"Inadvertent" by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Karl Ove Knausgaard has been a prolific literary phenomenon, especially in the last decade, with his six-part mammoth autobiographical novel, My Struggle, and The Seasons Quartet.  Yale University Press published his 2017 Windham-Campbell lecture under the title, Inadvertent.  In an attempt to answer the common question thrown at most writers, Knausgaard has much to say about why he writes.

How much of our behavior is dictated by the reality of our death?  Knausgaard believes he writes because he will die, which is a realist mission statement for any artist.  One wishes to preserve the sacred, the fleeting moment of truth or beauty or melancholy.  Sometimes, all of the above spurs us to take up a brush or chisel or fountain pen.  Because he has made a life of studying the Norwegian painter, Edvard Munch (1863-1944), Knausgaard believes he understands the painter’s motivation.  He can articulate Munch’s inspiration:  “I paint because I have lost trust in the world.”  What trust is broken for this artist?  The world betrays us because it will go on without us after we die.  We are given only this brief episode in an almost infinite history, and this is a source of human tragedy.  In a way, it is narcissistic because life is more of a relay race than an individual event.  We all play a part, but no one is the lead in this human comedy.  Knausgaard cites the deaths that shattered Munch’s life:  losing his mother when he was five, and his sister when he was thirteen.  So art is a defense against a finite world, and tragedy colors everything in the artist’s world.

Knausgaard sums this up in pure poetry:  “We live in an ocean of time, where events, things, and people are continually succeeding one another, but we cannot live with such boundless complexity, because we disappear in it, and therefore we organize it into categories, sequences, hierarchies.”  We name things; we identify ourselves with our country of birth; we define our existence by our occupations.  “All of us sum up our lives in this way,” he writes, “that is what we call identity.”

Formulating these identities as characters in his writing leads him to success.  “It wasn’t until I started breaking the rules, showing how something was and should be understood, very precisely and with no room for doubt, and describing people in psychological terms, that my writing came alive.”  In doing this, he moves far beyond another writing cliché:  show, don’t tell.  The book contains advice for writers that often cuts across the grain of what is taught in MFA classrooms.  He is also clear about what constitutes a foundation for a writer.  From childhood, he has always been a voracious reader.  He offers two salient observations about his reading-to-writing life.  “[T]he essential thing about books, I think, was that they constituted a place in the world where I could be, where nothing was demanded of me, where on the contrary I got what I wanted…the whole point of them being precisely that I read them alone, and yet it never felt like that, for while you were reading you were always together with someone else.”  He started out wanting to live in an author’s universe and then decided he wanted to create his own separate worlds with stories and characters.

Knausgaard offers some insight into the unique phenomenon of My Struggle, his epic.  He imagined the work as a fictional diary with all the intimacy that the genre conveys.  Writing it was a way to move through self-reflection in a step-by-step, realistic novel.  He is not a fan of heavy outlining and preparation.  The words must come to the writer, he argues, and they cannot be forced.  Often he does not know where he is going in a piece, a scary but necessary feeling.  This is the source of the book’s title.  The words and paragraphs arrive out of a cloud of unknowing; he comes to the finished piece inadvertently, making it fresh and new.  “For me all writing is blind and intuitive,” he writes, “it either works or it doesn’t…”

For him, what has not worked, is creative writing programs.  The one in which he participated shattered whatever confidence he had in his own abilities.  It left him “paralyzed by shame and low self-esteem.”  Instead, he focuses on writing the way he reads:  in a total state of self-absorption.  He realizes that he aspires “to a different ideal:  to one day be able to write something so essential and important that it speaks to all people, since it is true or relevant for everyone, irrespective of gender, class, or culture.”  This is the powerful message of this book and lecture, and a necessary mission for all writers and artists around the world.