My Struggle, vol. 6: Marit MacArthur, December 6

Davis, California

Dear interlocutors,

Fecal transplants are the future.

I appreciated the figurative spirit of Jacob's riff on Knausgaard's shit, if not the substance. But yeah, I would argue that even shit—Nordic, American, Knausgaardian, etc.—rewards close attention. More later about the healing power of shit.

One late afternoon early this fall, I watched Bergman's Winter Light (1963) with my partner in the strange quiet of our house, before going out to dinner—his parents were watching our children at their house while we had a "date night." Last summer, we saw First Reformed (2017) in the theatre—a film Dan calls "sublime Knausgaardian art."

Winter Light, of course, is the Swedish film that inspired First Reformed. The plot is similar, with crucial differences. A widowed minister, Tomas, who has lost his faith, preaches to a tiny, shrinking parish that includes a spinster teacher, Märta, with whom he had an affair. She quietly hopes to renew the relationship. After one service, a pregnant woman, Karin, talks to Tomas, asking him to meet with her troubled husband, Jonas, who stands there mutely. Jonas returns later, and Tomas, who is feeling under the weather, does most of the talking, ineptly oversharing his own woes. Jonas leaves. Märta returns to talk to the feverish Tomas; she wants to know if he's read a recent letter she wrote to him. He has not, he compares her unfavorably to his dead wife, he resists her advances. News arrives that Jonas has killed himself. Tomas has to watch over the body until the police arrive.

My favorite part occurs just after Tomas has made a cruel, absurdly misogynist speech to Märta, as if to sever even their friendship once and for all. (We cringe—or I do—through the speech, which Märta quietly endures in tears.) After a terrible silence, Tomas asks Märta if she wants to accompany him on his errands. She does.

This moment, when Tomas and Märta get in his car and drive off together again—with her at the wheel—is deeply, somberly funny. No music cues laughter, of course. The film has no music (though apparently it was inspired by Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms) except during the church services, and the quiet is as oppressive, or as potentially meditative, as the dim winter light. Märta, despite all appearances a moment ago, is not an abject victim. Tomas depends on her, and she knows it. What he says does not matter. There is no real hope in the film, no resolution of broken relationships, no contradictions are resolved. They just go on. As in I can't go on, I'll go on.

In the American remake—a fine film in many respects, with an amazing performance by Ethan Hawke as the minister, and critiques of capitalism for its role in megachurch American Christianity and industrial pollution—there is more closure, a measure of hope, and more romance and eroticism. Hawke's character, Ernst Toller, is divorced—fallout from encouraging his son, who was killed in Iraq, to join the military. Toller once had an affair with the choir director at the nearby megachurch where his boss preaches, an African-American minister who patiently tries to mentor Toller. The choir director approaches Toller, concerned for his health, and he rejects her cruelly, once and for all. It takes.

In First Reformed, the pregnant widow—whose husband, an extreme environmental activist, kills himself after the minister fails in counseling him—is young and beautiful, and attracted to the minister, who returns her feelings. A Mary figure, she is carrying a male fetus. Toller, who is probably dying of cancer, secretly takes on her dead husband's cause. That is, he finds a new faith of a sort, and new hope in her, though, it is implied, it all ends in disaster. We just might be able to go on! And if we can't, let's go out with a bang, not a whimper! This might be the American sentiment that adjusts the plot of Bergman's film.

Paul Schrader is a good director. He need not be Bergman. I like the shit that both of these films deal with, I like having them both in my intellectual-creative microbiome, and I don't want to have to choose between them. But I feel like I might need the Bergman a little more than the Schrader, partly because I grew up regularly visiting my grandparents' Dutch Reform church in upstate New York, a dead ringer for the one in the film, which has a flourishing membership ably led by a charismatic African-American minister originally trained as a Baptist, who the church board sent back to weekend Dutch Reform divinity school as a condition of hiring him. Maybe I need European film and literature not only because it tends to appeal to my sensibility, but because familial connections to Europe feel much more remote—a German Jewish great-great-grandmother, a Norwegian great-grandfather from whom I get my first name, which most Americans mispronounce unless they hail from North Dakota or Minnesota.

***

Shit, in a Knausgaardian spirit, is not what it seems.

Antibiotics have saved and continue to save countless lives, but we have overused them. Antibiotic-resistant strains of diseases present a new challenge, which is where fecal transplants come in.

Maybe adherence to literary-political dogma is like excessive reliance on antibiotics.

A few years ago, my mother contracted C. difficile, a terrible bacterial infection that resists antibiotics, and the doctors took a week longer than I did to diagnose it, simply because I had read about it in The New York Times and she had the symptoms. I wanted them to treat it with a fecal transplant, but the FDA had not yet approved it. No, this isn't some crazy California shit. Fecal transplants—that is, administering a bit of a healthy person's microbiome, taken from their shit, through an enema, or even through a capsule taken orally—are at least as effective as antibiotics at curing C. diff., maybe even Crohn's disease, and are probably a better idea in the long term, as antibiotics kill the healthy bacteria in our microbiome along with unfriendly microbes. Some doctors in Norway confirmed this efficacy recently in a small study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Earlier in Book 6, when Knausgaard apparently is shitting—he bemoans an unlockable bathroom door—I wondered how Knausgaard ever shits. He doesn't seem to like vegetables, and mostly only the children eat fruit. I guess drinking all that coffee keeps him regular. He and his kids finally eat a salad later in Book 6, and, apparently, he ate an apple once on his honeymoon. His father's dark urine, which (I think jokingly) he calls "masculine" to his own "feminine" clear urine, is the urine of someone who never drinks water. The Knausgaards do not seem healthy from the perspective of California.

What is in Knausgaard's shit that we might need or want in American literature? Like Bergman, Knausgaard offers self-aware, unapologetic earnestness, and moral and intellectual seriousness, levied with humor so dark you might miss it. Relentless, critical scrutiny of the self. And a refusal to resolve irresolvable contradictions. ("Unresolved contradictions are not American," as my partner put it recently. But anti-intellectualism is. When Jonathan Franzen wrote about critical theory in The Corrections, it was only to mock it. When Knausgaard takes it seriously, he is mocked by Americans, because, I guess, literature should not take itself so seriously?) These are tendencies Schrader found in Bergman and in his own Calvinist upbringing. Could he have found them in an American film? Maybe. Why is Post45 devoting space to a Norwegian writer? Because he is up to something that few Americans are?

***

When I finally finished the essay portion of Book 6, and started Part 2, it was strange to feel how the pace picked up again. Reading about the character of Knausgaard and his intensely described daily life at different ages is the primary experience of My Struggle. For a while, I missed the rigor of the essay, though it had been hard to get through at times. I missed the large questions it dealt with, and the way it had me thinking about Hitler and Trump and immigration and a complacent "we." Trump's election and the rise of the far right throughout Europe have certainly made the essay portion feel quite relevant. Though Hitler never enjoyed anything close to a majority of the popular vote, and enforced his rule through violent intimidation, he didn't have the Russians and unlimited campaign spending by the Koch brothers' super PACs to help him.

Knausgaard asks,

"Now that Nazism has become 'they,' it is easy to distance ourselves from it, but this was not the case when Nazism was 'we.' It we are to understand what happened and how it was possible, we must understand this first.... The gas chambers were not a German invention.... Paranoid anti-Semitism was not a German phenomenon either, the world's most celebrated and passionate anti-Semite in 1925 being not Adolf Hitler but Henry Ford. And racial biology was not an abject, shameful discipline pursued at the bottom of society or its shabby periphery, it was the scientific state of the art, much as genetics is today, haloed by the light of the future and all its hope. Decent humans distanced themselves from all of this, but they were few, and this fact demands our attention, for who are we going to be when our decency is put to the test? Will we have the courage to speak against what everyone else believes, our friends, neighbors, and colleagues, and to insist that we are decent, and they are not? Great is the power of the we, almost inescapable its bonds, and the only thing we can really do is hope our we is a good we. Because if evil comes it will not come as 'they,' in the guise of the unfamiliar that we might turn away without effort, it will come as 'we.' It will come as what is right" (826-827).

The response to the refugee crisis in Europe, and Trump's success in changing the narrative about immigration in the U.S., are not reassuring phenomena.

When Jews were forcibly transported by train to concentration camps, Knausgaard writes, travel agencies made the arrangements. Parents and children were forcibly separated at the U.S. border this summer, beginning no later than October 2017 according to the New York Times, and it took until late June 2018 for Trump to officially end the policy, caving to bad publicity and protests.  Many families, of course, remain separated, lost in the chaotic system that wrenched them apart. It took until June 20, 2019, the same day Trump issued his executive order, for four major airlines to announce that they would not transport children who had been separated from their families, noting that "the policy runs counter to their corporate goals of connecting people."

Currently there are more than 40,000 migrants in detention—as of October, 13,000 of them were minors—many in for-profit facilities, for no crime other than trying to enter the U.S., as refugees applying for asylum, or as poor immigrants seeking to fill jobs American citizens often won't take. During WWII, more than 110,000 Japanese-Americans were forced to live in internment camps. Only 60,000 immigrants remain to match that nadir. And these family separations have been going on a long time through deportations. Five years ago, a student who had never missed a class of mine at CSU Bakersfield shyly asked to speak to me after class. She wanted to know if she could make up a quiz for next week, as she'd be going to Mexico to visit her mother for Mother's Day, not having seen her since she had been deported three years earlier. Since then, she, my student, had become the guardian of her younger siblings. More recently, at UC Davis, even before the election of Trump, a DACA student had such anxiety about deportation that it clearly affected his academic performance. I would try to reassure him he was safe, he was at school. But what about his family? And what about now?

I don't need Knausgaard to make me think about this, but My Struggle has helped me think more deeply about it. I don't know how complicit we all are, but this is our government. This is obviously not a "good we," and calling the anti-immigrant, pro-Trump voters "they" isn't helping matters. The only thing that seems to reign in Trump at all is corporate protest and, occasionally, sustained media attention. Of course, corporations don't protest unless their employees make a fuss. Did Hitler invent fake news? I learned from the Times Literary Supplement, though I suppose I could have learned it from an American media outlet, that "fake news" as a term directly "translates Hitler's Lügenpresse, as contemporary Germans recognize," but it was reading Knausgaard that made me think of the question. He makes the rise of Nazism feel more current and relevant than any media comparisons of Hitler and Trump have done.

A recent CNN poll noted that, amid the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe, one-third of Europeans know "just a little or nothing at all about the Holocaust." In such a context, I really have no problem at all with the "Hitler section" in a book by a non-Jewish European that has been translated into just about every language in Europe and sold very well there. The next best thing to making every European watch "Shoah" might be hoping that some of them will read Knausgaard on it, and get them thinking about the current meaning of "we" and "they" in Europe. Everyone should read Jenny Erpenbeck's Go, Went, Gone too, but they won't. This history is shit we cannot wash off. This is shit we need to deal with.

***

Reading about Linda's extended episodes of intense depression and mania, I found myself both more and less disturbed by Knausgaard's decision to write about his wife and marriage in such detail. For the manic depressive, such episodes resemble storms—or maybe terrible droughts and monsoons—that recur in a lifetime. Major and seemingly minor events can trigger these episodes. For Linda, the publication of and publicity around My Struggle do not seem to have precipitated any of her breakdowns—but of course, My Struggle offers Knaugsaard's perspective, not Linda's. He ends Book 6 by proclaiming that he is no longer a writer, celebrating her latest publication, and praising her stories and poems to the skies. In real life, they end up divorcing. He does not understand his wife's mental illness—his ignorance about mental illness, as represented in My Struggle, is matched only by his literary ambition. He learns to weather these episodes, to support Linda as she endures them, and to shelter their children from realizing how ill she is, with help from her mother and his own. During this period, he goes to do a reading and regrets his choice of material, about losing his temper with his children when they were young, going "almost completely out of control." He thinks, "I could sense what people were thinking...[that] I was seeking absolution in literature." That is not what My Struggle is seeking, and that's not certainly not what Knausgaard got from it.

His earlier ignorance of his wife's fragility sometimes seems willful, as he knew she had spent a year in a psychiatric hospital before they became a couple, which worried his mother. But who wants to admit that one's beloved spouse, however maddening in her failures as a housekeeper and her self-doubts about her own brilliance, has a serious mental illness? The gravity of the last part of Book 6, which details Linda's episodes, feels familiar to me—amid the daily demands of caring for children, running a household, and pursuing one's ambitions or career, it is the easiest thing in the world to ignore one's spouse, and to interpret their vulnerabilities as shirking their duties, self-indulgence, etc. If you are one of the intellectual, creative class and plan to procreate but haven't yet, just wait. If you go back to My Struggle as a parent, you just might devour it effortlessly (unless you are carrying a baby, in which case you might want to read it on your Kindle, like Cecily), and identify with Knausgaard and Linda both.

On their fraught honeymoon in the Canary Islands, with two young kids in tow, Knausgaard is reading Gombrowicz's Diaries, which seem to have inspired My Struggle. He thinks, "So I had to go down beneath the surfaces, beneath the ideologies, which you can only stand up to by insisting on your own experience of reality, and not by denying it, for that is what we do, all the time, deny the reality we have experienced in favor of the reality we have learned, and nowhere was the betrayal of the I, the unique and individual I, greater than in art, as art has always been the privileged domain of the unique" (910).

Knausgaard isn't like anyone else, and he's just like everyone else. His shit, European shit, is our shit too. E pluribus unum.

Wondering who "we" are,

Marit

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

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

My Struggle, vol. 6: Cecily, December 4