My Struggle , vol. 6: Omari, October 31

Portland, OR

Dear all,

Before I get to Hitler, I want to talk about feelings—my own, stirred by one Karl Ove Knausgaard.

I wrote another letter before I wrote this one. It tried to take K's philosophies of language seriously and literally. It touched on the sublime and referenced Lyotard's postmodern take on it, offering his work as a reference that might have stabilized some of K's messy disquietude about the processes of immigration that were helping to shape Malmö as an urban space. It dabbled in K's observations on Peter Handke's novel, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, and why Handke's thin, unaffected description of his mother's funeral would appeal to K as he stumbles at length through a banal crisis about artistic license and creative process, facing a potential lawsuit levied by Gunnar, his uncle. It flirted with what emotion means for K, the ways in which he articulates a stance that places affect in stark contradistinction with rationalism while pining for utopia, what José Muñoz calls an affective structure. I even finally brought up Nazism because I truly find it difficult to even gesture toward how utopia circulates in Book 6 without referencing how much K's definition of the term is wedded to the basic fundamental principles of the Nationalist Socialist German Workers' Party.

That letter failed.

Or, maybe it didn't fail. But, it definitely didn't work.

I couldn't figure out why I was struggling to write about this sixth volume. Partially, I'm exhausted. Rainy season was behind schedule, but it has finally arrived in Portland. The hour-long commute to Willamette, which has always been a nuisance, has begun to tear at my being in ways that force me to confront exactly what it is I am doing here. My classes are going well and many people teach much more than I do, but juggling three radically different preps has pushed me intellectually in interesting and unnerving ways.

But even more than this, even more than the physical exhaustion that has seeped into every nook and cranny of my body and my mind and my spirit, I have become truly exhausted by K.

I thought I knew what the project of My Struggle was. I thought it was a project that was always doomed to failure, an attempt to capture the everyday realities of a life in its totality. This sixth volume has thrown my understanding of the struggle into chaos; I have been forced to confront the possibility that this book constitutes something else that has unfurled for page after page after page but never coheres into what I wanted.

(51-some-odd hours' worth of pages according to Rachel, a statistic I want to challenge because, though my "reading" "practices" aren't the same as Diana's, I have not read every word of My Struggle and I feel like I've been reading K for years, not hours).

I agree with Dan and Stephanie when they reference the shift to deep time in this volume. I agree that part of what Knausgaard means to do is more faithfully construct the distance between writer and subject that Katherine tells us we need to pay more attention to in her recent letter. These moves away from chronicling the minutiae of his experience make some sense when one considers that he writes this volume in the midst of trying to disentangle his own memory of dealing with the aftermath of his father's death from the sanitized narrative that Gunnar would prefer that he publish. Nevertheless, I think K overcorrects in the face of the humiliation he feels when his uncle threatens to undermine his recollection of formative events. It's dizzying to try to keep up with K's attempt to reorient and reconstruct the spatial and temporal scope of, at least, Scandinavian history if not world history when I'm so much more interested in his slow descriptions of exploding sausage.

K's extended meditations on the quotidian amounted to an indexing of reality that was ambitious even when the descriptions themselves were at their most hackneyed. When I saw K abandoning the project that I had grown to tolerate—even, at moments, enjoy—I shifted my own reading practices to make intellectual room for a grown man desperate at the end of a 3600-page tome to show that he has read some stuff. A lot of stuff. And much like an older shopper whose grocery store coupons won't scan properly, he needs to speak to someone about it. But I did not come to this project to take K seriously as a thinker and that's one of the main reasons why my first draft of this letter failed.

Perhaps I should backtrack a little to say that there remain glimpses of the Knausgaard that fascinated me when we began The Slow Burn. Take the ways in which Vanja, Heidi, and John bring a bouncy levity that elevate this volume from being little more than a gross(ly inaccurate) approximation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason or Spinoza's Ethics or Marx's Capital or any other related or unrelated philosophical tract. I continue to be infinitely charmed by K's brusque approach to child rearing and the kinds of questions that it opens up as he shuts his children down. For instance, Vanja's philosophy of time, articulated in a series of questions toward the end of the first part of this volume, forces me to think deeply about temporality in a way that K's does not. I groan audibly when K tries to spatialize time, revealing his endless contemplations about how time works: "I thought about how I had always considered time to be vertical. Time was to me a kind of ladder one climbed, whose rungs were ages—at the bottom one's time at preschool, then school, gymnast, university, and so on" (259). Karl. That's just a straightforward model of linear time that you have decided should go bottom to top rather than side to side. The metaphor of the ladder brings nothing; it complicates nothing; it shuts down my thinking rather than invites me to think along with you.

However, in an exchange between Vanja and her father that reflects my own recollection of road trips as a child, I found myself both grinning and pensive:

Vanja twisted around and found my gaze and asked when we'd be there [at the beach]. A few minutes yet, I said. How long is a minute, she wanted to know. Sixty seconds, I said. How long is a second, she wanted to know. From now until now, I said. That wasn't long, she said. Don't start counting, I said. She looked at me. Why not? She asked. I shrugged. You can if you want, I said. She began to count. When she got to thirty-eleven I corrected her. [...] What comes after thirty-nine, Daddy? Said Vanja. Forty, I said, turning my head to Linda. (400-401).

When I read this, I had follow-up questions, most of which were similar to Vanja's with different emphatic flourishes. How long is a minute? How long is a second? Truly, how soon is now? These are the lines of inquiry with which he should engage, not with the acerbic terseness that we have come to expect from him as a parent, but with the languid meditations that we have come to expect from him as a writer and a thinker. Does Vanja deserve any less than what we readers get when it comes to the intricacies of K's mind?

There is so much parenting in these first 400 pages of Book 6 and, yet, not enough of it. I blame Geir, K's best friend and his emotional rock as he obsesses over his uncle's threats of a lawsuit. It is truly remarkable to watch a stay-at-home dad cling so tightly to traditional gender roles. My incredulity as a reader is only exacerbated by watching two grown men attempt to absentee parent their children while they are the only parents around. They can do this because no one needs fathers to take care of their children well. Fathers have to be just competent enough not to kill their children. Geir's take on why Christina, his wife, has taken on the majority of the parenting in their relationship? "Not only does she put more into [child rearing] than me, she also gets a lot more out of it. It's highly meaningful to her" (311).

What an utterly boring take on parenting and masculinity! Especially after five books in which K struggles to toe a weird and arbitrary line between knowing that his profession should allow him the time to play a meaningful fatherly role and despairing about the fact that his absenteeism is what his life has become.

What Geir appreciates in K (what K appreciates in Geir?) is exactly this sense of masculinity that K cannot achieve when he is home all of the time—i.e., a masculinity that he admires and tries to reclaim with the turn to deep time and his rigorous and unoriginal philosophizing about so many topics, including reading ("The reader, however, is unconstrained by such insistence on independence or individuality, on the contrary, literature's entire system is based on the reader submitting to the work and vanishing within it" [233]); the social contract ("I knew that I was not inferior to anyone I met [at the children's nursery], my weaknesses and shortcomings were no greater than theirs, but they weren't representatives of themselves, they were representatives of a system in which there were rules, and those rules were very simple: if you followed them you were a good person, if you didn't you were a bad person" [364]); or art ("The fact that art had become so cerebral that everything to do with feelings is left to the simpleminded, is perhaps the best argument there is against progress, for the very reason that such a standpoint, which it seems must take precedence over our human experience, is so stupid and unintelligent as to be truly simpleminded itself" [308-309]). This sixth volume represents an expression of masculinity with which we are all familiar—namely, an exhausting exercise in demonstrating how widely read one is without anticipating that one's audience has any idea what is actually being spoken about.

At ASAP/10 in New Orleans, our panel was asked a provocative question about whether or not we would be willing to teach My Struggle and, if so, what pedagogical strategies would be most instructive. I gave something of a mealy-mouthed answer, which I can extend here and then still stand by, that I would not, but not on the grounds that I don't think K is a serious thinker. He is. My disagreements with him are less on the basis of a lack of rigor on his part and have more to do with the fact that our worldviews operate so differently and across such an insurmountable gulf that many of his musings on anything more complex than the simple narration of having to change a diaper sound to me like so much coughing and spitting that I cannot, nor can I want to, embrace them.

(Allow me this riff—coughing and spitting—off K's description of the language of Muslim immigrant communities in Malmö on page 83, a dehumanizing description that didn't make it into my reading of that scene on the playground in my previous letter).

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.

To return to a point I'm still lingering over from my previous letter, I don't believe K when he says that language—coughing and spitting—is what keeps him from understanding those undecipherable immigrant communities. 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.

I will continue to read, but only because I know that Linda will reappear as a central figure in the narrative and I want to get back to intimacy and feeling and affect and close proximity and the soft suppleness in K's life that Geir stifled by reminding K of the man that he so desperately wants to be.

Yours,

Omari

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