Nordic incontinence

I’ve just finished the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard’s _A Death in the Family_, the first volume of his sequence of autobiographical novels, _My Struggle_ . The novel, if novel is the best word for it, is at once brilliant and horrible. Brilliant, because of Knausgaard’s talents for description and for self-observation; horrible because of the meticulous way in which he sets out the decline of his father and grandmother. In the novel, and doubtless in real life, Knausgaard’s father is an alcoholic, who at the end of his life, barricades himself into the house of his semi-demented mother and drinks himself to death amidst his own waste. The final third of the book consists of the author’s description of himself and his brother cleaning up the mess and preparing for the funeral. Incomprehensible to the author – and to the reader – is his father’s sudden mid-life transformation from being reserved, proper, distant and controlling, first to would-be bohemian and then to hopeless drunk. Though this change provides the organizing principle of the novel, it is only one of its parts. Much of the “action” (if action there is) consists of an alienated Knausgaard recalling his adolescence and observing himself struggling to write somewhere in Stockholm. In the course of this, we get his reflections on art – and what it does for him – his feelings towards his pregnant girlfriend and children (less warm than he thinks they should be), on death, alcohol, music and much besides. I can’t say that it is anything other than compelling, even though simultaneously revolting. Of course we cannot know what Knausgaard holds back, but he gives a good impression of total candour: he notices the difference between what he ought to feel and think and what he does, actually, feel and think, and tells us anyway.

The central dimension on which this reflection happens is the parent-child relationship. One thought that his writing prompted in me concerns how different things must be for the childless (for better or for worse). Most of us have the experience of having a parent (and usually of having two). We know how difficult that can be but also, if we are lucky, how rich, interesting, consoling it can be also. Those of us with children are on the receiving end of similar hopes, fears, expectations, longings and resentments to the ones we have directed at our own parents. The childless cannot, at least in the usual case, have that place in the gaze of another. It has the possibility of being a great place to be, but also a terrible and treacherous one: to be loved and admired is one thing, to be hated and resented in a role where the normal expectation is love and admiration is quite another. Knausgaard’s father is the object of his son’s contempt and disdain (after fear and alienation).

Reading Knausgaard brought many (and better!) memories of my own surging to the surface. That he had this effect tells something of the power of his writing. Naturally, I reflected on how much of what I remembered I could ever bring myself to tell. Though my own memories are generally much happier than his, there is much that I couldn’t bring myself to say: out of shame, embarrassment, but also out of care and love for others. I couldn’t and wouldn’t reveal some things because of a duty of respect and privacy to people. Even for people I no longer see or even know, I’d often think it unfair to them to reveal some moment of gaucheness, stupidity or cruelty that might say nothing about who they are now. Knausgaard has no such reservations: in order to serve his art, he is a shit. Though his father may have merited little mercy, it is hard to feel the same about his grandmother who seems to have been a generally fine and vigorous person, with an interesting life, until the return of her eldest son prompted and alcoholic unravelling supplemented by senility in her nineties. Cruel then, for Knausgaard to use his ability at close description to tell us about her bewilderment and incontinence in the days following Knausgaard’s father’s death.

All this is to say that I have considerable doubts about the ethics of Knausgaard’s project, even as I can’t help but admire both his artistic accomplishment and his psychological insight. I shall make a point to read the rest of the series though.