My Struggle, vol. 6: Jacob Brogan, November 29

Washington, DC

Dear friends,

Near the end of the very dull book that we have all been discussing together there is a scene in which Karl Ove Knausgaard spends several paragraphs trying to get rid of two buckets of shit. "One had a lid, the other didn't, it was covered with a plastic bag," he tells us with his famed attentiveness to the details that matter. He considers taking them to the dump, but soon abandons the plan, held back by his performative and turgid social anxiety, here in the form of his fear that sanitation workers will ask him what he's throwing out. Rather than risk human contact, he digs a hole and tosses the shit in, "splattering" and "splashing" some of it on himself in the process.

"I felt as if I were in an inferno, my brain was on fire, everything was bathed in flickering light," he writes, "and the whole time I was frightened someone would come and see what I was doing."

I do not for a moment believe that Knausgaard fears anyone will see what he is doing; to the contrary, I think he hopes they might. I think that because I have read this very dull book that we are, for some reason, all discussing together. I have seen Knausgaard wallow in shit, or at least in his shittiness. This scene is nothing if not the sum of everything in the many pages before, a miniaturized—and possibly deliberate—encapsulation of what he has been showing us for hundreds of pages: a man concealing shit, even as he spackles himself with it, all but showering in it.

And I, for who knows what reason, am right there in the shit with him. I began this letter by specifying that I wanted to talk about a scene from the "end," presumably because I needed you to know that I had pulled on my waders and made my way to that point. When I contributed to this series before, I told you all that I had given up on him, that I would not be reading any more, that I had too many other things to read, and I held to that promise until this one came out, at which point I dutifully read every page, even the exhausting ones in the middle that Keating told me to skip.

I say I read every page, but that's not quite right, at least not in the most literal sense, since I read it on my Kindle. I would have liked to count the pages passing by, but, instead, I obsessively monitored the arcane "location" numbers by which Amazon keeps pace of the accumulated words. The shit scene, for example, begins around loc. 18,459 and continues until around loc. 18,675. The book itself ends just short of loc. 20,500, a number that I kept always in mind. Slogging through his struggle, I fancied myself less a reader than an ultramarathoner, counting the miles, marshalling my strength, resting when I needed to, wondering why I was attempting this stupid feat at all. I treated it, in other words, as a challenge, which probably makes me a shittier reader than usual, though I'm not sure that matters here.

(The trouble with longing for the end was that nothing in this book could have been as good as the part at the beginning where Knausgaard has to hear from those he's written about in the first volume of My Struggle, an experience that leaves him sick with worry. I liked these parts because I enjoyed seeing Knausgaard suffer thanks to what he has written. It was, as the kids say, very relatable. Here, at least, he has to sit still and take it as his shit flies back at him.)

Marit complains twice in her letter about the tendency to take bits and pieces of this big novel "out of context," but I am more concerned with the way things smell. In any case, venerating "context" strikes me as little more than an unwitting submission to Knausgaard's favorite trick. Novels are, he tells us, like poems in that they are "essentially mysterious," since whatever they say "cannot be said in any other way." The novel, he suggests, "provides a means of thinking radically different from the essay," one that has as much or more to do with what happens when the novelist is writing—"the headlights of the cars gliding past on the other side of the river"—as it does with the signifying content of the things that wind up on the page. In his account, literature is inaccessible except as a whole, but that very quality renders it elusive. The work is always slipping away from us, resisting our every attempt to fix its meaning in place. This is, Knausgaard helpfully explains, "perhaps the most important thing I learned at university."

Like many of the things we all learned in university, it is also bullshit. Knausgaard has, after all, written what many of you have rightly characterized as an essay, and the book that contains it is only a "novel" because he calls it one. To the extent that Knausgaard thinks at all, he thinks in fragments, mostly bits and pieces of rewarmed continental philosophy, here resembling nothing so much as limpid thanksgiving leftovers, a week on. As if to hide the rewarmed quality of these reflections, he surrounds them with the details that most of us come to his work for—the whole quotidian accumulation of lived detail. This contrast—the sudden shift from description to reflection and back again—recasts his beige theories in the light of revelation, mind bursting out of senseless matter. By the same token, the irregular quality of these observational bits makes it almost impossible to evaluate what he's saying at one point or another, since there's always more, always some point of contrast or elaboration. He wants to be taken seriously, which would mean looking at his ideas on their own, but also demands that his work be taken as a whole. The latter preempts the particularity of the former, meaning that to read him right means accepting that he is a thinker while declining to engage with his thought.

"The moments of insight and sublimity would feel—wrong? different? disingenuous?—packed into shorter volumes," Marit writes. Perhaps this is because those moments are neither insightful nor sublime! They are just a lot of shit, many buckets of it, as Knausgaard seems to know better than any of us. I cannot really fault him for producing it—everyone, the saying goes, poops—but I do wonder why I spent so long wading in it.

Off to shower,

Jacob

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

My Struggle,  vol. 6: Jess Arndt, November 6

My Struggle,  vol. 6: Joshua Keating, November 12

My Struggle,  vol. 6: Marit MacArthur, November 13

My Struggle, vol. 6: Dan, November 20