Knausgaard, Wallace, Dostoevsky

The Sincerity Files #2

For a few days on the week it was published I was so distracted by the gooners essay, and then the various reactions to the gooners essay on social media (which have now become an expected part of the experience of cultural consumption, like the postgame shows for sporting events), that I failed to notice Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “second read” column in the New Yorker, on The Brothers Karamazov. Normally I would have rushed to read such a thing as soon as it appeared, then texted it to several friends and fellow Knausgaard obsessives. I read almost anything Knausgaard writes, but this signaled a special significance to me for a couple reasons. It is rare to read the great writers of our own time on the great writers of all time, and usually it is revealing. In addition, the article interested me in relation to the set of ideas that inspired the (largely notional so far, I know) project on sincerity which I promised to undertake on this platform back in January.

That’s because David Foster Wallace, who I argued in my first post was the key starting point for exploring the various different paths that “sincerity” has taken since the 1990s, also wrote an essay about Dostoevsky. That essay, a review of the first four volumes of an (eventually) five-volume biography, called “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky,” is one of the keys to understanding what Wallace took to be the main challenge facing his generation of fiction writers. It also offers a concise precis—and preview—of the kind of sincerity Wallace would employ to meet that challenge, above all in Infinite Jest, the career-making novel he published later in the same year. Would Knausgaard’s article about Dostoevsky be similarly revealing about his approach to sincerity in his decade-defining autobiographical novel, My Struggle? (Don’t worry, I’ll come back to the gooners.)

The article is not one of Knausgaard’s most memorable, which doesn’t mean there is nothing memorable about it. Knausgaard is interested in the emotional experience that informed Dostoevsky’s writing of The Brothers Karamazov, and he is also interested in his own emotional experience reading the novel. In terms of the former, Knausgaard emphasizes the sudden death of Dostoevsky’s three-year-old son, Alyosha, which occurred just a few months before he began writing The Brothers Karamazov, in 1878. The “devastating loss of meaning that accompanies the death of a child,” writes Knausgaard, “runs as an undercurrent throughout the book, and, I think every time I read it, ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ is written in defiance of this loss of meaning—that is, the abyss it stares into, the night it seeks to fill with light.”

Although Knausgaard does not mention any previous commentary on Dostoevsky’s novel, his emphasis on this aspect of the Russian writer’s biography, in relation to perhaps the most well known “novel of ideas” in literary history, is noteworthy. It suggests an attempt to turn on its head the conventional interpretation of the novel’s greatness: the central thing is not the ideas or the ideologies, but rather the “abyss” that the author has glimpsed beneath them. The novel’s cacophony of voices and action, suggests Knausgaard, is its ultimate answer to the fact of that abyss. The point is not to arrive at some conclusive idea about how to live but to be carried to a place beyond or beneath our ideas, the place where we actually do live. “If, contrary to the nature of the book, I were to attempt to sum up in one sentence what it is about,” Knausgaard writes, “it would have to be a quote from a conversation between Ivan and Alyosha: ‘Love life more than its meaning.’”

Accordingly, the climax of the article comes not in any of its arguments but rather when Knausgaard narrates his own first encounter with the novel as a semireligious experience, one that is replicated in each subsequent rereading:

When I read the novel for the first time, I was twenty, the same age as Alyosha, and I toiled through the first hundred pages driven by sheer will—why on earth should I read lengthy explications of the Russian Orthodox Church and monasticism in the eighteen-sixties and its relationship to the state? But then something happened; something seemed to catch fire. I was suddenly inside something, and wanted nothing more than to remain there, wanted nothing other than to read about these people, the three brothers and their terrible father with the turkey neck, and, not least, the women—the almost insanely proud Katerina, the unbalanced young girl Liza and her obdurate mother, and of course the alluring, malicious Grushenka. I read the novel the way I had read books as a child, with no thought of myself, no thought for my circumstances: my entire self was contained within the book. Nor did I think about what I was reading; I didn’t analyze anything, didn’t mull anything over—everything except feelings and presence was blotted out by the white incandescent light that reading filled me with.

Since then I have read the novel several times, and though with every reading I have understood a little more of what is going on, the sense of being self-forgetfully present is still tied to every encounter. It is as if the essential thing about “The Brothers Karamazov” is the experience of it, the feelings it generates in the reader, and this makes it difficult to write about. The moment one steps out of the novel and describes it from a distance, by saying, perhaps, that in a fundamental way it is about freedom, and that in a fundamental way it discusses morality and obligation—to whom or to what, if to anyone or anything, are our actions obligated?—the essential thing is lost from sight. Freedom, morality, and obligation are ideas, abstractions, and if this novel is drawn toward anything it is to the place where ideas and abstractions dissolve into life.

I know of no other writer who gets more mileage out of narrating his encounters with artworks, one of the most memorable being in his NYT book review of Michel Houellebecq’s Submission, in which he describes reading a Joris-Karl Huysmans novel for background while waiting for his young daughter to finish her gymnastics class. These narratives almost always depict the prosaic Karl Ove—in this case we need only a brief glimpse of the twenty-year-old “toiling” through a dense, foreign book—being delivered by a novel or painting or film from the tedium of his everyday tasks into a kind of spiritual stupor, here described as the place where “everything except feelings and presence was blotted out by the white incandescent light that reading filled me with.” Above all, what comes through in such descriptions is Knausgaard’s profound gratitude to the artist who has mustered the courage and sincerity to bring to him this fully immersive experience, an experience that he believes is the closest that he can come, as a highly educated secular individual living in a liberal democratic society, to transcendence. A transcendence that he equates not with an escape from the prosaic details of that life but with the capacity to “dissolve” himself into them.

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Wallace, too, expresses a sense of gratitude to Dostoevsky, though he does so in a more roundabout way, and the gratitude is not for the possibility of transcendence. Wallace’s review of Frank’s biography, which first appeared in the Village Voice in 1996, contains much more information about the political, social and philosophical context of Dostoevsky’s writing, and hardly any about the emotional experience of reading it. This might be expected, given that Wallace was asked not to reevaluate a specific novel but to review an encyclopedic biography of the artist. Yet the article also reflects Wallace’s characteristically comprehensive (sometimes called “maximalist”) style, including dozens of footnotes for anyone who wants more information about Dostoevsky or Frank or nineteenth-century Russia than Wallace is able to work into the body of his several-thousand-word review. The review is not written in an “academic” style, but it does attest to the fact that Wallace possesses an academic’s superego. (One footnote begins: “Never once in four volumes does Professor Frank mention the Intentional Fallacy or try to head off the objection that his biography commits it all over the place.”)

The review, however, also contains an element that would not occur in an academic article—or in most reviews, for that matter—in a million years. Interspersed throughout the discussion of Frank’s portrayal of the social and political backdrop for Dostoevsky’s novels are a series of self-enclosed (typographically, by asterisks) paragraphs in which Wallace lists thematically linked sets of moral questions, one on top of the other. E.g.:

** Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I’m bullshitting myself, morally speaking? **

These interstitial sentences on freedom, faith and morality are, we gather, a kind of residue of the questions that were raised for Wallace himself while reading Dostoevsky’s novels. If they make us want to cringe, that’s part of the point. Wallace meant to make his sophisticated 1990s readers ask themselves why they found these lists of questions, arranged with such apparent earnestness, so off-putting or uncomfortable. I say “apparent” because, toward the end of the essay, Wallace acknowledges that his way of posing these questions is itself a kind of hedge. Dostoevsky’s true value to American readers and writers in 1996, Wallace argues, is “that he appears to possess degrees of passion, conviction, and engagement with deep moral issues that we—here, today—cannot or do not permit ourselves.” That the “we” includes Wallace himself is clarified a couple of sentences later:

Frank’s bio prompts us to ask ourselves why we seem to require of our art an ironic distance from deep convictions or desperate questions, so that contemporary writers either have to make jokes of them or else try to work them in under cover of some formal trick like intertextual quotation or incongruous juxtaposition, sticking the really urgent stuff inside asterisks as part of some multivalent defamiliarization-flourish or some such shit.

The essay thus represents an almost too-perfect distillation of Wallace’s paradoxical approach to the “really urgent stuff,” as well as an important clue about what kind of stuff Wallace considered really urgent. In opposition to the ironized and / or academicized modes that dominated the “advanced” literary fiction of his time (read, Bret Easton Ellis and John Barth), Wallace insisted that the really urgent stuff is the heart of all great literature and art, including his own. At the same time, Wallace makes clear that although he admires Dostoevsky for the directness with which he approached the “desperate questions” of existence, he cannot emulate him. Instead he places his own desperate questions between asterisks in the middle of a dense book review, then inserts a piece of metacommentary into his conclusion in order to make sure the reader knows that he has considered that this might be cowardly. It is as if, for the “really urgent stuff” to appear in the essay at all, it must appear not only within actual asterisks but also within metaphorical ones.

At the end of his review, Wallace describes the kind of novel that he believes could break through to his generation’s cultural sophisticates—“a piece of morally passionate, passionately moral fiction [that] was also ingenious and radiantly human fiction.” Amazingly, he would publish a novel later that year which has a credible claim to having met this description. I have written elsewhere about the way that Infinite Jest achieves “sincerity by way of sophistication,” in part by burying an urgently moral message within the carapace of a cleverly plotted and highly self-conscious postmodern novel. The strategy certainly worked on me, when I first read the novel at the age of 23 and then again, five years later, when I finally comprehended that the sections about Alcoholics Anonymous represented the novel’s ethical core in a way that was no joke at all. Looking back at this review now, though, I’m struck by the word “ingenious” in Wallace’s prophecy. Its existence is conspicuous: “radiantly human” is simply not enough.

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Before concluding with what I find to be the broader significance of this comparison between Knausgaard’s Dostoevsky and Wallace’s, I want to briefly say something about the attitude of each to language, and especially to the linguistic phenomenon of cliches. Wallace, especially in Infinite Jest, defends cliches in theory, arguing that his demographic of highly educated American liberals is often overly dismissive of the deep wisdom that can be embedded in them—wisdom that, for the addicts at AA (but perhaps, not only them), is literally “life-saving.” Yet in his own writing Wallace, as we have seen, places whatever might be perceived as cliche or sentimental inside (both literal and metaphorical) asterisks. Knausgaard, by contrast, uses cliches liberally and with little apparent self-consciousness. Taken in isolation, the phrase I quoted above—“that is the abyss [The Brothers Karamazov] stares into, the night it seeks to fill with light”—is not just a cliche but a dreadful piece of purple prose. And as anyone who has read much of Knausgaard knows, the pages of his novels are clotted with such phrases. One of the great mysteries of Knausgaard’s style is how prose that would feel commonplace and even careless in some other context manages to captivate us in the way that Knausgaard’s does. I don’t pretend to know fully how Knausgaard manages this, but I suspect it has something to do with the emotional intensity that runs like an undertow beneath the surface of his sentences, as if the cliches are the product of someone trying as urgently as possible to record what they are thinking and feeling before it escapes them. Another way of putting it would be to say that the unworked-over feeling of his language, which would in most cases be merely a blight, is here part of what makes the author come across to readers as so nakedly sincere.

Two recent posts about contemporary literature here on Substack are helpful for suggesting why Wallace’s and Knausgaard’s divergent approaches to language, and to Dostoevsky, might matter for the course of 21st-century fiction. One, published in mid-October by Jeffrey Lawrence, is a review of Adam Kelly’s book New Sincerity. In this review, Lawrence is concerned chiefly with the writers whom Kelly devotes chapters to in his book—Dave Eggers, Benjamin Kunkel, Jennifer Egan, Colson Whitehead, Helen DeWitt and George Saunders. These are all American fiction writers who were Wallace’s contemporaries or followed closely in his wake, and who, in Kelly’s and Lawrence’s telling, responded in one way or another to his call for the writers of his time to produce a “passionately moral, morally passionate” fiction. The other, published over the summer in Republic of Letters by Derek Neal, is called “The Case for Autofiction.” Neal is concerned with understanding what distinguishes the style of the great (and, perhaps not incidentally, non-American) autofictionists of the long 2010s—Knausgaard, Sheila Heti, Elena Ferrante and Rachel Cusk.

Both essays are worth reading on their own, but they need to be put into dialogue if we are to understand the consequential differences in the ways that different cohorts of fiction writers, in the years between 1990 and 2020, expressed their commitment to sincerity. While Lawrence mentions Wallace’s centrality to Kelly’s book and therefore to the development of the novels the two scholars consider the high achievements of American literature in the Aughts, Wallace is mentioned only once, and not as an influence, in Neal’s essay on the autofiction that shared the stage with this literature and in some ways superseded it in the ensuing decade. But whether or not they were directly influenced by Wallace (and to some extent, they likely were), the novels of Heti and Knausgaard, for example, are just as surely products of the New Sincerity as are Kunkel’s and Eggers’s. That said, I believe a crucial contrast between the two groups can be expressed as follows: Whereas the American writers Lawrence and Kelly write about followed Wallace’s example—that is, by embedding their sincere moral ideals within novels and stories that retained a formal commitment to irony and self-consciousness—it was largely the non-American autofictionists who actually followed his famous advice for writers to forsake “double-entendre principles” and treat “plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions … with reverence and conviction.”

Wallace may have been right about what was required for a morally passionate novel to break through with his readership and in his cultural moment. Perhaps my 21-year-old self would never have cracked open something that completely neglected the postmodern parlor tricks that I had learned to associate, however warily, with serious art and thought circa 2001. Nonetheless, “ingenious” is a word Knausgaard would simply never use, either to describe himself or a work of art that he admired. This does not mean that Knausgaard is not, himself, a genius. It means, rather, that Knausgaard endeavored to actually do what Wallace recommended writers do but which he did not, in fact, “permit” himself to do. And that is to write about the really urgent stuff with no asterisks whatsoever.

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I said I would come back to the gooners. I’m sure I was not the only one who was reminded, reading Daniel Kolitz’s report from the “stream room,” of the infamous “entertainment” in Infinite Jest, a video about which the only thing that is known is that it paralyzes its viewers with the desire to do nothing besides continue watching it, eventually leading to their deaths. We can only speculate on whether these paralyzed viewers have reached something like the “goonstate” that is described by Kolitz’s subjects as “intense bliss,” and “tingles all over me, brain fuzzy, skin tingling all over.” But it is noteworthy, to me anyway, how closely this state resembles, for the gooners, the one that Knausgaard describes reaching—“everything except feelings and presence was blotted out”—while reading Brothers Karamazov. Which suggests one more way we might think of the contrast I’ve been trying to draw out here.

Wallace and Knausgaard were both aware of the addictive technologies that the contemporary novelist now had to compete with for their reader’s attention—technologies, it goes without saying, that were not present in Dostoevsky’s time. For Wallace, notwithstanding his deep rejection of many aspects of the postmodern project, the solution still involved using techniques that were widely associated with postmodern literature and theory, such as the fragmenting of the text with footnotes or the interruption of the narration by some metacommentary or formal destabilization, intended in one way or another to detach the reader from the kind of immersive experience that Wallace sometimes denigrated as “televisual.” That all of this was meant to lead the reader to the moral sincerity at the center of the maze distinguished Wallace’s project fundamentally from his postmodern forebears. But Knausgaard’s break with them would be even more dramatic. Accordingly, his main formal innovations all worked to immerse his readers more fully in the life of his novel. Knausgaard, though he can hardly be unaware of the panoply of “entertainments” that are now even more addictive than the ones Wallace contended with, barely engages with the modern mediasphere at all. He seems to believe something Wallace did not: that he can just choose to write like Dostoevsky—not exactly like him, of course, but with his unequivocal confidence that it is possible for a serious and sincere literary novel to provide readers with an experience that is just as immersive and all-consuming as anything else that is vying for their attention.