The Morning Star by Karl Ove Knausgaard

I began reading The Morning Star without any prior knowledge of the contents, just as I had begun reading every other book of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s since receiving an ARC of the first volume of My Struggle long before he shone above us like the morning star in this novel. This time, however, after having read the most of the opening chapter, a friend happened to mention Knausgaard had claimed it is a horror novel, following the example of Stephen King’s The Stand in which multiple characters narrate their experience of an apocalyptic event. I was then resigned to expect drama to enter the familiar world of everyday Norwegian lives narrated here much like the everyday Norwegian life in My Struggle, which until then I was enjoying in the same way. 

 

However, now that I’ve read all 666 pages, I can say I continued to enjoy it in the same way, perhaps because no apocalypse occurs, at least in the sense we understand it. What drama appears is not vast destruction but closer to the Greek meaning of apokalypsis: disclosure in the everyday sense and revelation in the theological. In The Morning Star there are only uncanny events in the corner of each individual’s everyday narrative: from excessively warm weather and wild animals appearing in great number, to characters who are apparently alive when they're dead, and, of course, the appearance of a new star in the sky. So comparisons to the horror genre are deceptive, as The Morning Star more closely follows volumes one and two of My Struggle in which the apparent banality of a human life presents itself against a background of absent meaning which is nevertheless forever impending, never quite arriving, no matter how many events promise resolution of the questions they present, which is why it’s surprising that Sam Byers’ very negative review reckons Knausgaard has “enriched” the My Struggle project “with a new and welcome undertow: unnamed dread”. But Unnamed Dread could be My Struggle’s alternative title! It's unname is there in the face in the sea young Karl Ove sees in TV footage in volume one and the sky in Constable's painting in volume two over which he weeps in the realisation that it can be depicted, if not named.

Naming what is unnamed in the novel – attaching public meaning where private meaning lacks – is not only expected by the reader and demanded by the reviewer but inevitable, as a book is defined by its submission to unity, from its title and all the way down through its sentences to its final full stop. The book differs from an everyday human life because the latter's meaning becomes a question only when it becomes a narrative, when something happens: a great love, a break-up, an illness, a bereavement, the loss of a football match; when what happens becomes something outside oneself; a genre narrative. This is why applying labels such as autofiction and horror by writer, reader or reviewer is an avoidance tactic, as it provides a name for the outside where its meaning is otherwise withheld. Byers is inadvertently on the right track when he calls The Morning Star “a literary supernova", which he uses as a metaphor for "the entire Knausgårdian project entering spectacular, all-consuming heat death”.

This is not an idea that has fallen apart in the execution, it’s a novel that dreams of having an idea, a novel that, over hundreds of pages, seeks meaning in everything from the boiling of an egg to the passing of a soul into the afterlife, only to come back empty-handed.

Indeed, what comes back is not an idea but the uncanny presence of the novel itself, emphasised here by what Byers calls its "bloated and inconsequential" content. That is, the novel and the Novel (if there is really any difference), an object of obscure fascination, an obscurity named to obscure it; the novel as the morning star, appearing in our heavens where heaven had previously retreated, further brightening what was otherwise already bright but which we could not see until it appeared, under whose blaze we sweat because nothing dies, hence the multiplication of animals and characters who remain alive despite their death, and an artist character whose most distressing symptom of mental illness involves resisting this fact, and in the final chapter an essay "On death and the dead" which nevertheless turns into a ghost story, as if the novel seeks its own end in vain, becoming the ghost of itself.

In 1969, Maurice Blanchot observed that:

Essays, novels, poems seem only to be there, and to be written in order to allow the labor of literature … to accomplish itself, and through this labor to allow formulation of the question "What would be at stake in the fact that something like art or literature exists?" (Translated by Susan Hanson)

The question is unintelligible to us because it is one, Blanchot says, the "secular tradition of aestheticism has concealed, and continues to conceal". Perhaps if we pay closer attention to the relentless, indeed interminable, presentation and inevitable evasion of the question, which Karl Ove Knausgaard fails to evade better than most, we may begin to hear what the ghost has to say.

The end of literature, part three

On the evening of December 12th, 2019 a numbed grief descended over the land, and has lain there ever since. At that time a mild alternative to barbarism was being put to death. Back in 2015 when, against all odds, a lifelong socialist and campaigner against racism and imperialist wars became leader of the Labour Party, I made a prediction. His leadership would at first create a surge in support as people saw the values he stood for and the policies he offered, equivalent in magnitude, I said, to Thatcher's in 1979. But once corporate media had time to organise and focus, it would be destroyed. I cited Chris Mullins' 1982 novel A Very British Coup as a fictional precedent. This is exactly what happened. What I didn't predict was how such organisation and focus would itself rely on fiction. 

The numbed grief is also numbed horror at how such a mild alternative was presented as a terrible threat to all we know and love, and how those who took the fiction seriously were co-opted so that their anti-racist sentiments ended up favouring practising racists, their feminist sentiments were co-opted to silence reports of the mass murder of women (among others), and their pro-human rights sentiments were co-opted so that they came to admire the most brutal terrorist group imaginable and its assault on a society much like their own. The cynicism and cruelty with which these inversions were manufactured exposed more clearly than ever the demonic infestation at the heart of the political and media class. 

But this isn't a post about British politics. It begins as such because the same numbed feelings descended when I looked at the thirteen novels on this year's Booker Prize's longlist, and because it reveals a similar inversion of progress.

 

I studied the brightly coloured spines for the basic information, read descriptions of the contents of each and listened to the judges acclaim the list as "an excitingly diverse" selection full of "bold, fresh and accomplished" writing, without generating the slightest throb of interest. I wondered if, after all these years, my appetite for novels had gone. Even if I had long lost faith in book prizes to bring to light novels that deserve more attention, this was a singularly dispiriting selection, as it appears to offer not the slightest challenge to the form, only indulgence in familiarity dressed up in colourful clothing.

Perhaps these books need to be saved from their champions; what, after all, do those adjective mean when applied to writing? The first canto of Dante's Inferno is "bold" and "accomplished" and remains "fresh" after 700 years, but these words don't begin to say anything about the poem. They are words borrowed from a marketing department.

By contrast, many readers expressed excitement: Candice Carty-Williams says she's "sort of in love" with the longlist because it features "several black authors and debut female writers". She says it's "only a good thing" that one of the novelists, Brandon Taylor, said “I didn’t write this book for the white gaze”. Remember when John Carey said the modernists wrote works to exclude the masses and that was only a bad thing?

I went to the Booker Prize website to seek enlightenment about the novels in the hope that marketingspeak would be toned down and the books would be revealed in truer light. It reports that one novel is about "a world ravaged by climate change", another about "the hope and potential of one young girl and a fledgling nation", while others "[lay] bare the ruthlessness of poverty", contain "piercing social commentary", or are about “sexuality and race", "a life of violent crime", and "what it means to be a woman at war". There are even two about that subject matter nobody ever mentions, "love and loss". 

So here too diversity is the selling point, extended to subject matter. It is as if the judges sought to include everything and everyone – diversity par excellence – in order to suppress doubts about the conditions under which everything and everyone is revealed.  

What is happening when book prizes and the coverage of them has much less concern for the books in themselves than for the identity of the authors and their extra-literary agendas? 

Of course, this focus dominates mainstream literary reception. The symptoms are clear in Veronica Esposito's essay explaining why she's "falling out of love with Modernist Literature": while its books once "understood what it was like to be me", they do so no longer, and she's moved on to those that do.

In addition to discontent with older novels, there have been rumblings of the same with the contemporary novel and its place in the cultural landscape. First there's this anonymous waft of gas from a winged chair in a gentleman's club, and then there's Joseph Epstein's more fragrant equivalent, both coming from politically conservative standpoints, which the Booker longlist is implicitly keen to resist, and rightly so, yet the wish to emancipate different 'voices' above all else has lead to an apparently formally conservative selection of novels, correlating to the concern to protect progressive ideals for fear of enabling those that might honour them in practice and settling instead for the most vicious, illiberal of postwar governments, which might also be praised for the diversity of its ministers, but which of course makes not the slightest difference to their barbaric policies. 

The confidence of marketingspeak of the Booker Prize reveals only a profound lack of confidence in the novel as an artistic force, while history shows change is possible in art and politics only ever from a refusal to compromise; from always going in the opposite direction.

What then is the alternative to what I call "about novels", as defined in contrast to Beckett's description of Joyce's Work in Progress as "not about something" but "is that something itself"? 

How might we recognise a novel going in the opposite direction?

My reaction to novels is often more physical than it is intellectual, so to codify the genre would betray that feeling. But perhaps this feeling can be described, or described for me.  

In his short book addressing why he writes, Karl Ove Knausgaard quotes a passage from War and Peace in which after a dinner Prince Andrei asks Natasha, the woman he is courting, to sing. As she did so, he "felt tears choking him" because "something new and joyful stirred his soul". Why this unexpected emotion?

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.

Knausgaard then adds his commentary:

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. (Translated by Ingvild Burkey)

While the quoted passage is a narrated part of a novel and remains 'about' so that it is a condition only described to rather than experienced by the reader, its value lies in its description of the rare atmosphere experienced in some novels that cannot be attributed to what they're about; something for which a marketing department could not supply words. What's significant here is the revelation of what Andrei's 'love' for Natasha means and what it depends upon: the incarnation of an irreducible distance and, at the same time, its overwhelming presence. So instead of seeking a novel that is War and Peace for our time, or whatever, I propose we look for novels that become that revelation, so a reader becomes the Prince as he listens to Natasha singing at the clavichord. Knausgaard's book title suggests this is not necessarily something the author has any control over, which also suggests the focus on the writer rather than the work turns everything into a game of personality and mastery.

Knausgaard's example from Tolstoy is the less melodramatic version of Kafka's famous call for "the books that affect us like a disaster....". What would that kind of book look like?

Soon after the passage from War and Peace, Knausgaard says that, as a writer struggling with his writing, he was stuck between feelings induced by entertainments that carry no obligation yet provide an illusion of an engagement with meaning (watching Games of Thrones is his example), and feelings that "cannot be transmitted, cannot be sold" and are "yours alone until you die". This, he says, produces a work such as Mallarmé’s A Tomb for Anatole, a long poem written after the death of the poet's eight-year-old son and never intended for publication but handed to its original editor in a small box 63 years after Mallarmé's own death.

It contains no sequence of events and hardly any address or communication, for grief is mute, turned toward darkness and emptiness, and so is the language of this poem. Reading it, there is no sense of drama, no burst of sorrow or sudden shock, the poem doesn’t convey emotions, it is the emotion itself, its rending apart of meaning, coherence, language.

For the reader there is perhaps nothing to gain from reading such a work except to feel distant, excluded, bewildered, frustrated, offended even. However, Knausgaard's connection of the Prince's reaction to religious practice may help us to appreciate why Kafka's call and Mallarmé's work depend on extreme experiences, as they address what escapes meaning in the absence of faith and the disenchantment of the world, out of which the novel grew. This may be how writing recovers something of what has been erased by modernity and the novel.

 
A book like A Tomb for Anatole could never appear on a Booker Prize list of course, first of all because its the wrong genre and because, like Jacques Roubaud's The Great Fire of London, another generically uncertain work written after the sudden death of the author's wife, its original language is French. But it is precisely this obsession with genre that is the problem. We need to remember that the novel emerged at the time when the authenticity of dominant genres came under question. There's Samuel Johnson's famous criticism of Milton using a pastoral elegy to express grief at the death of a friend: "Where there is leisure for fiction, there is little grief." The genre label acts like a filing cabinet in which the author can whip out the relevant file, write an entry according to the template within, and whip it back in again. Clunk. 

We have been in a filing-cabinet time for many years now, and perhaps it will carry on clunking for a long time to come. The "about novel" is that filing cabinet – full of bold, fresh and accomplished files. Instead, I long for those works which affect us like the song and its singing affected the Prince, for novels which struggle for generic definition and lay on the floor in diverse locations discarded by the office drones. This is how we may recognise a novel going in the opposite direction.

Dante on the beach

This sumptuous Folio Society edition of Dante's Vita Nuova translated from the Italian by Mark Musa arrived with the suggestion that I post photographs to accompany anything I wanted to write. So here it is, bathed in marine light.

What I wanted to write was unclear to me, and feeling incapable of adding anything worthwhile to the centuries of studies, I began with the basics.

The book was published in 1295 and comprises 31 poems and a prose narrative described by Robert Harrison as juxtaposing "quasi-hallucinatory dreams and visions with pedantic commentary on the poems"; an unusual genre for us, with one familiar forerunner in Boethius' Consolations of Philosophy and no obvious descendants. TS Eliot describes it as a mixture of biography and allegory "according to a recipe not available to the modern mind"; closest perhaps to a modern scholarly edition of selected poems edited and annotated by the poet himself, and so perhaps even outside of our time given the suspicion or regret we feel towards that which is not the thing itself. Here the distance from the thing itself is everything.

The book tells of Dante's love for a woman he saw first when they were both children and with whom he had only the merest acquaintance throughout the rest of her short life, but whom he regarded from the start as "a miracle manifest in reality", as a sign of God's presence on earth, causing "the most secret chambers" of his heart to tremble and for his eyes to weep uncontrollably; a joy indistinguishable from distress. The new life of the title is one in which Dante would praise Beatrice in the very book we're reading; poetry being the gift that could not be taken from him once she had died.

While the Vita Nuova sprang from the tradition of troubadour love poetry, Eliot says Dante was following "something more essential than merely a 'literary' tradition". This might be what that I would like to write about here. What is it that makes the Vita Nuova "something more" than an exercise in genre, and what can reveal to us about the literature of our time?

Dante would go on to place Beatrice as his guide in heaven in his most famous work, which Borges argues was composed solely to manufacture another meeting with the object of this "unhappy and superstitious love". If in the Paradiso she is celebrated as "one of the beautiful angels of heaven", Charles Singleton says we recognise this in the Vita Nuova "not from a poet's extravagant rhetoric in rhyme, but from a sober and solemn and reasoned prose". This might come as a surprise given Dante's reputation as a poet. Except Borges also observes that what happened to Dante's vision "is what often happens in dreams: they are stained by sad obstructions". So we might see such prose here as another sad obstruction, and this is what Teodolinda Barolini argues when she says that a central purpose of Dante's commentary is "to divest the poem of any residual temporal immunity", thereby creating a tension between the physical and metaphysical elements of the story, which may correlate to the tension between distress and joy Dante experienced in Beatrice's presence.

Much of Barolini's own work, she says, is "finding ways to understand ... the deep meaning of the lyric/narrative contaminatio" in which the lyricism and fragmentariness of one form seeps into the regular linearity of the other, and vice versa. This is something that also fascinates me, for less focused reasons, but which emerges from what Barolini goes on to say about the 'excessive narrativity' that attracted later generations of writers in the form, thereby losing the lyric side, something that we can see today in the tendency of modern fiction toward graphomania.

Perhaps that "something more essential" appears in this contamination. There are others in the Vita Nuova in addition to that between lyric and narrative: there's the oscillation that Harrison notes between "Cavalcantian nihilism and Christian evangelism", in which the afflictions of romantic infatuation and the redemptive promise offered by Beatrice create what to us is an odd mix of pathos and piety; a mix that is also present in the light she radiates that acts in the opposite way to the Eurydicean darkness of pagan myth, looking into which nevertheless has a devastating impact on Dante. The nearest equivalent in modern writing to such contamination might be a book that 'plays with genre' or has multiple styles. Except this would also be furthest from equivalence because, as has been said, in the Vita Nuova the forms are necessary to the story rather than there to dazzle the reader with the writer's generic learning.

We might find a modern equivalent in Beatrice's role as mentioned by John A. Scott. She reflects the Christian Neoplatonic view of the human being as the midpoint of creation – a link between heaven and earth and between "pure intellect and brute matter". Her death acts as a challenging opposition to the lover left behind, just as narrative time challenges lyric timelessness. Beatrice in her absence is like the Untergeher featured in many of Thomas Bernhard's novels: the one who goes under, leaving the writer/narrator on the shore looking out into the unknown, between life and death; "between statis and conversion" as Barolini says of the form of the Vita Nuova. This is not as contrived a leap forward in literary history as it might seem. Singleton reveals how unusual the opening of the Vita Nuova was for its time, somewhat like the 'found text' theme of modern novels, including Bernhard's:

In that part of the book of my memory before which there would be little to be read is found a chapter which says: Here begins a new life. It is my intention to copy into this little book the words I find written under that heading – if not all of them, at least their significance.

Singleton says handwritten works of this age did not announce the presence of the scribe copying the words from another book, so immediately there is an unusually self-consciousness intervention. The book becomes two books and the poet becomes two people: the writer is a protagonist in the story and the one who lived through what happened and is now looking back, giving the narrative another opposition: "the principle of a then and a now, so mercury jumps like a spark". There is no staged innocence here as in the modern Bildungsroman: the story is already over – "Beatrice will not happen again".

If the unusual mix of genres in the Vita Nuova reveals that we are not as modern as we think we are, writing of a young woman as a kind of vernacular Jesus is by contrast more or less unintelligible to us, and thereby easily dismissed as a museum exhibit. I was prompted to wonder about this question by the seductively intimidating presence of this Folio Society edition with its decoration proclaiming an arcane value but also, it seemed to me, standing in for it. The poems and commentary work against the solemnity, cultural worth and demand for dutiful respect that we associate with canonical works, replacing them with anxiety, reflexivity and self-abasement. And while its unintelligible aspects also mean it's tempting to dismiss Dante's elevation of Beatrice as sublimated sexual obsession bordering on the pathology of a stalker, with her death relieving him of the possibility of her ideality becoming tainted, this would also be our form of relief, enabling us to dismiss a disconcerting resistance to our self-ratifying assumptions. Nor would it be original: Scott reports that a contemporary to whom Dante sent the poems told him to rid himself of such visions by "giving his balls a good wash".

We might begin to recognise what it means by raising yet another contamination, noted this time by Alison Cornish: "One of the most important and original aspects of Dante's literary project is his recuperation of sensual, earthly love ... as salvific and educational". This could be adapted to describe Proust's In Search of Lost Time with its two unhappy and superstitious loves from which Marcel learns and Swann doesn't, and the salvation of unredeemed time by the famous Proustian moments, not to mention its heady mix of description and commentary. The lineage suggests that unintelligibility is a function not of religion or cultural distance but the rarity of literary works set in motion by the interaction of such contaminations. We're used to one or the other dominating a novel (inevitably labelled a tour de force), but not both working alongside, distinct yet inseparable.


In the remarkable final volume of My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgaard suggests this is the case when he repeats the standard complaint that Dante's Inferno lives for its readers because it is populated by real people but dies in Paradiso because of the "non-human or beyond-human" nature of the divine. The comment arises from a discussion of what he learned when he had to delete his father's name from the first volume to placate his irate uncle. He discovered it robbed the presence in the book of the unique individual he had felt compelled to write about. From this Knausgaard recognises that this robbery recurs in our lives with the proliferation of screens – TV, laptops, smartphones – piping images into our lives in every conceivable location: "all kinds of people and places present themselves before us with nothing in common but being somewhere other than where we are". Everything has become fiction or is seen as fiction, causing the world to vanish because it is always somewhere else from where we are.

This is why he felt the job of the novelist had changed and would have to be "about the real world the way it was, seen from the point of view of someone who was trapped inside it with his body, though not his mind, which was trapped in something else". It is notable however that Knausgaard's own literary project, so saturated in the details of sensual, earthly life, nevertheless begins, like the Vita Nuova, in the aftermath of a death, and why Dante's precise naming of Beatrice is a necessary materialisation of the abstract 'Lady Philosophy' of Boethius, thereby maintaining a nameable midpoint in creation with which to relate earth to the heavens. It is Knausgaard's (and our) misfortune that his midpoint is the endpoint. My Struggle may be so long because the search for a midpoint cannot end without the mystery of life and death resolving into a name. (Even a phrase such as 'the mystery of life and death' seems unintelligible now.)

Perhaps the midpoint is writing itself. There is in certain volumes of My Struggle an approach to something more essential that is present in the writing of Dante, Proust, and many others, which is a product of this strange compulsion to approach what is not there, "to look to death for what life cannot give", as Eliot says is a lesson of the Vita Nuova. It is a compulsion that is itself a product of writing and its contamination of the world. After writing the final sonnet of his book, Dante says "a miraculous vision" appeared to him that made him resolve to say no more about Beatrice until he was capable of writing about her "in a more worthy fashion". It is notable that he does not describe the vision, but we know what he went onto write.

Time and the unthinkable

A review of Autumn by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Ingvild Burkey


Karl Ove Knausgaard stands in front of a 14th century Swedish castle speaking to a film crew from Melvyn Bragg's South Bank Show. "I don't understand what time is," he says. "Place I can relate to. We are here now and the castle's there now. But I don't understand what it is that someone was there 700 years ago". There is a pause before the camera pans over the castle walls, as if performing a token search for long-dead Swedes. It's an oddly innocent moment in what is otherwise a predictable portrait of a successful author, in which mastery and control of a subject is invariably a given. Other documentaries confronted by such a moment might have rushed to interview physicists and cosmologists and then illustrated their theories with colourful animations and lens flare. Here, there is only innocent utterance.

Knausgaard's new book is this utterance developed over book length. Framed as collection of short essays on diverse subjects written for an unborn daughter, they are suffused by an innocence for time and for when time is apparently in abeyance, as in this hesitation before birth. Knausgaard describes digging a hole in waterlogged ground and seeing a plastic bag "Swollen with water, handles up [hanging] a few feet down in the water" and how, in that moment, he sensed the inexhaustible, something transcending its ephemeral appearance, then adding the date of the sighting, as if to bring it into human time. He senses it in early photography when exposure times meant the human form left no trace and only unmoving objects could be captured on film, so a practice that at first appears to be a straightforward representation of the human realm reveals a world altogether outside of it. When exposure times improved, people became visible and this uncanny experience disappeared. Knausgaard says he thinks the first human to appear in a photograph is actually the devil because his permanence allowed him to be seen. This wonderfully perverse suggestion is reminiscent of the small boy in volume one of My Struggle who sees a face in the sea and the son in A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven who understands that seagulls are devolved angels. It reemphasises how Knausgaard is a writer deeply affected by the disenchantment of the world and willing to resist the recourse to the rational in order to bring attention to what has been submerged by modernity.

It needs to be said again: the features of Knausgaard's writing that have led to his public success and drew Melvyn Bragg to interview him are only a superficial by-products of its true subject. When the Norwegian stands before the countryside in the deep south of Sweden telling of how that, as soon as he arrived, he felt at home, it has nothing to do with a personal soap opera and everything to do with the absence the landscape evokes, which, again, is due to time: "everything I see is more or less the same as it must have been in the nineteenth century. Churches, villages, far-flung fields, great leafy trees, the sky, the sea. And yet everything is different". The landscape provokes a powerful nostalgia because "utopia is vanished from our time" and a longing for it can only project backwards onto the past. The churches, he says, are "feats of spiritual engineering" representing "another level of reality" which stood "open to the future, when the kingdom of heaven would be established on earth". If such a feeling suggests a conservative mindset, perhaps one wishing for the imposition of more hierarchical relationships, his perversity reappears to disarm:

That no one seeks the divine level of reality anymore and that the churches stand empty means that it is no longer necessary. That it is no longer necessary means the kingdom of heaven has come. There is nothing left to long for other than longing itself, of which the empty churches I can see from here have become the symbol.

It's a perplexing statement, as if utopia is at best a wilderness, at worst a waste land. But it is also a statement necessary to the form it takes, for if churches are symbols of what has departed, then so too is writing. If the divine is the inexhaustible and the foundation of language, writing can no longer reach for it without departing from common sense and, as a result, appearing quaintly absurd. The inexhaustible might appear in the world, materialising in moments like that of the plastic bag, but the neat opposition of science and superstition means there is nowhere for it to pass into common discourse. In recent years we have seen how the preciously affected language and sentimentality of 'nature writing' has directed what Knausgaard diagnoses as nostalgia for utopia or the divine into popular history and vicarious travel, thereby giving good reason why Knausgaard's writing is generally misconstrued. What he writes toward is almost unthinkable.

The majority of essays are structured to lead a young spirit to think in the open. 'Frames' follows the pattern: an everyday item is described as simply as possible – we all know what frames are but Knausgaard tells us anyway – whose effect is then applied in a more general sense – frames categorise what we can see – before it becomes a metaphor for human striving: the search for authenticity and truth is the wish for "a life, an existence, a world unframed". Potential gifts of the process are also noted: Knausgaard observes that all the chemicals necessary for photography were available in medieval times but the thought of photography was unthinkable and it was only "the slow turn of thought toward the material world" that enabled the discovery. Therefore, if we open ourselves to unframed modes of thinking, perhaps something other than what is expected might emerge. So while at first it is understandable that English reviewers have dismissed Autumn with such knee-jerk language as "the most colossal load of old cobblers" and "brain farts", it does suggest Knausgaard's consciously naive approach is necessary to combat rote thinking. But perhaps we no longer have the strength to let them come to us in their innocence.

It's notable that in the latter of the English reviews, the essays are criticised for being "rough sketches by a man who doesn’t know how to draw" while throughout the value of such knowledge is challenged, and challenged explicitly in an essay on Van Gogh's struggle to commit his life to anything in particular. Painting did not come easily to him; he wasn't a natural and his early paintings lack technique. But Knausgaard says the lightness in his landscapes "resembles nothing else" and comes not from finally acquiring painterly technique but from relinquishing it, adopting instead "a carelessness that allows the world to appear unfettered by how we happen to have conceived of it". He argues that only by committing himself to death does Van Gogh find the conditions to live and to paint as only Van Gogh could paint, with each work dependent "on the look he casts...really being his very last".

Such a commitment could explain why Knausgaard often specifies a date for an experience, as it thereby depends on what happened or what was felt in a human life, resisting a turn toward sterile abstraction. It also points to the influence of Peter Handke, especially in his prose collection Once Again for Thucydides, in which each transcription of an observation is given a precise date and location, and to the long poem To Duration in which "the most fleeting of all feelings" is sought in concrete experience. It is an influence that has, as far as I'm aware, gone unrecognised in the English reviews, despite Knausgaard's stated regard for the author. Given time, both books should become better known.

The virtue of a prayer

I'm still bothered by Karl Ove Knausgaard's fear that the poetry of Hölderlin would not open to him even while he carried on to have a successful literary career. It's worth quoting at length:

You could write a whole dissertation about Hölderlin, for example, by describing the poems, discussing what they dealt with and in what ways the themes found expression, through the syntax, the choice of words, the use of imagery, you could write about the relationship between Hellenic and Christian modes, about the role of the countryside in his poems, about the role of the weather, or how the poems relate to the actual politico-historical reality in which they had arisen, independent of whether the main emphasis was on the biographical, for example, his German Protestant background, or on the enormous influence of the French revolution. You could write about his relationship to other German idealists, Goethe, Schiller, Hegel, Novalis, or the relationship to Pindar in the late poems. You could write about his unorthodox translations of Sophocles, or read the poems in light of what he says about writing in his letters. You could also read Hölderlin’s poetry with reference to Heidegger’s understanding of it, or go one step further and write about the clash between Heidegger and Adorno over Hölderlin. You could also write about the whole history of his work’s reception, or of his works in translation. It was possible to do all of this without Hölderlin’s poems ever opening themselves up.

I'm still bothered because I don't know what it means. How would you know when poetry has opened up to you? If the intensity and patience of scholarly attention does not guarantee its opening, then what withdraws itself? Knausgaard sidesteps an answer by telescoping the question through the anxiety of his younger self that if poetry did not open to him he was destined for "a life on a lower plane". But what are the profound insights of poetry if not those unpacked in the library of close readings?

The presence of My Struggle suggests that Knausgaard expected poetry to open up empirically rather than as an idea, and the six volumes of empirical data is necessary to evoke this painful absence. For instance, his experience of looking at a reproduction of painting by Constable is the expression of an opening that allows no apparent worldly meaning. Compare this with Simone Weil who, despite being raised in a secular Jewish household and with no history of religious devotion, told a friend how, as she recited a poem by George Herbert, "Christ himself came down and took possession of me":

It is called Love. I learned it by heart. Often, at the culminating point of a violent headache, I make myself say it over, concentrating all my attention upon it and clinging with all my soul to the tenderness it enshrines. I used to think I was merely reciting it as a beautiful poem, but without my knowing it the recitation had the virtue of a prayer.

Poetry as the revelation and presence of divinity. A difficult idea. But, if we seek the origin of language, such difficulty might not be so alien to atheistic secular thought. In March, 2015 Noam Chomsky discussed his study of language with the physicist Lawrence Krauss. He was asked to explain why he believes that what is important about language from an evolutionary perspective has nothing to do with external communication but what is internal. "The core property of language", he says, "is its use in creating and formulating thought" and contrasts this with the idea that language evolved as an instrument of communication. Animal communication systems and human language "differ radically in every respect", as the former consists of signals connected to external events, while:

human language is a free, creative activity … and primarily it's just used for thinking. If you simply introspect, almost all of your use of language is internally creating and interpreting thought. [...] If you actually look carefully at the design of language, it turns out that the externalisation, the articulation, what comes out of your mouth, is kind of peripheral to language. The core principles of language are those that determine how you construct and interpret thoughts. And the way it’s externalised doesn’t enter into that. [...] This reinforces the traditional view that language is fundamentally what is sometimes called 'audible thought'.

So from where does language and thought come? Chomsky says we know no more than Descartes. While we don't accept his dualism, what we don't understand about language is what he didn’t understand about language:

Same mystery. And this holds for voluntary action altogether, not just language. There’s a recent review by a very good scientist about what’s known about how voluntary action takes place, [such as] my reaching for this drink. Then he goes through what is known about the neurology, muscles, what the neurons are doing and so on. But he ends up by saying we’re now beginning to understand the puppet and the strings but we don’t know anything about the mind of the puppeteer. Nothing. So what is making me pick this [drink] up rather than take that and throw it on the floor? About that nothing is known. So we have to be very humble. That’s hundreds of years and we’re exactly as ignorant as before, and we don’t even know how to investigate it.

In line with Knausgaard's muted mistrust of scholarship, Chomsky jokes about the "huge literature" on the evolution of language when "the subject doesn't exist". There is evolution only in the capacity for language. Krauss adds that the key development that produced the capacity was apparently simple and arrived quickly, and, much like Weil's conversion, something to which we have no access. Perhaps then reading literature, and poetry in particular, is an uncanny encounter with the mind of the puppeteer, an encounter with both our most intimate self and our most intimate non-self, and one that opens only within this space.

Decompression – My Struggle: Volume 5

Perhaps I nailed my colours to the mast too soon. So let the excuses begin. Volume one of My Struggle was sent to me before publication in an ARC minus a title on the spine, well before the serious praise, before the potatohead hype and before the deluge of interviews and features, so I had low expectations, which were then lowered when I found, tucked into the book, a playlist of songs to accompany the reading. The kind of music liked by most everyone of my generation, for sure, Knausgaard's generation, but not me. So unlike almost everyone else, I began reading in almost pure innocence; to me it was just another book, and so many new books disappoint for no obvious reason, especially novels, and once initial goodwill has been replaced by indifference, the reason becomes obvious: this really is just another book.

You recognise in each sentence of most novels the assumptions of the literary form, the opening sentences as prim and confident as a maître d', the reproduction furniture of description and the inexplicable confidence that any of this is at all necessary. Everything could be different, surely, you think, entirely different, and you wonder why other book bloggers don't think so too and instead put up with what's present long enough to write a review, though when you read them, with their own assumptions of the form, content with the same sentences and the same appeals to the glamour of contemporary relevance and industrial import, you realise in horror and in envy that this is because they are cheerfully free of doubt, fear, disgust, bitterness and anger, what we might call ideas. Such is your penance.

But then I found My Struggle begins with an idea rather than the personal details for which it has become famous and I did not want to put it down.

The overture discusses how despite being "constantly surrounded by objects and phenomena from the realm of death," we keep them out of sight. This is the maître d' slumping onto a chair. And while this book thereby might be said to bring death to the fore in its excruciating detail, notably in its latter part, there is also, right at the start, right after the overture, the face in the sea little Karl Ove sees on television, something perhaps from a realm other than death, and in itself an idea ghosting into the narrative, or even prompting it in the first place. And then there's the adult Knausgaard's walk at night through a district of Stockholm in which an event seems to impend, because why else give prominence to such an otherwise mundane event? Every corner promises a revelation of some kind, because this is what narration does. But nothing happens. He returns home to bed. I found this to be as confusing and liberating as when aged fifteen I heard the overture to Proust's novel on the radio; there was no action beyond Swann ringing the doorbell. While it suggests a taste for swathes of endless, apparently boring print, it captures instead precisely what I miss most other books: the confrontation of writing with itself, and thereby with what it presents. On the walk, what is present seems to be just out of reach, suspended in the darkness over Stockholm. The distance between narration and its meaning is animated here like nothing else in contemporary literature.

The confrontation and distance is also present in the most moving and puzzling passage in volume one, when Karl Ove can't sleep that same night and gets up, moves into the living room and flips through a book of paintings by John Constable.

I didn’t need to do any more than let my eyes skim over them before I was moved to tears. So great was the impression some of the pictures made on me. Others left me cold. That was my only parameter with art, the feelings it aroused. The feeling of inexhaustibility. The feeling of beauty. The feeling of presence. All compressed into such acute moments that sometimes they could be difficult to endure. And quite inexplicable. For if I studied the picture that made the greatest impression, an oil sketch of a cloud formation from September 6, 1822, there was nothing there that could explain the strength of my feelings.

What's notable here is not only that this is art causing these feelings rather than the actual world but reproductions of art in a coffee-table book, a further compression of the compression he values and a distinct contrast to the expansive quality of My Struggle. Its presence allows a comparison with Marcel's famous experiences compressing time into singularities transcending time. Knausgaard's non-transcendental content acts instead like a sink hole in a dam compressing an over-abundance to reveal or to create a pure and terrifying void (the adjective you choose might determine how you respond to his books). In volume one, Knausgaard seems to recognise this when he writes that "strong themes and styles have to be broken down before literature can come into being. It is this breaking down that is called 'writing'."

For this reason, I thought volumes one and two could be summed up as a literary embodiment of Weber's disenchantment of the world, the loss of the certainties provided by a belief in God and the communal rituals of observance, but also, and more crucially, the loss of an awareness of loss. While Knausgaard is like the rest of us embedded in rationality and science, his experience of inexhaustibility, beauty and presence in the constraints of art suggested he was aware of something lurking in the shadows cast by the light of modern life that is otherwise dismissed as illusion, delusion and mystification. His novel about angels with the strange, biblical title only encouraged the suggestion.

Except now, having read volumes three, four and five, I realise in dismay this might only be a chance product of the melancholic perspective from which the first two volumes are narrated. In the latter volumes, there is straightforward linearity, full of soap opera readability, enabling the same psychological readings or critique from experts of genre that afflicted the initial volumes, only with more justification. Nowhere in volume five does an abyss open without a clear object to plug it, such as Ingvild, Gunvor and Tonje, tormentors of his youthful heart. In volume two, by contrast, the past opens up as he sits on a balcony gazing across rooftops at dusk, so that its compression is foregrounded even as it seeks decompression in that 'breaking down' of writing, for inexhaustibility, beauty and presence to expand into daily existence. A deeper struggle thereby becomes clear. Later in volume two, he finds in Hölderlin's poetry a "lofty, clear and pure light" and in Dostoevsky's novels a light that is "wretched, dirty, sick," thereby offering another explanation for the dynamic of his own narrative. There is plenty of the latter light but the former is perhaps too weak a theme or an effect to sustain over such length and has itself been reduced to a trace of enchantment.

A blog comes to one in the dark

What follows the break wasn't going to be posted. I wrote it last week and decided it would be more effective to summarise on my Tumblr blog and then publicise on Twitter. To my surprise, bar one message of support, there was no response. The silence was instructive.

In the early days of February 2015, 3AM Magazine advertised an event in London to celebrate "the recent boom in online criticism" and to encourage readers "to get involved in the growth of digital literary culture". My interest was piqued, as the subject is close to my heart and is rarely discussed in fleshy public, for the obvious reason that those who produce it must do so from their disparate basements in Terre Haute.

Indeed, the event was to be held in big London and I was unable to attend. Still, as I have been writing online about books, mainly on blogs, since as recently as 1996 and am familiar with many of those who do the same, I was keen to see who was speaking and what the reference points might be. It turned out I had heard of one of the six panellists and knew one other personally.

It was to discuss:

• the implications for contemporary literary culture 
• the distinctive challenges and opportunities facing the new generation of online literary journals 
• the democratisation of criticism in the online landscape: in a world without journalistic gatekeepers, can anyone be a critic? 

While the first is so vague as to mean nothing and the second as euphemistic as a corporate press release (challenges = redundancies, opportunities = bend over), the third is very clear. The third is ... well, everything. This is because the panel includes only one person who is a recognised literary critic and not one who has ever been a literary blogger, that is, not one who might be able to talk about the form from the inside.

As soon as I read about the panel, I tweeted a question concerning this curious situation. There was, after all, still time to invite a London literary blogger for their insight. I didn't get an answer. The only response was for a well-known US critic to favourite the tweet. However, Flowerville noted what I had overlooked wearing my blogger-goggles:

As you can see, there were no responses to this either.

On the day itself, the event was publicised on a webpage and the link retweeted by a panellist.

Once again I tweeted, only this time with the bitter assumption that nobody would respond. I was then blocked by the same panel member. Still, while there was no woman on the panel, at least naked female mannikins were on display.

While this is a storm in an espresso cup, it is exemplary of a distinct campaign of middle-class revanchism in British culture. Where amateurs and outsiders had dominated, professionals are taking their place. The great Morrissey, the finest bloom of the flowering of postwar British culture borne on a welfare state won by an organised and compassionate working class, has noticed this in his own field:

In the guise of serving the public, the Brit Awards have hijacked modern music in order to kill off the heritage that produced so many interesting people, to such a degree that we could not imagine anyone who has ever truly affected the course of British music to be on stage at the 02 collecting a deserved award.

The major music TV event of the year is now about marketing "acts" manufactured by talent managers, business managers, brand managers.

With this in mind, note the labels given to each of 3AM's panellists: Co-editor in Chief, Contributing Editor, Senior Editor, Founder and Editor, Novelist and Publisher, Digital Publisher. The titles are impressive and I have no argument with them or the talent and hard work they signify, but contrast them with the titles of those who laid the foundations for online criticism's "recent boom": plain Blogger. It appears we must now submit to a professional hierarchy. So in addition to there being not one woman and not one blogger on the panel, there is not one person without a CV of such note; not one non-professional, working-class voice. Blogging for years and building a reputation and audience counts for nothing. Again.

Of course, this person could get involved, sans CV and anonymously, that is, they could perhaps buy a train ticket, travel to the big city and spectate. They might not be blocked and might even be allowed to speak, if invited, but what they say would always remain secondary, always dependent on permission from the high table.

Sugar Aping

This is an unexpected consequence of online literary magazines usurping the space blogs once occupied, and rather than reinventing the form, they mimic the broadsheet book pages from which the internet was meant to liberate us. For many years writers developed an audience relying solely on the quality of their work. For them, as it was for TS Eliot, criticism is as natural as breathing, or indeed necessary for breath. Blogging was about paying attention, exploration, discovery and sharing. Now editorial patronage is key and replaces radical possibilities with gatekeeping.

The host of this event, 3AM Magazine, is a prime mover. The step change became clear to me when the "Reviews editor" launched a personal attack on three unnamed but clearly identifiable working-class writers whose work is "exclusively online (their writing is so tedious that no editor would commit it to print)" under the cover of a review that didn't even address the book's contents with anything like good faith. In fact, it repeated the condescension and misrepresentation the book drew in the corporate print media. The reviewer's bracketed aside, even if it were true (and there are numerous examples to refute it), demonstrates the instinct to appeal to professional authority, where power and money relieves any need for justice. As 3AM's pages lack a comments section, attempts to challenge such calumny are stifled at birth. So much for "getting involved".

Later, the same reviews editor posted another review of a debut novel summarised as "an awful book", one that prompted the reader to want "to hurl the fucking thing across the room" (James Wood this is not). The author of the novel subsequently tweeted the news that there may be more than literary motivations at work here (though on his side such motives might have been strongly at work in relation to a certain "full-length novel" not having yet seen the light of day). When concerns were put to the "Editor in chief" that privileged access to its pages was being used to pursue undeclared personal grudges, the reply came back that 3AM was "open to different points of view" (apart from those it isn't) and indeed any requests for basic decency, honesty and fairness would only encourage more such reviews "for the sheer hell of it".

As Flowerville has shown elsewhere, this policy isn't restricted to 3AM Magazine, and has nothing to do with democracy, pluralism or a commitment to free speech but the very nature of "dudenation" editorial policy; one must share the "gatekeeper's mostly adolescent male mind" for the sheer hell of being published. The aspiring critic must realise that compromising to further a career – even one as lacking in reward as writing online – and thereby winning the protection and authority of a magazine title, means compromise becomes that career.

It would be too much to expect this state of affairs to prompt a Peter Oborne-like gesture from the co-editor in chief who blocked me, let alone a document like the September Statement produced by professional philosophers concerning the behaviour of an influential academic. But internet literary magazine culture certainly requires serious attention to renew its radical beginnings.

Oh, and by the way, guess who 3AM is publishing now.


An indication to the cause

Why is this happening? While I have argued that it is down to professionals moving into the domain where amateurs flourish, it is also perhaps a product of literature and how we respond to it. This is suggested in volume two of My Struggle, in which Karl Ove Knausgaard writes about how, as a young man, poems never opened themselves to him: "When I approached them I felt like a fraud, and I was indeed always unmasked, because what they always said as well, these poems, was: Who do you think you are, coming in here?". Not knowing how to open poetry, he felt a judgment had been passed and his literary dreams were pathetic mirages on the horizon: "I was an ordinary man who would live an ordinary life and find meaning where I was, nowhere else". One alternative, he explains, is to deny your feelings and "to stay afloat in that world without literature ever opening up to you".

You could write a whole dissertation about Hölderlin, for example, by describing the poems, discussing what they dealt with and in what ways the themes found expression, through the syntax, the choice of words, the use of imagery, you could write about the relationship between Hellenic and Christian modes, about the role of the countryside in his poems, about the role of the weather, or how the poems relate to the actual politico-historical reality in which they had arisen, independent of whether the main emphasis was on the biographical, for example, his German Protestant background, or on the enormous influence of the French revolution. You could write about his relationship to other German idealists, Goethe, Schiller, Hegel, Novalis, or the relationship to Pindar in the late poems. You could write about his unorthodox translations of Sophocles, or read the poems in light of what he says about writing in his letters. You could also read Hölderlin’s poetry with reference to Heidegger’s understanding of it, or go one step further and write about the clash between Heidegger and Adorno over Hölderlin. You could also write about the whole history of his work’s reception, or of his works in translation. It was possible to do all of this without Hölderlin’s poems ever opening themselves up. The same could be done with all poets, and of course it has been.   (Translated by Don Bartlett)

This is surely the experience of so many of us seeking to deal with the judgment literature passes down. Many of us have accepted fate and sought to stay afloat in denial. (Some are so floaty that they are invited onto panels.) But I have never been able to square admiration for such scholarship with the fact of literature, the utter remove onto which writing sometimes opens, something that I sense opening in Knausgaard's own work despite the ostensibly banal, terrestrial focus. How is such work possible and why does criticism avoid this space? How can it indeed approach the void opened by its own practice?


Reinvention

One answer is for criticism to seek to literature in criticism itself. That is, to seek the space in which critical writing opens onto this remove. This is how the online literary magazine might be reinvented. I have a dream in which the content of such a site is determined by constraints, as in Lars Iyer's Dogma, in which Lars and W. constrain the writing of conference papers: Dogma is spartan (don't use quotations). Dogma is full of pathos (rely on emotion). Dogma is sincere (speak with seriousness). There are many others. I have a dream in which this magazine has only a homepage, with two or three discrete columns, each one written by a different person but each discussing the same subject, the same thinker, the same event, the same poem, the same book. The focus would then be on the subject and the quality of writing and each writer would be writing beside and against their fellows in the same space.

A similar project was pursued by Maurice Blanchot with the Revue Internationale, a failed utopia described here by the same Lars Iyer, in which "total critique" was the goal. Perhaps it is inevitable that such attempts lead to a neutralising blandness, if not also to 3AM's reactionary hit pieces. So instead, I would recommend those of you who share Knausgaard's experience to pursue your own work on a solitary or small group blog with a focus on truth and necessity rather than reception, to seek your own identity as a writer, to wait for literature to open, however long and lonely the journey; to lie down in the dark and, like Beckett's narrator, listen. A blog comes to one in the dark. Imagine.

In daylight, we can all then watch wide-eyed as the literary internet is otherwise expropriated, with the events such as Literature 2.0 providing a fig-leaf for the banality and careerism to come.

Boyhood Island: My Struggle: 3, by Karl Ove Knausgaard

It's been said that Boyhood Island is "the most Proustian" of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle series, and while this is true that both Proust and Knausgaard present intense remembrances of childhood, the same could be said of many other novels, for example Tomas Bannerhed's The Ravens, recently published by the Clerkenwell Press and, like Boyhood Island, a novel of a 1970s childhood set in Scandinavia. Both Proust's and Knausgaard's would surely be lost among them were it not for what sets them apart.

What sets them apart might best be summarised as the lingering uncertainty of their status as novels. For all the differences between the authors that are finally destructive to the casual comparison, there is a common pressure exerted by the formal quality of each narrative voice: an essayistic spirit set within a distinct, first-person predicament refusing the comfortable distance of the knowing third person and, because of that, demanding that the reader participates in the questing nature of the narration.

While the Overture to In Search of Lost Time emerges from the uncertain place between dreaming and wakefulness, Boyhood Island merely introduces a discussion of the status of childhood memory. After a traditional family scene of moving into a new house on a Norwegian island narrated with objective confidence, Knausgaard interrupts the nostalgic flow and admits that he doesn't remember any of it himself: the action and dialogue are inventions based on family legend. As the distance is made explicit, there is no blurring of generic edges.

Memory is pragmatic, it is sly and artful, but not in any hostile or malicious way; on the contrary, it does everything it can to keep its host satisfied. Something pushes a memory into the great void of oblivion, something distorts it beyond recognition, something misunderstands it totally, something, and this something is as good as nothing, recalls it with sharpness, clarity and accuracy. That which is remembered accurately is never given to you to determine. (Translated by Don Barlett)

This is certainly a truism yet, placed before a narrative explicitly based on the author's own life, it introduces anxiety to the mournful dejection that personal memories invariably provoke, making what proceeds less an indulgence than a nervous exploration of what remains. As a writer then, Knausgaard, like Proust, must navigate a path between the total freedom offered by the constraints of genre – amply demonstrated by Tomas Bennerhed's reliance on heavily descriptive prose to dissemble its lack of truth and necessity – and the silence of terminal uncertainty. It is here that Knausgaard retreats from Marcel's quest to recover the living presence of the past and instead sticks to a straightforward narration of everyday life. There are only two, brief, vertiginous diversions that resemble anything like those in the first two volumes and what elevates them beyond fictionalised memoir, and, as a result, the sly and artful come to the fore.

He writes that young Karl Ove took great pleasure in not defecating when he felt the need, sticking his fingers up his backside to smell what he held back, which means we have the author of a six-part autobiographical work reporting that he was anally retentive as a child! He then enjoyed the relief of letting go, a feeling perhaps similar to completing the sixth and final volume of My Struggle. Moreover, he is told off by his teacher for revealing in class the reasons for a classmate's broken home and is told that he should learn some social decorum. Are these anecdotal precursors of later life too good to be true? Sometimes it seems that way, especially as much less trivial events are later pushed toward the void.

The best edition of the Scott Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation

Where Knausgaard might become realigned with Proust is the tension in the book created by opposing ways of life. In Swann's Way, the child Marcel walks two paths in the country surrounding his home: going in opposite directions and accessed by different gates, the Méséglise Way is full of lower class sexuality and sensuous nature, while the Guermantes Way presents the aura of history, nobility and the glamour of high society. Each represents a core example for Marcel's understanding in later life and the potential for happiness – what Deleuze called his apprenticeship to signs. Each has its appeals but are apparently irreconcilable. Which should he choose? Knausgaard has similar paths: the island's wooded landscape full of schoolmates, adventure and exciting temptations, and the one provided at home under the Panoptic gaze of his tyrannical father. How will the boy deal with such competing pressures? Outside he behaves recklessly, testing the limits of his freedom while at home he cringes with fear at the probable consequences. Knausgaard has acknowledged the "dynamic force in this book" is:

the difference between the freedom outside and the prison-like state inside, and how the latter very slowly influences the former, and in the end changes it fundamentally. Another word for that would be integration, I think. The eye of God ends up inside, so that, in the end, you take care of judgment and punishment yourself.

Perhaps a supplication to greater powers sums up the reckoning with the past and present that the book sequence displays and why it began with the death of his father. However, in Time Regained, the adult Marcel takes the Méséglise Way again and discovers it is in fact physically linked to the Guermantes Way; there wasn't such a profound opposition and, in revising his assumptions, makes him more aware of continuities and possibilities for revising ongoing assumptions. The proximity of separate paths turns out to be true of Karl Ove's paths too, leading us to a better comparison than with Proust's novel – that of Kafka and his father, or, more specifically, George Bendemann and his father.

The Judgment begins with Georg's self-assurance that he can write about his life to his friend in Russia without worrying too much about the consequences. Writing is freedom. But this is soon ended by his father when he reveals that the Russian friend knows all about Georg's self-serving behaviour because he, the father, has been in contact with him all along. Georg's suicide then is a submission to the power that reveals itself to be present in writing too. His suicide is the murder of writing by means of writing. Compare this with Karl Ove's actions as his family prepares to leave the island idyll. The teenager finds himself out of God's sight and, at a school camp, he and other boys pursue girls and behave in ways that readers will have to read and judge for themselves, if indeed they notice it all, so cursory is the description. Collusion with other boys is significant here because it dilutes responsibility, allowing the brute instincts of teenagers to stand in for the 'suicide' of the oppressed little Karl Ove; these girls disappear into the distance like a roadkill in a rearview mirror. Writing is as pragmatic as memory.

I guess I have a talent for humiliation, a place within me that experience can’t reach, which is terrible in real life, but something that comes in handy in writing. It seems as though humiliation has become a career for me.

Behind this confession is perhaps what is most disturbing about Boyhood Island: the possibility that father's tyranny is growing in the little boy even as he appears to resist it, or, to be less personal and less judgmental, the manifestation of the manipulative power that secretes itself within even the most open, honest, self-abasing act.

Light is the lion: My Struggle – Book 2 by Karl Ove Knausgaard

The focus of the first volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard's six-book series My Struggle is in the foreground of its narrative and in the title of the UK edition – A Death in the Family – which for the book-devouring industry mitigated such a prolonged presentation of one man's relatively ordinary childhood and youth. And you can expect the content of the second – A Man in Love – to do the same: the author's romance, marriage and parenthood will occupy review coverage alongside doubts as to the value such indulgence has now that the initial hit has been absorbed. Isn’t this now going a bit too far? What purpose can repetition serve?

It should at least contradict the impression that My Struggle is a traditional bildungsroman, a genre in which the book we are reading is the vantage point from which all the missteps and miseries, all the highways and byways of the individual on his path to the summit, can be surveyed: the relief of a landscape. Knausgaard is not an old man; a knowing distance is not an option.

Archipelago Books’ bold decision to place the original title in the foreground of the US edition enables us to focus on what's key to Knausgaard's struggle: the background. After all, in terms of the writing there is little difference between volumes one and two: in both the prose is straightforward, the characters memorable and the chronology clear, even when Knausgaard interrupts a domestic cliffhanger to plummet back in time only to resolve the issue in one sentence 236 pages later. The writer himself vindicates the impression when he says the length and speed of the writing were important formal constraints. Let's be clear: My Struggle is not about the life of Karl Ove Knausgaard. The interminable specifics of the content are superficial necessities for an experiment in stretching the everyday to such a degree that it becomes translucent, for light of a kind to shine through.

Light is a constant in book two. When the writer falls in love “everything was light”; his new girlfriend was “filled with an inner light” and, when their daughter is born, “she was the light”. Light reveals something otherwise absent. He sees it elsewhere in the “endless summer nights, so light and open”. He sees it in his father-in-law’s face, so “utterly open; it was as though there was nothing between him and the world”. Too easily, the light fades and habit shadows his life. He sits on a balcony of an evening and ponders: “the life around me was not meaningful. I always longed to be away from it. So the life I led was not my own. I tried to make it mine, this was my struggle.”

He turns to literature and reads Hölderlin’s poetry and Dostoevsky’s novels and discovers “that was where the light was. That was where the divine stirred”. Light and the divine were also the focus of the fictional speculations in Knausgaard’s remarkable novel A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven. As a child Antinous Bellori witnesses two angels at the riverside in a dark forest and spends the rest of his life pursuing the nature of their existence on earth. The task of My Struggle might be similar. Why does Knausgaard respond so powerfully to works art and literature? It wasn't always this way. The angel of poetry was once closed to him.

The poems looked into another reality, or saw reality in a different way, one that was truer than the way I knew, and the fact that it was not possible to acquire the ability to see and that it was something you either had or you didn’t condemned me to a life on a lower plane, indeed, it made me one of the lowly. The pain of that insight was immense.

This is perhaps a common experience if not a common revelation. Knausgaard realises it is “entirely possible to stay afloat in that world without literature ever opening up to you”, but he does not want to settle for this world. A Man in Love covers the same time as Knausgaard was writing the angels novel and it’s disconcerting to read of his determination to write at all costs; he is willing to sacrifice his marriage and family life in order to pursue the work. Clearly My Struggle follows the same personal imperative, only more explicitly. But in this personal element lies its danger. For the fictional Bellori, writing had conjoined the world with human concepts of the world rather than revealing the one beyond the other. “Christ never wrote”. The incarnation of divinity is abstracted by writing; literature takes possession of God. For Knausgaard, however, writing can resist this self-confirming circularity, and provides a precise example:

Paul Celan’s mysterious, cipher-like language has nothing to do with inaccessibility or closedness, quite the contrary, it is about opening up what language normally does not have access to but that we still, somewhere deep inside us, know or recognize, or if we don’t, allows us to discover. Paul Celan’s words cannot be contradicted with words. What they possess cannot be transformed either, the word only exists there, and in each and every single person who absorbs it.
      The fact that paintings and, to some extent, photographs were so important for me had something to do with this. They contained no words, no concepts, and when I looked at them what I experienced, what made them so important, was also nonconceptual. There was something stupid in this, an area that was completely devoid of intelligence, which I had difficulty acknowledging or accepting, yet which perhaps was the most important single element of what I wanted to do.

The danger here is revealed in the form: Knausgaard is merely describing this in essayistic fashion, and no matter how aware the author is of the contradictory direction he has taken, the familiar mode of discourse envelops the world, casts a shadow on the open. “Everyone can write essays! It’s the easiest thing in the world” his friend Geir complains. But Knausgaard is not a painter or photographer, and he certainly isn't Paul Celan. For this reason he must fill his books with the sensory particulars of existence – the storm blowing through our world, as he puts it – as a means of approaching the nonconceptual. So while Knausgaard contextualises and investigates his experience with exceptional clarity and intensity – which alone justifies My Struggle as a project – it is a struggle lost in advance. “Come on! Into the open, my friend, as Hölderlin had written ... But how, how?”.

A book review pursues the same circular path without asking the same question, tending to light upon statements and notable events as an alibi for disregarding the silence within writing. It is the regrettable fate of literary genre. Knausgaard’s method then is to use length and speed to evade the tyranny of form, and speed is the best method for the reader too, enough to appreciate that dwelling on the author's life and opinions is to close the door upon the light.