In the Land of the Cyclops

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  America, with its millions of European immigrants, its systematic wiping out of the indigenous population, its grand mechanization of agriculture, its factories and poverty, its cities and skyscrapers, America with all its social chaos, so infinitely less regulated than today, this first mass society, was to the young Hamsun the very emblem of rootlessness, exploitation, progress. If on the outside he regarded America with ambivalence, in the sense that it was as fascinating to him as it was repellent, that ambivalence is nothing compared to what must have churned in his inner being, where the pull toward belonging and tradition was in the mind alone and must constantly have been contradicted by feelings, or whatever it was that drove him from place to place and which meant that over time he never attached himself to any milieu or any person, for while the thought perhaps never became explicit to him, it must nonetheless have been present within him: his soul belonged to America. What he describes in Mysteries are not the mimosa-like movements of the soul, but the America of the soul, and perhaps this is the most important reason the young Hamsun’s first novels still seem so fresh and relevant to us: the world they depict is our own, the way it was when it was still nascent, alive with all the potentials of the new, yet to become fossilized in the systems of completeness. So if we are to compare Hamsun’s characters with anyone, the figure of the Tramp, created by Charles Chaplin, another uneducated, self-taught artist who emerged out of miserable conditions in the nineteenth century, would seem a natural parallel. The Tramp too was without a past, without family or friends, arriving in every place as if it were the first, free of all ties except those of the now. When the nameless, haggard protagonist of Hunger sits in his shabby suit on a park bench in the night and raves about his electric hymnbook, Chaplin’s Tramp is not far away, and he is there too when Nagel staggers about the woods as if in some slapstick comedy, believing himself to be in the throes of death, and when, shimmering with the glee of a child, he daydreams about a future living off the land with Martha Gude. But in contrast to the Tramp, who can transform anything in his surroundings and infuse it with meaning according to his needs, regardless of how insignificant and useless it might have seemed to begin with, Nagel never gets further than emptying the meaning out. The last step, that required in order to survive, and which is the very premise of life, discovering ways in which to refresh and invigorate it, is beyond him, he is too unfree to accomplish or grasp it. Did Hamsun?

  There is a strange and beautiful symmetry in Hamsun’s oeuvre, in which not only the first and last novels, Hunger and On Overgrown Paths, belong together – both are about a man obsessed with writing who finds himself completely on the outside of society, at its very bottom, but whereas the first has time ahead of him and is on his way up, the other has time behind him and has already been at the top, only to be brought down – but also the second, Mysteries, and the penultimate The Ring Is Closed. These latter two novels open in exactly the same way, with the arrival of a steamboat at a small coastal town, but while the events in Mysteries are presented as inscrutable and mysterious, the exact opposite is true of The Ring Is Closed, which emphasizes the unimportance of what takes place. “An unforgettable experience, a sight fit for the gods, some sort of benediction or other? No no no. A few people and boxes ashore, a few people and boxes on board. No one says anything, neither the mate at the ship’s rail nor the agent on the dock needs to say a word, they look at the papers, they nod. That’s about it. People have a pretty good idea what they’re going to find there each day, still they go.” The main character, Abel, has no designs on anything, does nothing, is content just to sit in the sun in front of his shed and munch on a filched kohlrabi. Abel is Nagel’s antithesis, and intentionally so. But what Hamsun expresses in The Ring Is Closed is exactly the same as in Mysteries, only darker, more dangerous and sinister, the meaninglessness that looms from all sides arising not from any line of argumentation, nor any investigative will. On the contrary, it is Abel’s lack of will that brings it to the fore. Against his apathy, which apart from what he must do to keep himself alive is near absolute, life in the small town goes on in all its endeavor, its ceaseless jostling for position, its everyday ups and downs, a comedy of the utterly vacant, and as long as Abel’s longings are not directed toward life’s meaning, but instead are concerned with its most basic issues of warmth and nourishment, Nagel’s escape routes of art, nature, love, death are quite as meaningless. In The Ring Is Closed, the meaning has already been emptied out of the world before the novel begins. And as if to say that this not only applies to his characters, removed from all context, Hamsun quite exceptionally in his oeuvre bestows on Abel both parents and a childhood. Moreover, in contrast to the main characters in his earliest novels, he has Abel journey to America, allowing his drifting life of idleness there to remain in all its ambivalence in his consciousness throughout the novel. So, Hamsun did indeed grasp it. He was nearly eighty years old when he wrote The Ring Is Closed, and he believed this darkest of all his novels to be his last. Then came the war, the trial for acts of treason, and On Overgrown Paths, apparently an apologia, though with no plot to speak of, no ideas of significance, merely an old man, hard of hearing, trudging around the grounds of the nursing home where he is interned, writing down what he sees, things that have happened during the day, observations on his surroundings; his old galoshes, his walking stick, a pocketknife that has fallen into his possession, some religious magazines, the little spruce in the neighboring garden. What kind of apologia is that?

  As he writes On Overgrown Paths, Hamsun is only a few kilometers away from Lillesand, yet the vital emotions expressed in the two works are so far removed from each other one would think they stemmed from different worlds altogether. That it is the young Hamsun who depicts a meaningless world of loathing and yearning for death, while the aged Hamsun celebrates life and the living, albeit somewhat resignedly in places, is striking. There are those who despise On Overgrown Paths, Hamsun having hardly a word to say in it about the war and its suffering, this being taken as confirmation of his hostile and unscrupulously fascist leanings. By writing about his own suffering, his own misery, rather than about the millions whose suffering and death was caused by those he defended in speech and writing, it is charged that he twists and distorts the realities, and certainly there is an undercurrent of reaction and hostility toward his fellow men throughout Hamsun’s novels, including Mysteries, undeniably so, but the system of which it is a part is not Nazism or fascism, but their opposite.

  Hamsun is regarded as a great novelist, yet it is remarkable that he shunned the great novel with its grandness of story, for in all his works the sweeping lines are absent, or at least unnoticeable in the milling detail of the quotidian. Compared to those other great novelists of his day, Sigrid Undset and Olav Duun – both of whose work contains clear thematic similarities, particularly in terms of what is referred to in our posthistorical present as “reactionary,” evident in their focus on the prosaic and the down-to-earth, on nature and the past – we can say that while they produced “great” novels, stories whose wholeness is seldom if ever threatened, Hamsun, whether because of the extraordinary explosiveness of his prose, which continually strikes the moment, or his constant search for details, always, sooner or later, ends up where the lines get broken, where something comes apart or comes into being, and the grand story is just a dream someone goes on about. Even when Hamsun clearly wishes to harmonize, to sing the song of the earth and the people upon it, the way he attempted in Growth of the Soil, he invariably falls short of the great coming-together, remaining instead rooted to the spot, in the place where life is lived. I think I am in line here with Bruno Schulz, who once wrote of Gombrowicz’s novel Ferdydurke, quoted in the latter’s Diary: “While under the cover of official forms we honor higher, sublimated values our real life plays itself out secretly and without higher sanctions in that dirty realm, and the emotional energies located in it are a hundred times more powerful than those the thin layer of offi
cialdom dispenses.”

  Gombrowicz’s idea is that our entire cultural inheritance is down to us concealing our immaturity and is “the work of people pulling themselves up to a certain standard, of people who are wisdom, seriousness, profundity, responsibility only on the outside,” that all art and culture therefore fundamentally compromises us, being “above us and more mature than we are,” plunging us into “some sort of second childishness.” Basically, that it is hard to take Heidegger’s notion of Dasein seriously when sipping coffee and munching bread on a Sunday afternoon, or cramming our dirty laundry into the washing machine on a Wednesday morning.

  The kind of literature that deals only with our most elevated notions is dead, Gombrowicz says, citing The Death of Virgil and Ulysses and some of Kafka’s work, because “the ‘excellence’ and ‘greatness’ of these works realize themselves in a vacuum,” whereby they seem “somehow remote, inaccessible, and cold…for they were written in a kneeling position with thought not about the reader but Art or some other abstraction.”

  Hamsun belongs to those and was perhaps even the first to expound a different modernism, a dirty modernism, an in-the-midst-of-the-world modernism, as Céline and Faulkner do too, notwithstanding the huge differences between them. Our grandest notions, ideals, and superstructures, whether religious, cultural, or political, dissolve when they come up against the world, flaking like dandruff on its shoulders, settling like dust under its sofa, a scattering of crumbs on its table. The low flows constantly throughout Hamsun’s novels, not only in the nearness of the world and everything that is ordinary in it, but also in the nearness of our lowest emotions: contempt, hatred, smugness, selfishness, avarice, jealousy. All the ridicule, the sending up, the ripping into and taking to task that practically none of his novels is without. The cripples and the doddering elderly, the sick and the weak, the dandies and the itinerant peddlars, the working-class rabble and debauched Englishmen that populate them; the detestation of tourism, capitalism, intellectualism – all of this is low and base, and its presence expresses a longing for purity, for the uncorrupted, the innocent, and the untainted, which in all its naïveté is not the antithesis of the low, but then perhaps not its consequence either.

  Hamsun was not only a modernist, he was also a romantic, and in a purely literary perspective it is hardly the presence of the low, the reactionary, and the politically objectionable that has led to his work being lumped among only the minor classics of world literature, his books never a point of departure for French or American intellectuals in analyses and theorizing endeavors, ignored by the literary avant-garde, but rather the presence of romantic naïveté. This is harder to suffer. But Hamsun’s problems were the problems of modernity, and these were what he wrote about in his novels, not because it was what he thought, but because it was what he felt, and it is no coincidence that his first novel is about survival, the second about a person who commits suicide, for that was his span, and if The Ring Is Closed is fatalistic and nihilistic from start to finish, written in the shadow of death, in continuation of Mysteries, then On Overgrown Paths is written in the light of life, in continuation of Hunger, its author the insuperable human, brimming with an inner dignity that cannot be dislodged, for the lightness with which the world is described here can be known only by one who is above it. This person has no need of others, apart from as a mark of life, the living, in its most general sense, and this is not to suggest anything lacking or impoverished about that, for the remarkable thing about the narrator of On Overgrown Paths is his human wealth, which perhaps primarily consists in his ability to infuse everything in his surroundings with life and meaning, even a pair of shoelaces, a plane flying over the hill, a scrap of newspaper, and never is his kinship with Chaplin more apparent than in this, and here Chaplin’s famous fork dance from The Gold Rush comes to mind: two potatoes, two forks, and a plate are all he needs to dazzle the world. I can’t make a speech, but I’ll do a dance, he says. And therein lies the art.

  At the Bottom of the Universe

  November 23, 2010, 7:20 p.m. I’m feeling low. It goes away when I write, which is the reason I’m writing, to escape myself – even if it’s myself I’m writing about. Something happens when thought meets words put into sentences, a particular space opens up, neither thought nor language.

  But every time I look up from the screen and meet my own gaze in the window something comes apart inside me. I hate myself. But I’m all I’ve got, and I owe it to my childen to look after myself. I need to be there for them as long as possible. Besides, the hate is something that flares up, it’s not there all the time, and when it is it can be diverted. By writing, but also by seeing. For no matter what we look at, it belongs to the world. Every time we open our eyes the world is there in front of us. Every time we shift our gaze we see another side of the world. In the yard outside ten minutes ago: Everything was covered by a thick layer of snow. The trees, the only things tall enough to stick up out of the white, were leafless, black and stiff. From the white globs descending in the light of the street lamps I could see it was snowing, but in the garden, where darkness had settled on the white, absorbing its brilliance only at the bottom, I saw no snow fall.

  Snow on the moon.

  That was a notion too.

  One of the most beautiful passages in Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks has to do with the moon. He sees oceans and forests up there. The thought has attracted me ever since I first read about it, I don’t know why. Much of what Leonardo wrote makes me feel like that. It’s probably the innocence of it that appeals to me. Or rather, not innocence, more purity. That’s it, the purity of the gaze. He’s seeing what he sees for the first time. The human body had barely been opened up in the centuries before him, certainly it had never been looked at as closely as he looked at it. His pictures always seem to connect the great with the small, microcosmos with macrocosmos, the body with the world.

  The rivers of the arteries, the ropes of the sinews, the caves of the eyes.

  The tremendous fires of the soul.

  November 24, 1:06 a.m. Someone has written inscriptions on the beams and under the windowsills of the house where I’m writing. The man who sold us the place said there were more, but they’d removed them. One they left is on the beam directly above my head. It says, Days that tire you out for life.

  It’s been one of those days.

  But underneath the windowsill you look straight up at if you’re lying in the bed against the wall on the other side of the room, it says, Epiphany.

  There are many nooks and crannies, walls and beams in these three buildings, so there’s probably more. The walls talk. I’ll have a poke around one day and see what they say.

  ABANDON ALL HOPE, YOU WHO ENTER HERE, it says at the entrance to hell in Dante’s Divina Commedia, that masterpiece of verticality. I read it first when I was twenty, an undergraduate in literature studies, and what appealed to me most were all the dragons and reptiles, the devils and monsters, and the physical world they moved about in, the bubbling ooze and foul-smelling sludge, the smell of sulfur and smoke, all the bodies that were beaten, burned, bitten, scalded, cut up, and dissected, for hell is first and foremost a place of bodies, wherever Dante goes he sees bodies in motion, and of all the sounds he hears, those of the body are most dominant: when at the beginning of the work he stands at the edge of hell and stares down into the void, he hears sighing, sobbing, moans and wailing, strident voices, smacking hands, swirling in the impenetrable darkness, like sand in a whirlwind. The visceral, sensory aspects of hell were what struck me most, and I read it in pretty much the same way as I read Lord of the Rings by Tolkien. One scene especially made an impression. It’s one of the most famous, but I didn’t know that at the time. It occurs toward the end of the journey through the Inferno, in Canto 32. In the darkness, Dante and Virgil come to a vast, ice-covered lake. There, forever frozen fast, are the very worst sinners. Only their heads stick up above the ice. They can’t
move, their skin is blue, their teeth chatter with cold, even the tears in their eyes freeze to ice. Their mouths are a testament of suffering, Dante writes, and their eyes proclaim their sorry hearts. But if their bodies are rigid, something inside them still moves, for as Dante and Virgil carry on, two of the heads become enraged, butting each other like goats. This aggression seems to rub off on Dante and Virgil, or perhaps it’s being so close to absolute evil that affects them, for as they pace on, Dante by accident strikes another head hard with his foot. It screeches at him, Dante halts, a tremendous argument ensues. Dante demands to know the sinner’s name, the sinner refuses to tell him. Seething now with anger, Dante bends down and begins to tear out the hair from this head, which, locked in the ice, is completely defenseless. Only when others nearby start shouting, wanting to know what’s going on, and thereby reveal the sinner’s name, does Dante leave him alone. He moves on with Virgil as if nothing had happened.

  It’s a strange and mysterious passage. The only time during their long journey among the crags and clefts of hell that Dante intervenes physically. His behavior seems out of character and against the rules he’s stuck to for so long. It’s got to mean something, but what?

  1:01. It’s snowing again. Small, dry granules, flurrying sensitively in the gentle gusts. The lawn is nearly all white, only the tips of grass poking up here and there. It’s cold in the house, I haven’t got the under-floor heating to work yet and am going to have to get in touch with the previous owners. Only not yet, not today, I need to write. For the time being I can chop wood and keep the stove going.