Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

I liked her writing but also felt uncomfortable because it meant nothing to me, I didn’t know what she was trying to say or what the poems were about.

After she had finished Hovland took over. Now we had to comment on the texts, and we would do it in sequence so that everyone spoke and had a chance to say something. What we had to remember, he said, was that none of the texts we discussed in class was necessarily finished or complete, and we learned through criticism. But it wasn’t only criticism of our own texts that was important to us, it was equally important to be involved and discuss others’ texts, for what this course was based on primarily was reading, learning to read, improving our ability to read. For a writer it was perhaps most important not to write, but to read. Read as much as you can because in so doing you won’t lose yourselves, become unoriginal, what happens is the opposite, by doing this you’ll find yourselves. The more you read, the better.

The round of comments began. There was a lot of hesitation and groping for words, most people confined themselves to saying they liked this image or that sentence, but amid all this some concepts emerged which were carried on and slowly became the standard currency for everyone, such as ‘rhythm’, the rhythm was ‘good’ or ‘didn’t quite flow’, and then there was mention of ‘tone’ and ‘the opening’ and ‘the ending’ and ‘deleting’ and ‘cutting’. That was a nice opening, and the rhythm’s spot on, there’s something a little unclear in the middle section, I’m not quite sure what it is, but something jars there, well, maybe you could shorten it a bit, I don’t know, but then there’s that strong image at the end which elevates the whole poem. That was how it began to sound when poetry was under discussion. I liked this way of talking because it didn’t exclude me, I could understand openings and endings, I became particularly good at endings, the idea that something had to rise and resonate after the last line. I always looked for that, and if I found it I piped up. If I didn’t, I said so too. You sort of shut off the poem here, I would say then. Can you see? The last line? It’s a conclusion, it shuts itself off. Can’t you delete it? Then you open everything up. Do you see? Also the question of line breaks came up in these readings. It soon transpired that chopped-up prose, as it was called, whereby standard prose was divided up as if it were a poem, was the enemy, the nightmare in person. It looked like a poem, but it wasn’t, and this was the 1970s, something they did back then. In addition, we discussed all the literary devices, such as metaphors and alliteration, but not often because Fosse and the students who wrote poetry had an aversion to metaphors, I noticed, there was almost something ugly about metaphors, or old-fashioned, in the sense of passé or antiquated and useless for our purposes. It was bad taste, quite simply, naff. Alliteration was even worse. What was important was mostly rhythm, tone, line breaks, openings and endings. Jon Fosse, I noticed, when he made any comments, was always looking for whatever was unusual, different, out of the ordinary, as well.

This first session, however, was almost completely terminology-free, only Knut had a vocabulary fit to talk about poems, and his words also had the greatest impact. Trude sat in deep concentration, listening the whole of the time, making occasional notes and also asking direct questions, why this, why not that. I could see she was a writer and a poet, and she not only wanted to go far, she was already well ahead.

When my turn came I said the poems were full of atmosphere and they were profound but a bit difficult to talk about. In some places I didn’t quite understand what she was trying to achieve. I said I agreed with a lot of what Knut had said, I particularly liked this line while she might consider leaving out that line.

While I was speaking I could see she didn’t care. She didn’t take any notes, she wasn’t concentrated, and she watched me with a little smile at the corners of her mouth. I was upset and angry, but there was nothing I could do, other than sit back, push my papers away, say I had nothing more to add and sip my coffee.

After that Jon Fosse held forth. While both the way he moved his head — in jerks, like a bird, sometimes as if he had been startled by or remembered something — and the way he spoke — hesitantly, full of pauses, stutters, coughs, snorts, an unexpected deep breath here and there — suggested nervousness and unease, what he said was, by contrast, completely assured. He was utterly sure of himself, there was no room for doubt: what he was saying was right.

He went through all the poems, commented on their strengths and weaknesses and said that horses were a fine ancient motif in poetry and art. He cited the horses in the Iliad and the horses in the Parthenon Frieze, he cited the horses in Claude Simon, but these, he said, were more a kind of archetype, I don’t know, have you read Ellen Einan? Something here is reminiscent of her. Dream language.

I wrote everything down.

The Iliad, the Parthenon, Claude Simon, archetype, Ellen Einan, dream language.

On my way home that afternoon I nipped up the alleyway to the left after the hill by Verftet to avoid having to walk with the others. It was still raining, as persistently and heavily as when I arrived, and all the walls, all the roofs, all the lawns and all the cars were wet and shiny. I was elated, it had been a good day, and Trude’s total disregard for what I had to say, indeed her demonstration of this to the others, didn’t bother me at all any more because in the break, when we had been in the café opposite Klosteret, I had spoken to Ragnar Hovland and exchanged opinions about Jan Kjærstad. In fact, it had been me who brought up his name. Else Karin had asked me what I liked reading, apart from Hamsun and Bukowski, I had said my favourite author was Kjærstad, especially his last book The Big Adventure, but also Mirrors and Homo Falsus, yes, and also The Earth Turns Quietly was good. She said his books were a little cold and contrived. I said that was exactly the point, Kjærstad wanted to describe humanity in a different way, not from within but from without, and the notion that characters in books were warm was a delusion, that was a construct too, of course, we had just got used to it and thought of this mode as genuine or warm while other ways of writing were equally genuine. She said yes, I understand that, but I still think his characters are cold. And this ‘I think’ was a victory for me, it wasn’t an argument, just a feeling, empty words.

After the break it was Kjetil’s turn, and his texts, which were prose and bordered on fantasy and the grotesque, were talked about in quite a different way. This wasn’t about openings and endings or tone, we dealt more with the plot and individual sentences, and when someone said it was too exaggerated I said I had perceived this to be the whole point, that it was ‘over the top’. The discussion was much livelier, this was easier to talk about, and it was a relief, this was material I could get my head round.

Tomorrow my texts would be read and discussed. I was terrified yet looking forward to it too as I walked up Strandgaten, in some way what I had written had to be good, otherwise I wouldn’t have been accepted on the course.

Up the mountainside, from the station with the gleaming cobblestones, the bright red Fløybane glided smoothly into the green. FUNICULAR, it said in neon lights, and there was something alpine about this short ascent, a funicular railway rising from a town centre, a stone’s throw from the old German wooden houses. If you took away the water you could well imagine yourself in the German-Austrian Alps.