The World As It Is

"The duty of literature is to fight fiction. It's to find a way into the world as it is, to open a road we can glimpse for a second or two before a new fiction has covered it again," said Karl Ove Knausgaard in an interview with Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker on November 11, 2018. This week I read his novel Spring, which presents a day in his life as told to his youngest daughter, a baby as he writes. I quite loved it, and especially the epiphany he describes in the evening, when he takes his children to a community bonfire on Walpurgis night.

My husband and I are renovating our house over the winter and have shipped our things, including all of my writing materials, to Los Angeles where we plan to move. I didn't know it would take this long. I've been missing my work and my characters, but I am taking a writing hiatus for the duration. It is a chance to step out of this project I have been working on for a long time and open up my thinking. In walks Knausgaard, among others.

Knausgaard is one of the few writers working in what I call "long form." He has completed six volumes of  his book My Struggle, writing of his life in intimate detail. In a process quite counter to the Norwegian norm, he wasn't interested in taking a giant "selfie." Rather, he thought his work would illuminate the world around him. By all accounts, he has been successful.

I have always liked long form. Once one is committed to a set of characters, why not stick with them. Not that it's necessary, but one learns from sustained attention. They may also surprise you. Tolstoy, in response to those who wanted him to write European novels, said, "War and Peace was what the author wanted and was able to express in the form in which it was expressed."

It is what I would say of my own work. It is not what most people want. It is not an entertainment. It is definitely "long form!" But working closely with Don has shown me the limits of my perception! I tend to fly at 10,000 feet and then swoop down to pick out poetic, representative details. He is much more able to work doggedly on the details in front of him. But I think I can say for both of us, we know there is an objective world ripe for depiction and are passionately committed to the world as it is.