More Knausgaard
“Over recent years I had increasingly lost faith in literature. I read and thought this is something someone has made up. Perhaps it was because we were totally inundated with fiction and stories. It had got out of hand. Wherever you turned you saw fiction. All these millions of paperbacks, hardbacks, DVDs and TV series, they were all about made-up people in a made-up, though realistic, world. And news in the press, TV news and radio news had exactly the same format, documentaries had the same format, they were also stories, and it made no difference whether what they told had actually happened or not. It was a crisis, I felt it in every fiber of my body, something saturating was spreading though my consciousness like lard, not the least because the nucleus of all this fiction, whether true or not, was verisimilitude and the distance it held to reality was constant. In other words, it saw the same. This sameness, which was our world, was being mass-produced. The uniqueness, which they all talked about, was thereby invalidated, it didn’t exist, it was a lie. Living like this, with the certainty that everything could equally well have been different, drove you to despair. I couldn’t write like this, it wouldn’t work, every single sentence was met with the thought: but you’re just making this up. It has no value. Fictional writing has no value, documentary narrative has no value. The only genres I saw value in, which still conferred meaning, were diaries and essays, the types of literature that did not deal with narrative, that were not about anything, but just consisted of a voice, the voice of your own personality, a life, a face, a gaze you could meet. What is a work of art if not the gaze of another person? Not directed above us, nor beneath us, but at the same height as our own gaze. Art cannot be experienced collectively, nothing can, art is something you are alone with. You meet its gaze alone.” - Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book Two (http://www.amazon.com/My-Struggle-Book-Two-Love/dp/1935744828/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=&qid=)
This is such a long passage to unpack and discuss, I thought about abbreviating it or chopping it up, but here it is. It has so much of my own feeling in it, some as an avid, lifelong reader of fiction, a lot as a writer of same. What he says about being inundated with fiction, drowning it-do I need to add another bucketful to that ocean? Do I even want to? More and more, the answer is no. But I am still a writer, love writing, and write everyday, nowadays with no intention other than self satisfaction and insight. Nonetheless I miss the feeling of being productive, of being a “real writer,” though I can’t help seeing that former self as anything other than a delusion. If all of life is a series of transitions, then I’m acutely aware of being in the midst of flux, with the trace of a hope of finding something stable I can plant my flag of identity on.
Knausgaard writes of diaries and essays-but these are also narrative forms, no? I wonder if there is a quirk in the translation from Norwegian. Poetry is the unmentioned obvious.
Voice, yes. I am a reader of voices and always have been. Nothing else matters nearly so much. The most exciting thing about reading is allowing another consciousness into your own. It is a private act, performed alone with a book, and yet, it’s hard to imagine a way of being more intimate with another.
Not sure where I’m going, but it’s interesting and inspiring to meet another with similar thoughts and see what he had made of them. I don’t think I’ll be writing a 3000 page memoir. Pretty sure about that.
This is such a long passage to unpack and discuss, I thought about abbreviating it or chopping it up, but here it is. It has so much of my own feeling in it, some as an avid, lifelong reader of fiction, a lot as a writer of same. What he says about being inundated with fiction, drowning it-do I need to add another bucketful to that ocean? Do I even want to? More and more, the answer is no. But I am still a writer, love writing, and write everyday, nowadays with no intention other than self satisfaction and insight. Nonetheless I miss the feeling of being productive, of being a “real writer,” though I can’t help seeing that former self as anything other than a delusion. If all of life is a series of transitions, then I’m acutely aware of being in the midst of flux, with the trace of a hope of finding something stable I can plant my flag of identity on.
Knausgaard writes of diaries and essays-but these are also narrative forms, no? I wonder if there is a quirk in the translation from Norwegian. Poetry is the unmentioned obvious.
Voice, yes. I am a reader of voices and always have been. Nothing else matters nearly so much. The most exciting thing about reading is allowing another consciousness into your own. It is a private act, performed alone with a book, and yet, it’s hard to imagine a way of being more intimate with another.
Not sure where I’m going, but it’s interesting and inspiring to meet another with similar thoughts and see what he had made of them. I don’t think I’ll be writing a 3000 page memoir. Pretty sure about that.