Knausgaard explains

About 100 pp in to book 6 of My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgaard explains his technique and his intentions as a writer. I'm not sure I understand all the nuances of his self-analysis but I get the essence. He is describing his intentions in Book 1, which focuses on his difficult relationship w his nearly abusive father, the unexpected torrents of emotion and sadness he feels on his father's death, and the sorrow and humiliation he feels when cleaning up the squalor in which his father lived and died. He reflects on this when faces w his uncle's threat to bring a lawsuit to prevent publication of the novel. KOK compares his writing on his father's death w a novel by Handke, on his mother's death by suicide. KOK says first he wants to be as accurate as possible - which is in part why his uncle's differing recollection upsets him as it call into question - his own question - his ability to recall accurately. Second he notes that his work differs from handke's in that he wants it to grip us emotionally- not just intellectually. And most important he notes that he almost entirely avoids literary artifact - metaphor, turns of phrase, and so forth. These techniques he says would be artificial and would distract from the topic and the central ideas. (All of this does make us wonder why he didn't call his work a memoir, as well as raises questions about book 6 - perhaps both books 1 and 6 are fictive accounts of his distress and of his thinking about his own work as a writer.) I can follow this far, but he goes further and talks about literature and fascism, w an implication that the artifice and subsequent mesmerizing effect of literary fiction is or at least can be an instrument of fascism. The idea it seems that his novel of truth offers the reader an integral authority of his or her own - that his own writing, so specific to his life experiences, is a open door through which readers can pass through at will and, in followed the course of his life can recognize and better understand their own.


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