again. The lapping of the sea, the immense dark sky above us, strewn with stars, the sounds of the tropical night. I read Gombrowicz’s diaries there, they were fantastic, and this merged into the world of Scandinavian strollers, worn-out parents of small children, and pee-warmed swimming pools in a strange, almost alluring way: this was life too! This is how it could be too. Embrace it! But while we were there ennui was the dominant mood apart from two moments, one when I was on a dolphin safari with Vanja, out at sea, and the beautiful creatures playfully plowed through the water just below the railing where we stood, and not only I, but Vanja too, thought it a magical sight. When we talked about it afterward it turned out that her attention had been caught as vividly by the man who, on our return journey, went white in the face, rushed to the railing, and threw up. I could still feel how she had placed her little head in my lap and fallen asleep, and the rush of pleasure it gave me. And the picture of the Knossos dolphins I had seen once in a museum on Crete came to mind, the simple but almost unbelievable joie de vivre that lay in that fresco. Such simplicity was difficult to imagine in northern European art from that period, which was ornate to a far greater degree, and in the preornate era, in the Stone Age with its simple rock carvings, the simplicity of the line drawings was only on the surface, for humans and animals were interconnected in other, profound, and to us incomprehensible ways, the thinking behind this art was ritual and magical, whereas the Knossos dolphins were only dolphins. This fact basically ripped the bottom out of the theory I had just read, and loved, because it turned one perception of the world on its head, namely, the Italian nuclear engineer and pseudo-historian Felice Vinci’s idea that Homer’s Odyssey actually took place in the seas between Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. Like so many others, Vinci had been puzzled that the geography in the Odyssey was so much at variance with the real geography of the Mediterranean area, even if the names were the same. Ithaca was described in a way that did not fit Ithaca as it was, and it was the same everywhere. When Vinci for some reason looked north he discovered that the geography there fit the descriptions to a tee. Aeaea was Håja in northern Norway, Thrinacia was Mosken in Lofoten, Scheria was Klepp in Rogaland, the Peloponnese was the island of Sjælland in Denmark, Naxos was the island of Bornholm, the northern part of Poland was Crete, Faros was the Swedish island of Fårö, and Ithaca was the little Danish island of Lyø. If you went to Lyø you would see Homer’s description perfectly matched the topography of the island. The notion was beguiling and it couldn’t be rejected out of hand either as it solved a number of problems regarding the epic poem, for instance the fact that they light a fire in midsummer, which is odd when you know how hot the days are in the Mediterranean at that time of year, or the fact that the sea is often ascribed hues that are alien to the Mediterranean as we know it but more normal in northern waters. Vinci also had an explanation for how the whole transformation from the north to the south had come about: the people Homer describes lived for a long time in the north, but then, because of the change in climate, they were forced south, down to the Mediterranean, where they simply gave places the same names they had used in their earlier home. Hence the geographical mismatches between the book’s Ithaca – which was Lyø in reality – and the real Ithaca. Ithaca was “Ithaca” or New Ithaca. But what really flew in the face of the notion, I now realized, with Vanja quietly breathing on my lap and the wind blowing straight into my face, surrounded by that strangely intoxicating mix of gasoline and salt, and slightly seasick though happy nonetheless, were the cultural differences between places. It is not only people who define the culture of a place; the place itself also defines the culture of a people. There is a direct line between the Knossos dolphins and the horses in the Parthenon friezes or between the smiling kouroi and the magnificent bronze statue of a bearded man, presumably Zeus, which was found at the bottom of the sea off the coast of Greece in 1928, or between the first Doric temples and Aristotle’s philosophy. I am talking about the joy of experiencing the world as it is, as it presents itself to the eye. For that is what the Greeks did, they set the world free. The radical nature of Greek art, which deals with the world as it is, with no links to any secret world or any deeper truth, can in consequence probably only be compared with the idea that man was the son of God. One of the most interesting things about the development of Greek art is how the demand for authenticity seemed to increase, as though every move to make the world more visible was bound up in a new way with the invisible, which only then was made apparent and subsequently rejected. The archaic statues, with their inscrutable smiles, were created from the same matrix, whereby the identical, nonindividual aspect is also a nonhuman dimension, and if you imagine them in front of a temple or a grave, out in the world among people and not in a museum, they must have had a formidable, intimidating effect, for the nonhuman in human form, that is death or the divine. Their time is not ours. Their place is not here. The classical statues the Greeks made some centuries later are individual through and through, with none of those frightening nonhuman qualities about them, they point neither to death nor the divine, but are wholly human. There is however a dignity and beauty about them that in a sense places them outside time, they are elevated, ideal, representatives and universal, which later generations attacked in the Hellenistic Period, when attention was focused on divergence, including its ugly or unattractive sides, and nothing was elevated, take for instance the bronze bearded boxer sitting on his own with cuts to his arms and legs and a broken nose, apparently at rest after a boxing match, his head cocked, looking to his right, scowling almost or a little aggressive, as though his peace has just been disrupted by a call or a sarcastic remark. He looks slightly stupid, but the strength and latent brutality of his body seem to eclipse that, stupidity is not what defines him. Here, in this statue, made by one Apollonius in the last century before Christ, there is nothing that points to anything beyond this particular moment, what we see is everything, nothing is hidden, neither death nor the divine, nor man as an idea or ideal, this is the world as it is, no more, no less. But is it art?

  What is art?

  The conflict between what we know and what we don’t is played out in all art, that is what has driven it over the centuries, and that situation is never fixed, never stable,
because the moment we find out something new, something else new appears of which we know nothing. In their art, the Greeks were the first to ignore completely what they didn’t understand, they concentrated on what they knew. There aren’t any mysteries in Greek art. The Pyramids are an enigma, but not Doric or Ionic temples. Onstage this became a theme: Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex is about a man who doesn’t know and about what happens to him as he is gradually enlightened and finally discovers the truth. The question of whether the tragedy lay in ignorance or knowledge is central because this was Greek culture’s own great issue. But in the play there is both what Oedipus knows and what he doesn’t know, and the emphasis is on his reaction to the unknown, not on the unknown itself. And Greek mythology, the whole pantheon, consisted of gods it was impossible to take completely seriously, they were too human for that, and the allure of the underworld, which is so strong in many other mythologies, not least Norse, is quite insignificant in Greek mythology, where the dead are shadows, in other words a darkness we are familiar with. What we see is what we are. But Plato, doesn’t he look to a world behind this? Yes, in a way, but that world is no different, it is the same one, only stronger, as an object is stronger and more real than its shadow.

  I found it difficult to imagine that an art such as Greek art could have been spawned in Polish forests or the Danish heathlands. Why, I didn’t quite know. Many people have gone into this in the past, indeed I have myself read several interpretations of the southern and the northern temperament and climate by the great Swedish poet Vilhelm Ekelund, and even though it might be frowned upon to speak in these terms now, to say that culture was influenced by climate, as those who maintained this seldom did so without hailing northern clarity and simplicity as opposed to southern deviousness and peacock-like vanity, that was how it was, I thought to myself, only vice versa: clarity belonged to Mediterranean culture, lack of clarity to northern European culture. A forest where everything is hidden, everything is connected, and everything is always a sign of something else is not conducive to ideas of openness, clarity, and simplicity. That Norse culture became obsessed with ornamentation and interwovenness and American Indian culture with animals and always balked at objects in themselves is not in the least surprising and demolishes Vinci’s otherwise fascinating idea that Odysseus ravaged the Skagerrak and the Baltics. This was what was going through my mind on the boat, which was full of tourists, while a voice announced over the loudspeaker that a whale had been spotted in the vicinity, but it had dived a few minutes ago and probably wouldn’t resurface before we were back in the harbor. I told Vanja this when she woke up and we were about to disembark, she was disappointed, she wanted to see a whale so much, but contented herself with the thought that it had been out there with her. I praised her for going to sleep when she felt seasick, no one else had done that, I said, she was very clever, I said, and for the whole of the following year she remembered that and returned to it several times, the others hadn’t gone to sleep, so they had been sick, but I went to sleep, do you remember that, Daddy?

  We walked through the harbor area to the little beach in the middle of the town. I had swimming things in my backpack, but Vanja didn’t feel like a dip, she wanted to go home to Linda and Heidi, so after she had polished off an ice cream in a café and I had bought her a pair of heart-shaped sunglasses we got on the bus and were soon speeding along the road, as it wound its way like a shelf around the cliffs over the sea, the sun burning high above us. Before I had paid for the sunglasses in the shop I spotted a clothes stand at the other end, and as I made my way there with them the assistant shouted, almost screamed, at me, the sunglasses, you have to pay for the sunglasses! That annoyed me because pilfering was not in my nature, to put it mildly, and I also had a child with me, so why did she think I was stealing? When I said this to her she didn’t even apologize.

  “Why weren’t there any sharks?” Vanja asked, not looking at me, she was staring out to sea, so vast and blue and deserted, quivering with the reflections of the sun.

  “I suppose they must have been somewhere else,” I said. “And they might be a bit scared of dolphins, don’t you think?”

  I had the idea that dolphins held sway over sharks from The Phantom. He had two dolphins on the island of Eden, which pulled him along on his water skis. One of them was called Nefertiti, but the other one? Dolphi? Anyway, if sharks came, they drove them away.

  “Why are they frightened of dolphins?” Vanja asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “They’re stronger, I think.”

  She accepted that. I studied her, the little head, her blue eyes, the slight squint as she stared out to sea. Was she thinking about sharks, dolphins, and whales? If she was, what were her thoughts? She was three and a half years old, her vocabulary was limited, and what she didn’t know or understand was endless. How did that feel?

  I smiled and tousled her hair. She was so lovely.

  She looked at me seriously. Then she smiled too and looked out the window again.

  Had she done that to humor me?

  I stared at the craggy mountainside flashing past the windows on the right like a film. Maybe her thoughts were basic and undeveloped, but they must have filled her mind in the same way mine did. They must have been just as important for her as mine were to me. So it couldn’t be the understanding that thoughts produced that was the point of them, their objective content, but just their interaction with feelings, sense impressions and consciousness. Whatever was connected with the sense of oneself. So why push your thoughts so far and measure yourself by that yardstick? Intelligent, not intelligent, brilliant, not brilliant?

  That awful sales clerk.

  I stretched a leg out into the central aisle and leaned back. The trip had gone well. Vanja was happy, and the unease I had felt in the morning, that she might get bored and yearn for Linda and Heidi, had completely gone.

  Something important, close to me, flagged itself up.

  What was it?

  Something I had been thinking about.

  I looked out the window.

  Something out there.

  The sun?

  The dark blue sea?

  The slightly curved horizon? The feeling of being on a planet whirling through space?

  No, no. The boat we had been on, Vinci’s theory about Homer.

  That was it.

  What was so important about that?

  Let’s see …

  The bus braked sharply, I looked ahead, there was a big white semi in front of us on the bend. We backed up.

  “What’s the matter, Daddy?” Vanja said.

  “We have to back up because of a truck,” I said. “Feel like some chewing gum?”

  She nodded.

  “It’s adult chewing gum,” I said.

  “Does it taste like toothpaste?” she asked.

  “Yes, just like it,” I said, putting one of the small tablets into her outstretched hand. Popped three in my mouth as the truck slowly passed the windows. The peppermint taste spread like a miniature storm in my mouth.

  Ah, yes. It made no difference to Vinci’s theory that Mediterranean art had got close to the world in its representation of it and torn it free from all fetters. If Odysseus’s adventures had taken place in the north, the accounts of them need not have been written there. And was this not what constituted the battle in the Odyssey? A battle between the mythical world represented by the Cyclops, Circe who turned the crew into pigs, the song of the Sirens, in other words a magic reality, and the new, as yet unrealized, nonmagical world from which Odysseus with his reasoning powers and ingenuity comes and which he brings with him? Horkheimer and Adorno had understood this conflict as the very dialectic of enlightenment, the place where reason liberates itself, and the barbarism of the Second World War as the place where it comes crashing down again. They were clear-sighted, it was brilliant, but I had never gone along with the implicit idea of progress in it, that the enlightened world was better than the unenlightened world, reas
on better than unreason, perhaps only because my own thoughts were obscure, unclear, superstitious while, at the same time, intelligible and sensible. I felt the irrational was always as important, or as dominant, as the rational. Inside me all of this ebbed and flowed, and all my thoughts, even at their most precise, were invariably colored by feelings and urges. Oh, the Sirens, they also sing for us, death lures us too, the song of decay and destruction never ceases, for in it lies the new, that which is to come, this is how life is organized. We can develop culture, we can elevate it higher and higher and we can shut out the song of the Sirens. But people are not identical with the culture in which they live, although it is easy to believe they are, as we are born into it and grow up in it. A sophisticated culture has to be sustained, it requires a great effort from all and sundry, as though they are living beyond their capabilities, until the culture’s structure is strong enough to carry itself, which is treacherous as a lack of effort makes the construction invisible and we merge into the culture in which we live. Then it becomes natural, it is the only option, there is no beyond anymore, which is where the Sirens are, and barbarism becomes incomprehensible, evil, nonhuman. How can a brilliant literature professor become one of the worst war criminals in the Balkans? It’s a mystery! Incomprehensible!

  Knut Hamsun knew this. In almost all of his novels the enchanted and disenchanted worlds lie side by side, with the insight that is gained thereby, that all of this is of no real consequence since in the end life is empty and meaningless. But this too can be celebrated, and maybe this is what his books do.

  “I’ve finished, Daddy,” Vanja said, taking the chewing gum out of her mouth. I put out a hand and she placed the gum in it. I tore off the outside of the packet, wrapped the strip of paper around the gum and put it in my pocket. Far below us lay a little town of newly built hotels and holiday homes, shimmering white in the bright sunlight.

  “Is it much farther?” Vanja said.