All essays copyright © Karl Ove Knausgaard, 2013–2020
English translation copyright unless otherwise stated © Martin Aitken, 2015–2021
“Fate” English translation copyright © Damion Searls, 2017
“Tándaradéi!” English translation copyright © Ingvild Burkey, 2017
“The Other Side of the Face” English translation copyright © Ingvild Burkey, 2014
First Archipelago Books Edition, 2021
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Archipelago Books
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Distributed by Penguin Random House
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Library of Congress CIP data available upon request
Ebook ISBN 9781939810755
Cover art: Hooded Crow by Stephen Gill
Book design: Zoe Guttenplan
This book was made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
Archipelago Books also gratefully acknowledges the generous support of The Klingenstein-Martell Foundation, Furthermore: a program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund, NORLA, the Carl Lesnor Family Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Lannan Foundation, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
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Contents
All That Is in Heaven
Pig Person
Inexhaustible Precision
Fate
Welcome to Reality
America of the Soul
At the Bottom of the Universe
Tándaradéi!
Michel Houellebecq’s Submission
Feeling and Feeling and Feeling
Idiots of the Cosmos
In the Land of the Cyclops
The Other Side of the Face
Life in the Sphere of Unending Resignation
Madame Bovary
To Where the Story Cannot Reach
The World Inside the World
Ten Years Old
Acknowledgments
Sources
Art
All That Is in Heaven
A few days ago a picture appeared on a number of news websites. It was from a medical examination, an ultrasound image of a man’s testicles; there was a face in there as clear as day, with eyes, a nose and mouth, a child gazing disconcertedly out of its darkness in the depths of the body. The phenomenon is not uncommon and has often been associated with Christ, perhaps because only his face makes such occurrences noteworthy enough to report on. The face of Jesus can appear in a marble cake, a slice of burnt toast, a stained piece of fabric. Last autumn I was stopped by a woman on the street in Gothenburg. She wanted to give me a photograph of Christ seen in a rock face somewhere in Sweden. These viral images are not vague schemata filled in by vivid imaginations, but are utterly convincing; the face staring out of the man’s testicles is incontestably that of a child, and the male figure in the rock face, his hand held up in a gesture of peace, is incontestably an image of Jesus Christ exactly as he has been iconized. This is because the forms that occur in the world are constrained in number, and the human face and body are one such form. They can just as easily appear in a pile of sand as in a pile of cells.
If you lie on your back and look up at the sky on a summer’s day, hardly a few minutes will pass before you see a recognizable shape in the clouds. A hare, a bathtub, a mountain, a tree, a face. These images are not fixed; slowly they transform into something else, as opposed to the person lying there looking at them, whose face and body remain unchanged, and to the natural surroundings from which they are observed: the ground with its grass and trees, they too remain unchanged. But the immutable is only seemingly so, for the face, the body, the grass, and the trees change too, and if we return to the same spot, this clearing in the forest, fifteen years later, it will be completely different and the face and body will also have changed, although they will still be recognizable. However, in the greater perspective of time they too will transform; over a two-hundred-year period the face and body will have come into being, formed, deformed, and dissolved in sequences of change not unlike those undergone by the clouds, though far more slowly since these changes take place in the denseness of the flesh rather than in the vaporous firmament.
That we do not see the world in this way, as matter at the mercy of all-destructive forces, is only because that perspective is not available to us, our being confined within our own human time as it were, and viewing all change from that vantage point only. We see the changes in the clouds, but not the changes in the mountains. On this basis we form our conceptions of the immutable and immutability, of change and changeability. We retain in our minds the form of the mountain as it appeared to us the day we stood in front of it, but not the forms of the clouds that were above the mountain at that same moment. Our body exists somewhere between these monitors of mutability that measure the speed of our lives. Our own time, the change we are able to register as we stand here in the midst of the world, is, apart from the movements of the body, almost always bound up with water and wind. The raindrops that drip from the gutter, the leaf whirled into the air, the clouds that slip over the ridge, the water that trickles toward the stream, the river that runs into the sea, the waves that form and break apart in an ever-changing abundance of unique forms. We can see this, for the time in which such movement occurs is synchronized with that of our own existence. We refer to that time as the now. And what happens within us in the now is not dissimilar to what happens outside us, a continual formation and breaking apart that never ceases as long as we live: our thoughts. On the sky of the self they come drifting, each unique, and over the precipice of oblivion they vanish again, never to return in the same shape.
The idea of a connection between our thoughts and the clouds, between the soul and the sky, is ancient and has always been opposed, or restrained, by the connection between the body and the earth. That which is fleeting, ethereal, and free has always been eternal; that which is firm, material, and bound has always been transient. With the arrival of modern science in the seventeenth century, which overcame the limitations of the human eye with the invention of the microscope and the telescope – an era in the Western world where the human body began to be systematically dissected – one of the greatest challenges to arise concerned the nature of thought in this system of cells and nerves. Where was the soul in this mannequin of muscles and tendons? The French philosopher Descartes performed dissections in his apartment in Amsterdam, striving to find the seat of the soul, which he believed to be located in one of the glands, and trace human thought, which he believed to be conducted through the tiny tubes of the brain. Science has come no closer to pinning down these concepts in the three hundred or so years that have passed since Descartes made his investigations, for the distinction between the I who says I think, therefore I am, and the brain in which that sentence is conceived and thought, and from which it then issues, that biological-mechanical welter of cells, chemistry, and electricity, is immeasurable, as one of Descartes’s contemporaries only a few city blocks away, the painter Rembrandt, demonstrates in one of his dissection pictures, where the upper part of the skull has been removed and held out like a cup by an assistant while the physician himself cautiously cuts into the exposed brain of the corpse. No thought, only the tubes of thought; no soul, only its empty casing. What were thought and t
he soul? They were what stirred inside.
In his essay collection Descartes’ Devil: Three Meditations, a substantial and near-fuming apologia for Descartes, the German poet Durs Grünbein writes about one of the Baroque philosopher’s dissections of an ox in whose eye Descartes claimed to have seen an image of what the ox itself had seen in its final seconds of life. Descartes writes: “We have seen this picture in the eye of a dead animal, and surely it appears on the inner skin of the eye of a living man in just the same way.” Of this strange idea, Grünbein writes: “Descartes, who imagines the retina as a sheet of paper, as thin and transluscent as an eggshell, really believes that something seen is somehow imprinted on it.”
We do not see the world, we see the light it throws back at us, and the thought that this light in some way affixes itself to the inner eye is perhaps not as farfetched as it seems, for when we close our eyes and block out the light of the world, we have no difficulty conjuring up an image of it from the darkness inside our skulls. That it does not happen in the way Descartes imagined – an image of the seen attaching to the retinal membrane – does not alter the fact that the world exists inside us in the form of pictures, for of all the light that is continually thrown back at us from objects and phenomena, some will always make an impression on us and remain, and that these impressions should have an objective existence, discernible not only by the inner “I” but by other people too, for instance during a dissection of the eye, is no odder an idea than that the soul should exist independently of the body through which it expresses itself.
The mechanical image, which is to say the photograph, the fixing of light in time, of which Descartes’s tiny image in the ox’s eye is an anticipation and the Shroud of Turin a variation, did not exist in the Baroque era; instead all depiction was routed through the human sphere, meaning the human being’s inner world of images, thoughts, feelings, notions, intuition, and experience, transposed and objectified in the form of colors on a canvas. What belongs to the outer world and what belongs to the inner world depends on the eye that sees. Rembrandt’s dissection pictures also concern that distinction. The eye can see only surfaces, which throw back the light, and the surface is furthermore both the material of painting and its limitation. Thought and the soul belong to the inner world and being invisible they are in themselves impossible to depict. If they are to be shown, they must be represented, and represented in the form of something else, as a surface. In the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, such people as were thought to be holy, who were or had been in contact with the divine, were depicted with halos above their heads. The angels, messengers of the divine, God’s representatives, were depicted with wings. In many of these pictures, the sky opens and human figures with wings and halos spill out onto the earth in cascades of light and clouds. In the Middle Ages the holy faces represented faces, the holy figures represented human figures, the light represented light. All parts of the body and all facial features were heavily formalized, and this denial of the individual was reinforced by the indefinite quality of the light, which meant that it did not belong to any definite moment but to all moments, to eternity. The iconic images expressed the immutable, that which prevailed forever. With the Renaissance, light, the form of the age, becomes more clearly defined, and human faces increasingly approach the definite face, the body the definite body, the landscape the definite landscape. The painting emerges into the human era and represents the holy within it: Christ casts shadows. The sky still opens and is filled with figures from the realm of the divine, but is no longer indefinite, it resembles the sky we know, with lazy twirls of cloud, shades of gray, light and darkness, and together with the anatomically correct figures that inhabit it, it is increasingly drawn downward in the direction of reality, which is to say the world as it appears before our eyes, which know nothing of eternity, only the moment, as it unfolds before us here and now.
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Deijman, painted by Rembrandt in 1656, later damaged by a fire that left only the middle of the picture intact, is hard to consider as anything other than an end point in this process. Not necessarily because it depicts a dissection, but because the dissected corpse is depicted in the same position and with the same radical foreshortening as Mantegna’s Dead Christ. The body dissected is not Jesus Christ, but is Christlike nevertheless, and the painting thereby not only brings the Christlike to earth, into death’s inexorable attachment of the body to matter, it also opens up the body’s insides, not only revealing the vital organs, but also exposing the very seat of thought, the brain. Look, no soul. Look, no thought. What else are the soul and thought but the sky of the individual? In this dizzyingly concentrated picture, the sky of the deceased, and of us all, is gone, all that remains is our nontranscendental, secular life: the world as it appears to whoever can see.
One of the most remarkable aspects of Rembrandt’s paintings is that hardly any contain clouds or sky. Those not depicting indoor scenes present their motifs beneath the canopy of night. Certainly there are exceptions, but characteristic of the few skies Rembrandt did paint is their vague and indefinite nature. This contrasts with many of his contemporaries, for whom the landscape outside the four walls of the studio was compellingly seductive and seemingly infused with what for them was a truly liberating force, for they paint their landscapes as if they were the first in the world to set eyes on them.
The canvases of the seventeenth-century Dutch master Jacob van Ruisdael are dominated by sky, their most striking element being clouds, as in the magnificent Gezicht op Haarlem met bleekvelden (View of Haarlem with Bleaching Fields), painted eight years after Rembrandt’s dissection, where the sky with its colossal, seemingly onrushing clouds takes up two-thirds of the painting’s surface area. There is a lake, a forest, houses, steeples, scattered about the flatland, yet these elements seem to be little more than the ground into which the painting’s actual content is pegged. The sky is like a hall, a theater, the scene of some great event, not of anything divine or mythological, but of different forms of aqueous vapor as they appear on that particular day in the seventeenth century over the Dutch town of Haarlem. The Baroque painters who were active farther south on the continent, such as Claude Lorrain, also painted clouds, but the landscapes over which they appeared were archaic or religious. To these painters, conception was superior to sight, thought superior to the eye. In Ruisdael’s landscapes, conception and thought have given way to the eye. This eye, whose impressions are represented by the hand, sees what is there, the flatland with its scattering of buildings and trees, the blue sky with its towering white clouds. When the eye is primary, the question posed by the painting concerns not only the nature of the world, but also of the eye itself. One might imagine that the clouds Ruisdael painted could also have appeared in the eyes of a corpse, a faint reflection passing over the sheen of the orbs staring emptily up at the sky, the way their reflection passes over all reflective surfaces in the landscape. The mechanization of the lens that took place at this time, and of the body, liberates our attention from the soul, suggesting that what is seen exists in its own right. When August Strindberg placed his camera on the ground and let it take pictures of the clouds in the sky, it was that progression he was pursuing and trying to complete, toward the world beyond the human world, the way it is in itself, seen by the soulless eye. With that, the purging of the heavens that had been going on for at least a hundred years was achieved: the clouds were not painted, not composed, not even seen, merely registered by a mechanical apparatus without will or thought, a machine for the recording of the most will-less, thoughtless, and arbitrary entities imaginable: formations of cloud. In this a place emerges, but it is not the world without human presence, for the world is not something that is, but something that becomes, and all pictures of the world as it is are utopian in the original sense: they are nonplaces. Which is to say, art.
One of the Swedish photographer Thomas Wågström’s pictures shows an airplane beneath a huge formation of cloud.
The plane is approximately in the middle of the photo. Level with the plane, but at the extreme right of the picture, is a bird. It is a large bird, a raptor perhaps, and it is much closer to the photographer than the plane, both the bird and the plane look like they are the same size. The bank of cloud is immense. The plane is small. But some details may nonetheless be discerned, such as its tail being to the right, indicating that the plane is flying from right to left, at great speed across the sky, with the cloud behind it. This is how I look at the photograph, the plane captured in midflight across the sky, captured in the moment. And this is how it must have been in reality too, the photographer must have seen the plane and the bird and the towering bank of cloud, raised his camera to his eye and taken a picture of what he saw, and when he lowered the camera again the plane continued on its way, soon to vanish from sight, while the bird perhaps soared on the wind for a moment longer before it too vanished from sight. But none of this belongs to the picture. The plane is in fact still.
Indeed, it hangs suspended and motionless beneath the cloud, and the bird hangs likewise suspended and motionless slightly farther away. But the plane being still is impossible to see. Our assumptions about the plane are so strong as to override the fact of the photograph. I see the plane on its way across the sky. I see the moment that follows. That moment is in me, not the photo, for in the photo the plane is not moving. In the photo, the next moment does not exist. And in reality, the moment of the photograph did not exist either, for never has the world or anything in it been still. Any photograph, any painting is a fall – it falls from the world. I don’t know in what way Descartes imagined the relation between light and the retina, but he could not have believed that every moment became etched like the miniature photograph he saw in the ox’s eye; presumably he imagined something fluid and fluctuating that became fixed only in death. Such a conception lies close to the nature of photography, which can capture light only in an image of something that has already passed.
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