Ben Parker has a perceptive and contrarian take on Karl Ove Knausgaard in the Los Angeles Review of Books, perhaps the best essay yet on Dancing In the Dark, the fourth volume of My Struggle. Parker begins with the observation that many novels “contain a spectral double, another book trapped within their pages” — Cervantes’ parody of an illicit sequel to the first volume of Don Quixote, for instance, or Tristram’s father’s Tristrapedia in Tristram Shandy — and then considers the purposes towards which Knausgaard incorporates fragments of his father’s diaries into his own work. One of his purposes, perhaps unsurprisingly, is to sharply differentiate himself from his father, which eventually leads Parker to the assertion that My Struggle in its totality “is an attempt to create distance and partitions, to police psychic boundaries.” Parker goes on to support this assertion, more or less convincingly, by carefully and compellingly reading the novel’s aesthetic strategies as an almost necessary outgrowth of the experiences that prompted Knausgaard to write it:
The textures and devices of the book are best thought of as neutralizing tactics — in line with Knausgaard’s image of life as “a boat in a lock: life is slowly and ineluctably raised by time seeping in from all sides,” where this “enclosedness” is protective, regulating. Nicholas Dames has remarked on the “immersive” quality of the world conjured by the writing; this is right only provided we understand that immersion is a kind of threat or unwelcome outlet. Instead, writing means monitoring proximity, regulating intensity, maintaining a proper scale and distance. …
The point is never understanding; it is always distance. More precisely, a safe distance. … The much remarked-upon abundance of detail in My Struggle is not revealing, not sublime, not meaning-infused. The profuse description is only another distancing mechanism, a way the author pushes off. Knausgaard’s so-called “realism” is only the senseless, resistant substance he is hacking his way through.
All of which leads Parker back to a comparison of Knausgaard’s father’s diary with Knausgaard’s own unwieldy novel. Knausgaard’s “aesthetic program,” Parker says,
demonstrates a basic objection to his father. Namely, that [his father] tried to create distance by fiat, by detachment, and by drinking. The diary is a chronicle that holds experience at arm’s length, rendering it as compact as possible. The son’s novel also creates distance, but by the opposite means: distance cannot be merely affirmed with a sneer, and drinking is only a temporary and reversible means of producing it.
We’re at a point in the publication of My Struggle when there exists, on the one hand, a broad critical consensus on the purposes of Knausgaard’s aesthetic program, and, on the other hand, a kind of critical inoculation to its effects which has led to a largely underwhelming response to Knausgaard’s fourth volume. It’s refreshing, then, to come across a re-evaluation of Knausgaard as provocative as Parker’s — an attempt to overturn the existing consensus, and to challenge the assumptions it encourages Knausgaard’s readers to make, in order to reinvigorate our capacity to appreciate the subtleties and dynamics of My Struggle.
Infinite Patience 