Karl Ove Knausgaard's thoughts on literature and writing

Karl Ove Knausgaard says some provocative things when he pauses, in volume 1 of My Struggle (p. 176 in the vintage pb, I think) to discuss the nature of and qualities of great literature. First, he talks about his initial attempts to write the story of his father's life, which, I think, he says he initially conceived of as a piece set in the 1800s. He says the project failed because he chose the wrong "form" and then goes on to say that above all else great literature requires the correct form: a novel can have great style, plots, character, etc. but without the right form the work will fail. This statement strikes most of us as odd: form follows function, right, doesn't precede it? And he's clearly not speaking in the most specific and obvious sense: form as in literary mode (fiction, drama, poem, etc.) or form as choice of genre (historical, mystery, first-person, etc.). I think he means "form" in more of as a choice of overall structure and point of view: in his case, the proper "form" to tell the story of his father's life was to do so through the form of an extended personal memoir rich in detail but proceeding not chronologically but in overlaid patches of time and place. Each novel, that is, has a form or structure, even if an open structure and a convention-bound genre, but the "form" of the novel has to do w/ how the novelist adopts that structure to his or her material and point of view and in that process creates a unique form. OKO notes, further, that a novelist does not create a form, does not create a literary work, but that the act of writing is an act rather of destruction. Here, what I think he means, is that as we transform thoughts, memories, feelings, learnings, experiences into a literature, or more specifically into words, we actually destroy: writing captures the experience, but the words once written are much less than the experience, they are a reduction and a diminution, at least to the writer. Most writers understand this very well: we may draw on memory to create a work of fiction but our experience, or mine at least, is that having done so the experience is diminished or even lost to us: I have the work I've created, on paper let's say, but I can no longer remember the experience so precisely. It's lost to me, destroyed. Further, OKO states that the only writer to truly comprehend this was Rimbaud. Yes, I agree exactly: a writer such as Rimbaud transforms his experience into a literary form and, when finished, has nothing left and abandons writing: his success as a writer has also destroyed him as a writer. Other writers may approach that ideal, but Rimbaud did so in the purist manner, and at a very young age as well, but all writers understand this: as writers transform experience into language, they relinquish part of their consciousness, memories, and soul.