Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

‘And where do you place me in this system of yours?’

‘You?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, you’re a cynic. You’re proud and ambitious, perhaps the proudest person I know. You would never do anything openly debasing, you’d rather starve and live on the street. You’re loyal to your friends. I trust you blindly. At the same time you look after yourself and can be ruthless to others if for some reason you have something against them, or if they’ve done something to you, or if there is something greater to gain by it. Isn’t that true?’

‘Yes, but I’m always considerate to those I like. Really. Scrupulous might be a more accurate expression. There is in fact an important distinction.’

‘Scrupulous then. But let me mention one example. You lived with the human shield in Iraq, travelled with them all the way from Turkey, shared everything with them in Baghdad. Some of them became your friends. They were there because of their convictions, which you didn’t in fact share, but they didn’t know that.’

‘They had a suspicion,’ Geir said with a smile.

‘So when the US Marines come, you simply say goodbye to your friends and go over to their enemies without a backward glance. You betrayed them. There is no other way to see it. But you didn’t betray yourself. I place you somewhere around there. It’s a free, independent place, but the price of getting there is high. People lie strewn around you like skittles. That wouldn’t be possible for me. Social pressure from all sides starts when I get up from my office chair and by the time I’m in the street I’m bound hand and foot by it. I can hardly move. Ha ha ha! But it’s true. At bottom, and I don’t think you have understood this, it’s not saintliness or high morals but cowardice. Cowardice and nothing else. Don’t you think I’d like to cut all my ties to everyone and do what I want, not what they want?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Do you think I’m going to do that?’

‘No.’

‘You’re free. I’m not. It’s as simple as that.’

‘No, it isn’t, not by a long chalk,’ Geir said. ‘You may be trapped by social pressure, which sounds strange, after all you never meet anyone. Ha ha ha! But I understand what you mean, and you’re right, you try to take account of everyone all at once. I’ve seen it with my own eyes, how you run around when we come to yours for a meal. However, there are many ways to be trapped; there are many ways of not being free. You have to remember that you’ve had everything you wanted. You’ve had your revenge on those you targeted. You have status. People sit waiting for what you do and wave palm leaves as soon as you show your face. You can write an article about something that interests you and it will be in print in the newspaper of your choice a few days later. People ring and want you to go here, there and everywhere. Newspapers ask you for a comment on all sorts of matters. Your books will be published in Germany and England. Do you understand the freedom there is in that? Do you understand what has opened in your life? You talk about a longing to let go and fall. If I let go I would be standing in the same place. I’m standing right at the bottom. No one’s interested in what I write. No one’s interested in what I think. No one invites me anywhere. I have to force my way in, right? Whenever I enter a room full of people I have to make myself interesting. I don’t pre-exist, like you, I don’t have a name, I have to create everything from scratch every time. I’m sitting at the bottom of a hole in the ground and shouting through a megaphone. It doesn’t matter what I say, no one is listening. And you know that whatever I say from the outside contains a criticism of what is inside. And then by definition you’re self-opinionated. The embittered querulous type. Meanwhile the years pass. I’ll soon be forty and I don’t have any of what I wanted to have. You say it’s brilliant and unique, and perhaps it is, but what good is that? You have everything you want, and you can dispense with it, leave it, make no use of it. But I can’t. I have to get in. I’ve spent twenty years trying. The book I’m busy with now is going to take three years at least. I can already feel how the world around me is losing belief and hence any interest. I’m becoming more and more like a madman refusing to drop his mad project. Everything I say is measured against that. When I said something after my doctorate it was measured against that, that was when I was academically and intellectually alive, now I’m dead. And the more time that passes the better the next book has to be. It’s not enough for the next book to be all right, pretty OK, very good, because I’ve spent a lot of time on it and because my age is, relatively speaking, so advanced that it has to be outstanding. From that perspective, I’m not free. And to link up with what we were talking about before, the Victorian ideal, which wasn’t an ideal but a reality, namely a double life. Therein lies a sorrow too because such a life can never be whole. And of course that’s what everyone dreams of, one love affair, or falling in love with someone, when cynicism and calculation are absent, when everything is whole. Yes, you know. Romance. A double life is a passable resolution of a problem, but it is not unproblematic, if that’s what you reckoned I went around thinking. It’s practical, provisional, pragmatic, in other words, part of life. But it’s not whole, and it’s not ideal. The most important difference between us is not that I’m free and you aren’t. For I don’t believe this to be the case. The most important difference is that I’m happy, a glad soul. And you aren’t.’

‘I don’t think I’m that unglad—’

‘Exactly! Unglad. Only you can use a word like that! It says everything about you.’

‘Unglad is a good word. I’ve seen it in the old Norwegian saga Heimskringla , in point of fact. And the Storm translation is a hundred years old. But perhaps it’s time we changed the subject?’

‘If you’d said that two years ago I would have understood.’

‘OK. I can go on. After everything finished with Tonje I went to an island and lived there for two months. I had been there before, I just had to get on the phone and everything was arranged. A house, a small island, right out in the sea, three other people there. It was the end of the winter, so the whole island was frozen and stiff. I walked all over it thinking. And what I thought was that I would have to do everything I could to become a good person. Everything I did should be to that end. But not in the abject, evasive manner that had characterised my behaviour so far, you know, being overcome by shame at the smallest trifle. The indignity of it. No, in the new image I was drawing of myself there was also courage and backbone. Look people straight in the eye, say what I stood for. I had become more and more hunched, you see, I wanted to occupy less and less space, and on the island I began to straighten my back, quite literally. No joking. At the same time I read Hauge’s diaries. All 3,000 pages. It was an enormous consolation.’

‘He went through worse times, didn’t he?’

‘He certainly did. But that wasn’t the point. He fought without cease for the same, for the ideal of how he should be, as compared with the person he was. The determination to fight was extraordinarily strong in him. And that in a man who didn’t really do anything, didn’t really experience anything, just read, wrote and fought his inner struggle on a stupid little farm by a stupid little fjord in a stupid little country on the margin of the world.’

‘No wonder he was prone to going absolutely bananas.’

‘You get the impression it was also a relief. He gave in, and part of the velocity with which he was hurled off course was born of happiness. He escaped the iron grip on himself and relaxed, so it seemed.’