Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book One

The novel I wrote while studying at the academy was turned down, I started at the university, I studied literary science half-heartedly, couldn’t write any longer, and all that was left of my writing career was the desire. That was strong, but how many people at university did not nurture the same desires? We played at Hulen with our band, Kafkatrakterne, we played at Garage, some of our songs were played on the radio, we had a couple of fine reviews in music papers, and that was good; however, I knew all the while that the sole reason I was there was because I was Yngve’s brother, I was a terrible drummer. When I was twenty-four I had a flash of insight: that this was in fact my life, this is exactly what it looked like and presumably always would. That one’s studies, this fabled and much-talked about period in a life, on which one always looked back with pleasure, were for me no more than a series of dismal, lonely, and imperfect days. That I had not seen this before was due to the constant hope I carried around inside me, all the ridiculous dreams with which a twenty-year-old can be burdened, about women and love, about friends and happiness, about hidden talents and sudden breakthroughs. But when I was twenty-four I saw life as it was. And it was okay, I had my small pleasures too, it wasn’t that, and I could endure any amount of loneliness and humiliation, I was a bottomless pit, just bring it on, there were days when I could think, I receive, I am a well, I am the well of the failed, the wretched, the pitiful, the pathetic, the embarrassing, the cheerless, and the ignominious. Come on! Piss on me! Shit on me too if you want! I receive! I endure! I am endurance itself! I have never been in any doubt that this is what girls I have tried my luck with have seen in my eyes. Too much desire, too little hope. Meanwhile Yngve, who had had his friends all this time, his studies, his work, and his band, not to mention his girlfriends, got everything he wanted.

What did he have that I did not? How come he was always lucky while the girls I spoke to seemed either horrified or scornful? Whatever the reason, I stayed close to him. The only good friend I had during these years was Espen, who started at the academy the year after me, and whom I met through the literature course — he asked me to look at some poems he had written. I knew nothing about poetry, but I looked at them, gave him some baloney he didn’t see through, and then little by little we became friends. Espen was the type who read Beckett at school, listened to jazz, and played chess, who had long hair and a somewhat nervous and anxious disposition. He was closed to gatherings of more than two people, but intellectually open, and he made his debut with a collection of poems a year after we had met, not without some jealousy from my side. Yngve and Espen represented two sides of my life, and of course they did not get along.

Espen probably didn’t know this himself, since I always pretended to know most things, but he pulled me up into the world of advanced literature, where you wrote essays about a line of Dante, where nothing could be made complex enough, where art dealt with the supreme, not in a high-flown sense because it was the modernist canon with which we were engaged, but in the sense of the ungraspable, which was best illustrated by Blanchot’s description of Orpheus’s gaze, the night of the night, the negation of the negation, which of course was in some way above the trivial and in many ways wretched lives we lived, but what I learned was that also our ludicrously inconsequential lives, in which we could not attain anything of what we wanted, nothing, in which everything was beyond our abilities and power, had a part in this world, and thus also in the supreme, for books existed, you only had to read them, no one but myself could exclude me from them. You just had to reach up.

Modernist literature with all its vast apparatus was an instrument, a form of perception, and once absorbed, the insights it brought could be rejected without its essence being lost, even the form endured, and it could then be applied to your own life, your own fascinations, which could then suddenly appear in a completely new and significant light. Espen took that path, and I followed him, like a brainless puppy, it was true, but I did follow him. I leafed through Adorno, read some pages of Benjamin, sat bowed over Blanchot for a few days, had a look at Derrida and Foucault, had a go at Kristeva, Lacan, Deleuze, while poems by Ekelöf, Björling, Pound, Mallarmé, Rilke, Trakl, Ashbery, Mandelstam, Lunden, Thomsen, and Hauge floated around, on which I never spent more than a few minutes, I read them as prose, like a book by MacLean or Bagley, and learned nothing, understood nothing, but just having contact with them, having their books in the bookcase, led to a shifting of consciousness, just knowing they existed was an enrichment, and if they didn’t furnish me with insights I became all the richer for intuitions and feelings.

Now this wasn’t really anything to beat the drums with in an exam or during a discussion, but that wasn’t what I, the king of approximation, was after. I was after enrichment. And what enriched me while reading Adorno, for example, lay not in what I read but in the perception of myself while I was reading. I was someone who read Adorno! And in this heavy, intricate, detailed, precise language whose aim was to elevate thought ever higher, and where every period was set like a mountaineer’s cleat, there was something else, this particular approach to the mood of reality, the shadow of these sentences that could evoke in me a vague desire to use the language with this particular mood on something real, on something living. Not on an argument, but on a lynx, for example, or on a blackbird or a cement mixer. For it was not the case that language cloaked reality in its moods, but vice versa, reality arose from them.

I didn’t articulate that for myself, it didn’t exist as in thought, barely even as inklings, more as a kind of hazy lure. I kept this entire side of me hidden from Yngve, first of all because he wasn’t interested, and didn’t believe in it either, he had taken Media Studies, and was in full agreement with the tenet of his subject that objective quality did not exist, that all judgments were relative, and that of course what was popular was just as good as what was not popular, but soon this difference, and whatever I held back, was charged with much more for me, it began to be about us as people, about the distance between Yngve and me actually being large, and I didn’t want that, I didn’t want that for anything in the world, and I systematically played it down. If I suffered a defeat, if I failed at something, if I had misunderstood something vital, I never hesitated to tell him, for anything that could drag me down in his eyes was good, while on those occasions I achieved something of significance, I often opted not to tell him.

In itself, this was perhaps not a serious matter, but when the consciousness of it reared its head, it became worse because I thought about it when we were together, and I no longer behaved in a natural, spontaneous manner, no longer chatted away as I had always done with him but started brooding, calculating, and reflecting. It was the same with Espen, except in reverse, I toned down the easygoing, entertainment-focused lifestyle. At the same time I had a girlfriend with whom I had never been in love, not really, which of course she must have known herself. We had been together for four years. So there I was, playing roles, pretending this and pretending that. And as if that were not enough, I was working at an institution for the mentally impaired as well, and not content with fawning on the other staff there, who were trained nurses, I was also joining them at their parties, which were held in the part of town that students shunned, the down-homey bars with pianists and singalongs, to tune into their opinions and attitudes and perceptions. The few I had of my own I repudiated or kept to myself. There was consequently something furtive and dubious about my character, nothing of the solid, pure traits which I encountered in some people during this period, people whom I therefore admired. Yngve was too close for me to be able to judge in this way, for thoughts, whatever good one can say about them, have a great weakness, namely, that they are dependent on a certain distance for effect. Everything inside that distance is subject to emotions. It was because of my emotions that I was starting to hold things back. He wasn’t allowed to make mistakes. My mother could, and I wasn’t bothered, my father and my friends could, and of course I could, I didn’t give a shit, but Yngve was not allowed to fail, he was not allowed to make a fool of himself, he was not allowed to show weakness. When, however, he did, and I was watching, shame-filled, the shame on his behalf still was not the crux; the crux was that he mustn’t notice, he mustn’t find out that I harbored such emotions, and the evasive looks in such circumstances, emerged to conceal feelings rather than show them, must have been conspicuous, albeit not easy to interpret. If he said something stupid or glib it did not change my attitude to him, I didn’t judge him differently for that reason, so what went on inside me was based exclusively on the possibility that he might believe I was ashamed of him.