Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

‘I’ll have the meatballs, please,’ I said and raised my glass. ‘And another of these.’

‘Thank you, gentlemen,’ the waitress said, putting her tiny notebook in her breast pocket and heading for the kitchen, which you could glimpse through the ever-swinging doors.

‘What do you mean by high morals?’ I asked.

‘Well, you’re a deeply ethical person. There is an ethical foundation at the base of your personality and it is irreducible. You react in a purely physical way to inappropriate behaviour, the shame that overwhelms you is not abstract or conceptual but a hundred-per-cent physical, and you cannot escape it. You’re not a dissembler. Nor a moralist though. You know I have a predilection for Victorianism, their system with the front stage where everything is visible and a back stage where everything is hidden. I don’t think that kind of life makes anyone happier, but there is more life. You’re a Protestant through and through. Protestantism, that’s inner life, that’s being at one with yourself. You couldn’t live a double life even if you wanted to, it’s not something you can make happen. There’s a one-to-one relationship between life and morality in you. So you are ethically unassailable. Most people are Peer Gynt. They fudge their way along life’s road, don’t they? You don’t. Everything you do you do with the uttermost seriousness and conscientiousness. Have you ever skipped a line of the manuscripts you read, for example? Has it ever happened that you haven’t read them from the first page to the last?’

‘No.’

‘No, and there’s something in that. You can’t fudge anything. You can’t . You’re an arch-Protestant. And as I’ve said before, you’re an auditor of happiness. If you have some success, generally something others would die for, you just cross it off in the ledger. You’re not happy about anything. When you’re at one with yourself, which you are almost all the time, you’re much, much more disciplined than me. And you know what I’m like with all my systems. There are unmapped areas in your mind where you can lose control, but when you don’t go there, and nowadays invariably you don’t, you are absolutely ruthless in your morality. You are exposed to temptations far more than me or anyone else. If you had been me you would have lived a double life. But you can’t do that. You are doomed to a simple life. Ha ha ha! You’re no Peer Gynt and I think that is the heart of your nature. Your ideal is the innocent, innocence. And what is innocence? I’m right at the other end. Baudelaire writes about it, about Virginia, do you remember, the picture of pure innocence, which is confronted with the caricature, and she hears coarse laughter and realises that something dishonourable has happened, but she doesn’t know what. She doesn’t know! She folds her wings around herself. And then we’re back to the painting by Caravaggio, you know, The Cardsharps , where he’s tricked by all the others. That’s you. That’s innocence as well. And in that innocence, which in your case also lies in the past, the thirteen-year-old you wrote about in Out of the World , and the crazy nostalgia trip you have for the 1970s… Linda has some of this too. How was it she was described? Like a mixture of Madame Bovary and Kaspar Hauser?’

‘Yes.’

‘Kaspar Hauser, he’s the enigma of course. Now I never met your previous wife, Tonje, but I’ve seen photos of her, and although she’s not like Linda there was something innocent about her, her appearance. Not that I think she is innocent, necessarily, but she gives that impression. Innocence of this kind is typical of you. Purity and innocence don’t interest me. However, it’s very clear in you. You’re a deeply moral and a deeply innocent person. What is innocence? It is that which has not been touched by the world, that which has not been destroyed, it is like water into which a stone has never been thrown. It’s not that you don’t have lusts, that you don’t have desire, for you do, it’s just that you conserve innocence. Your insanely huge longing for beauty comes in here as well. It wasn’t by chance that you chose to write about angels. That’s the purest of the pure. You can’t get purer than that.’

‘But not in my novel. There it’s about the bodily, the physical side of them.’

‘Well, nevertheless, they are the very symbol of purity. And of the fall. But you have made them human, allowed them to fall, not into sin, but into human-ness.’

‘If you take an abstract view of this, in a way you’re right. The thirteen-year-old, that was innocence, and what happened to it? It had to be made physical.’

‘What a way to put it!’

‘Yeah, well, OK. She had to be screwed then. And the angels had to become human. So there’s a connection. But all this takes place in the subconscious. Deep down. So, in that sense, it’s not real. I might be heading in that direction, but I’m not aware of it. Of course, I didn’t know I had written a book about shame before reading the blurb on the cover. And I didn’t think about innocence and the thirteen-year-old until long after.’

‘It’s there though. Perfectly obvious and not a shred of doubt.’

‘OK. But hidden from me. And it strikes me there’s something you’re forgetting. Innocence is related to stupidity. What you’re talking about is stupidity, isn’t it? About ignorance?’

‘No, no, far from it,’ Geir said. ‘Innocence and purity have become a symbol of stupidity, but that’s nowadays. We live in a culture where the person with the most experience wins. It’s sick. Everyone knows which way modernism is going, you create a form by breaking up a form, in an endless regression; just let it continue, and for as long as it does, experience will have the upper hand. The unique feature of our times, the pure or independent act, is, as you know, to renounce, not to accept. Accepting is too easy. There’s nothing to be achieved by it. That’s more or less where I place you. Almost saint-like, in other words.’

I smiled. The waitress came with our beer.

‘ Skål ,’ I said.

‘ Skål ,’ he said.

I took a long swig, wiped the froth from my mouth with the back of my hand and put the glass on the beer mat in front of me. There was something uplifting about the light, golden colour, it seemed to me. I looked at Geir.

‘Saint-like?’ I repeated.

‘Yes. Saints in the Catholic faith could have been close to your way of believing and thinking and acting.’

‘You don’t think you’re going a little too far now?’

‘No, not at all. For me, what you do is utter mutilation.’

‘Of what?’

‘Of life, of opportunities, of living, of creating. Creating life, not literature. For me, you live in an almost frightening asceticism. Or rather, you wallow in asceticism. As I see it, it’s extremely unusual. Extremely deviant. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone, or heard of anyone… well, as I said, then I have to go back to the saints or the Church fathers.’

‘Stop right there.’

‘You did ask. There’s no other conceptual framework for you. There are no external characteristics, there’s no morality at stake, there’s no social morality, that’s not where it is. It’s in religion. Without a god though, that’s clear. You’re the only person I know who can take communion despite not believing in God and not commit blasphemy. The only person I know.’

‘No one else you know has done it, I suppose?’

‘They have, but not with purity! I did it when I got confirmed. I did it for money. Then I renounced the Church. What did I spend the money on? Well, I bought a knife. But that’s not what we were talking about. What were we talking about again?’