In the Land of the Cyclops

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  An editor always works with more than one writer at a time, all different, pursuing different projects, with different interests and voices, and not least all with their different needs; nevertheless, I think writing is basically always the same, what separates one writer from another is the path that leads them there, the nature of the various obstructions that lie in their way, and the job of the editor is to identify those obstructions and try to provide the help necessary for the writer to overcome them. Now and then, this will require looking at things from the outside, an occasional correction, now and then it calls for discreetly planting something in the mind of the writer, for instance by talking about a certain poem or novel that might indicate a possible direction, a trigger, something that can grow into an idea seemingly out of nothing, and these ideas – for example the way D. H. Lawrence depicts emotions, as something monumental and almost material, and at the same time so finely calibrated and complex – can suddenly give direction to a writer who says that he or she is empty, has nothing to write about, no theme to pursue, a writer who wants to be vigorous, but can’t get going or doesn’t know in any articulated sense where to look. Lawrence opens vast rooms for us, but only in the writing are they revealed to us. In that sense, he makes them exist. I remember seeing a plastic bag swirling on a gust of wind in the middle of a film, it had no bearing on anything, but the very fact that it was accorded that little bit more time and space than expected gave it weight and value on its own, and this, as any good editor knows, applies to everything. As Eldrid Lunden once said to a student, cited in an interview in Vagant: Go home and write about milk, lad! In any relationship like that between writer and editor, the one giving and the other taking, without either necessarily realizing that this is what’s going on, insights gradually accumulate, though insight here comes only as something practical, materialized in the writing. Not in the sense of any algorithm, more as some sort of consequential understanding, and this means it’s hard to trace anything concrete back to the editor, it being so much a matter of process, a thousand threads projecting out into the text from life – apart from what happens in the final edit, which is quite tangible, though much less interesting: Get rid of that bit, and this bit will come across stronger, and hey, this sentence here isn’t very good, is it? Is this really what you want to say?

  Some time at the beginning of the new millenium I had lunch with two Swedish editors, and the first thing they asked me, even before the napkins were in our laps and our glasses filled with water, was what the secret of this Norwegian editor might be. How does he do it? they asked. How does he work? What is it about him?

  The reason they asked was because of the astonishing success of his authors. In a relatively short space of time he had published a remarkable number of first-time authors, several of whom had become big names, hyped as representatives of a new literary boom. It was like a climate change in Norwegian literature, the attention devoted to it and the aura it had taken on being radically different than ever before. Because I was a part of this, some people will think I’m exaggerating, mythologizing, talking myself up, but that was what it felt like, that something big was happening, and that this new editor was at the very center of it. Now it’s all in the past, something that happened once, that we now take for granted. But at the time there was nothing at all to suggest there was going to be such an upsurge of new authors, a whole generation almost, and all tied to the work of a single editor. At the time, it was practically nothing – a few tentative names jotted down on a notepad, perhaps, and presumably some ideas about how the relationship between editor and author might be imagined. That this nothing so quickly turned into something so huge means, I suppose, that what he was doing found resonance, that the prerequisites for it happening were in place, and that essentially he was a catalyst for something that was already there waiting to be released.

  When he moved to Oktober a few years later, practically all his authors went with him. There are a lot of editors in Norway, the editor is a role, a function belonging to the processes of publishing, and one might be as good as another, but it’s understandable that authors short on integrity and highly reliant, like myself, were loath to switch; they were accustomed to him, and the mere thought of upheaval in a relationship so fundamental to their writing was terrifying. That almost everyone went with him at that time is an indication that he offered his authors something more than just a role, and that what he was doing must have been significant indeed.

  But what was he doing?

  To the two Swedish editors I replied rather guardedly that I didn’t quite know. Now fifteen years have gone and it’s not hard to see that the important thing was the way he managed to redefine the role of editor, essentially by breaking down the distances involved: the distance between publisher and author, the publishing house no longer coming across as a fortress, and the difference between being on the outside and being on the inside, was radically closed down; the distance between author and text, where focus was now on the writing process more than the end result, more on the author than on the text; and finally the distance between the evaluating authority and the evaluated text, evaluation coming not from above, not from outside, but from inside.

  What this means is that the role is no longer a role in quite the same clear-cut sense as before, and therefore this description of the breaking down of formal structures, boundaries, distance, and authority, which is about the structures themselves rather than the people within them, is at once accurate and not. This is also one of the problems of writing history, that people become representatives of something, something they bear in themselves, whereas in the actual situations as they occurred they represented nothing else but themselves, on their own terms. Representing something requires distance, and in this case that distance was erased, at the same time as that erasure itself is representative of something, which is erasure. The same thing happens in literature, every book is written with a life on the line, a soul laid bare, but the moment the book comes out it is immediately representative of some tendency or trend, and before long, after a few years, of an ideology, an aesthetic, a moral outlook, a period, an epoque. This is so because we are unique, we have this unique face, these unique eyes, this unique voice, these unique thoughts, but we are also always part of a community, a time, and a culture – look at a portrait photograph from the nineteenth century and what you see more than anything else is a nineteenth-century face, such faces have a different form, a different expression than our own; read a diary from the nineteenth century and what you read more than anything else is a nineteenth-century voice expressing nineteenth-century thoughts.

  This ambivalence, the fact that we are at any one time always ourselves, our roles, and representatives of our time, has another parallel in the work of this editor, since he is a writer too. This has been crucial to his editing: he knows what a writer needs, because he knows what it means to write. But being a writer-editor is not an unequivocally uncomplicated, positive thing, for what if the writer doesn’t like what the editor suggests, doesn’t respect it, can’t fit it in with his or her own literary standpoints: can he really mean what he’s saying to me? Again, this is about erasing a boundary, and about openness: all editors have their personal preferences, but not all editors lay them out on the table in full view. But what does this mean? It means the editor too is vulnerable, he too invests his innermost self in literature, and in my own case this has made clear precisely the fact that literature is simultaneously collective and individual. The collective aspect becomes clear in the discourse about it, the crisscrossing lines that run so confidently through the discussion, from William Shakespeare to Cathrine Knudsen, from Petter Dass to Yngve Pedersen, from Franz Kafka to Taiye Selasi, from which insights may be drawn, thoughts, ideas, from this comes creative surplus, literature is all around us, in the collective space, it is there and leaves its mark on us – we exist outside of it, take what we need from it and make it our own. But when we
write ourselves, this isn’t how it is at all, confidence evaporates, we are on our own, alone with the writing, and it is this aloneness that is important, it is literature’s innermost self, this is where it comes from always. When I read my editor’s own books, it is this sense of innermost self, this aloneness, this creative source that comes across to me, in contrast to when I listen to him speak. This is the confident individual versus the vulnerable, the assured editor versus the searching writer, the discussion about literature versus literature itself. In other words, to literature one can only go alone, but to go alone requires help too, in the same way as only the one can see the all, and can do so only by standing outside, which is to say by being alone – which likewise always requires help.

  To write is to strive inward toward a place where the social does not exist, but from where it can be seen, inward toward a place where boundaries are transgressed, coming into view and being laid down anew at the same time. Defamiliarization, the concept established by the Russian formalists, belongs here: habit means that we see objects or phenomena in a certain way, almost as preconceived notions, the true nature of the object or phenomenon, its uniqueness, evaporating in its familiarity: we see a “tree,” we see a “man with a dog,” we see a “campsite.” To write is to penetrate through the preconceived, to the world on the other side, the way it could be when we were children, fantastic or frightening, but always rich and wide open, without this in any way being childlike, it is the perspective by which something is seen as if for the first time which is important. Ole Robert Sunde writes his way in toward this very place, in his insistence on the own value of the detail, Jan Kjærstad does so, in his searching for new points of entry into the world that surrounds us, Jon Fosse does so, in the emptiness that surrounds his characters, against whose darkness all movements or spoken words become almost iconic, which is to say universally human, Eldrid Lunden does so, in showing how language and its identities can be mechanisms of control and constraint, which her own language opens up, providing pathways by which to come free. To write is to strive inward toward these places, and that process takes place in solitude, but if we lift our gaze, a circle of faces are all around, and if we lift it further still, we see circle upon circle upon circle of faces outside that circle. This is society, it is our culture, our contemporary age, and the changes that are ongoing there cannot be traced back to any one individual or any one event, but accumulate within us, while at the same time radiate out from us, as if we were both inside and outside, subject and object, individual and collective all at once. In my lifetime, which is to say the last forty years, the changes that have occurred in our culture have been very much about the breaking down of boundaries. From the large scale, those between nations and cultures, for instance, to the smaller scale, between the sexes and between generations, and not least – and this is perhaps the most revolutionary of those changes – the barriers that have regulated our access to information. Nation is a construct, its borders are arbitrary and may be redefined. Gender is a construct, its borders are arbitrary and may be redefined, and in the social realm the distances that exist between people, safeguarded only two generations ago by polite forms of address, for example, or formal norms of interaction between social roles such as lecturer and student, have become smaller, more informal, at the same time as previously state-run institutions providing services in broadcasting, telecommunications, health, education, and childcare are now no longer the monopolies of before, they have become players in a market, where money and services are required to flow as freely as possible, to be in a continuous state of flux. The most potent symbol of the boundary, the barrier, and of instititutional constraint, was the Berlin Wall, pulled down in 1989.

  The interesting thing about such powerful architectures is that they may be identified in all kinds of structures, even the very smallest, including the editing of a Norwegian manuscript. When the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze wrote about what he called the rhizome in the 1980s, a figure characterized by connections between points, which is to say a network structure, with no specific subject or object, whose units are subordinate to the context they comprise, there was no such thing as the Internet, at least not as far as the general public was concerned, and the concept was unfamiliar, at least it was to me when I read about it in the early nineties; whereas now, with the vertical perspective increasingly dissolving into the horizontal, the absolute and the monolothic crumbling into the dust, the rhizome is one image of an existing, no longer utopian, mental reality. But even when I read Deleuze in the early nineties, what he wrote resonated quite differently in me than, say, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Kant was history and belonged to the museum; Deleuze was alive, relevant, he mapped something out for us, or in us. That something was openness, movement, mobility, boundlessness, connectivity, networks, the horizontal. Today, this is our reality, our new ideal, toward which everything in society strives, leaving behind all that is closed, constrained, restricted, confined.

  In almost everything I have written there is a longing for boundaries, a longing for the absolute, something nonrelative and constant. Likewise, there is a strong aversion to the unbounded, to relativism. These two currents point out of the culture, inward toward nature and religion, and it is to there my longing seems to be directed. I am drawn toward place, for place is constrained and immobile, the boundaries of place establish difference, and difference establishes meaning. To write is precisely to establish difference, the unlike in the alike: only in writing can difference be established in sameness, for in writing sameness is given form, and with that it becomes something, in contrast to something else.

  But surely, it might be argued, the breaking down of boundaries, the diminishing relevance of place, the increasing relativization of reality, is a good thing? Surely the clearing away of differences, between countries, the sexes, the generations, is a huge and marvelous step forward, widening our opportunities for freedom, opening our societies for all?

  In one sense, ideally, this is true. But the breaking down of boundaries, this ever-increasing sameness, is also about money, industry, commercialization. This essay is about the production of literature, the whole point being that it is not production in the capitalist sense, but the opposite, nonindustrial, unstreamlined, uncommercial – for the thing about money is that it accords and systematizes value, making one thing, money, exchangeable for another, goods or services, and it is precisely this kind of exchange to which literature stands in opposition. What is happening all around us now? Bookstores are becoming increasingly the same, stocking exactly the same books, the books too becoming increasingly the same, written according to a template – all crime novels, all genre fiction is the same and can be repeated into infinity, and the major publishing houses in Norway, like the major bookstores and, basically, the entire society as a whole, have been blinded by figures, which are equally valid in all instances, and have forgotten letters, writing, whose validity varies. A figure such as “349.50” means the same regardless of what book it is attached to, whereas the series of letters that spell “heart” have different meanings according to the book in which they appear. When I see that women are the same as men, I see a leveling down of the value that resides in the differences between them. When I see that being born in Sweden is the same as being born in Somalia, I see a leveling down of the value that resides in the differences between being born in those respective places.

  Much of my editor’s own writing leans toward relativization, his work, antimonolothic and antiabsolute, has a clear slant in the direction of equalization, which is to say something that goes against everything I aspire to in my own writing. The difference between us here is fundamental and might have made our collaboration impossible, or at least fraught with conflict. But this has not been the case. And the reason is that not even sameness is always the same, as an ideal it manifests itself differently according to the context in which it occurs, and only here, in a piece of writing su
ch as this, can such disparate elements as bookstores, money, gender identity, and Swedish Somalis be placed on an equal footing, juxtaposed so they can be said to express the same thing. In one way they do, though only in an overarching, ideological sense, not in themselves. And it is toward this “in itself,” that which stands alone and unexampled, that literature forges its path. The ideal of the open, the Deleuze-like perspective of the horizontal, operates on several levels, of which one is the ideological, another the commercial, another the social, where it has to do with roles and institutions, another the existential, which has to do with our conceptions about reality. The activities of writing and reading are essentially about freedom, about going out into the open, and it is this striving toward freedom that is fundamental, rather than that what we seek to free ourselves from, which can be an identity, an ideology of equality, or a certain conception of reality. Or, as my editor said to me on the phone two days ago when we were talking about the work of Peter Handke: Perhaps the task of literature now is to go where the story can’t reach. In other words, to where nothing is, but everything is becoming.

  The World Inside the World

  In Sweden’s southeastern corner, edged by the Baltic, lies Österlen, a cultivated flatland a handful of kilometers in width, some tens of kilometers in length. Its soil is highly fertile and people have probably lived here since the end of the Ice Age. It is an area that remains actively agricultural, one of the few still left in Sweden. In spring, fields of yellow rape lie luminous beneath blue skies; in summer, golden cereal crops wave in the wind; in autumn, tractors plow up the stubble, and the fields lie brown and sodden and empty through winter. Anyone caring to stand on one of its low and gently sloping hills to look out over the land, the sea a narrow sliver of blue-gray at its perimeter, will find the view barely any different than it was a hundred or two hundred years ago. The villages, each with its own church tower, lie scattered with only a few kilometers separating them, roads crisscross in between, some laid with gravel, and here and there, dotted about the open land, lie tree-embraced farms like small islands. Beaches line the coast beneath plunging, wooded drops, in some places wide and white like the beaches of the Danish west coast, in others narrow and dark yellow. Rivers are found in name only, most are thin as streams, trickling half-hidden through the land in their shallow channels.