“Knausgaard isn’t really quotable.”
If your attention as a writer is so egalitarian that your memoir describes a bowl of cornflakes and, say, your brother’s face with the same level of detail, how do we determine a hierarchy of value?
‘It seems like a child has written it,’ Knausgaard told an interviewer. ‘There are childishness, stupidity, lack of wisdom, fantasies. At the same time, that’s where my creativity can be found. If I tried to control it and make it more mature, it wouldn’t be good at all. It’d be uninteresting, without any vivacity.’ I can almost hear Knausgaard going on to say: ‘It would merely be literature.’ My Struggle positions itself as an anti-literary project: it’s what Knausgaard writes instead of novels and it describes his increasing revulsion from fiction (broadly construed). If he were to write another novel [...] ‘it would just be literature, just fiction, and worthless … just the thought of fiction, just the thought of a fabricated character in a fabricated plot made me feel nauseous’.
“In Volume 6 I even wrote a couple of lines about future novels, stories I’d thought of, just to kill them off. The last sentence in that book is: “And I’m so happy that I’m no longer an author.”’
The radical inclusiveness, the style-less style, the apparently equal fascination with everything – places a tremendous pressure on the end of the book, on closure as a moment when form is achieved and retrospectively organises the work. Because the book makes a bid to be radically co-extensive with a life – ‘there is nothing left,’ everything gets put down – closure has to present itself as a kind of death // Kawara’s Today series is a perfect example of this
This is why the extreme inclusiveness of Knausgaard’s attention – and the flatness of the language in which it’s conveyed – is so important: it feels universal, less interested in the exceptional life than in the way any life can feel exceptional to its subject (even if it sometimes feels exceptionally boring). Much of My Struggle isn’t a story so much as an immersive environment.
That childish sense of open-endedness, in which everything is equally interesting, is countered by another fiction: that the meaning of My Struggle will be revealed at its end, secured by the author’s death (at least his death qua author). The former fiction is a fiction of formlessness, the undifferentiated, an infinite verticality outside time; and the latter is a fiction that gives form, the imposition of shape on experience, a syntax of events. The constitutive tension of Knausgaard’s work, its internal struggle, is the push and pull between these two fictions. The former is the promise of an artless infinity purchased at the cost of structure; the latter is the promise of a unity purchased at the cost of death.
Even if Knausgaard’s ‘literary suicide’ is an enabling fiction,
The problem of form rising from formlessness, of how to bring order to the undifferentiated mass of experience, and the relation of that problem to death: this is the problem with which My Struggle began.