In the Land of the Cyclops

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  Nazism, of course, had beauty. If it didn’t, no one would have been seduced by it.

  That beauty, which we know to be wrong, is something only a novel can describe.

  Why should it do that?

  Because Nazism had beauty.

  All other institutions of society tell us: this is how it must be. Everywhere we go we’re confronted by rules and regulations, orders written and unwritten, all of which are devised to make life work for us, as smoothly and painlessly as possible, in the fairest and most equal way. I’m not against what’s right, but I do insist on the freedom to say that what’s wrong exists too.

  We know that drinking probably isn’t good, but we drink anyway.

  We know that yelling at our kids isn’t good, but we yell at them anyway.

  We know that envy isn’t good, but we’re envious anyway.

  We know that bitterness isn’t good, but we’re bitter anyway.

  What we know we ought to be is clear and plain to us. What we are, in spite of what we know, is something we must hide. It has no voice, and is our secret. It leads us into feelings of guilt and shame. We smother it, and it destroys our self-esteem. We keep silent, as we must, each of us on our own. But society as a whole cannot be silent, cannot pretend that it doesn’t exist, because it does exist, it’s here with us now and must be given a voice so it can be acknowledged. Not the voice of morality, which tells us thou shalt not, not the voice of the media, which reduces it, but the voice of literature, which says, This exists. It might not be good, but it exists, it’s here with us now, and we must address it as a reality.

  What happens to a society when it stops addressing what it knows to exist and yet refuses to acknowledge? A society that instead of looking truth in the eye, looks away?

  The arts and culture pages of the cyclopes’ newspapers are hostile to literature, because morality there reigns above literature, and ideology above morality. I don’t know any other country in the world, apart from totalitarian states, where writers are so invisible in public discussion. Literature is not free in the land of the cyclops – its hands and feet are bound. You never see a writer stand up on their own in the land of the cyclops. You never see a writer risk anything in public.

  It’s hardly surprising. To be called a pedophile in the cyclopes’ biggest newspaper is not a pleasant experience. It’s not the end of the world, of course, and it is a legitimate opinion, but there’s no other country I know of where literature professors call their writers pedophiles and tell them what they should and shouldn’t write about. That could only happen in the land of the cyclops.

  The Other Side of the Face

  When I consider the neck, the first things that spring to mind are guillotines, beheadings, executions. Which does seem a little strange, since we live in a country where executions do not take place, there are no guillotines, and beheading is thus an entirely marginal phenomenon in our culture. Nevertheless, if I think neck, I think, chop it off.

  This may simply be because the neck leads a hidden existence in the shadow of the face, that it never assumes a place of privilege in our thoughts about ourselves, and only enters the stage in these most extreme situations which, though they no longer occur in our part of the world, still proliferate in our midst, given the numerous decapitations in fiction. But I think it runs deeper than that. The neck is a vulnerable and exposed part of the body, perhaps the most vulnerable and exposed, and our experience of this is fundamental, even without a sword hanging over us. In this sense, it is related to the fear of snakes or crocodiles, which may as well appear in people living on the Finnmarksvidda plateau as in central Africa, or for that matter, the fear of heights, which can lie dormant in people who have never seen anything other than plains and sand dunes, lowlands and swamps, fields and meadows.

  Fear is archaic, it is embedded in the body, in its purest form untouchable by thought, and it is there to keep us alive. There are other vulnerable parts of the body, the heart being perhaps the most obvious, but when I think of the heart, I don’t think of it being pierced by a javelin or a spear or a bullet; that would be absurd. No, the heart fills me with thoughts of life and force, and if vulnerability and fear are involved, it is no more than a mild concern that one day it will simply stop beating. This must be because the heart belongs to the front of the body, the front we turn to the world and always keep in check, since we can see what lies ahead of us, we can see what is coming and take our precautions. The heart feels safe. That the neck is in fact just as safe, since we live in a world where people no longer carry swords, makes no difference to the feeling of vulnerability, it is archaic and closely linked to the fact that the neck belongs to the reverse side of the body, it is always turned toward what we cannot see and cannot control. The fear of everything we cannot see converges on the neck, and if in earlier times it used to be associated with physical violence, the most pressing association now is its figurative sense, which lives on in the social realm, in expressions like being attacked from the rear, getting it in the neck, watch your back, having eyes in the back of your head, being spoken about behind your back.

  But the symbolic language that radiates from or the associations that converge on the neck are not only about being struck, that is being a passive victim of a surprise attack, or having something taken away from you, but also the opposite, where vulnerability is something that is offered. When we wish to show someone respect or to be polite, we bow to them, in other words, we expose our neck. It is a way of showing trust, and of giving something of yourself to the other, in an ancient system of differentiation where, in the face of the supreme, you not only make a deep and sweeping bow, as to a king or other dignitary, but kneel and lower your head to the ground, as you would before an altar or on a prayer mat. The gesture is humble, self-surrendering, it means laying your life in the hands of others.

  While this country has not had the death penalty since the trials of Nazi collaborators after the Second World War, it is still applied in countries we have close ties to, namely the United States, our main ally. If we consider the execution methods used there, it becomes obvious that death is not just death, since there is a big difference between separating the criminal’s head from his neck with a well-aimed stroke of the ax, and injecting his body with a lethal toxin or sending a surge of electricity through it. An injection has something neutral, controlled, and professional about it, it is administered by a medical doctor, while electricity belongs to modernity and therefore seems civilized – though perhaps not so any longer, there is something crudely early-modern about it, we associate it with quantity, with mass, and therefore also with the same kind of brutality and lack of sophistication shown by the errors of medical science during this era, lobotomy, measuring human skulls, eugenics. But still not as brutal as hanging, traditionally the least honorable form of execution, that most degrading to the victim – it is said that the prospect of being humiliated through hanging is what caused Göring to commit suicide in his Nuremberg cell, and even more so in the case of beheading. We perceive beheading as something barbaric and inhumane. To see a head being separated from a body must be one of the most terrifying sights a human being can be exposed to. But why? The end result is the same as when a lethal injection is administered, the person dies. It must be that something else is revealed in the act of decapitation, something more than the bare fact, the cessation of life functions. So what is it? In ritual sacrifice, which is still carried out in certain cultures, the head is separated from the body, and it is this, as much as death itself, that the community gathers around. Death is displayed, and thus controlled, but the same would have been achieved if the victim had died quietly of poison.

  When the French philosopher Georges Bataille founded the secret society Acéphale (The Headless) in 1936, which among other things celebrated the decapitation of Louis XVI and supposedly also discussed the possibility of carrying out a human sacrifice, the reason was not
simply because the chop in the neck opened the abyss between life and death, but also between head and body, reason and chaos, human and animal, in a symbolic language where the neck forms the transition between what is low, corporeal-animal, and what is high, spiritual – but in an ambiguous mythical language too, where beheading reveals or liberates certain forces, murky and archaic, linked to death, soil, darkness, but also to repetition and continuity, for what the sacrificial victim exhibits, with its steaming blood and deep bellow, is a place where existence is dizzyingly densified. This is why Francis Ford Coppola ends his film Apocalypse Now with sacrifice and beheading, where meaning meets meaninglessness, life meets death, collective transgression meets individual limitation.

  Having said that, the opposite way of thinking, which views beheading as the cutting of an electrical cord, that is a way of thinking that is instrumentalist and functionalist, is not just possible but completely dominant in our time. We desire clarity, aspire to reason, reject the darkness, the uncertainties, the steaming blood. Few places express this more clearly than a hospital. In a hospital the body is divided into departments. One department for the ear, nose, and throat, one for the eyes, one for the stomach and the intestines, one for the sexual organs, one for heart and blood vessels, and one for the soul, which is treated in the psychiatric wards. This is of course the case because medical science is instrumental, it has analyzed the functions of the different body parts and organs, and seeks to restore them when they have been weakened or damaged by disease or injury.

  A common objection to this is that it leads to an instrumental view of human beings, materialist and fragmented, and that medical science and hospitals never consider the human being as a whole, in its totality, but reduce it to components, and also leave out the existential dimension of being human. But as long as the medications and the operations actually work, as long as the coronary arteries can be cleared of plaque, or the brain drained of blood after a stroke, thereby perhaps prolonging the patient’s life by several decades, the objection seems as odd as it would seem to an auto repair shop if one were to point out that the focus on individual wires and fan belts, spark plugs, and engine oil levels diverts attention from the car as a whole. Car healing will never become a widespread phenomenon, we will never see incense burning and prayer in an auto repair shop or mechanics who attempt to fix a car by washing and polishing it. The fact is that the heart is a pump with four chambers, the action of which causes a red fluid to circulate through the body’s system of transmission lines, and that the neck is a tube through which bundles of nerves run from the brain into the body.

  The first time I really understood this aspect of the body was when I read about a woman who had had a fall while she was skiing, and had lain unconscious for a long time with her head underwater in a stream. When she was found, her body temperature was extremely low, and for all practical purposes she was dead. Her heart was restarted, but her condition remained critical, and as far as I understood, to reheat her body too quickly would have placed too great a strain on her system, so what the doctor did was to allow her blood out into the room and let it go around in a tube there, before it was led into her again, slightly warmer, until her body temperature returned to normal. She survived, with no serious injuries.

  This story shocked and fascinated me at the time, it seemed almost like a revelation, not of the divine, but of its opposite, the mechanical nature of the body, its automaton-like properties, that the doctors, those engineers of the flesh, could repair it as if it were a clock or a hydraulic crane. I had always known this, that hands can be stitched back on and myopia burnt off, intestines removed and stomachs sewn up, but the simplicity of these operations vanishes from view in the sterile and blinking order of the operating rooms, in the – to me – unattainable expertise and professionalism of the doctors, all the smocks and special equipment, which in this particular case was completely trumped by the provisional, simple, and improvised nature of the doctor’s solution; it seemed like something I could have come up with myself, related to the way children play with water, hoses, channels. Any thought of the sacredness of human life, the grandeur and mystery of it, was stripped away in a second, and I saw the body for what it is, a construction of bones, strings, tubes, and liquids that you can tinker around with if something inside it should break. Why, I would not have been surprised if the doctor had patched a burst blood vessel with a wad of chewing gum.

  To compare the body with clocks and automatons is something people began to do in the seventeenth century, the mechanical century, the spirit of which was perhaps best captured by Descartes and Newton, and which is still present in our view of the world and ourselves, for while new knowledge may arise quickly, insight travels slowly. It takes generations before a discovery or a phenomenon out there gains enough weight to sink in and change what is in here, if it ever does.

  That quantum physics and quantum mechanics found their expression as early as the 1920s made no difference to the teaching of physics and chemistry when I was at school sixty years later; no one told us that the discoveries made by Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli, Dirac, Sommerfeld, and all the other physicists of the interwar period had in fact revolutionized our knowledge of the material world. The same holds for genetic engineering, for even though we know that a revolution has taken place in this field, after the mapping of the genome, and that it is now possible to clone animals, probably even humans soon, that it is possible to extract genes from fish and insert them into plants, and that cultivating organs for transplantation, and not just on the backs of mice – in other words, mass producing them – is no longer science fiction, we don’t care, we don’t take it in, we don’t allow it to change a single thing in our thoughts and conceptions of what it is to be human.

  This may be because we are extremely adaptable, we are constantly turning the future into the present, the unknown into the known, this is how we have always existed in the world. It may also be because culture, which is to say language, soaked through as it is with conceptions and worldviews, is so sluggish that it either fails to perceive the new – that it is, so to speak, beyond the reach of novelty – or it sees the new as a variation of the old. Or it may simply be that being human is always the same, regardless, that the force of it, being cast into the world with all one’s senses and needs, is immutable. A beer is malt and hops and water, it tastes good and quenches thirst. A loaf of bread is grain and yeast, it tastes good and fills the stomach. The sun shines and gives warmth. The grass beneath my bare feet is soft and pleasant to the touch. A chopped-off human head is the most terrifying of all sights.

  When I study the photographs in Thomas Wågström’s book Necks, that is what I see. A neck cannot be modern. A neck is in time, belongs to time, but is not formed by it. If these photos could have been taken ten thousand years ago, they would have looked the same. My guess is that photos of even Neanderthal necks would not differ significantly from these. In other words, the neck is untouched by culture, it is, in a certain sense, pure nature. Something that grows in a certain place, the way tree trunks grow, or mussels, fungi, moss.

  But is this really true? And if so, what does it mean? In that case, does it not also hold true for all the other parts of the body, such as the face, the knees, the heart, the fingers?

  In a certain sense, of course it does. There is such a thing as a human being as it is in itself a pure object in the world; this is the naked body, the body as biological matter. But, and this is a major objection, this body is inaccessible to us. We can’t see it. Nor can we be it. For the biological body, the human being as pure nature, is swathed in thoughts, conceptions, ideas of such diversity and opulence that not one square inch of the body or the world is untouched by them.

  A face? We see what the face communicates, what it tells us. We enhance communication, we apply lipstick, mascara, we wear glasses, grow a beard, whiskers, or we don’t, but even a naked face tells us something, every look is a form of
address, and a downturned gaze is not nothing, it is a nonaddress, a turning away. In the world of images we inhabit today there is hardly a single part of the body that has not been exploited, sexually, commercially, or intellectually. Breasts, bottoms, thighs, calves, feet. Backs, biceps, six-pack abs. Cunts and cocks. Toes and fingers with nails lacquered red. Pierced tongues. Inner organs are bought and sold in the Third World; in the First World the transactions take place between the living and the dead, in what we call organ transplants. In this sense, the neck is perhaps the only body part left that is not for sale, that is not on view in magazines and periodicals, that doesn’t serve as the owner’s marketing site or display window, that doesn’t change owners after death, and which, in contrast to its front side, the face, hardly communicates anything, neither contemporaneity, nor culture, nor community, and thus appears mute. And this is why, I think, that in looking at the neck, as these photos lead us to do, we get the feeling that we are being offered a glimpse of the body as it is in itself, nonindividual, nonrelational, biological, whole. Something growing in a certain place in the world.

  But the fact that the neck is unexploited visually and commercially of course does not mean that it stands outside culture, on the contrary, the neck, too, is loaded with meaning. It means only that it is marginal, somewhat forgotten, most often associated with not seeing, and with not being seen, that is with negation, in contrast to the heart, for instance, which is also blind and mute but in touch with a whole other wealth of signification. The heart signifies love, it means warmth, kindness, consideration. She has a big heart, home is where the heart is, our heartfelt sympathy, his heart is broken. The heart is life, light, love, compassion. The only figurative sense assigned to the neck that I can think of is found in the expression stiff-necked – stubborn, obdurate, willful, intractable, impossible. To be stiff-necked is not to give way, not to yield a single inch, to always know best, always keep one’s cards close to one’s chest. The meaning can be extended to uprightness, which is the positive variant of being stiff-necked, that is, not relinquishing one’s pride and self-respect, holding one’s ground. Thus, the neck, in a certain sense, is linked to an existence outside the community. The opposite, in the symbolic language of the neck, is to be stooped, that is cowed, at the mercy of others, but in a more passive and less voluntary sense than when one bows deeply or kneels out of respect for the other or in awe of the sacred.