My Struggle , vol. 6: Katherine Hill, October 26
October 26, 2018
Brooklyn, NY
Dear Each and Every One of You,
Several of you have heard this already, out loud, at our exhilarating Slow Burn panel at ASAP/10 in New Orleans, and I have to admit, it feels a little unfaithful to our vow of contingency to revise any of it now. Then again, my thoughts on Knausgaard are constantly shifting and rewriting themselves. Last week, the Philadelphia Inquirer published my review of Book 6, portions of which I already disagree with, and rereading this draft before I send it to Dan, I disagree with myself, in part, yet again.
My problem is the opposite of Diana and Rachel's resistance. All too often, I don't resist Knausgaard at all. Ask me what I did in September and I will paint you a picture of a 36-year-old woman on her sofa, reading a 1156-page, square, dust-jacketless hardcover. Each and every page. I let it sit in my lap all month, as though the book were a scared child, or a weighted blanket for my own anxiety. I assumed, after all we'd been through together, that Knausgaard still had something valuable to offer me, and so I allowed his words and ideas to operate, with that old familiar intimacy, on my mind. It's how I've approached each volume since the first—which I did initially resist, though it's hard to remember that now—and I generally recommend Knausgaard on this basis, for the unlikely pleasure of surrendering. To his tedium. To his ego, even. Or, as I wrote in the Inquirer: "Banality is one of the novel's great risks, sublimity its frequent surprise."
But now, after reading your letters, participating in our panel, and constantly reexamining my position on this long-winded Norwegian man, I find myself faced with the critic's greatest fear. Oh no, the worry goes: have I been duped? Have I been duped because I let my feelings override my thinking?
Maybe. Even so, I'm going to stick with (most of) what I told you in New Orleans.
***
October 19, 2018
Brooklyn, NY, and New Orleans, LA
I actually don't think the Hitler nesting doll fails.
I read Knausgaard the way a lot of people listen to podcasts, to get a particular perspective on a range of subjects that interest me—authenticity, parenting, alcoholism, Scandinavia—as well as a range of subjects I never expected to think so much about. Hitler falls into the latter category. I am terrified of him the way every American student in the 1990s was educated to be. I read Anne Frank and watched Schindler's List, and generally consider it a duty to visit Holocaust memorials whenever they cross my path. It bothered me when I found out Hitler was a vegetarian. I would never in a million years read a single sentence of Mein Kampf.
As Knausgaard writes in Book 6: "Unwrapping [the two volumes of Mein Kampf] and standing with them in my hands filled me with distaste, to say nothing of the near-nausea that came over me when I started reading the first volume and Hitler's words and Hitler's thoughts were thereby admitted to my own mind and a brief time became a part of it" (492).
This, exactly, was what I couldn't abide—admitting Hitler's thoughts into my mind. It's a moment of agreement between writer and reader, or, in Emily's words, a "sharing of consciousness." I have to confess a lot of my time with K has felt like that; it's a big reason I keep coming back. He gets me and my shame.
But then there are the moments of disagreement—when I, like apparently everyone else in this collective, am alarmed by his misreadings, or suspicious of his tendency toward radical simplification, or embarrassed by his punctuation. Because of that dilation technique Dan describes, and the immersion in daily action that so captivates Cecily, the experience of reading Knausgaard is probably the closest I'll ever come to living my life as another person. But it's also palpably not that. It's reading through a lens, like all reading.
We seem to be trying to uncover the tint and orientation of that lens here. Is it white? Is it male? It is conservative? Is it liberal? The presumption, because of the novels' many linguistic, ethical, and stylistic claims to authenticity, is that there is no distance between Karl Ove, the narrator, and Karl Ove Knausgaard, the author. One's values are the other's, and vice versa. Ditto the blind spots and the failures.
But autobiographical pacts aside, I sense a bit more critical distance between author and narrator than we've generally granted in this forum, especially in Book 6, the only volume to dramatize the series' writing and publication, and the longest volume, so heavy that reading literally destroys it. (Somewhere in the middle of the Hitler section, while I lay there powerless against it on my couch, the footband on my square Archipelago edition audibly ripped from its glue.) Karl Ove reads Mein Kampf because he has provocatively named his novel My Struggle—a title suggested by Geir, who also procures him the books, like a pushy dealer—and now, riddled with guilt over the human consequences of his literary project, Karl Ove has to face what he's done.
Is it grandiose? Yes. Would it have been more ethical and humane to abandon the idea of the book and recommit himself to his family? Definitely. But Karl Ove is an obsessive, and he has to finish what he started. Not just the six volumes of My Struggle, but also the low-grade, simmering suggestion that he is Hitler—and the total exposure of a wife deeply unsuited to such exposure.
The 440-page Hitler section is the most committed expression of Knausgaard's essayistic mode—essentially a book within the book about Karl Ove's family—and it's also the section in which I finally recognized that I understand our author as an informational podcaster. In this episode, he performs a reverent close reading of Paul Celan's Holocaust poem "The Straitening," and he offers a historical account of Hitler's ideological trajectory and rise to power via Hannah Arendt, Albert Speer, Stefan Zweig, and numerous other sources. He incorporates and argues with Hitler's biographer, Ian Kershaw, and he analyzes several passages of Mein Kampf, "literature's only unmentionable work" (493).
I live with a (I feel compelled to say Jewish) historian who has read Kershaw's biography, and other books about the Nazis, and I have always put Hitler in the category of stuff that he has more stomach for than me. Yet thanks to Knausgaard, whose voice and literary project I'm already deeply invested in, I was learning, in detail, and often in Hitler's own words, about a history I only knew in third-hand summary. It was an unsettling experience, to say the least, to think so carefully with Knausgaard about Hitler's personal grief and national grievances, his student days in Vienna, his misogyny and xenophobia, and his final, chilling vision for a regenerated Germany—but I can't say I found it boring. The most famous inhumane person in history was, after all, a human being. For Karl Ove, this is not a koan that humanizes Hitler; it's a koan that Hitlerizes the human.
In one section, Knausgaard describes Hitler's unlikely power as a speaker, which has never translated in the black-and-white, History Channel footage I've so often seen of his ranting. He looks and sounds totally deranged in those films, which must mean that all of Germany was also deranged, which is terrifying to fathom, but also sort of unfathomable in my own political experience—hmm, that is, until 2016. "His charisma as a speaker lay very much in the sense he gave that here was a man who said things the way they were," Knausgaard writes, "and the trust he thereby gained from his audiences, who in expressing their enthusiasm for him were also expressing their enthusiasm for themselves, the unity he created this way, was an unprecedented force he discovered himself able, like a magician, to direct wherever he wanted" (747).
The subtext here, and often throughout the book, is, Oh no, am I Hitler? For in the My Struggle novels, Karl Ove is, like Hitler, a man who has "failed at every endeavor" before age thirty (722), is "effeminate" (736), "clearly a damaged individual" (741), "the great simplifier" (743), "so alienated from his own emotions" (745), and a man who aims to say "things they way they were." Every one of these quotations addresses Hitler, but resonates for Karl Ove as well.
Is it grandiose to worry one is Hitler? Probably so, but Knausgaard's discursive style somehow makes the worry feel reasonable, thought-through. The Hitler pages come in the middle of a volume that finally questions the core premise of Knausgaard's project, showing in slow, painful detail the perils of an extreme commitment to authenticity: the destruction of an ethnic community in Hitler's case, the destruction of a family in Karl Ove's. Tellingly, before Karl Ove understands that Linda isn't just having a hard time, but experiencing a genuine psychiatric break, he holds her incapacity against her; in her manic behavior, he feels, she isn't living up to his "demands for authenticity" (1118).
Yes, there's an error in scale here. As Diana says, Karl Ove's "we" and fascism's "we" are easy to tell apart; so are their corresponding "I's." But if you've ever felt the power of Karl Ove—that is, if you respond emotionally to his insistence on the family as a center of drama, to his dilation technique, and especially, to his reality hunger—you know how enthralling his spell can be, how readily he encourages us to conflate ourselves with him. Like Hitler to his crowds, Karl Ove has been speaking directly to his romantic middle-class readers in our own language, making sublime our dealings with our difficult parents and children, our mundane beer drinking, house cleaning, and grocery shopping. It's hard to imagine a narrator with as many blind spots as Karl Ove getting away with his celebrated "honesty" if that honesty didn't also recognize his readers, illuminating us so that we might feel seen.
But in Book 6, the blind spots catch up to him. Armed with his pronoun-driven reading of Celan, and quaking with liberal guilt, Karl Ove finally sees his wife and children: They are the vulnerable, individual "yous" he has overlooked in his hyper-focus on the "I." I'm using sight words deliberately, because Karl Ove is obsessed with "hidden" realities, starting, in the opening pages of Book 1, with death. His excavation of this and other cover-ups thrills sensitive readers like me, who've always known the entire world is faking. Yet even as his method makes the hidden things visible, it flattens and buries others, an error our narrator finally recognizes in the concluding section on Linda's hospitalization. The seriousness of the event creeps up on him, partly because of the nature of her illness, partly because he's been busy writing, underestimating her psychiatric deterioration, and partly because he has a grievance with her for failing to pull herself together. It's not a good look for him, and still he shows it to us, eventually admitting his total blindness: "The photos of the children she had brought with her when she first came suggested she'd known her stay wouldn't be for one night. No one else had thought [it would be so brief] except for me. Me and the children" (1137).
In the end, then, there's very little we can hold against Karl Ove that Knausgaard doesn't already hold against him. It's a bit of a dodge—who can critique the author who so thoroughly hates himself? the author who compares himself to Hitler?—but it's also a direct implication of the reader as deluded volk. For to fall for My Struggle is to discover, belatedly, in Book 6, that we have been complicit in Karl Ove's crimes against Linda. And what a discovery that is. Ethically, it feels absolutely awful, but aesthetically, it's once again sublime, because we understand that Knausgaard has only achieved this devastating turn by committing himself fully to his project—subject, style, title, and all. We hate him for doing it, but we love him for writing it, and we get the sense that he feels the same way.
So, yes, there's plenty to critique here, in writer and reader alike. But while we're at it, I hope we'll also wonder a bit more about the value of literary authenticity, and what Knausgaard's extreme enactment and indictment of it suggests for those of us under its spell.
Hopefully not a Nazi,
Katherine
ALSO IN THIS SERIES:
The Slow Burn, v.2: Welcome Back
The Slow Burn, v.2: An Introduction
My Struggle, vol. 1: Cecily, June 6
My Struggle, vol. 1: Diana, June 9
My Struggle, vol. 1: Omari, June 14
My Struggle, vol. 2: Dan, June 17
My Struggle, vol. 2: Omari, June 24
My Struggle, vol. 2: Cecily, July 1
My Struggle, vol. 2: Sarah Chihaya, July 5
My Struggle, vol. 2: Dan, July 12
My Struggle, vol. 2: Diana, July 16
My Struggle, vol. 2: Jess Arndt, July 18
My Struggle, vol. 3: Omari, July 25
My Struggle, vol. 3: Ari M. Brostoff, August 1
My Struggle, vol. 3: Dan, August 4
My Struggle, vol. 3: Jacob Brogan, August 8My Struggle, vol. 3: Diana, August 12
My Struggle, vol. 4: Katherine Hill, August 25
My Struggle, vol. 4: Omari, September 1
My Struggle, vol. 4: Dan, September 2
My Struggle, vol. 4: Diana, September 15
My Struggle, vol. 5: Omari, September 27
My Struggle, vol. 5: Diana, October 3
My Struggle, vol. 5: Dan, October 13
My Struggle, vol. 6: Omari, September 25
My Struggle, vol. 6: Dan, September 28
My Struggle, vol. 6: Stephanie, October 5
My Struggle, vol. 6: Cecily, October 9
My Struggle, vol. 6: Emily Tamkin, October 10
My Struggle, vol. 6: Diana, October 15
My Struggle, vol. 6: Rachel Greenwald Smith, October 23
My Struggle, vol. 6: Katherine Hill, October 26
My Struggle, vol. 6: Omari, October 31