‘You can’t say this’ is the opposite of literature

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s essays take on the moralistic philistines

IN THE LAND OF THE CYCLOPS by Karl Ove Knausgaard, tr Martin Aitken

320pp, Harvill Secker, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £20, ebook £9.99

Not many writers would see a news story about the face of Jesus appearing in an ultrasound image of a man’s testicles and be inspired to go on an intellectual jaunt that takes in Descartes, Rembrandt, and an epiphany experienced by the author’s 16-year- old self. But Karl Ove Knausgaard is a true writer as well as a famous one, celebrated for his six-novel sequence, beginning with A Death in the Family, that has seen him described as a modern Proust. In this volume, though, he’s more like a modern Roland Barthes, drunk on the cultural meaning he sees everywhere he looks.

An essay that starts with necks begins to interrogate the nature of childhood. (“I have always liked Heraclitus’s image of the god as a child playing somewhat carelessly with pieces on a draughts board” – which certainly might explain the events of 2020.) Knausgaard sees the northern lights, which sets him off on Blaise Pascal’s ideas of infinity. He writes about writing to stave off bad feelings, and ends up ventriloquising the moon. “If the moon is an eye, it is the eye of the dead. What it says to us is you are alone, you too.” There are also more literary excursions that show off his sharp sensitivities as a critic: he reads Kierkegaard in Beirut, explains how Flaubert came to write Madame Bovary, and reviews Michel Houellbecq’s controversial oversial novel Submission, about an n Islamic takeover of France, accurately tely seeing it as a comedy of disillusionllusionment. He exults, too, in his s fellow Norwegian Knut Hamsun, who he says gives us “almost absolute solute presence in the thoughts of a human being” – which is the magical effect of Knaussgaard’s own My Struggle.

Knausgaard has a gift for or stopping the reader in their eir tracks with an unexpected, d, casual profundity. Discusssing the mutability of things, gs, he notes: “We see the changes ges in the clouds, but not the changes in the mountains.” He is concerned throughout, in a book that contains a lot of seeing, , with what we see and what we fail to see. “We do not see the world,” orld,” he reminds us at one point, “we see the light it throws back at us.” Even further removed, it follows, is the world we see via the light beamed into our eyes by a computer or phone screen. That is, implicitly, the message of the centrepiece of the collection, “In the Land of the Cyclops” itself.

The author explains that he lives in a land populated by “cyclopes” (the correct plural of “cyclops”, pronounced “cyclo- pees”), who are permanently angry, hateful, and afraid. “The cyclopes think their view of reality should be shared by everyone, and when they discover this isn’t the case, they become angry.” The author has aroused the ire of the cyclopes by publishing a novel that treats a controversial subject with nuance, and so he is denounced by them. No one defends him from the onslaught, for such are the social dynamics of outrage: “This is how the days pass in the land of the cyclops. The cyclopes get angry and hurl rocks at those who say something they don’t like or don’t understand. This makes other cyclopes afraid, because they know that if they say something the angry cyclopes don’t like or don’t understand, the angry cyclopes will start hurling rocks at them too. Cyclopes are for this reason either angry or silent.”

This, of course, is a perfect emotional portrait of every day on Twitter, with its self-admiring “call-out” culture, its herds of cry-bullies and other exotic fauna spending their days hate-scrolling in the demented hope of finding something else to become publicly furious about, as though denunciation were the highest social good. Yet it was written in response to a very specific event fi five years ago, when the translatio translation into Swedish of Knausgaard’s fi first novel, about a teacher who has sex with a pupil, saw him accused of “literary paedophilia”.

With t this piece, Knausgaard has achieved what he elsewhere says he hopes to do as a novelist, which is to rel relay his experience as honestly a as he can, gambling that it will somehow be universal. Here Here, in one outburst of controlle trolled rage against moralistic phil philistines, he has diagnosed an e entire modern psyche. The cyc cyclopes, he writes, have as the their slogan an idea he identifie fies as the opposite of literatu ture: “You can’t say this./ T This is the literature of the cyclopes.” Against which, true thinkers and writers, such as Knausgaard, are our only hope.

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‘The cyclopes get angry and hurl rocks at those who say something they don’t like or don’t understand’: Karl Ove Knausgaard