In the Land of the Cyclops

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  It turned out that Against the Grain is about a nobleman who shuts himself away in a house, weary of people, weary of society, weary of the age, a man who finds everyday life insufferably banal and who, alone in contemplation, endeavors to establish a completely artificial life, through books, paintings, art, and music, but also through grand, performance-like happenings in which he re-creates the world outside by stimulating individual senses – smell, sight, taste, hearing – in systems as closed as they are unsettling. Moreover, he is obsessed by decay, obsessed by all that unravels, crumbles away, weakens, dies.

  The depiction of Jean Des Esseintes (Huysmans’s protagonist) probably seemed just as astonishing and aberrant to the reader when the book came out in 1884 as it does today, whereas the conception it represented, of the connection between refinement and decline, which flourished in the arts toward the end of that century, would most likely no longer seem as clear-cut. Presumably, the Second World War put an end to it; before that, it was a view that dominated European thought, not only in decadent literature and art but also in the novels of a writer like Thomas Mann, and not least in philosophy, by way of Oswald Spengler’s once unprecedentedly influential work The Decline of the West, published starting in 1918, which construed civilizations as organic entities passing through clearly defined life cycles of a thousand years, in which culture’s pinnacle, its summer, also contained the very seed of its decline, for at that point it was consummate, and then stagnated, withered, turned in on itself, questioning its own raison d’être, a path that inexorably led to nihilism and decadence, the autumn of civilization – whereas winter marked the return of faith, when religiosity once more descended upon it.

  Huysmans’s literary life was like Spengler’s system in miniature: he began as a naturalist, continued as a fin de siècle nihilist and perhaps the foremost exponent of the decadent movement, before eventually turning religious and converting to Catholicism, an evolution he spent his final books putting into words.

  All of this resonates in Houellebecq’s novel, in the simplest of ways, through the protagonist François’s absorption in Huysmans’s books, his identification with his life – Huysmans is “a faithful friend,” he writes. François finds modern life to be quite as intolerable as Des Esseintes before him, as empty and as hollow, but Submission, unlike Against the Grain, is a realistic novel, and the life it depicts is a perfectly ordinary French middle-class life. François is in his midforties, a professor at the Sorbonne, he lives alone, eats microwave dinners in front of the TV in the evenings, his romantic relationships are fleeting, a year at most, usually with one of his female students. As the narrative commences, in the spring of 2022, he resumes a sexually intense, albeit uncommitted relationship with a student called Myriam. Everything he does is tinged with a pessimism that escalates when Myriam leaves him and moves to Israel, and first his mother, then his father, die shortly afterward. He has no friends, no interests apart from nineteenth-century French literature, he browses porn on the Internet, visits a few prostitutes, at one point he says he’s nearing suicide, elsewhere he notes that suddenly, during the night, he was overwhelmed by unexpected, uncontrollable tears. Presented thus, as a detached list of facts, it seems apparent we are dealing with loneliness, lovelessness, the meaningless void. In the context of the novel itself, however, this doesn’t seem to be the case at all, for François never writes about his feelings, losing his parents is a matter hardly touched on, and his perspective is in every instance cynical and disillusioned, and since the cynical, disillusioned perspective generally is characterized by distance, it overlooks, or ignores, or does not believe in or recognize emotional intimacy. The disillusioned perspective distinguishes continually between faith and reality, between life as we want it to be and life as it actually is – for it is faith that joins us together with our undertakings and with the world, faith that accords them value. Without faith, no value. That’s why so many people find the disillusioned perspective so provoking: it lacks faith, sees only the phenomenon itself, while faith, which in a sense is always also illusion, for most people is the very point, the profoundest meaning. To the disillusioned, morals, for instance, are not so much a question of right or wrong as of fear. But try telling that to the moral individual. When François at the beginning of the novel writes that the great majority in Western societies are blinded by avarice and consumerist lust, even more so by the desire to assert themselves, inspired by their idols, athletes, actors, and models, unable to see their own lives as they are, utterly devoid of meaning, what he is describing is the function of faith in modern society. The fact that he himself does not possess such faith, that he exists outside it, within the meaningless, as it were, is something he explains: “For various psychological reasons that I have neither the skill nor the desire to analyze, I wasn’t that way at all.”

  This is the only place in the novel that opens up for the idea that the emptiness and ennui that François feels is not just universal, a kind of existential condition applicable to us all and which most people hide away behind walls of illusion, it may also have individual causes. That is somewhere he doesn’t want to go, and thus a vast and interesting field of tension is set up in the novel, since the narrator is a person who is unable to bond with others, feels no closeness to anyone, not even himself, and moreover understands solitude existentially, that is from a distance, as something general, a universal condition, or as something determined by society, typical of our age, at the same time as he tells us his parents never wanted anything to do with him, that he hardly had any contact with them, and that their deaths are little more than insignificant incidents in his life. Such an understanding, that the ennui and emptiness he feels so strongly are related to his incapacity to feel emotion or establish closeness to others, and that it is difficult, indeed impossible, not to see this as having to do with lifelong rejection, is extraneous to the novel’s universe, since nothing would be remoter to François’s worldview, an intimate model of explanation would be impossible for him to accept, a mere addition to the list of things in which he doesn’t believe: love, politics, psychology, religion.

  Such a disillusioned protagonist allows, too, for a comic perspective, insofar as the comic presupposes distance, shuns identification, and is nourished by the outrageous. Indeed, Submission is, in long stretches, a comic novel, a comedy, its protagonist François teetering always on the brink of caricature, his thoughts and dialogue often witty, as for instance in this passage, where Myriam, his young mistress, asks if he is bothered by her just having referred to him as macho:

  “I don’t know, I guess I must be kind of macho. I’ve never really been convinced that it was a good idea for women to get the vote, study the same things as men, go into the same professions, et cetera. I mean, we’re used to it now – but was it really a good idea?”

  Her eyes narrowed in surprise. For a few seconds she actually seemed to be thinking it over, and suddenly I was, too, for a moment. Then I realized I had no answer, to this question or any other.

  The main reason François’s ennui never really seems significant, at least not compared with the status ennui is accorded in Huysmans’s Against the Grain, even if it is consistently present in nearly all the novel’s scenes, is, however, neither abhorrence of emotional closeness nor the remoteness with which its comic passages are infused, but rather the fact that it coincides with the massive political upheaval France is undergoing in front of his very eyes. An election is coming up, and the mood across the country is tense, there are armed street battles and riots in several towns, right-wing radicals clash with various ethnic groups, and yet the media avoids writing about it, the problem is played down, and people seem weary and resigned.

  It is this theme that lends the novel its narrative thrust and which of course is the reason for all the attention it has received, for anything that has to do with immigration, the nation-state, multiculturalism, ethnicity, and religion is explosive stuff i
n Europe these days. Many of its elements are recognizable, like the newspapers omitting to mention, or mentioning only with caution, conflicts arising out of ethnic differences, or the political left’s antiracism overriding its feminism, making it wary of criticizing patriarchal structures within immigrant communities, say, but in this novel all is brought to a head, taken to its most extreme conclusion, in a scenario of the future that realistically is less than likely, and yet entirely possible. What’s crucial for the novel is that the political events it portrays are psychologically as persuasive as they are credible, for this is what the novel is about, an entire culture’s enormous loss of meaning, its lack of, or highly depleted, faith, a culture in which the ties of community are dissolving and which, for want of resilience more than anything else, gives up on its most important values and submits to religious government.

  In this, Submission is strongly satirical, and its satire is directed toward the intellectual classes, among whom no trace is found of idealism and not a shadow of will to defend any set of values, only pragmatism pure and simple. François sums up the mood among his own as: “What has to happen will happen,” comparing this passivity with that which made it possible for Hitler to come to power in 1933, when people lulled themselves into believing that eventually he would come to his senses and conform.

  During a reception given by a journal of nineteenth-century literature to which François regularly contributes, shots and explosions are suddenly heard in the streets outside, and when later he walks through the city he sees the Place de Clichy in flames, wreckage of burned-out cars, the skeleton of a bus, but not a single human being, no sound other than a screaming siren. No one knows what’s going to happen, whether all-out civil war will erupt or not. And yet in François’s circles weakness prevails, and if this is meant to be satirical, a depiction of a class of people helplessly enclosed within its own bubble, without the faintest idea what’s going on outside or why, a bit like the aristocracy before the revolution, it is also realistic, because when a person has grown up in a certain culture, within a certain societal system, it is largely unthinkable that that culture, that system, might be changed so radically, since everything in life – the beliefs instilled in us as children at home and at school, the vocations we are trained in and to which we later devote our labor, the programs we watch on TV and listen to on the radio, the words we read in newspapers, magazines, and books, the images we see in films and advertising – occurs within the same framework, confirming and sustaining it, and this is so completely pervasive that to all intents and purposes it is the world, it is society, it is who we are. Minor modifications and adjustments take place all the time, of a political nature too – sometimes the right is in charge, sometimes the left, and the Greens may win a percentage of ground – but total upheaval isn’t even a faint possibility, it is simply unimaginable, and therefore cannot exist.

  And yet society’s total upheaval is what Submission depicts. The election is won by a Muslim party with which the left collaborates in order to keep the National Front from power, and France as a result becomes a Muslim state. But maybe that isn’t so bad? Maybe it doesn’t matter that much? Aren’t people just people, regardless of what they believe in and of how they choose to organize their societies? It is these questions that the novel leads up to, since this entire seamless revolution is seen through the eyes of François, a man who believes in nothing and who consequently is bound by nothing other than himself and his own needs. The novel closes with him looking forward in time, to the conversion ceremony of his own submission to Islam, a travesty of Huysmans’s conversion to Catholicism, not because François becomes a Muslim rather than a Catholic, but because his submission is pragmatic, without flame, superficial, whereas Huysmans’s was impassioned, anguished, a matter of life and death.

  This lack of attachment, this indifference, is as I see it the novel’s fundamental theme and issue, much more so than the Islamization of France, which in the logic of the book is merely a consequence. What does it mean to be a human being without faith? This is in many ways the question posed by the novel. François shares Huysmans’s misanthropy and disillusionment, but fails to grasp the religious route of his deliverance. He does, however, try, traveling to Rocamadour to see the Black Virgin, perhaps the most famous religious icon of the Middle Ages, sitting before her every day for more than a month, and for increasingly longer periods of time, but while intellectually he is fully aware of what she represents, something superhuman, from a period of Christianity in which the individual was as yet undeveloped and both faith and judgment were collective in nature, and although in the hours he spends in her presence he feels his ego dissolving, he ends up departing in a state of resignation, “fully deserted by the Spirit,” as he puts it.

  In this part of the novel, which is brief yet significant, there is no trace of satire. The description of the statue’s unearthliness, its dignity and severity, its almost disturbingly powerful aura, is exquisite in a novel that otherwise seems to shun beauty or not to know it at all. And the attempt to approach its mystery is genuine: “What this severe statue expressed was not attachment to a homeland, to a country; not some celebration of the soldier’s manly courage; not even a child’s desire for his mother. It was something mysterious, priestly, and royal that surpassed Péguy’s understanding, to say nothing of Huysmans’s.”

  This is probably the only instance in which François rather than diminishing what he sees actually adds to it instead. What he describes here is nothing other than the sacred.

  So what is the sacred in this novel?

  What François seems to be looking for, in a sudden mood of gravity, is faith in its purest form, that which is unconcerned with human needs like safety, comfort, or belonging, but which is directed beyond the human to the divine, the truly sacred. This is the only thing that cannot be impinged on by the perspective of disillusionment, because it veils nothing, conceals nothing, is nothing other than itself.

  To François’s mind, Huysmans’s conversion was nothing but a cultish yearning, a transparent attempt to lend meaning to the meaningless, possible only through self-delusion, that is by allowing illusion to trump disillusion.

  Faith that has no foundation but itself, this is the religion of Kierkegaard, the absurd and, in relation to human life, meaningless act, which may be conceived as the commencement of that period in Western history of which Huysmans and François are a part, where faith is not a natural element of life but something that may be attained only by particular endeavor, a leap undertaken alone.

  It is from the Virgin of Rocamadour that François returns to Paris, to the comedy, eventually converting to Islam in order to continue teaching at the Sorbonne, now a Muslim seat of learning. Before doing so, however, he writes a forty-page foreword to a Pléiade edition of Huysmans, as if in a fever, having now finally understood him better than he ever understood himself, as he puts it:

  Husymans’s true subject had been bourgeois happiness, a happiness painfully out of reach for a bachelor…His idea of happiness was to have his artist friends over for a pot-au-feu with horseradish sauce, accompanied by an “honest” wine and followed by plum brandy and tobacco, with everyone sitting by the stove while the winter winds battered the towers of Saint-Sulpice. These simple pleasures had been denied him.

  Was all this refinement, all this decadence, this misanthropy and disillusionment, were all these religious agonies and scruples merely the sublimation of a longing for the sedate pleasures of a bourgeois life? Was Huysmans’s entire body of work the result of a grandiose self-delusion?

  François appears to believe so, and the idea is far from improbable, in fact I find it quite plausible. The disillusioned gaze sees through everything, sees all the lies and pretenses we concoct to give life meaning, the only thing it doesn’t see is its own origin, its own driving force. But what does that matter as long as it creates great literature, quivering with ambivalence, full o
f longing for meaning, which, if none is found, it creates itself?

  Feeling and Feeling and Feeling

  On January 9, 1978, I was nine years old and living on a new housing estate in Tromøya outside Arendal in Norway. I’ve no idea what happened in my life on that particular day, nothing has stuck in my memory. But the records of the meteorological station at nearby Torungen Lighthouse tell me the weather was cloudy, the temperature six degrees Celsius, and that the wind picked up into a strong breeze between 1 and 7 p.m. School must have just started again after the Christmas holidays, meaning I’d probably have left the house about 8:15 that morning and walked up to the B-Max supermarket, where the school bus would have picked us up at 8:30. The trees would have been swaying in the wind, the spruce heavy and reluctant, the pine springy and more compliant; there can’t have been much snow on the ground, and the grass would have been yellowed. Although by this time I’d started reading the local newspaper delivered to our mailbox every morning, and was therefore at least vaguely aware of what was going on in the world around me – I knew that the American president was called Jimmy Carter and that Norway’s prime minister was Odvar Nordli, and I’d heard of Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, and Olof Palme – my reality was still primarily that of a child, so closely, closely bound to the things and people that were nearest to me. The white tennis racquet I’d got for Christmas two weeks earlier, the name John Newcombe in blue cursive script on the shaft; the song of the strings when struck. The sensational taste of Muscat grapes. Dad’s red Opel Kadett, parked in the gravel drive outside the house. The pale face of Geir Prestbakmo, my friend from next door, and his characteristic tuft of hair. Yes, I think to myself now, forty years on, how reminiscent that childhood existence was of the life ascribed by Heidegger to animals, which he construed as being held captive by their surroundings and functions, as if they were spellbound. Not even the skylark sees the open, he wrote, by which presumably he meant that the animals know only the few stations of their day-to-day existence and how they relate to them. We can only guess at how close the life of a child actually comes to that of an animal in this respect, but having read what Ingmar Bergman wrote in his workbook that particular day, it’s tempting to think that my own experience, at least, was closer to the animals’ than that of the adults around me, for nothing of what Bergman was thinking and doing that day was in any way familiar to me then, nothing of what was important to him was important to me – we were living in totally distinct worlds.