[ed. I've been trying to read My Struggle for a while now and have to admit, I'm about to give up the struggle. I thought Bolaño’s 2666 was a tough read, but for some reason this one seems even tougher (mostly because the narrative feels digressive and somewhat banal. I guess I just don't get it. Postscript: 200 pages in it's getting better.)]
Last September in Oslo, the New Yorker critic James Wood conducted a public interview with the novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard as part of the third annual Norwegian-American Literary Festival. Their audience filled the main auditorium of Litteraturhuset—the writers’ center across the street from the royal palace—beyond capacity, with disappointed latecomers crowding the café next door.
An estimated one in ten Norwegians owns a copy of Knausgaard’s six-volume autobiographical novel, My Struggle. Extreme in its candor, by turns earnest and satiric, attentive to the minutiae of postmodern family life, My Struggle marks a revolution in Scandinavian fiction and, in the United States, has sparked more critical discussion than any translated work since Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. To date, only the first three volumes of My Struggle have been published in English; an excerpt from Book Four follows on page 87. We are grateful to Wood and Knausgaard, and to the organizer of the festival, Frode Saugestad, for allowing us to publish this exchange.
WOOD
Your six volumes have been received as an extraordinary example of literary courage—the courage to confess and the courage to take risks with form. Sometimes you take the stakes so low that fiction or drama, conflict, plot might disappear altogether. You’re also, of course, willing to look at things. In Book Three, you’ve got a bit about you and a friend shitting in a forest. Like everyone here tonight, I read it thinking, He’s going to describe the shit. Not just the act. I think, knowing Knausgaard, he’s actually going to describe what the piece of crap looks like. And you did. Then there is small stuff, like your willingness to use exclamations like “yuck,” “phew,” “oh oh oh,” “ha ha ha”—the kind of exclamation that one sees in children’s fiction or genre fiction but which is snobbishly disdained in contemporary high fiction, so to speak. Were you aware at the time that these were risks, that they were acts of daring?
KNAUSGAARD
That was the torture of writing this thing, especially Book Three, because it’s seen from the perspective of a kid between seven and ten years old, and that is the perspective of an idiot. The whole time I was writing these six books I felt, This is not good writing. What’s good, I think, is the opening five pages of Book One, the reflection on death. When we were publishing that first book, my editor asked me to remove those pages because they are so different from the rest, and he was right—he is right—it would have been better, but I needed one place in the book where the writing was good. I spent weeks and weeks on that passage, and I think it’s modernist, high-quality prose. The rest of the book is not to my standard. [Laughter from audience] I’m not saying this as a joke. This is true.
WOOD
But to know that, at the time of writing, is to be making an experiment, no?
KNAUSGAARD
Yes, it is.
WOOD
It’s to be courageous in some way, wouldn’t you say?
KNAUSGAARD
No, it hasn’t anything to do with courage. It’s more that I was so desperate and so frustrated. The only way I could trick myself into writing was by doing it like this. By setting myself the premise that I would write very quickly and not edit, that everything should be in it. Without that, I wouldn’t have been able to do it. I’m too self-critical to be a writer, really, and I was very critical of this project. It was torture. I had a friend, I read everything to him on the phone, all thirty-six hundred pages as I wrote them, and he had to say, This is good, you must go on.
The part you describe about shitting in the wood, though—that was a joy to write. That’s the other side of it, you know, because it’s unheard of to go into such detail, but for a kid it’s very important how the shit looks, how it smells, all the differences between one shit and another. That’s a child’s world, and I felt connected to it through the character of the child. I remembered, all of a sudden, how it was. The small things mattered, like shitting. It’s easy to understand why. You don’t yet have many experiences, and it’s your body, and here is the world going into it and then leaving it, and although it’s not the first time that this has happened, still it is kind of a new thing.
WOOD
And of course that’s the great theme of your work—meaning and the loss of meaning. It’s obvious enough that in your work the insane attention to objects is an attempt to rescue them from loss, from the loss of meaning. It’s a tragedy of getting older. We can’t ever recover that extraordinary novelty, that newness, that we experienced as children, and so you try to bring those meanings and memories back. There’s a lovely thing in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics that reminds me of your work. Adorno writes, “If the thought really yielded to the object, if its attention were on the object, not on its category, the very objects would start talking under the lingering eye.” Does that sound like a reasonable description of what you are trying to do?
KNAUSGAARD
Very much so. Before I wrote My Struggle, I had a feeling that novels tend to obscure the world instead of showing it, because their form is so much alike from novel to novel. It’s the same with films, with their attention to narrative structure. Most films, anyway.
Last September in Oslo, the New Yorker critic James Wood conducted a public interview with the novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard as part of the third annual Norwegian-American Literary Festival. Their audience filled the main auditorium of Litteraturhuset—the writers’ center across the street from the royal palace—beyond capacity, with disappointed latecomers crowding the café next door.
An estimated one in ten Norwegians owns a copy of Knausgaard’s six-volume autobiographical novel, My Struggle. Extreme in its candor, by turns earnest and satiric, attentive to the minutiae of postmodern family life, My Struggle marks a revolution in Scandinavian fiction and, in the United States, has sparked more critical discussion than any translated work since Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. To date, only the first three volumes of My Struggle have been published in English; an excerpt from Book Four follows on page 87. We are grateful to Wood and Knausgaard, and to the organizer of the festival, Frode Saugestad, for allowing us to publish this exchange.
WOOD
Your six volumes have been received as an extraordinary example of literary courage—the courage to confess and the courage to take risks with form. Sometimes you take the stakes so low that fiction or drama, conflict, plot might disappear altogether. You’re also, of course, willing to look at things. In Book Three, you’ve got a bit about you and a friend shitting in a forest. Like everyone here tonight, I read it thinking, He’s going to describe the shit. Not just the act. I think, knowing Knausgaard, he’s actually going to describe what the piece of crap looks like. And you did. Then there is small stuff, like your willingness to use exclamations like “yuck,” “phew,” “oh oh oh,” “ha ha ha”—the kind of exclamation that one sees in children’s fiction or genre fiction but which is snobbishly disdained in contemporary high fiction, so to speak. Were you aware at the time that these were risks, that they were acts of daring?KNAUSGAARD
That was the torture of writing this thing, especially Book Three, because it’s seen from the perspective of a kid between seven and ten years old, and that is the perspective of an idiot. The whole time I was writing these six books I felt, This is not good writing. What’s good, I think, is the opening five pages of Book One, the reflection on death. When we were publishing that first book, my editor asked me to remove those pages because they are so different from the rest, and he was right—he is right—it would have been better, but I needed one place in the book where the writing was good. I spent weeks and weeks on that passage, and I think it’s modernist, high-quality prose. The rest of the book is not to my standard. [Laughter from audience] I’m not saying this as a joke. This is true.
WOOD
But to know that, at the time of writing, is to be making an experiment, no?
KNAUSGAARD
Yes, it is.
WOOD
It’s to be courageous in some way, wouldn’t you say?
KNAUSGAARD
No, it hasn’t anything to do with courage. It’s more that I was so desperate and so frustrated. The only way I could trick myself into writing was by doing it like this. By setting myself the premise that I would write very quickly and not edit, that everything should be in it. Without that, I wouldn’t have been able to do it. I’m too self-critical to be a writer, really, and I was very critical of this project. It was torture. I had a friend, I read everything to him on the phone, all thirty-six hundred pages as I wrote them, and he had to say, This is good, you must go on.
The part you describe about shitting in the wood, though—that was a joy to write. That’s the other side of it, you know, because it’s unheard of to go into such detail, but for a kid it’s very important how the shit looks, how it smells, all the differences between one shit and another. That’s a child’s world, and I felt connected to it through the character of the child. I remembered, all of a sudden, how it was. The small things mattered, like shitting. It’s easy to understand why. You don’t yet have many experiences, and it’s your body, and here is the world going into it and then leaving it, and although it’s not the first time that this has happened, still it is kind of a new thing.
WOOD
And of course that’s the great theme of your work—meaning and the loss of meaning. It’s obvious enough that in your work the insane attention to objects is an attempt to rescue them from loss, from the loss of meaning. It’s a tragedy of getting older. We can’t ever recover that extraordinary novelty, that newness, that we experienced as children, and so you try to bring those meanings and memories back. There’s a lovely thing in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics that reminds me of your work. Adorno writes, “If the thought really yielded to the object, if its attention were on the object, not on its category, the very objects would start talking under the lingering eye.” Does that sound like a reasonable description of what you are trying to do?
KNAUSGAARD
Very much so. Before I wrote My Struggle, I had a feeling that novels tend to obscure the world instead of showing it, because their form is so much alike from novel to novel. It’s the same with films, with their attention to narrative structure. Most films, anyway.
by James Wood and Karl Knausgaard, Paris Review | Read more:
Image: uncredited
