Inadvertent

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  What I wanted with this book, which was eventually titled My Struggle and grew to six volumes, was to erode my own notions about the world, allowing whatever had been kept down by them to rise to the surface. The only way I could accomplish this was to abdicate as king of myself and let the literary, in other words writing and the forms of writing, lead the way.

  That is also the method employed in writing this essay. I have written literary texts for thirty years, and for twenty of them I have done it full-time; in short, I have spent my entire adult life writing. This means that I know a great deal about what it is to write, and about why I do it. Yet despite this great knowledge, I have been sitting in front of my screen for three days, not knowing what to say—or rather, not knowing how to say it. And as soon as I got started, by writing that the simplicity of the question was treacherous, my pathway through the material took a certain direction, excluding all the other possible paths, so that only what I am writing now could be written. This is what became accessible, not all the rest. And perhaps even more important: I still don’t know what lies ahead, what to say, where this essay is going.

  This is so because I have to hit upon it inadvertently, or it has to hit upon me. It is one thing to know something, another to write about it, and often knowing stands in the way of writing. Make it new, Ezra Pound said—and is there any other way to do that than to let everything we know about something fall away and regard it from a position of defenselessness and unknowing?

  The reason this text is so temporizing and evasive is of course that I don’t quite know why I write, nor quite what writing is. I don’t think anyone really does, to be honest, at least not in such a way that it can be fully accounted for. Whom is one addressing when one writes? Who am I in my writing, when form makes it seem foreign to me? How is it that all thoughts seem to vanish when one writes, even during the most intense and cerebral reflections? What are feelings in a text that consists of letters, black marks on a page?

  On the other hand, I know—the way you just know something, for example roughly how much a stone will weigh in your hand (a certainty you become aware of if the stone turns out to be surprisingly light and made of papier-mâché) or that you love someone (in which case the answers to the question of why can never be as persuasive as the feeling)—both why I write and what writing is. The writer who has come closest to capturing it is Leo Tolstoy, in his great novel War and Peace from 1869, a book I love above all others, where it suddenly crops up in a scene set in the home of the Rostov family, whose daughter Natasha is being courted by Prince Andrew.

  “After dinner Natasha, at Prince Andrew’s request, went to the clavichord and began singing. Prince Andrew stood by a window talking to the ladies and listened to her. In the midst of a phrase he ceased speaking and suddenly felt tears choking him, a thing he had thought impossible for him. He looked at Natasha as she sang, and something new and joyful stirred in his soul. He felt happy and at the same time sad. He had absolutely nothing to weep about yet he was ready to weep. What about? His former love? The little princess? His disillusionments? . . . His hopes for the future? . . . Yes and no. The chief reason was a sudden, vivid sense of the terrible contrast between something great and illimitable within him, and that limited and material that he, and even she, was. This contrast weighed on and yet cheered him while she sang.”

  The contradiction between the illimitable that dwells within us and our simultaneous limitation and earthboundness is the driving force behind all literature and all art, or so I believe, but not only that; the longing to equalize the difference, suspend the contradiction and simply exist in the world, undifferentiated from it, is also an important part of all religious practice.

  Almost nowhere is the battle between the illimitable within and external limitation more apparent and striking than in the case of Vincent van Gogh, the painter, since he at first didn’t have access to any language at all. When he began to paint at the age of twenty-six he didn’t know how to paint, nor did he have any obvious talent, unlike most other painters, in the sense that painting comes easily to them from an early age, they have the manual dexterity, the compositional skill and the sense of color required to produce a verisimilar image of reality. Van Gogh didn’t have any of this, his figures were misshapen, his forms crooked and mean, his colors dark and lacking assurance, as if the paintbrush were his adversary, as if he were wading heavily through a swamp in the darkness while his contemporaries strolled across a sunlit meadow. He was on fire, driven by an intense will to communicate his inner world to the outer one, but the resistance was too great, the language he had access to was incapable of expressing it. But his will was as wild as it was blind, little by little the distance was whittled away until he produced his final paintings, painted only ten years after his first, and which are simple and rich and dizzyingly intense, full of an existential yearning which it is difficult to remain indifferent to. Van Gogh found a language, not for the illimitable within him, but for the longing of the illimitable to overcome the limitations of the external world and become one with it. That is what I feel when I look at his last paintings, one of them in particular, depicting a green field beneath a dark sky: a great joy in existing, in being a part of this world, it is as if the soul is lifted and I am no longer myself but only this movement of the soul, until sorrow comes, not overwhelming, merely a pinprick, as I realize that this elevation is valid only here, in front of this painting, a height once attained by van Gogh and subsequently by everyone who sees it, a vast coming together of meaning which will soon dissolve as one’s habitual, well-worn, and often uncomfortable thoughts begin to drift back and everyday life takes over.

  Even in the world of the everyday there are elevations and sudden contractions of meaning, however: yesterday, as I was about to drive to school to pick up the kids, the sky above me suddenly turned black with hundreds of jackdaws that had gathered, forming a huge, slowly undulating shape against the gray cloud cover, while at the same time each separate jackdaw was clearly visible, flapping and screeching, with its hoarse caw! caw! caw! The feeling it gave me was one of shocklike joy at the simple fact that I was here, now, their contemporary. Joy that I existed, together with everything else in existence. When I see something like this, or when I look at a painting that evokes the same thing, I feel an urge to write, as if I have to find an outlet for it, find a form to express it in. Not the experience in itself, that means nothing, but the longing to be in the world which it gives rise to. Or to open the world. Yes, I write because I want to open the world. But when I sit down at my desk and switch on my computer, there is no way to get there, for language carries its own meaning, form carries its own meaning, and that which seemed so evident within me, so luminously clear and simple, and so near to me, to what I am, changes radically as soon as I begin to write, it is no longer near, it is no longer mine, and the meaning which language and form carry within them creates a distance, turns it into something else, at best a text which refers to an experience but does not itself contain it, at worst a text full of pretension written by a man unable to contain his emotions.

  After I wrote this, I took a break and scrolled through the newspapers on my phone, and in one of them, the British daily The Guardian, there was a headline about one of my books. I never read reviews, not this one either, but the headline was enough to give me the general idea. It said “Sentimental, cliché, repetition.” I had no time to shield myself, it felt like a slap in the face. I fetched the children from school, picked up some takeaway for dinner, slept for an hour to clear my mind of recent events so I could start writing afresh, flipped through the news on my phone again, this time only the Norwegian news, thinking all was well, but there the review in England had already made the news, suddenly a headline flashed before me, “Knausgaard trashed by English critics: The book is a load of rubbish.”

  I mention it because it confirms how I myself view my writing, though I always push the thought aside, for if I make room for it, it paralyzes
my writing, my self-confidence evaporates, and the only way to get it back is by writing something unquestionably good and thoroughly thought out, which in turn ensures that nothing can reveal itself, it can only be revealed. The experience also casts a different light on everything I wrote earlier. With what right do I mention Munch and van Gogh? How stupid I was to compare hedgehogs to writing novels! Why should anyone listen to me talking about why I write when what I write is worthless?

  But I mention it also because the way my books are received, how they are interpreted and discussed in the public sphere, is of course a decisive part of my identity as a writer, whether the reception is positive or negative, and thus becomes not only one of several factors influencing what it is possible to write but also an important part of my motivation for writing. It isn’t easy to talk about, for these are not honorable motives, on the contrary they are unworthy, even base—I’m thinking of revenge, of retaliation, of self-assertion, thirst for honor and rewards. But if I am to answer the question honestly, I have to include it.

  The first time I thought of becoming a writer, and then began to write literary texts, I was eighteen years old. I no longer remember why I wanted to write, only that it seemed within reach, it didn’t feel like such a big leap. I got a job as a teacher in a small village by the sea in the far north of Norway, I didn’t know anyone there and would have plenty of time to write, that was the idea. It didn’t turn out quite that way, but I wrote anyway, roughly one short story per month. Most dealt with childhood experiences, with my father as a domineering and dreaded figure, so one impulse to write must have been to work through those emotions.

  But more important was what writing these texts made me into. Every time I wrote a new short story, I sent a copy to everyone I knew, and in the days that followed I waited for their responses. I wanted to be seen, and I wanted the recognition that came with being a writer, by becoming a writer I would show that I was someone special, that I was remarkable, that my work had a special significance, not like that of a junior high school teacher or a journalist but something more important, an author, an artist. I dreamed about it, not unlike the way I had formerly dreamed of becoming a soccer player or a pop star. It was as if I wasn’t worth anything, and that I could be worth something only if I did something other people admired.

  The year after, I was accepted into a creative writing program, they admitted only ten students per year, and when I entered the program I already considered myself a writer. Of course my hopes were crushed, everything I wrote was torn apart, and when I completed the program my confidence in myself as a writer was shattered. I continued to write anyway, squeezing out a short story or two per year, but nothing of what I wrote justified my will to write, for my short stories were not merely poor, they were practically pointless. Almost the only thing left was the will, something forced and immovable, like a carapace, and perhaps more than anything I kept it up because it would be so humiliating to have gone all out to become a writer, and then fail.

  We knew it, people would say, he was just a conceited fool. And so I was: in my heart of hearts I knew that I was neither a writer nor an artist, I knew I didn’t have what it takes. That I kept on trying anyway at times filled me with burning shame and despair, because it was so obviously a lie I told myself to maintain my sense of self. I knew I couldn’t write, but I pretended to myself that I didn’t know it—it was the same mechanism that once, when I was maybe twelve, had made me write down a poem by an English author in my diary and then pretend that I had written it. To myself, in my own diary!

  And this was more or less the same thing: I wrote because I wanted to become a writer, I wanted to become a writer because I would then become someone in the eyes of others, at the same time that I knew for certain that I didn’t have what it takes, and occasionally, in the clear light of shame, I admitted as much to myself.

  Around that time I made a good friend, his name was Espen Stueland, and he wrote poetry. He was more than usually talented, and he was more than usually learned, he made his literary debut with a volume of poetry at the age of twenty-three. I realized that what he had was precisely what it took. He wasn’t just a writer, he was a poet, which in my eyes was the ultimate achievement. When I met him he was nineteen, he read modernist poets whom I found completely hermetic, like Gunnar Ekelöf and Paul Celan, he read Beckett and Claude Simon, he had a picture of Edith Södergran on his wall, he found stuff in dumpsters that he brought to his bedsit and used, he played chess and he had a nervous energy which could turn into passionate involvement with whatever he happened to be reading.

  The mere fact that he knew what he liked impressed me. I liked what I had been taught to like. I jostled for position, I knew that writing a thesis about Ulysses conferred status and that a little of Joyce’s luster would rub off on me, so I did it; I knew that Tor Ulven and Ole Robert Sunde were the two most sophisticated Norwegian authors, so accordingly I read them and liked their work, even though it didn’t do much for me at the time. Espen, on the other hand, was a writer, he was the real thing, as uncompromising as he was thirsty for knowledge, and the difference between us was so great that spending time with him confirmed my conviction that I wasn’t a writer at all, just a regular guy, at the same time that his fervent passion lit up my own reading too, lit up even my life as a reader.

  Once we went to Prague together. I tried to see what he saw, experience what he experienced, and one afternoon when we were in a church and he sat down on a pew, I froze inwardly, for he remained seated for a long time with his eyes closed, and I felt certain that he was having a religious or spiritual experience, that something in there, in the same room I was in, had transported him into a state of ecstasy or deep contemplation. When we came out into the street afterward and walked along in the sunlight that seemed sharp after the gloomy church, I at first didn’t dare ask him what he had experienced in there, in case it had been what I thought, which would confirm once and for all that his world was more elevated and sacred than mine, or more genuine, but at last I gathered up my courage and asked him as casually as I could, “I saw you closing your eyes in there, were you meditating or what?” “No, I must have nodded off,” he replied.

  It seems comical now, but back then it wasn’t, to me this incident was a matter of serious import. That I wasn’t a writer, didn’t have what it took, but fooled myself into believing I did, left a deep mark on me. I was deceiving myself, nothing about me was genuine.

  And yet I continued to write. The summer before I met Espen, a novel I had written had been rejected, and the following year, in autumn, I began writing a new one. Sometime that winter I gave Espen the manuscript. He read it and then suggested we take a walk together to talk about it. We walked up the hill toward the hospital outside town, past the large villa gardens there, I remember it well, it was cool and foggy, we had our hands in our pockets as we walked and he told me it wasn’t good enough, he advised me to shelve the manuscript for good. After the initial shock, which hit me like an icy blast, I began to peck at him in my mind, what did he know, after all, he was just an elitist snob who wrote stuff even he couldn’t understand, it was just words, and who the hell spent Friday evenings at home playing chess with themselves, anyway? But even as I was thinking these things, I knew that he was right, and that evening I followed his advice, I burned the manuscript in the fireplace.

  I still wrote after that, though not much, completing maybe one short story the following year, and the first thirty pages of a new novel the year after that. The will to become a writer, to be someone who wrote, was now exclusively fueled by negative thinking, by my fear of losing face.

  But there was something else there too. It wasn’t merely a question of will, there was also a yearning. I didn’t know what I yearned for—these were vague and inarticulate emotions, somewhere between the conscious and the subconscious strata of my mind—I knew only that it was something good. The things I wrote had no connection with this, and really no connection to mysel
f, either, I wrote the way I thought literature was supposed to be, whether I happened to be modeling myself on Thomas Bernhard or the Swedish poet and playwright Stig Larsson. The text was an object, a construction, I could push it in one direction to say something about this, I could push it in another direction to say something about that. What mattered was that it looked like literature, or like my idea of what literature was. Nothing came back to me from these texts, they were wholly separate from me, like little monoliths, mindless and blind.

  So where did the yearning come from? What was it I longed for, which I didn’t know what was, but still knew about?

  In these years I didn’t read only difficult books that provided prestige, I also read books that I loved and could disappear into the way I had done as a child. Though I never reflected on it, these books were closer to me and the reality of my life than anything I wrote. Ask Burlefot, the young man in Agnar Mykle’s novels Lasso Round the Moon and The Song of the Red Ruby, for example, seemed closer to me than I had ever felt any family member or friend of mine to be. In my social relations, all kinds of things represented a hindrance, hardly anything could be done or said, something always stood in the way, I was paralyzed by shame and low self-esteem combined with a high degree of self-reflection, I hardly spoke, and others hardly spoke to me. In Mykle’s novels, on the other hand, almost nothing was forbidden, everything stood open, and although the protagonist, Ask Burlefot, was a fictitious character who didn’t exist, the story about him unlocked things within me which would otherwise have remained dormant, as I read his experiences became my experiences, opening the way to emotions I hadn’t known I could feel. Grief over the death of a younger brother, for instance: how was it possible that I was overcome by such a deep and lasting sense of loss, I who had never had a younger brother or experienced a death in the family or ever felt profound sorrow?