My Struggle , vol. 6: Diana, October 15

Brooklyn, NY

Dears,

If, having opened a long book by a novelist you despise in preparation for an unpaid task, you find yourself too unwilling to let him tell you about autumn, a season you feel he doesn't deserve, to keep going—but are still hoping to talk yourself into reading the damn thing—I do not recommend turning to the middle. Put on a sweater instead. Call out sick; sit in some leaves.

If you do try opening to the middle, though, you might find the narrator frustrated that Hitler is unfairly mocked for loving Wagner (given that others are permitted to like Wagner without ridicule, even Wittgenstein, who whistled, our narrator complains). At least this is inane: if you've gotten this far, stay put. Perhaps recall your own questionable enjoyment of Der Ring des Nibelungen, how much you liked settling into an emotional nap at the Metropolitan opera. Re-read Wagner damning Mendelssohn with anti-Semitic praise:

"[Mendelssohn] has shown us that a Jew may have the amplest store of specific talents, may own the finest and most varied culture, the highest and tenderest sense of honour—yet [ . . . ] The washiness and the whimsicality of our present musical style has been [ . . . ] pushed to its utmost pitch by Mendelssohn's endeavour to speak out a vague, an almost nugatory Content as interestingly and spiritedly as possible."

Get jealous of Mendelssohn: you'd love to spiritedly, and in a washy style, offer up some capital-C content. Listen to Mendelssohn's "Herbstlied," his Autumn Song, and realize that he didn't know about cuffing season: for him, autumn marks the death of love. Write a poorly fictionalized story about your weekend walking with a girl in the suburban fall. Do not, instead, turn another 80 or so pages, where you might find the narrator puzzling over his strong sense of national identification produced by a local massacre only to conclude that the "we" that permits mourning is indistinguishable from the "we" of fascism.

Don't get me wrong: I love some self-absorbed bullshit (see above). But to pull off that look, it helps to appeal to a reader's shared manner of self-absorption. For example, "we" can all get behind this setup: a national tragedy made me desperately sob for days, but now, just a little bit later, I can't access that feeling—what the fuck does that mean? Was my then-sadness fake?  But the next step is not "aha, I get Nazis now!" These are easy wes to tell apart.

As a teacher, I'm a hypocrite. When students have tried to tell me they hated an assigned text, I've questioned whether they actually read it; I've explained that it's not necessary to like an object to analyze it; I've asked them to suspend disbelief; I've pretended that pleasure is irrelevant to criticism; I've reminded them that characters are not their authors; I've asked them to look for a pattern to analyze; I've offered them constructions for complication—while it may seem that _______, actually __________," or for hiding their disdain in the citations of those with more critical authority; I've suggested they find models. Forgetting that they're likely to find models in more "accessible" styles, ones that permit critics to write about themselves, I've then crossed out the paragraphs where they've found a path into the text via anecdotes about their own weekends or feelings—"stick to the text," I remind them.

Last week, I asked myself: what if you pretended you were still in school, and you were reading Knausgaard for a seminar paper? What would you write, if you had to repress hating him? I could do this. I'd close-read the section on Celan's "The Straitening," where K returns to the experience of feeling "closed off" from poetry:

"The deep secrets of erotic life and the esoteric insights of poetry were meant for others, whereas I, constrained by the stupid thinness of my life, struggled to accept that life was just that, stupid and thin."

I could open a term paper with this, making an argument about Knausgaard's implied defense of the prosaic: "Though the narrator's sorrow about his inability to read poetry recurs, his emphasis on the everyday shows us a deeper commitment to prose itself . . ." I could turn to K's criticism of the "smallness" of Hitler's prose (which reads, in fact, like Wagner's dismissal of Mendelssohn's style). If I got writer's block, I could find the paper I wrote in undergrad for a class on "Poetry As Experience"—a reading of Bernadette Mayer's Midwinter Day against Lacoue-Labarthe's reading of Celan—find some choice quotes to throw in, determine whether Knausgaard finds a way to let prose translate experience. In doing this, I'd be mesmerized to discover that, at twenty-two, I managed to hide both my absolute fan girl obsession with Mayer and my real confusion about what the fuck Lacoue-Labarthe was saying. Every time I start to get too psyched about Bernadette, for example, I course-correct: "This is not to throw Lacoue-Labarthe aside, of course . . . Celan and L.-L. show up instead whispering Heute, and Mayer takes the echo."

I was full of shit. But in the middle of the shit, there was something: I was writing about Mayer's contemporaries' frustration that, in Midwinter Day, she chose to focus on motherhood. I quote her:

"Remember that woman I told you about who came to take a picture of Lewis and he said I was a poet too, and she looked at me and Sophia and Marie carefully crawling on me and she said, oh really and when do you get to write? There's no use ever actually saying you're a poet, it's a disservice to yourself except for the wonder you can sustain among the moths, but you'd better say it anyway."

Later in Book 6, K wonders why he fails to empathize with others, especially his wife, whom he sees "more or less in the way you see a room you know well; everything is there, the lamp and the carpet and the bookcase, the sofa and the window and the floor, but somehow transparently, no mark is left on your mind." He does not, at least, think this is good. "What do I want with this neutrality?" He then describes his attempt to get rid of two buckets of shit, packs up his laptop and Mein Kampf in preparation for a trip, goes to Iceland, returns, fights with his wife about leaving her alone with the kids again, as she feels it's dangerous, given that she's losing her mind. He loses writing time watching her break down, not getting the break's cause. But here, he isn't puzzled by the first-person-plural:

"Come on, Linda," I said. "Pull yourself together now. We're adults. We can't stop working because we're sad."

Of course, K means that he can't stop working. Linda stopped just fine. Either her sadness is stronger, and so better able to win out against work, or the category of "mother" draws different boundaries from "father." Regardless, Knausgaard only pretends that K's alienation from his wife is mysterious. The truth comes earlier: "Only someone who stands outside the social world knows what the social world is; to those within it, it is like water to a fish." This cliché's for Hitler, and for K. He's not thinking of, say, Riverdale's Jughead Jones, the resident uncool narrator, whose displacement helps him see the whole despite its parts (and whose exaggeration of his own role as outsider fucks him up). Knausgaard doesn't get that alienation, like everything else, is transformed by power, which obscures perception. Teen TV does.

My Struggle configures the "mysteriousness" of Linda's misery as a feature, not a bug. It's K's inability to understand that gives him the authority to document the world. This requires him to feign ignorance, to pretend questions are more difficult to answer than they are, to maintain the birds-eye perspective he believes alienation bestows.

"Intelligence is a hungry God," Andrea Long Chu warns us—it needs increasing evidence of its own complication to be sated. She's writing, here, about academic attempts to intellectualize Avital Ronell's abusive pedagogy, and I'd recommend that anyone who, against their better judgment, sets off to be a scholar, read this essay first. Not just to prepare yourself to avoid the compulsion to replicate a cycle of sadism with your future students, which is certainly a good idea.

There's a selfish reason, too: reading Chu, you might have a shot at protecting pleasure from that intellect's hunger. There are more important boundaries to practice drawing, sure. But it's worth being suspicious of a genre that insists its critics pretend to feel nothing. Take, as a counterexample, Chu's essay on the silent episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer:

"I do not care about most things in real life the way I care about Willow and Tara. Neither I nor my therapist can quite figure out why. They are in me, somehow, like stomach lining, or the quick under my fingernails. When they appear, I tremble. When they kiss, I writhe."

In literary studies, the insistence on critical distance is an insult-to-injury situation: it's super important that you keep your relationship to the text profesh, i.e. impersonal, even though there is almost no profession left to speak of. Poets mourn poetry's having become academic (if only because so many poets realized the funding for PhDs was better than none at all). Perhaps academics can become more like poets: once you realize there's no money to be made from your writing, you're freed from doing what you've been told.

Love,

Diana

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