Knausgaard’s Literary Response to the Tyranny of Technique

“Literature is not primarily a place for truths, it is the space where truths play out”

– Karl Ove Knausgaard

There are always arguments. And you, as a reader, can never get a handle on all of them. You can get a handle on some of them, perhaps, but never all of them.

The world has changed, no doubt, in the past hundred years. But the world has always been changing. It is just that recently, change has been convulsive. And the arguments we make and the arguments we read are about how to live with this change.

We ask: What have technologies added to the experience of being human? What have they taken away? How do we steward the earth on which we live? What have we done, and what can we do—if anything—to ensure it has a viable future?

And so we make the arguments, we hear the arguments, we sift and judge and adopt views and habits that seem right according to the information we have. We live by the light that we’re given.

We can’t “see” arguments, if you will, but we can “see” the garbage strewn by the side of the highway, we can “see” the choking smog settled over the city, we can “see” our children, with their necks strained down, staring into the crystal-ball void of a smartphone screen.

Yet, the problem with the arguments we make and hear is that they are never immediate. Life is immediate, but arguments are not immediate. We can’t “see” arguments, if you will, but we can “see” the garbage strewn by the side of the highway, we can “see” the choking smog settled over the city, we can “see” our children, with their necks strained down, staring into the crystal-ball void of a smartphone screen. These realities are so immediate that we see them, are troubled by them, but because of their ubiquity, we must detach. We become willfully blind, in other words, to both arguments and even to our own lives. All the while technology continues to shape and shift our human experience.

This is where art, and in particular literature, can still be a refuge. For the right kind of literature has the power to make the immediate visible to us once again. It can do so without resorting to arguments. Rather, this kind of literature can become the arena in which truths we thought we knew (but have stopped being able to see) come into focus. Moreover, literature can be the area in which we become visible to ourselves, even as we seek it out as a refuge from what is inside of us. That’s why in Inadvertent Karl Ove Knausgaard could write that,

Literature was a hiding place for me, and at the same time a place where I became visible. And this, an outside place where what is inside becomes visible, is still what literature is to me. Literature and art, along with religion, are the only places I know of that are capable of establishing such an outside.

In other words, for Knausgaard, literature has the capacity (along with religion) of externalizing the interior world, of making it objective, or if not objective, at least graspable. The interior life is private, full of intuitions and sensations, all bubbling below the surface of the conscious mind. Literature has the power to draw out these interior realities (for they are realities) and to make them plain, observable, and perhaps even give form to what is commonplace or universal.

The author, in producing such literature, makes visible what is inside of herself, and thus opens the possibility that the reader might recognize his own experiences in this externalization of the interior states of another. This outside space then becomes, in the words of Knausgaard, a “hiding place.” I might suggest that the word “refuge” is even more apt, because it is the place where one’s aloneness does not leave one alone but becomes a point of connection with another through literature.

Some readers might be unfamiliar with the celebrated novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard. Long a notable literary figure in Norway, his meteoric rise to international prominence came with the publication of his six-part series My Struggle (Min Kamp in Norwegian). My Struggle is an autobiographical novel about Knausgaard’s struggle to become a writer. Each volume is set in a different phase of Knausgaard’s life, but the reflections within each volume are not chronologically linear. In the first installment, A Death in the Family, the plot leads up to Knausgaard’s grappling with the death of his father, a figure that hovers over the rest of the series like a darkly luminous ghost. And, since the novel divulges so much personal information, it caused a ruckus within Knausgaard’s extended family. This dispute was picked up by the media in Norway, which only served to expand its readership. Of course the Norwegian title of the work drew comparisons to Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and this fed into a long reflection from Knausgaard on the comparison between himself and Hitler in the last volume The End. The combined length of the six-volume novel is over 3500 pages.

And since writing My Struggle, Knausgaard has continue his prolific career. In addition to articles in The New Yorker and The New York Times and profiles in every major newspaper and magazine, he’s continued to churn out one novel after another to the point that English translators can’t keep up with his output. More recent books include the four-volume Seasons Quartet, a collection of letters and essays meant for his daughter, as well as more occasional writing, such as So Much Longing in So Little Space, a book on the art of Edvard Munch.

Despite being wildly successful both in Norway and on the international scene, Knausgaard is not without his critics. Most of Knausgaard’s success came from his autofiction, and this has been controversial because of the way it draws attention the personal lives of his friends and family.

As Larry Rohter notes, part of the criticism from fellow Scandinavians came from Knausgaard’s willingness to write a tell-all about the unravelling of his father’s life. In a culture more formal and private than America’s, this caused great furor. Megan Nolan, on the other hand, sees Knausgaard’s exposure of shame—his own and his family’s—as deeply relatable.

Knausgaard’s subject matter—a focus on his own life and feelings—can feel boring or claustrophobic to some readers. For instance, Jonathan Clarke notes that Knausgaard

writes with a kind of naivete, a bracing confidence in his reader’s interest. At times he succeeds in creating a rare intimacy, the sense that we are getting the stuff of life itself. There are also long stretches in which his novels are simply boring. One wonders whether the writer himself can tell the difference. Perhaps boredom is part of what we are being asked to take on.

But the “boredom” that Clarke alludes to may say more about the reader than the author. Human beings are deeply interesting, and their lives are deeply interesting. To listen well to another, whether their voice comes audibly or in print, is to be drawn into a world that is almost infinite. There are treasures we might find there if we are attentive. We are so used to skimming over the surface of the stories we hear and read that we might miss them. A manufactured expectation for excitement, speed, and the grandiose may have desensitized us to the beauty of the simple. And Knausgaard’s writing is simple. It is relatable. It is human.

Critic Toril Mor makes just this point when she says, “Art that appears to be easy and simple, art that has an immediate appeal, doesn’t have to be shallow, doesn’t have to be something we exhaust at the first approach.” She goes on, writing, “The difference between good and bad art is precisely the sense of inexhaustibility. However many times you look at the painting, or read the novel, you will feel its infinity, as it were.” What Knausgaard does with his writing is that he magnifies the life of one individual in such a way that the very simple, relatively banal occurrences in the life of one troubled Scandinavian man trying to come to terms with his rocky relationship to his father becomes relatable to people from so many different backgrounds. They read about this one man’s struggle and see their own varied struggles hidden there as well.

Knausgaard continues to attract readers, and he does so without a social media presence or flashy book trailers. His success is a symbolic middle-finger to the technological age. His books are long, slow-paced, deliberate, are still wildly absorbing. They are a testament to the reality that good writing matters, that it is inherently worthwhile and enjoyable, that the internet has not completely vanquished our capacity for attention and pleasure in the printed word.

As much as My Struggle has been a reminder that there is a still a place for the personal, the life-sized, in our technologized world, Knausgaard says very little about technology in these books. But, in the past few years, Knausgaard has published five other volumes, known as The Morning Star series, that do focus on technology in the modern world.

So far, the collection tells a ranging story set across decades in Norway and Russia. The first three volumes, The Morning Star (New York: Penguin, 2021), The Wolves of Eternity (New York: Penguin, 2023), and most recently The Third Realm (New York: Penguin, 2024), have all been translated into English by Martin Aitken. The next volume, The School of Night, is set to appear in English in the next year or so.

The series is a psychologically penetrating look at the modern world. The first-person perspective of each novel enables the reader to see Knausgaard’s world-building from the inside out. The plot moves across Europe, and it is primarily focused on the appearance of a strange, bright star that lingers on the horizon. Along with this star comes all kind of paranormal phenomena, that, as the third novel progresses, we see linked to the ritual murder of a death metal band in Southern Norway.

The whole series sits just on the edge of fantasy and sci-fi, at least so far. Whatever supernatural occurrences or impossible scenarios are described in the series—from flying creatures, to demons from the underworld, to the cessation of death across the Europe—there remain other implausible explanations for each of them. The reader is left wondering if this is a realist novel that will end like every episode of Scooby Doo, with a rationalistic explanation for what otherwise seemed unfathomable, or if there something darker and more mysterious going on. The vacillation between these two possibilities lends an eeriness to the series that is difficult to describe.

In the second volume, The Wolves of Eternity, Knausgaard homes in on two characters, the Norwegian Syvert Loyning (a mainstay in the series), and the Russian Alevtina Kotov. It turns out that Syvert and Alevtina are in fact siblings, and she agrees to meet with Syvert for the first time, which drives much of the narrative.

But there is a side plot centered around Alevtina and her brilliant friend Vasilisa Baranov, who run into each other and begin to catch up after a prolonged parting. Vasilisa has been working on a research project involving the real-life Eastern Orthodox philosopher and mystic Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov who is interested in the resurrection of the dead. While most of the chapters in The Wolves of Eternity are first-person accounts of the characters in the novel, the whole of one chapter is a copy of Baranov’s research report, “The Wolves of Eternity,” which is an essay on Fyodorov and transhumanism more generally.

After some framing, Baranov describes the Russian anti-death movement and its origins with Fyodorov. Fyodorov was born in 1829 in Tambov Province of Russia. Here he was educated and went on to be a teacher before, in 1874, he became the librarian at Rumyantsev Museum, where he worked for over two decades.

At the Museum, he met and befriended Tolstoy. During this time, we are told in The Wolves of Eternity, “Fyodorov gave away almost everything he possessed and practised the strictest frugality, living in a small room without furniture, owning not even a bed or linen, sleeping on top of a chest or on the floor with newspapers to cover him, a book for a pillow.” Fyodorov led a spartan life, with his asceticism drawn from his Christian convictions. These convictions also bolstered Fyodorov’s philosophy and his plan for a universal resurrection.

For Fyodorov, resurrection was not mystical or eschatological, but part of a scientific program. Knausgaard (in the voice of Baranov) writes that “the starting point for Fyodorov’s philosophy is that death belongs to nature and life belongs to humans… The mistake we have made is that we have submitted to death, accepting it passively without question.” Fyodorov did not see human death to be something that is inevitable, but he believed humans could stave off death and even reverse deaths that had already taken place.

Knausgaard notes that for Fyodorov, “one notion is fundamental: the universe wastes nothing… Thus… at some point in time it will be possible to trace every atom that once belonged to a person and put them all together again.” In other words, Fyodorov’s concept of “resurrection” is actually “resuscitation.” In What Was Man Created For?: The Philosophy of the Common Task, Fyodorov writes, “The doctrine of resurrection could also be called positivism, but a positivism of action… Resuscitation changes symbolic acts into reality… For the people, science will be a method, whereas the positivism of science is merely a philosophy for scholars as a separate class or estate.” Fyodorov envisions Christ’s resurrection as a beginning, but he thinks that the human duty is to bring back all those who have died to live in the present in harmony with all those currently alive.

Fyodorov’s ideas were generative in Russia, and in the subsequent decades of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries they spurred researchers to keep severed heads of animals alive by way of machines and even, as in the case of Porfiry Bakhmet’ev, to experiment with anabiosis, the revival of frozen or desiccated creatures. Knausgaard traces, in the words of Baranov, this movement into the present efforts of Russian scientist and researchers.

Given that this essay appears in a book of fiction, it may lead the reader to believe that Knausgaard is just exaggerating or inventing an eerie back story to help with his novel’s ambience. The chilling truth is that this paper embedded in Knausgaard’s narrative is quite faithful to reality.

English readers may be less familiar with the Russian anti-death movement, but movements like Bryan Johnson’s endeavor “Don’t Die” are well known. Johnson’s ambition is to stave off death by forestalling his biological aging, and he has poured significant funding and research into achieving this goal.

It seems that Johnson’s anti-aging regimen has received more praise and interest than criticism. The little that it has received is primarily aimed at questioning whether or not his efforts will be effective. But it’s the ethical and human questions that we really ought to be asking. This is as true for Fyodorov as it is for Johnson.

Each is coming to their goals of life-extension or resuscitation with different motives (at least Fyodorov’s are rooted in some kind of theology) but both see mortality as a problem and technological method as the potential solution. Given that these are questions that are either unasked or brushed aside in public discourse, perhaps it is in only in literature, “the space where truths play out,” that we can see the Frankensteinian experiments for what they are.

Reading a book, reading a novel, especially a long novel, a slow novel—the kind of novel that Knausgaard writes—is an act of resistance to the quasi-religious belief in technological advance that plagues us today.

Knausgaard’s books are not books we read to achieve some end, but they are read for enjoyment’s sake. And to read for the simple pleasure of reading, of being drawn into a story—even a difficult story—is to participate in an activity that implicitly recognizes life is worth living, not simply extending.

Moreover, one of the truths that The Morning Star series calls to the fore is that seeking to stretch life out as long as possible, or to resurrect lives that are no longer, are monstrous endeavors. Having the technology and technique at our disposal to abolish mortality is not a triumph but a dangerous temptation.

Sure, the hope in technology to better human lives is not new. Neither is it inherently problematic: Some technologies are good and helpful and life-enhancing. But these can only find their place in a culture with a transcendent vision of the good, and to speak about the good meaningfully is to smuggle in theology. Only God is good. And a vision for the good life of humanity must be centered in a good that is outside of the individual, an objective good that is external to human subjectivity. Knausgaard does not go so far as to make this argument, but his portrayal of the grotesqueness of what humans might do to extend life shows that technology is not a solution to the problem of death.

Those who seek merely to extend life, or to reanimate lives that have passed, fail to apprehend the good that exists outside of human life. This good may feel too abstract in a world where following Bryan Johnson’s advice will make one’s gray hair go away. But in a world beset with noisy arguments about technique, we need quiet reminders of the purposes that all such techniques ought to serve. And literature might offer us a refuge in which the truths we need to stay sane, to stay human, can play out.

Image via stockvault.