Min Kamp 4 (Dancing In The Dark)
Karl Ove Knausgaard
The blurb on the back of this edition includes a quote from the New York Times review, which is a question that all Knausgaardians have asked themselves: “Why would you read a six-volume, 3,600-page Norwegian novel about a man writing a six-volume, 3,600-page Norwegian novel?”
For me, one reason is the central mystery of the book, which is not anything to do with plot (there’s no plot) but the mystery of the book itself. What is this thing? Why does it work the way it does? And the most important thing, hinted at in the NYT’s question, why is this flat, unadorned retelling of a life clearly a novel, and not a memoir?
Min Kamp 4 (the slightly terrible English titles have been tagged onto the translations) does a lot more to answer this final question than the previous three novels. It begins with an 18-year old Karl Ove freshly graduated from high-school arriving in a remote village in Northern Norway. Rather than going to university, he has taken a temp teaching gig, at a high school where the students are almost the same age as him. He has brought nothing with him except a few records and the typewriter with which he intends to craft the great novel.
He also brings his virginity, which he hopes to lose as quickly as possible, and his genetic disposition to alcoholism, which he doesn’t yet see as a problem. His first few months are spent getting blackout drunk and humiliating himself, often by seducing women but being incapable of completing the act.
The clarity of Knausgaard’s recollection is astonishing, as always. It’s like watching CCTV footage, if CCTV cameras could read the thoughts of the person they were recording. And that’s part of what makes Knausgaard’s writing so astonishing, the sheer integrity of the recollection. Although this is a man looking back into his own past, he has resisted the urge to apply any kind of hindsight. This is simply a record of what happened, and the teenage Karl Ove in the book must live it and learn from it, the same way the author did.
And this is part of the brilliance, the sudden, vertiginous dropping between layers. As ever, he will sometimes pull us forward into the world of Min Kamp 2, the authorial now where the book is being written. But he also drops us back a few months, with the middle part of this book being set towards the end of his time in high school, which we last saw in Min Kamp 1.
These timejumps are the heart of what this whole project is about: the nature of time, the nature of memory, the nature of being a creature that exists briefly in this world and is gone. Teenage Karl Ove says “I buy books and records because they say something about what life is about, what it is to be a human here on earth.” Adult Karl Ove is trying to say something about that experience too, although teenage Karl Ove is responding to the ephemeral nature of existence in a more traditional way: by trying to get drunk and get laid as much as possible.
Teenage Karl Ove does manage to spend a lot of time writing and we get to see a lot of this process, and the kind of literary values that became part of the older writer’s identity. Post-modernism is something that he both rejects and worships at the same time, resulting in the short stories that will eventually become his novel A Time To Every Purpose Under Heaven. So maybe what we’re seeing here is a big post-modern experiment, an autobiographical bildungsroman, but stripped of all authorial techniques, until what we’re left with is an ugly, naked, unadorned self-revelation.
What’s interesting is that, after 2,400 pages of this, I don’t really feel anything towards Karl Ove. I don’t love him, I don’t hate him, I don’t admire him, I don’t hold him in contempt. I think his work is extraordinary, but I don’t have any strong feelings towards the person who created that work.
Which is exactly the opposite of what literature usually does. Books are normally written with the urge, often unconscious, to make us love their authors. Or to hate them, which is kind of the same thing. Memoirs certainly do this, and they do so by trying to present a particular image of the subject.
But Knausgaard is, I think, really making an attempt to present himself for our examination. He is assisting us as we perform an autopsy on him, and allowing us to draw whatever conclusions we see fit.
Or maybe not. There are still two volumes to go in this maddening series.
(By the way, I liked this more than 3, but not as much as 1 and 2, not that it matters overall.)
