In the Land of the Cyclops

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  But even if this is so, and Pascal’s fear ought to be felt by us even more keenly, we reject it through our actions: Pascal’s descriptions of the vast and empty void, of man’s loneliness, his helplessness and infinitesimally small presence within it, seem outdated, as if what he says has not the slightest relevance to us, a perspective that, while conceivable, lacks validity. We know it to be true, surely, but don’t want to admit it. And this is so, Sloterdijk contends, because people are no longer interested in their place, no longer ask where they are, only who they are.

  The question of where finds its answer in the vertical, it compels the eye to look up, toward the stars, which the seafarers of old used to plot their position, and toward God or the divine, which in the Old Testament is above us, whereas the question of who finds its answer in the horizontal, in our human networks, and increasingly so, for when we look up we see not stars, not the divine, not infinity, but the satellites that beam back our images of ourselves and our reality and distribute them among us. It is not the face of God we see up there, but our own.

  The open and boundless has long been our ideal, laden with possibility and future, fundamentally positive and desirable to us, whereas that which is constrained, restricted, narrow in outlook, isolated, limited, has been undesirable, associated with stagnation, occasionally with regression, reaction. Limits and boundaries, anything that hems in our human lives, are something we have strived to abolish over the course of the past few centuries. Fences, barriers, boxes, all such words bring to mind something intrinsically negative. Gender is a hindrance, class is a hindrance, the categories are taken almost to be presumptive, expressive of some aspect of a person having been determined beforehand. The same is true of the place a person comes from. I remember reading an op-ed article many years ago written by a man who as a child had been adopted from an Asian country, he was frustrated by people asking where he was from, they didn’t ask other Swedes, only him and those who looked like him, with Asian features. In other words, it was racism. But, I thought to myself when I read it, it was a fact that he was born in Asia and that he shared similar physical characteristics as others born there, so the questions he was so tired of being asked were, in that light, more relevant to the facts of the matter than his answer to those questions, which was Sweden. One might object, however – and rightly so – that there are no “facts of the matter” when it comes to identity, identity being a construct, and what we see in instances such as this is a clash between two different ways of constructing identity: the old-fashioned one, which takes as its starting point place, the notion of origin, its question being where, while the new one takes as its starting point the individual as he or she sees himself, its question being who.

  Only a few generations ago, notions of the connection between geography and psychology were many. The Swedish poet Vilhelm Ekelund, for instance, returns continually to the difference of temperaments between north and south (much like Nietzsche’s distinction between Apollonian and Dionysian), and the same idea, that people from certain places possess certain temperaments or ways of being, could be broken down as far as individual towns and villages – indeed, when my maternal grandmother was growing up it was even usual to attribute certain characteristics to lines of descent at certain farms. Knowing where a person came from was important in knowing who they were. The question is whether such ideas were self-fueling, something the generations grew into, or rejected and moved away from. The Norwegian writer most associated with this culture is Olav Duun. That no one writes family sagas anymore has of course to do with the very notion of descent having lost all meaning and pregnancy, and that such places as Duun describes, where the landscape remains the same as generations come and go, have changed fundamentally and in our part of the world hardly even exist anymore. In that respect, Duun’s contemporary Hamsun is a more modern writer, rootlessness, dislocation, unbound individuality being his dominant themes. In Hamsun’s work, however, rootlessness (often directly connected to capitalism) was something ambivalent; Hamsun cultivates that which is bound to place, but as a rootless individual, and the world he described and of which he was a part was still markedly local, the technologies that would later allow place to be transcended still nascent – when Hamsun wrote Hunger there were no planes, there was no radio, no television, the camera was a new invention, the first film had been made only a few years earlier, the automobile was still a rare sight, so what conveyed news and people from one place to another was the telegraph, the steamboat, the train. By the time of his death in 1952, the world was full of cars, planes, telephones, radios, photographs, and films, a process accelerated especially by the two world wars (only sixteen years after he died, man set foot on the moon), though none of these mind-boggling advances left even the faintest mark on his writing: the voice and mind-set of Hunger, published in 1890, is much the same as the voice and mind-set of On Overgrown Paths, published in 1949. This is perhaps indicative of how formative the first twenty years of a life are, the outlook that emerges during those years being such that we are able to apply and integrate technological and social change without a wobble, and it is perhaps also indicative of how the form within which thoughts and writing are produced determines what is thought and written – writers still write novels in the same way Hamsun and his contemporaries did, and although we now have cell phones and the Internet, the world and our understanding of it are essentially unchanged.

  But then something happens that transcends everything, something new comes along, and often it’s hard to know exactly what it is, precisely because it’s new and exists outside the categories that constrain our thinking, and yet in some vague and strange way in accordance with something inside us. For me this was Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666. When I first read it, it was as if all other contemporary literature was at once consigned to the shadows. It was relevant, that was the feeling I had. Exactly what it was that was relevant I couldn’t put my finger on. But what if I compared it to other works of the same scope, for instance the great novel of the nineteenth century, War and Peace by Tolstoy, or the great novel of the twentieth century, Ulysses by Joyce, and looked for the differences between them, what would reveal itself then? The most obvious difference had to do with the regulation of distance. In War and Peace there is always a foreground and a background, always something near, always something distant. In other words a sense of there being a center of things. The war is something that takes place away from the center, flooding in over the characters in the form of rumor, news, accounts both first- and second-hand, the big story impacting on the small story – and when one of the characters rides out of the small story into the big one, the latter becomes foreground and the former recedes into the periphery and becomes background. In Ulysses the perspective is so tight up against the characters that what makes up the center is what goes on in their minds, rather than their actions and interactions, the world as sensed and perceived by Stephen Dedalus, Leopold, and Molly Bloom. The big world shows itself in the small as fragments in this particular moment on this particular day in this particular city, without their status ever being up for discussion: the faint smell of urine in the fried kidneys Leopold Bloom tucks into at the beginning of the novel belongs to the near world, the news he glimpes in the newspaper during the course of the day represents something beyond that world. It is present in his life, but only as something peripheral. Reading 2666, it is as if this sense of there being a center of things, based on the idea or experience of something being near and something else being distant, is dissolved or nullified. When two of the four western European scholars in the first part of the book, all of whom share the same interest in the disappeared author Archimboldi, travel to the place he was last seen, the Mexican border town of Santa Teresa, the description of that place and what goes on in it does nothing to suggest that they find anything there alien to them in any way, nothing to suggest any cognitive gap between them and what they see, in the sense of finding their surroundings
unfamiliar or strange or exotic, at least not to the extent that any of them feels compelled to address the matter, but conversely there is no familiarity either. The distance is always the same, they are neither near to anything nor removed from anything, nothing in their surroundings seems to have any impact on them, it’s like they’re seeing something on television, I thought to myself when reading it, and for perhaps this reason – that they have seen everything before, so nothing can surprise them, despite them being there for the first time. The world has been seen, so being physically present in it changes nothing. This preexisting knowledge, if that is what colors their perceptions, represents a remoteness from what is alien that no journey can resolve, and if Tolstoy with his descriptions of reality succeeded in making it strange again, as if seen for the first time, making it appear the way it actually was in its true state, unweakened by familiarity, Bolaño achieves the opposite, describing the weakening of images by reality, yet oddly enough arriving at much the same place as Tolstoy, for the world Bolaño describes is also mysterious, precisely by virtue of his characters not attempting to penetrate in any way into their surroundings, and in the lack of intimacy. We see this, and what we see, depicted in a way that refrains from attaching weight to one thing rather than another, is inexplicable. And such, we might say, is the very nature of the world – something that is not found, existing only in being meaningful to someone, but for the sake of reason – unexplained, uninterpreted, all occurrences, all entities within it having equal weight: to the world there is no difference between a butterfly settling on a gutter and a man thrusting a knife into someone, both are simply occurrences.

  In the early years of the new millenium I had all sorts of different TV channels I could watch at home, and one of them, I think it’s called Euronews – in fact I still sometimes watch it in hotel rooms – broadcast at night unedited images of the day’s news events. I used to sit and watch them, totally absorbed, because they were so mysterious. A normal news feature puts the images into a context, explains what’s happening, and there’s always cohesion between the images and the commentary, which is a narrative about reality, much as there’s always cohesion between the text of a fairy tale and the illustrations that accompany it. But without commentary it was impossible to say what was actually going on, what was actually important, what you saw was simply a number of people engaged in some event somewhere in the world, they could be shouting slogans, they could be holding up placards, they could be getting beaten up by the police or throwing stones at the police, running away from tear gas or water cannon, firing rocket launchers or running bent low across a street with rifles in their hands.

  With these short descriptions, I have already ascribed familiar stories to what was going on: demonstrations, confrontations, war. Watching them was different. A man could look at someone, what did it mean? A loud clatter of metal, where did it come from? A woman sits down on a pavement, why is she doing that? The voices of two people talking a short distance away, what are they saying? Who are they? And often there would be quite ordinary, undramatic events happening alongside, the transition to which was seamless. An old woman standing on a balcony, looking down at what’s happening, the rush of traffic on a road just behind, a seagull or a pigeon flying past. The confusion this brought about in me, the sense of not understanding anything, of watching something completely alien and unfathomable, events I was unable to connect with in any way, was, I think to myself now, the appropriate reaction to moving images broadcast from places unfamiliar to us. But usually we are unremoved from such images, for they come in the form of stories, and the stories are always the same, so the important differences, those existing between the place where we are and the place we see, are to a certain extent canceled out.

  If this is the case, that we take with us the feeling of knowing the world when we venture out into it, and that its strangeness is lessened because of the increasing imaging of reality and the incontestable fact that places in the world are becoming more and more alike, then it is also the case that we increasingly take our own worlds with us when we travel. I remember how it felt to travel in the 1980s. Leaving Norway, crossing into Denmark or Sweden, all contact with what was happening at home was immediately lost. You couldn’t read the newspapers, you couldn’t listen to the radio or watch TV. The ties to one’s local world were severed, what before was a here was now a there. And when you got home again, perhaps a month later, and opened the newspaper, the things you read about in it were baffling, a reality you could only look at from the outside for a day or so. Leaving the country today, you take it all with you, at least I do; on trains in Europe and America I check Norwegian news sources on my phone numerous times a day, and in the evenings I watch Norwegian TV on my laptop at the hotel. It feels like I’m never really away, that I’ve never really gone anywhere, that the boundaries between here and there no longer mean anything, or mean a lot less than they did only a few decades ago. Of course, this is down to technology and can be avoided; all it takes is to switch off the TV, disconnect from our laptops and phones, stay at home, or travel only in ways that require time (on foot, for instance), and place will take on its former meaning again. Or will it? Predictably, it’s not as simple as that, for technology changes our way of thinking and is something in which the individual has no say, it belongs to the community. Moreover, the changes that have occurred are quite tangible: not only has place taken on new meaning, places themselves have assumed new forms.

  Traveling through Norway in 1934, for instance, there would be differences in dialect, building traditions, and culture from valley to valley, from town to town, differences which have been all but erased today: the petrol stations are the same, the shops are the same, the buildings are the same. In his youth, my maternal grandfather did just that, wandering with a backpack full of books he sold on farms all over the Vestlandet. One time when he was old, I drove up to Ålesund with him and he compared what that place had been like then with what it looked like now. He said I wouldn’t comprehend how poor it had been, how much want and misery there had been, and what fantastic changes had occurred. It was quite unbelievable, he said. No one in those days could ever have imagined the kind of wealth that was there now. He was always pragmatic in his outlook, an optimist who believed in progress; once, toward the end of his life, I remember him talking about having his cows slaughtered and buying a satellite dish with the proceeds. But the perspective he expressed on our way to Ålesund, that everything that had happened since he was young had been of almost unfathomable benefit, is something I’ve carried with me ever since, even in my darkest moments of civilizational criticism: things have improved for the better. That places disappear, that the world becomes images, that screens replace life, is a price worth paying. There is no reason to yearn for the past.

  The Swedish writer Kerstin Ekman says the same thing, that there’s no call to romanticize the past, it was too poor and wretched, no one would want to go back to it, not really. This is almost certainly true. So why do I react so strongly against the technologification of our culture, its abstraction from reality, and the melting together of all things? For me it’s a question of value. At root, it’s also about capitalism and commercialization: since meaning is something that arises in the world of differences, never in the world of sameness, our geographical communities have become less meaningful as they have become more affluent, for money is what makes everything alike, its highest value being the value of exchange.

  What is news? News is something newspapers and television companies turn into money. What do we get out of it? Well, it entertains us. What does it mean to be entertained? It means to pass time in the easiest, most painless way possible. Images are painless, even images of pain are painless. They allow us to live our lives investing emotions in the imaginary, feeling without being accountable, drifting without resistance. Boundaries are resistance. Differences are resistance. Barriers, boxes, fences, are resistance. Such a perspective, that
the idea of the open, the free, the borderless, the undifferentiated, serves capitalism and facilitates the increasing commercialization of our world, is undercommunicated by the left, which believes the ethos of sameness to be progressive and that the female liberation that took place during the last century arose out of an idealistic, political struggle, whereas it also could be seen as society’s spiraling production demands necessitating a bigger workforce and increased consumption, met by women going to work alongside men, the care functions that had traditionally been their domain becoming institutionalized in nurseries and old people’s homes. It seems there are two very different concepts of equality at work at the same time, one has to do with equal rights and privileges, where imbalance is deeply rooted in the very structure of society, and the other with the way capitalist- and technology-driven images blur differences. The problem with identity politics is perhaps that it is mainly concerned with the images and not with the deep structure, where change means giving up privileges, so the status quo prevails. It just doesn’t look that way. It is easy to change the way we think and talk, it is very hard to change the way we act. We go in for ecology and protecting the environment, but are unwilling to follow things through to their logical consequence, for the industrialization of animal farming, for instance, or car transport, makes life easier and more comfortable for us.