My Struggle , vol. 6: Rachel Greenwald Smith, October 23

St. Louis, MO

Dear Slow Burners,

As I slowly make my way through Book 6, I keep thinking about this one moment in Charlie Rose's famous interview with David Foster Wallace. Rose has just asked Wallace about the length of Infinite Jest, and Wallace has given one of his typical evasive answers. Rose is about to ask a follow up, when Wallace jumps in, as if he has something he absolutely needs to say.

"Feminists are all saying this," he begins quickly, almost spitting out the words, "feminists are saying white males say, 'Okay, I'm going to sit down and write this enormous book and impose my phallus on the consciousness of the world.'"

Head shaking. Blinking. Almost, but not quite, an eyeroll.

"And you say?" Rose prods, generously.

"I... I... if that was going on, it was going on on a level of awareness I do not want to have access to," Wallace replies with a look of disgust.

Rose, who we now know had a habit of caressing the upper thighs of his female coworkers without their consent, responds with this probing follow-up:

"Do you still play tennis?"

*

Maybe I'm thinking about Rose's sudden topic-change because I was just rereading Diana's Book 5 letter and noticed a related moment in her account of James Wood's Paris Review interview with Knausgaard.

Wood asks Knausgaard about objectifying women. Knausgaard responds this way:

Knausgaard: Every time I see a woman, I think, How would it be to have sex with her? I think that's the first thought for every man. Don't you think that? I mean, if you are absolutely honest?

Wood: I didn't write the book. I don't have to answer the questions.

Wood, like Rose, suddenly finds himself confronting a situation in which he has to find a way to avoid implicating himself in his interviewee's sexism. While Rose deals with this by changing the subject, Wood deals with it by clarifying the order of authority, reminding Knausgaard that this isn't a conversation, it's an interview. And in an interview it is always clear who is asking the questions and who is answering them.

That is, unless you happen to be, say, a female senator interviewing a belligerent male Supreme Court nominee, in which case all bets are off.

You remember this exchange. Senator Amy Klobuchar asks Brett Kavanaugh if he's ever blacked out. Kavanaugh responds like this:

Kavanaugh: It's — you're asking about, you know, blackout. I don't know. Have you?

Klobuchar: Could you answer the question, Judge? I just — so you — that's not happened. Is that your answer?

Kavanaugh: Yeah, and I'm curious if you have.

Klobuchar: I have no drinking problem, Judge.

Kavanaugh's efforts to displace his guilt onto Klobuchar were so brazenly inappropriate that it's hard to even know how to talk about them. Maybe this was why SNL dealt with the episode by having Matt Damon repeat Kavanaugh's lines nearly verbatim.

While watching the hearings, I was naively convinced that this would be Kavanaugh's disqualifying moment. That the attempt to override Klobuchar's authority would read to everyone as it did to me: as a desperate act proving the guilt of the interviewee. But the result was the opposite. Kavanaugh's response acted as a galvanizing force among so many men who don't want to answer the question, who don't want to have access to their domination.

"I didn't write the book," Wood protested. And that's true in the strict sense. But Knausgaard wasn't asking Wood to fess up to something in the book. He was asking Wood to fess up to his culpability in a tendency to see women as objects, one that My Struggle, the author seems to say, is merely exposing as the prevailing reality.

*

The "feminists" Wallace was referring to in the Rose interview may have included one of Wood's colleagues, Michiko Kakutani, who objected to the length of Infinite Jest in her review in the New York Times. Wallace's response, damningly quoted by Amy Hungerford in her chronicle of Wallace's misogyny, is telling: "If the length seems gratuitous, as it did to a very charming Japanese lady from the New York Times, then one arouses ire. I'm aware of that."

Hungerford argues that Wallace's dismissive treatment of women is relevant to a reading of his fiction because Wallace himself conceived of the relationship between himself and the reader as sexual. It wasn't only on the Charlie Rose show that he used the language of seduction to describe the author-reader dynamic. As Hungerford points out, in an early short story, an author-figure observes that a good story should "treat the reader like it wants to...well, fuck him."

"Wallace proposes to fuck me," Hungerford concludes. "Unlike the 'charming Japanese lady' whose job it was to review Infinite Jest for the Times, I can refuse the offer, and so I will."

I'm not sure I agree with Hungerford's implication that female scholars would do best to refuse to read Infinite Jest. I myself was successfully seduced into reading the book, and I don't regret the experience. But as I watched the Kavanaugh hearings in my on-campus office, Book 6 of My Struggle sitting on my desk, guzzling coffee in solidarity with Dr. Ford, Wallace's dismissive response to the feminist critique of the long book kept echoing through my head.

*

I think this was because that moment returned me to a question that has come up again and again in your discussion of Knausgaard, the question of whether it's really worth any of our time to read—let alone write about—3,600 pages of a narcissistic straight white dude's sometimes-sexist, sometimes-xenophobic meditations on himself. (That's over three Infinite Jests, by the way).

Incidentally, this is a question that Karl Ove himself asks in Book 6 as he tangles with the unintended violence of his project. This is the book in which we see how unnerving it is for him to suddenly realize that what he's been writing has effects in the world, as the publication of the early volumes of My Struggle enrages some of his friends and family members and ultimately does considerable emotional harm to his spouse, Linda.

But despite my skepticism toward Knausgaard's entire project, I'm curious about what Book 6 holds. And yes, this is because I, like the rest of you, have been waiting for The Hitler Part for 3000 pages. But that's because I keep waiting for the book to deal with its own politics. I feel like that question is hovering over Book 6.

As Dan puts it in his letter on Volume 2, "When will we be forced to engage the fact that Knausgaard...titled his book—about, among other things, wounded masculinity and hostility toward the welfare state—Min Kamp?"

I'd add that the title not only forces us to engage with the book's politics; it seems as if it should make us engage with the fact that we've all been spending our time reading it. Somehow, I keep thinking, we'll all be implicated in the badness that this Min Kamp puts out into the world.

I'm only about 300 pages into the book so far, but there are already a few clues that suggest that Knausgaard might be interested in this relationship between the book and its readers.

I'm thinking, for instance, of the strangely sadistic discussion of force and will in childrearing that occurs early in the book. Karl Ove notices that one of the other dads in his circle has figured out how to make his child eat responsibly at mealtimes. He asks how he managed to do this.

She knows she has no choice, he said. How does she know that? I asked. We broke her will, he said. She sits there until she's finished, it doesn't matter how long it takes. One time she sat there until late. Sobbing, and shouting all sorts of things at us. Wouldn't touch a thing. But after a long while it sank in, she ate up and could leave the table. Three hours, I think it took! Since then there's hardly been an issue. He looked at me and beamed. Did he realize what he was telling me about himself, I wondered, but said nothing. It's the same whenever she throws a tantrum, he went on. I've noticed Vanja gives you a bit of trouble every now and again. Yes, she does, I said. How do you tackle that? I hold her still in a firm grip, he said. No drama, just hold her still until it passes. It doesn't matter how long it takes. You should try it, it works like a dream. Yes, I said, I certainly need to think of something.

This passage makes me think of Dan's observation about the temporal work that My Struggle does, how it dilates experience. Here, exposing someone to the full force of duration, of time passing is described as a tactic of domination. And if there's one thing that a 3,600 page novel signals to a reader, it's precisely that. The novel holds the reader still in a firm grip, telling her that it will be there until she's finished, that it doesn't matter how long it takes.

"Literature's entire system," Karl Ove opines later in his reflections on authorship, "is based on the reader submitting to the work and vanishing within it."

Those of us who are now on Book Six of Knausgaard's book have all been held still for hours—fifty-one hours and six minutes, according to one online read-time calculator. Have we submitted? Has the book broken our will? What kind of authorial force have we fallen victim to? Or are we just playing the masochists to Knausgaard's sadistic performance?

I say "we," but some of us have resisted. Diana, for instance, chose to walk away from the project of reading the book early on, not because it's "a giant pseudo memoir by a white man" but because "it's fucking titled My Struggle and often spouting misogynist and/or racist and/or boring sludge."

Maybe Diana got the joke before the rest of us did. Or, to use Sarah's terms, maybe it's not a joke. Maybe it's a trick.

*

I am continuing to read though, because while David Foster Wallace "does not want to have access to" the part of him that may have written an 1100-odd page book in order to impose his phallus upon the world, I suspect that Knausgaard does want to have access to that part of himself, and furthermore, that he wants to make public how it happened.

Or, put another way, so far Book 6 seems to be about confronting the fact that even if Knausgaard didn't mean to impose his phallus upon the world that he has, and without that world's consent.

Exploring the mechanisms and consequences of one's own domination is something that Wallace didn't want to do. It's something that Rose and Wood, hiding behind the role of interviewer, also didn't want to do. And it's something that the great majority of the parade of men who have been taken to task for imposing their phalli in all sorts of ways upon the world have not wanted to do.

One way to understand the incredible galvanizing force of Kavanaugh's adolescent outbursts is to see it as a performance of the angry refusal to do precisely this. What happens if you are called on to account for your violence? The answer that the success of the Kavanaugh testimony gives us is this: demonstrate that going through that process is a hell that no one should have to endure.

Karl Ove agrees. Here he is on being taken to task for his representation of his father's family: "It feels like I've gone to hell. I can't explain it. It's just hell."

Usually this feeling of hell makes most people refuse to even consider their perpetration of violence. Or refuse to answer questions. Or bite back. Or, at best, simply respond with the favored escape-hatch phrase of called-out leftists everywhere: "I'm listening."

But My Struggle seems to wants to account for how domination happens. And while I'm still not sure, I think that might, for me, make the book worth reading.

With a 20-ounce cup of coffee in one fist and a two-liter of coke in the other,

Rachel

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