My Struggle, vol. 6: Dan, January 4

Greenpoint, NY

Dear friends,

It is, he claims—all of it—a marriage fight. Call it marital realism, a demon released by the couple form. Call it a gaslight novel.

Linda projected a world so different from his own, he felt gaslit: "her mental picture of what was happening was the exact opposite of reality, and that was the picture we lived by" (982). Karl Ove felt that it was only his sacrifice, his superhuman effort that held the family together. But to Linda, "she was the hub of the family, the person who drove everything and sacrificed herself" (ibid). He writes, "What insanity was this? Were we living in Upside-Down Land?" (983).

At the worst of it, "as unhappy as [he] had ever been," he began to write My Struggle (981). "That was why [he] wrote it" (ibid, emphasis mine). He was, by his own admission, too cowardly to leave his wife and kids, though that is what he wanted, and too cowardly, even, to admit, at the time, his cowardice, blaming his inertia on Linda, who he felt couldn't bear his leaving.

What he could do was project his own world. He could do it with such meticulous precision, such incandescent detail that no one would doubt it. Along the way, he could put himself and everyone he'd known on public display, humiliating many of them, because he had nothing left to lose and only a claim staked on his version of reality to gain.

Well, he won.

Was it Pyrrhic?

*

With Book 6, he writes his victory into My Struggle. He displaces it as a victory over his uncle regarding the truth of his father's death. He spends the first part of the book, remember, anxious about what he experienced as a relative's gaslighting: Uncle Gunnar had accused him of fabricating much of Book 1. When, at last, Karl Ove checks the municipal records and finds that he, not his uncle, was right, he can bring My Struggle to a close. He recalls the details that he was right about all along: the house full of bottles, excrement on the sofa, his father's broken nose, face covered in blood. He absolves himself for not intervening before it was too late. He can, for the first time, name his father, put his name in print on the page, which he hadn't done out of fear of legal reprisals: there, on page 1039, "Kai Age Knausgaard."

This is the novel's proper end. By naming his father, he brings us back to the beginning, the origin in his father's death, he completes the archetypal project of recognizing and overcoming his father to become himself. Without fear of echoing Jesus, he writes, "It's finished now" (1039).

What follows, the last hundred and thirteen pages, is Linda's epilogue. He has displaced their fight onto his uncle and sublimated their argument over reality, again and again, into, by his account, the aesthetic problem of our time: "what is actual, what is real, how dependent we are on language and form for it to exist" (1041). According to Knausgaard, reciting a rote formulation of the distinction between modernism and post, something fundamental changed between the early twentieth century, when Proust could transform the world and imbue it with magic, and now, when "everything has already changed, everything is already something else, pervaded by fiction as it were" (1012). (Knausgaard would like In Search of Lost Time to be recognized as a predecessor of My Struggle.) Still, he toggles between the idea that My Struggle aims to be adequate to experience—"it has been an experiment, and it has failed because I have never been close to saying what I really mean and describing what I have actually seen"—and the notion that the act of writing conjures forth a fiction to compete with others making claims to reality. This means his theory of realism, which I've spilled so much ink trying to parse, is, in its own terms, like Jacob says, a series of incoherent fragments. We're ready for a Jamesonian turn: Knausgaard's inability to tell a coherent story about reality reveals that what changed is that capitalism became too big to comprehend, and, in the end, it's history that hurts. All we can do, in the twenty-first century, now beyond analysis, beyond finding new language for experience, is itemize.

Yes, and and and. Marit is right to be puzzled by Jameson's refusal to see My Struggle as engaged in the modernist project of estrangement. For me, Linda's epilogue—Knausgaard's admission that this is marital realism, his belated encounter with his wife's illness—reveals that for all Karl Ove's lauded domesticity, and to whatever extent he might be a mommy blogger, and notwithstanding the wonderful and dizzying effects he achieves through formal invention, autofiction is, for him, a way to bludgeon his wife.

Thousands of pages into his experiment, Knausgaard looks at Linda and, for once, sees her. He sees what, in his fury to best her take on reality, in his despair at their marriage and his life, he'd missed: not her precarious mental health, which first commands his attention, but her personhood. Emily and Diana recognized this ignorance, this narcissism, long ago and found it unforgivable. But now, he says, he belatedly sees. "Her struggle had been very different from mine; hers had been life or death" (1141).

His depiction of Linda in these final pages—suicidal in bed, or manically lost, vanishing into the city for unaccountable hours—is riveting, ethically questionable, maybe even at moments, like Katherine says, sublime.

But his contrition for her suffering leads to the greatest betrayal of Linda and My Struggle alike, the awful final few pages, in which Linda's manic episode ends, she returns home, and Knausgaard declares, as if it were as simple as that, "it was over" (1150). The intensity of her breakdown dissipates, wisping away with the turning of a page, as if it never happened. His heartless honesty gives way not to love, but to sentiment. He takes it all back. "Linda is a human being and her unique essence is indescribable, her own distinctive presence, her nature and her soul, which were always there beside me, which I saw and felt regardless of whatever else was going on. It didn't reside in what she did, it didn't reside in what she said, it resided in what she was" (1152). After 3600 pages, we get: the ineffability of life! This is mealy mystification, a bullshit apology to reconcile the couple form, a stupid version, from the man's perspective, of what Beyoncé does with "All Night" on Lemonade. Karl Ove famously promises, "I will never do anything like this to her and our children again" and proclaims, "I am no longer a writer"—promises he long ago since broke (ibid). And he writes a saccharine last page dedication: To Linda, Vanja, Heidi, and John / I love you (1153). My Struggle, it turns out, in Knausgaard's last minute twist, never even approached reality. How could it?

With Jess, I'd been swayed by Rachel's defense that, unlike David Foster Wallace, Knausgaard wants to access the "mechanisms and consequences" of his domination over his wife, and his readers. The ending relinquishes the logic of the project at the last minute, it's Wittgenstein kicking back the ladder he climbed up on, but vapid and malicious. Once he's won, once he's sent Linda to the hospital and registered his version of reality in the public record, he can say none of it mattered, none of it even made sense. He looks at her, in what I'm calling the epilogue, not to say, you were right, but to say, now that we both know I was right, that you are, in fact, insane, please know that I love you.

But let's review. Because he was frustrated with his wife, but too weak to go to therapy or talk to her or leave her, Knausgaard wrote and published My Struggle. The madness of this reactionary overreaction recalls nothing so much as Brett Kavanaugh's performance before the Senate. Like Kavanaugh, Knausgaard uses his loudness, his saturation of public space, and the authority of his masculinity to impose his version of reality, which has been contested by the accusations of a woman.

This is autofiction as hysterical masculinity. Its inverse is Rachel Cusk's autofictional mode—call it, after Deborah Nelson—tough womanhood, staged in the trilogy Cusk completed last year with Kudos. Cusk's narrator's method is to listen, offering her interlocutors, often men, enough rope to hang themselves. In Transit, the second book, Cusk devotes a chapter to a literary festival where her narrator, Faye, speaks alongside Louis, who is Knausgaard, thinly-veiled by making him gay. Of his readers, he says, "nothing, as they saw it, ever happened in his writing, or at least nothing they recognized as fit to be written about." His theme was "just the low-lying truth of his ordinary existence." Louis's monologue builds to a darkly comic moment when he says he will never be able to return to honesty in his writing because the fame his writing has brought him has destroyed the conditions for honesty: "like a dog that shits in his own bed, he said, turning and looking directly, for the first time, at me."

In this rare textual encounter between two autofictionalists, Louis claims kinship with Faye only through hostile accusation. Cusk is at once poking fun at herself—it's true, with the trilogy she shits in her bed—while observing an affective and methodological difference between how she does it and how he does. She listens, he talks, hardly aware of her until the precise moment that he feels the need to show her he knows her dirty tricks, they're the same as his. He's right and couldn't be more wrong.

In the infamous scene the ends Kudos, depicting an unknown man, we encounter the deforming energies of masculine hysteria on full display:

He came to a halt just where the waves broke and he stood there in his nakedness like a deity, resplendent and grinning. Then he grasped his thick penis and began to urinate into the water. The flow came out so abundantly that it made a fat, glittering jet, like a rope of gold he was casting into the sea. He looked at me with black eyes full of malevolent delight while the golden jet poured unceasingly forth from him until it seemed impossible that he could contain any more. The water bore me up, heaving, as if I lay on the breast of some sighing creature while the man emptied himself into its depths. I looked into his cruel, merry eyes, and I waited for him to stop.

That man could be, though it isn't, Knausgaard. Watch me watch you watch me as I piss into the water in which you swim. It is at once humiliating, petty, and silly. But that does not mean it's not also profound, or even sublime.

*

Does this mean I think My Struggle is bad? This is the question we keep returning to, all of us, and it's the question about which we're most divided. Is it worth it?

I don't know. I'm ambivalent, trapped between your arguments. Like Katherine, I fell for it, but if to fall for can be an infatuation, it can also be, like Sarah once suggested, to fall for a joke or a trick. Much depends on how we feel about the intentions of our author. Is he writing in good faith (Cecily, Emily, Jess, Joshua, Katherine, Marit, Rachel, Stephanie) or bad (Diana, Jacob, Omari)? For Emily and Joshua, it's a good faith effort that, through Book 5, was brilliant, but in Book 6 is lacking self-awareness, poorly done. For Diana and Jacob, Knausgaard is all too self-aware, a clever man up to a clever man's usual deceits. If it's not boring, it's at least far too familiar to earn our attention. But Cecily, Jess, Katherine, Marit, and Rachel argue the opposite; they see, in Knausgaard's his incredible attention to detail, a rigorous exposure of the shame and domination of contemporary white masculinity. He is harder on himself, Katherine says, than anyone else could be. Jess shows how he returns us, again and again, pedagogically, hopelessly, uniquely, to the messiness of being a body.

For my part, I've been seduced by form, by how Knausgaard's dilation of experience strives to regain childlike consciousness, by the slip into the perspective of a delivery room to see its view on birth, by shrinking to a size small enough to sail through the vessels of a newly dead body, by masochism, by the archival impulse, by the drive to make the novel form adequate to his anxiety, his despair.

Yet, Omari's denouncement lingers in mind:

We would never work together, K and I, because he narrates feelings but tells us that he hates intimacy. He loves desire but hates attachment. He privileges language but only if it makes sense to him. The dance he does around how meaningful affect can be for the rugged Norwegian individual working hard, writing hard, but feeling softly allows him to refuse feeling when he needs it the most.

He prefers boundaries. He likes borders. He puts up walls. Geir's arrival, at least, reveals this in him. Geir and his rigid understanding of masculinity, his disgust at plural masculinities, has put a great distance between me and K in Book 6. I have been forced to confront the possibility that My Struggle is less about capturing the everyday realities of life in its totality and more about expressing and excusing a racist, xenophobic masculinity that I often find difficult to bear.

*

On June 3, 2016, I wrote that, whereas in real life I'm a connoisseur of distance, "in writing, I bare myself." I wrote that this was something I loved about reading: "intimacy at a distance, intimacy without flesh." I believed I shared this with Knausgaard.

I also wrote that, "as Knausgaard discovers, life and writing cannot be as tidily compartmentalized as he or I might like. Despite his longing for anonymity, by the act of writing, everyone sees him—he invites every reader into his most intimate thoughts. 'For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can.' So he begins. It will turn out to be a dark joke. The heart, that corporeal engine, that seat of emotion, will prove anything but simple. It will break and spill. Body and soul, life and writing, bleed into each other."

Whether and what Knausgaard learned from this bleeding are questions we end with. Is Book 6 a sincere reflection on the consequences of writing and domination or, in the end, an evasion, a refusal, in Omari's final account, to love?

As for me, I've been challenged by all of you to learn from the bleeding between body and soul, life and writing. This correspondence has lived much more than a digital life. One of the greatest joys of the Slow Burn has been the unexpected ways it has occasionally lit down from the heights of the Cloud into my quotidian days. I've made friendships and deepened old ones. I've abandoned my own work of autofiction as I gradually learned the limits, the foolishness, the mean power of being a white man who makes a connoisseurship of exhibitionism in writing and distance in life, never more powerfully indicted than in Omari's block quote, above. And I've begun, with the help of love, the difficult work of being vulnerable—not just taking up the posture in print.

Posture, of course, can be revelatory, if sometimes against one's (my!) intentions. And friends and lovers have shown me that what I thought was distance was, often enough, intimacy disavowed.

Love,

Dan

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

My Struggle, vol. 6: Marit, December 6

My Struggle,  vol. 6: Omari, January 2