Inadvertent

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  INADVERTENT

  INADVERTENT

  KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD

  TRANSLATED FROM THE NORWEGIAN BY INGVILD BURKEY

  THE 2017 WINDHAM-CAMPBELL LECTURE

  The Why I Write series is

  published with assistance from

  the Windham-Campbell

  Literature Prizes, which are administered by the Beinecke

  Rare Book and Manuscript

  Library at Yale University.

  Copyright © 2018

  by Karl Ove Knausgaard.

  English-language translation

  by Ingvild Burkey.

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  Library of Congress Control

  Number: 2018940022

  ISBN 978-0-300-22151-0

  (hardcover : alk. paper)

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  INADVERTENT

  The question of why I write sounds simple, but simplicity is treacherous, for now I have been sitting here in front of my desk in southern Sweden for three days without making any headway. The first thing that came to mind was a television interview with an author that I saw many years ago; he walked into the studio saying, “I write because I am going to die.” He had clearly thought about it for a long time, and perhaps he even meant it, but he had tucked his sweater into his trousers, and the contrast between the solemnity of his words and his bungling manner of dress made it hard to take him seriously. I laughed at him, I remember, but now, sitting here faced with the same task as he had been, I understand how difficult it is.

  Why did I laugh, when not only did his response clearly spring from a deep conviction but was one I could actually relate to, if not quite subscribe to?

  It was the incongruity between his words and the context in which they were spoken that was comical, that his sweater was tucked into his trousers created a distance to what he said, and the chasm separating death’s solemnity from life’s unceremoniousness became apparent. This distance is literary, it is precisely that space literature explores, between something that is true and the setting in which truth unfolds. It is the space of Don Quixote, which plays out in the distance between what he imagines he is seeing and the world as it is, and it is the space of Madame Bovary, shaped by the distance between what she wishes the world were like and how it actually is.

  Literature is not primarily a place for truths, it is the space where truths play out. For the answer to the question—that I write because I am going to die—to have the intended effect, for it to strike one as truth, a space must first be created in which it can be said. That is what writing is: creating a space in which something can be said.

  Some years ago I wrote a book about the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch. It dealt primarily with space, naturally enough, given that the theme was visual art, and perhaps Edvard Munch’s greatest achievement was that he closed up the realistic pictorial space which dominated painting when he was growing up, first and foremost in his youthful work The Sick Child but also in paintings such as The Scream and Ashes. Realistic pictorial space is stable, it obeys the same rules of depiction regardless of what happens in it, and in this continuity, which allows for a before and an after, there lies the possibility of reconciliation. In The Sick Child the space is closed, or powerfully distorted, and in The Scream the entire space is subsumed into the face and the state of mind it expresses. We cannot evade what is happening in these pictures; death in the former and anxiety in the latter are acutely present, there is no distance to be had, we are defenseless against them.

  The question I posed was why only Munch chose to go in that direction and paint that way, and not any of the other young painters who were active in Kristiania (later Oslo) at the time, many of whom were clearly more talented than Munch. There must have been some incongruity between his experience of reality and the dominant way of depicting it, an incongruity so great that he couldn’t simply accept the existing painterly idiom if he wanted to be true to himself, but had to fight against it, working his way blindly inward, and not give up until he had brought out something external that corresponded with his inner experience. He spent more than a year painting The Sick Child, the picture that marked the turning point, and it looks as if it had been dug up.

  Edvard Munch lost his mother when he was five years old, and he lost his older sister, whom he loved more than anyone, when he was thirteen. In my book I wrote that Munch’s trust in the world must have been broken, especially by the death of his sister, and that painting for him was partly a way of articulating that loss of trust, but also an attempt to re-create faith in the world.

  So I knew why Munch painted, I knew it so well that I could articulate it with a single sentence. And it resembles the sentence spoken by the author with his sweater tucked into his trousers.

  I write because I am going to die.

  I paint because I have lost trust in the world.

  I still believe it is true, in a way; when I read about Munch’s life and look at his paintings, it fits, in the way truths fit, intuitively and incontrovertibly: that’s how it was. But on the other hand: exactly when was it like that? Everyone who has attempted to paint knows that it is a painstaking and complicated process, governed by a special form of thought, visual and unreflecting, almost like the colors and shapes themselves. It takes many years to acquire enough experience and confidence to be able to express what one wants on the canvas, or at least to minimize the distance between the internal and the external image so that the visual and unreflecting thoughts can move more or less freely between their inner and outer expression. The medium is physical, the picture is an object in the world made up of oil paints and canvas, and if it had been possible to stand next to Edvard Munch on a summer day in for example 1896, while he stood painting outside his house in Aasgaardstrand, for example some girls on a pier with a few houses and trees in the background, it is hard to imagine that he would look up, push his hat back on his head, and say, “I’m really doing this because I have lost trust in the world,” then wipe the sweat off his brow and light a cigarette. “My sister died when I was thirteen, you see. So I don’t have a choice. I have to stand here painting.”

  A sailboat comes so close than one can hear the flapping of the sail and the creaking of the rigging when it becomes taut. The fjord behind him is a blue swell, its color much cooler and deeper than the pale, light sky.

  “Twenty-seven years have passed since then. But my trust has never returned, you see. That’s why I am painting these girls on this bridge. Perhaps they can reestablish my trust? Or at least articulate my loss of trust!”

  Some children are standing a little way off looking at him, as they often do; with his dark suit, his light straw boater, his easel, and his little wooden case of paints, which he either carries around in the dusty streets of the small seaside resort or has in front of him while he stands painting, he is an odd bird in the neighborhood. He has no job, he has never done anything other than this, and he is beautiful, with a large, s
ensitive mouth and nervous eyes, large, restless hands. At the same time he is arrogant, a self-important and haughty man from a family of famous academics, and he drinks nearly every night, in the pale summer nights which are so quiet that his voice and those of his friends carry a long way in the residential streets and out across the still fjord. Later in life he secludes himself, cuts out friends and lovers, grows tetchy and impossible, an unreasonable old man who, when he meets someone, talks incessantly about everything and nothing, it’s impossible to get a word in edgewise once he gets going. Whereas when he was young, at least during a short ten-year period, he painted scenes from his own life, memories he had, for the remainder of his life he painted what he saw in front of him. Houses, plains, tractors, horses, laborers, trees, people, his own face. He lived a long life, from the middle of the nineteenth century and into the Second World War, and he painted throughout it all. One of his last pictures depicts a housepainter who painted the buildings on his estate, and it is as if he is saying, this is what I too do and have spent my whole life doing, brushing paint onto a surface. But the sun is shining, the house is white, and deep within the green of the garden a red barn wall is glowing.

  Could a lack of trust in the world really have driven him to paint one thousand seven hundred pictures and produce more than twenty thousand prints, could it have been the driving force behind his entire long life with all its victories and defeats?

  If the distance is great enough, the answer is yes—seen from a great distance, a life can be summed up in a single sentence—but as soon as one comes closer to life, it dissolves into an ocean of time, events, things, and people. It is still there, somewhere in the multitude, but it is no longer supreme, for in a life seen at close range there is no organizing principle.

  We live in an ocean of time, where events, things, and people are continually succeeding one another, but we cannot live with such boundless complexity, because we disappear in it, and therefore we organize it into categories, sequences, hierarchies. We organize ourselves—I am not nameless, my name is such and such, my parents were like this and that, I went to school in such and such a place, I experienced this and that, by character I am like this and like that, and that has caused me to choose this and that. And we organize our surroundings—we don’t just live on a plain with some grass, bushes, roads, and houses, we live in a particular place in a particular country with a particular culture, and we belong to a particular stratum within that culture.

  All of us sum up our lives in this way, that is what we call identity; and we sum up the world we inhabit in similar ways, that is what is called culture. What we are saying about ourselves fits, but no more than if we had said something entirely different, thought something entirely different about ourselves and our place in the world—if, for example, we had lived during the Middle Ages and not in the early twenty-first century—and it too would have fit and seemed meaningful.

  That identity and our understanding of the world at one and the same time fit yet are arbitrary is, I think, the reason why art and literature exist. Art and literature constitute a continual negotiation with reality, they represent an exchange between identity and culture and the material, physical, and endlessly complex world they arise from.

  But that isn’t why I write. Nor was it why Munch painted. For the negotiation is always personal, never—or extremely rarely—ideational or representative.

  If this is my understanding of art and life, why did I simplify so crudely and write that Munch painted because he had lost trust in the world?

  There are some fundamental rules of writing, for example that one shouldn’t psychologize when describing characters, or the related dictum “Show, don’t tell,” both of which spring from the realization that literature by its very nature always seeks complexity and ambiguity, and that monologic claims of truth about the world are antiliterary. In line with this, the statement “I write because I am going to die” is antiliterature, but the author with his sweater tucked into his trousers saying that he writes because he is going to die is literature.

  For many years I followed these rules of writing, that one shouldn’t psychologize and that one shouldn’t tell, but show. However, the texts I wrote ended up being neither complex nor ambiguous; on the contrary they were closed and unfree, as if the space they unfolded in was a prison, with locked doors and no windows. It wasn’t until I started breaking the rules, showing how something was and should be understood, very precisely and with no room for doubt, and describing people in psychological terms, that my writing came alive. This was so, I think, because even in the most meticulous and exhaustive explanation of a person’s character or actions, even in the most heavy-handed explication, there is always an outside. Language and literary form themselves contain a distance, making it impossible ever to get all the way in or to eliminate space entirely. All language casts a shadow, and that shadow can be more or less apprehended, but never quite controlled.

  The first novel I wrote is full of sentences such as “It’s like this” and “That’s how it is.” The first-person narrator—who incidentally is not at all unlike myself—had a problem with authority and authoritarianism, he was strongly opposed to it, but at the same time he needed it, for his life was adrift, it was full of uncertainty, hesitation, inability to act, and that conflict, which was fundamental, not only made necessary the categorical claims about the world and the people in it, it also undermined them completely—revealing a person who is using them to keep his head above water. The statements themselves are not necessarily untrue, but the space around them relativizes them utterly. When I wrote the novel, I didn’t know this, the confident claims about the world were probably as necessary to me as they were to my protagonist. If I had thought out this pattern beforehand, used it as a strategy, it would have become totally unbearable to the reader, for then there would have been no space around it, it would have been monologic and unambiguous, it would have lacked the sweater tucked into the trousers. It wasn’t until I discovered this, that the distance of form and language created a space into which I could pour my self, where I lost ownership and control over it and where what was me was transformed into “me,” that I became a writer.

  That wasn’t why I began writing, since for a long time I didn’t know this, yet I still wrote. But when I discovered it, it was already familiar to me: that’s what reading was like.

  My first novel was titled Out of the World. Out of the world is death, of course, and it is the past, but it is also literature. When I was a boy I read an enormous quantity of books, my sole object being to get away from the reality I was living in—in other words, pure and simple escapism. It began with comic books, which all the kids on the housing estate had and which could therefore be traded or bought and sold secondhand—I remember that I would walk around ringing doorbells with a bag full of comic books, usually at the houses of kids I knew, but as my supply sources dried up, I also began visiting houses farther away, where I knew who the kids living there were but normally would never play with them. I remember that in one of these houses a small boy turned around and shouted inside to his mother, “Mommy, the comics man is here!” I remember my greed, my simple and almost trembling joy at the sheer numbers, for a big pile of comics I hadn’t read before meant hours, maybe days in bed under the spell of these stories. But this life of abundance ended abruptly when one day my mother began to take an interest in what I was reading. She was shaken to the core. Many of the comic series were violent and sexist, and I was just nine years old. Besides, her sister had written her master’s thesis in psychology on violence in comic books, so she was already on her guard against brutalizing tendencies. She said I wasn’t allowed to read comics anymore. I cried, the punishment was incomprehensible, I hadn’t done anything wrong! But, she said, you’re allowed to read books. I’ll take you and your brother to the library every Tuesday. It wasn’t the same, but at least it was something, so I came with her, sitting in the green Volkswagen Beetle as we cros
sed the bridge, drove along the sound and into town, where the three-storied library lay halfway up a hill. From then on I read books, with the same greed with which I had previously read comics.

  Every Tuesday I brought home a shopping bag full of books. What I gained from this I don’t know; the essential thing about the books, I think, was that they constituted a place in the world where I could be, where nothing was demanded of me, where on the contrary I got what I wanted. I didn’t know anyone else who read except my brother, so I never talked about what I experienced in books, but it didn’t matter, the whole point of them being precisely that I read them alone, and yet it never felt like that, for while you were reading you were always together with someone else. I never thought about the books once I had finished them, and I didn’t learn anything from them, or rather, that was never the point. I consumed them, passed the time with them, escaped in them.

  But there was one exception. There was one book that never left me, that I often thought about and read over and over again throughout my childhood and into my teens. The book was called A Wizard of Earthsea and was written by Ursula K. Le Guin. It was my mother who brought it for me one day, she was studying that year and came home only on weekends. It was winter, swollen mounds of snow lay everywhere, and that Friday I was longing so intensely for her to come home that I couldn’t stay in my room, but went out in the hope of running into someone I could play with. I remember hardly anything from that year, but this I do remember, that I am walking down the deserted hill outside the house and lie down on a mound of snow and move my arms back and forth to make an angel in the snow. Afterward I lie still for a long time, gazing up into the darkness. The feeling of the cold rising from the snow and the vague but still unmistakable smell of snow and the sound of the smooth material of my down jacket against the snow made something lift within me. Shortly afterward a car came driving up the hill, its sound muted by the snow, which shone yellow in the headlights. There was no mistaking the sound, it was her car, she was finally here. I ran over to the car as she was parking outside the house and walked to the front door with her. She said she had a present for me, and it was that book, which I got when we had taken off our outer clothes; it lay in her handbag with no wrapping paper around it.