Reading Note:
No Complaints
30 July 2015
Complaining about literature does not appeal to me. I prefer to observe an old legal maxim, which is too symmetrically cute in Latin not to state: Inclusio unius est exclusio alterius. (Not very sophisticated, is it. Nothing with est in it ever is.) What it means is that the statement of one thing implies the exclusion of other, unstated things. Let’s say that all the DBR entries, taken together, constitute what I have to say about books and such. They may be said to indicate, by exclusion, that the authors whom I never mention, whose works I never discuss, simply don’t appeal to me. I also happen to believe that, by and large, the reasons for their failure to appeal to me are not very interesting, at least as literary criticism.
When I’m writing about myself, however, it’s quite different. Writing about myself gives me the license to describe, for example what a torture Moby-Dick is to read, the disgust with Melville’s dreadful writing, adolescent intellectualisms, and depressingly anti-social spirit that caused me to put down the book two-thirds of the way through. I really don’t know which is worse: Moby-Dick itself, or the reputation that twentieth-century critics, trying to counter what they feared was a feminizing trend in literature, crafted for what was by then a rather neglected book. (Melville’s contemporaries didn’t think much of Moby-Dick, either.) But I don’t talk about Moby-Dick itself except to complain about what those critics wrought when they hoisted twaddle as a model.
This is by way of making it clear that nothing in what follows is to be taken as complaint about Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle 4: Dancing in the Dark. My argument is with Knausgaard’s younger self, not with the way in which the mature writer presents him.
At the beginning of this book, the narrator is eighteen. He already knows that he wants to be a writer. He gives us a list of the writers he admires. That is what I am going to complain about: the preferences of a high-school graduate. The author whom that narrator grew up to become, the Karl Ove Knausgaard who is nowadays closer to fifty than to forty, does not write like Jack Kerouac or J D Salinger. It has been a very long time since I last looked at Charles Bukowski, but I’d be surprised to perceive any signs of the American poet’s influence on My Struggle — the very title of which constitutes, as I see it, a rejection of the following aesthetic:
Books about young men who struggled to fit into society, who wanted more from life than routines, more from life than a family, in short, young men who hated middle-class values and sought freedom. They travelled, they got drunk, they read and they dreamed about their life’s Great Passion or writing the Great Novel.
Everything they wanted I wanted too.
The great longing, which was ever-present in my breast, was dispelled when I read these books, only to return with tenfold strength the moment I put them down. It had been like that all the way through my latter years at school. I hated all authority, was an opponent of the whole bloody streamlined society I had grown up in, with its bourgeois values and materialistic view of humanity. I despised what I had learned at gymnas, even the stuff about literature; all I needed to know, all true knowledge, the only really essential knowledge as to be found in the books I read and the music I listened to. I wasn’t interested in money or status symbols; I knew that the essential value in life lay elsewhere. I didn’t want to study, had no wish to receive an education at a conventional institution like a university, I wanted to travel down through Europe, sleep on beaches, in cheap hotels, or at the homes of friends I made on the way. Take odd jobs to survive, wash plates at hotels, load or unload boats, pick oranges … That spring I had bought a book containing conceivable, and inconceivable, kind of job you could get in various European countries. But all of this was to culminate in a novel. I would sit writing in a Spanish village, go to Pamplona and run with the bulls, continue on down to Greece and sit writing on one of the islands and then, after a year or two, return to Norway with a novel in my rucksack. (3)
Alas, the realization of this grandly shambolic vision was to be thwarted, as we’re cued only a few pages later, by a quite different dream that also held the young Karl Ove in thrall: a passion for looking sharp in cool clothes and hanging out at discos, getting drunk and groping pretty girls. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s struggle was not between an idealistic youth and bourgeois society, but rather between the impulses of heroism and hedonism.
Why do I say alas?
***
Knausgaard is about twenty years younger than I am, which I point out as a way of suggesting that, when I was eighteen, this aesthetic — and please note that that’s what it is; it’s not a political program — was newer, fresher, and even more insistent. I see now, for the first time, that it was really just an updating of the old stories about knights slaying dragons, only with scruffy clothes instead of armor, and with balding bankers and discontented housewives instead of dragons, but it seemed new in 1960 because its animus was directed at things that really were new: household appliances, suburban ranchettes, bloated automobiles, and the maintenance of wives whose participation in the working world would be frowned upon. The moral and spiritual emptiness of this package, paying for which could tie a man down forever and crush the life out of him, was manifest. I don’t argue with that. I was there; I remember. I hope never again to see meretriciousness on that scale again. But to respond by writing angry novels while crashing on other people’s sofas never struck me as a better alternative. You could suffer in dishonest style, or you could suffer in honest discomfort. When I was growing up, these were the only apparent choices. It was godawful.
Then, the world turned. The world of dishonest style was broken, along with its legal and political underpinnings. People with alternatives to the WASP ascendancy other than becoming a beach bum stepped forward and insisted on changes, most notably the equalization of former “minorities.” Authority was questioned by people who had no intention of writing scathing novels on Greek islands. None of the struggles launched since the Sixties has been fully achieved, but together they have created many new choices, and only a few of those choices are tailored to the daydreams of half-educated white males.
In short, the posture of protest that was assumed by the young Karl Ove’s literary heroes has become as ridiculous as Moby-Dick. There will still be plenty of young men to “drop out” of the “rat-race” — to use happily obsolete terms — but their experiences will be of little interest to anyone else. There is nothing admirable in self-imposed poverty, unless of course it is in the service of others (requiring a selflessness unimaginable to young novelists), and the glamor of excess followed by rehab has been shredded almost to destruction. There is nothing new about the life-cycle of the wastrel. All that has happened is that we have given up on the idea that the wastrel might be somehow wise.
Criticizing bourgeois society — and it certainly has its faults — is a matter for political thought, not aesthetic response.
***
For the second day in a row, I have tried to use Knausgaard’s novel as a ramp to more personal territory, only to run out of time (or energy) before covering the ground. Yesterday, I meant to marvel at the intimate ambiguity of Karl Ove’s childhood, sometimes so like my own but mostly utterly unlike it. Today, I hoped to discuss at greater length — as my principal topic — the stultifying, as it were radioactive, impact of the Cold War on the humane imagination; an impact, by the way, that, looking back, I don’t think anyone overcame, not so long as the Cold War raged. This by way of toying with my favorite question: why has it taken me so long to get to where I am now? This would be opposite to the inquiry that the young Karl Ove proposed to write about (perhaps if only in being an inquiry), but perhaps it would be just as self-involved as a book by Philip Roth. I should hope not, because I’m more interested in the “historical forces” (ie changing social possibilities) that would explain my tardiness than I am in the fact that I’ve finally made it. It’s interesting to me that Knausgaard began writing My Struggle within a year of my remastering the model of this Web site, developments that emphasize our being contemporaries, rather than members of different generations.
One of these days, I shall have to begin an entry in medias res.