by Jimmy Fazzino

This essay has been peer-reviewed by the boundary 2 editorial collective. 

A Tale of Two Whales

Call Me Burroughs: A Life, Barry Miles’s landmark biography of William S. Burroughs, takes its name from a 1965 spoken word album, the first of many Burroughs would record over the course of his long and prolific life. Miles, then a co-owner of London’s Indica Bookshop, was in charge of the album’s UK distribution. “He made more records than most rock groups,” writes Miles (2013: 629). And later in life this “literary outlaw”[1] would become a rock star of sorts. Returning to the United States in 1974 after a quarter century of living abroad, he followed Allen Ginsberg’s example and began a “new career” of public readings (514). These engagements helped solidify Burroughs’s status as a countercultural icon; they also showcased the performative dimensions of his work. For those familiar with Burroughs’s singular drawl, which became even more pronounced onstage, it is impossible to read him without hearing that voice. It haunts the page. Burroughs is a master ventriloquist, inhabited by many personae, whose voice is best understood as a construction and, at times, a put-on. Establishing a sense of critical distance between author and performance, not easy to do when Burroughs’s performances are so incredibly convincing, is crucial for grasping his project as a writer. In a 1974 interview with David Bowie for Rolling Stone, he indicates the ultimate stakes of this project while gesturing toward a deeper performativity of writing when he says, “Writing is seeing how close you can come to making it happen, that’s the object of all art,” adding, “I think the most important thing in the world is that the artists should take over this planet because they’re the only ones who can make anything happen.”^[2]

It is fitting that Miles should borrow his book’s title from Burroughs, repurposing what was already an adaptation of the most famous opening line in all of US literature. This nod to the détournement of Burroughs’s writing practices, epitomized by the “cut-up” experiments of the 1960s, is also an implicit argument for Burroughs’s place in literary history. When Beat Generation writers—and the question of whether Burroughs was a “Beat” inevitably arises—get talked about at all in relation to literary history, they are usually confined to a distinctly American tradition stemming from nineteenth-century American Renaissance writers like Melville. (Burroughs did share an appreciation for Melville with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and when the latter two were students at Columbia, the English faculty happened to include Raymond Weaver, who had discovered the unpublished manuscript of Billy Budd and helped restore Melville’s reputation.) Beat writing continues mainly to be read and studied “domestically”—that is to say, as a latter-day manifestation of Emersonian individualism, Whitmanian populism and frankness, and Thoreau’s anti-materialist gospel.

Burroughs himself consistently rejected the Beat label, but if public disavowal were enough, then one would have to exclude Kerouac and many others besides. Miles’s biography in no way privileges or gives prominence to the Beat years, treating them as one phase among many in the long, strange trajectory of Burroughs’s life. Miles does trace an evolution in the author’s thoughts regarding the Beat movement, writing that while “previously he had always distanced himself from the Beat Generation,” upon his return to the States, “He now claimed Kerouac as a friend, even though they had been estranged for the last decade of Kerouac’s life. He recognized Ginsberg’s role in shaping his career and helped him to rehabilitate the Beat Generation and give it its rightful place—as Allen saw it—in the pantheon of American letters.” Burroughs had by this time become an “elder statesman” (Miles 2013: 513) of the whole counterculture that the Beats helped launch.

One of Burroughs’s earliest sustained attempts at writing, the 1945 novella And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, he cowrote with Kerouac, and his eventual career as a writer is practically unthinkable without the support of Allen Ginsberg, Burroughs’s first agent and his most vociferous booster. In fact, most of the early work (classics like Junky and Naked Lunch) has its origins in letters to Ginsberg. Ultimately, such questions as “was Burroughs a Beat?” should be a secondary concern, although I happen to think that he can be productively read alongside Kerouac and Ginsberg, Diane di Prima and Amiri Baraka, Gregory Corso, Philip Lamantia, and a host of writers and artists called, however equivocally, “Beat.” In my own work this has meant a more careful reckoning of the transnational sources and contexts of the Beat movement as a whole.

The Beats traveled widely and produced some of their most important works abroad. (Ginsberg: Kaddish, Kerouac: Mexico City Blues, Gregory Corso: Happy Birthday of Death, which includes the epochal poem “Bomb,” Burroughs: Junky, Queer, Naked Lunch, the Nova trilogy, just to name a few). This distance from home is precisely what opens up a space for all sorts of unexpected connections and crossings to arise in their work. And it turns out that Beat writers were profoundly engaged with the world at large, particularly colonial, postcolonial, and third world. Living and writing in places like Morocco, Mali, India, and Latin America (and centers of imperial power like Paris and London) at the great moment of decolonization across the globe, the Beats were more than just tourists. They could be very attuned to the immediate and usually fraught political situations unfolding around them, although it takes a certain kind of worlded reading practice to unearth these subterranean concerns in their work. For Burroughs in particular, it seems that his calling as a writer is predicated on leaving the United States behind. He turns out to be Ahab, not Ishmael, and the quest for his white whale—the “final fix,” as he first calls it in Junky (1953)—leads him all over the world.

Accordingly, some of the best recent scholarship on writers in the Beat orbit has taken a transnationalist approach of one kind or another. This includes Timothy Gray’s (2006) Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim and Rachel Adams’s (2009) Continental Divides. Adams argues that Kerouac is a quintessentially “continental” writer, while Hassan Melehy (2016) figures Kerouac as a Deleuzian nomad of the Québécois diaspora in Kerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory. Todd Tietchen’s (2010) Cubalogues examines the impact that Castro’s Cuba had on Lawrence Ferlinghetti, LeRoi Jones, and Allen Ginsberg, all of whom visited the island in the years just following the revolution, and Brian Edwards’s (2005) Morocco Bound addresses the topic of Cold War orientalism in part by locating Burroughs’s Tangier writing within a persistent set of tropes surrounding Arab North Africa and demonstrating the ways in which Burroughs both exceeds and gets “trapped” by orientalist discourse. A number of related currents in Beat studies have converged in the volume The Transnational Beat Generation, edited by Nancy M. Grace and Jennie Skerl (2012), and collectively they lead to these conclusions: the Beats represent a transnational literary and cultural movement par excellence, and the study of Beat writing can shed new light not just on the transnationalism of US literary history but on the meaning of the transnational itself.

So Miles’s title might turn out to be a red herring altogether. What if the whale in question isn’t the one who destroyed the Pequod but the one who swallowed up the prophet Jonah—the same one George Orwell invokes in his 1940 essay “Inside the Whale”? Chiefly a meditation on the proper relationship between art and politics in an age of totalitarianism, Orwell’s essay singles out for praise the work of American expatriate writer Henry Miller, who stands in sharp contrast to the “committed” writers of the day. In both spirit and style, Miller is a forerunner of the Beat Generation. Fans of Kerouac’s Big Sur (where Miller lived for two decades) are likely to regard their missed dinner date (Kerouac got drunk that night and never made it out of San Francisco) as one of the great lost opportunities of American letters. Along with Howl and Naked Lunch, Miller’s Tropic of Cancer became another milestone in the fight against censorship in the United States when the US Supreme Court declared it not obscene in 1964. Because of their affinities, Miller gets read in similar, and similarly reductive, ways as the Beats, and Orwell’s essay sets the tone for these later readings. It also points beyond them, offering by extension a fresh way to look at Beat writing in general and Burroughs’s work in particular. Finally, Orwell’s whale suggests an idiosyncratic image of transnationalism as worlding and a means of navigating some of the impasses that have grown up around the so-called “transnational turn” in the humanities.

Like Miller, Orwell had lived dead broke in Paris in the early 1930s, but his description of the experience in Down and Out in Paris and London is more akin to the reportage of Orwell’s own Road to Wigan Pier than to anything in Tropic of Cancer. That notwithstanding, he admired Miller’s work and championed it at a time when Miller was known only to a cognoscenti, who, like T. S. Eliot, had gotten hold of a copy printed in France by Jack Kahane’s Obelisk Press. (After the war, his son Maurice Girodias changed the name to Olympia Press and would go on to publish The Naked Lunch, as the 1959 first edition of Burroughs’s novel was called.) In his essay on Miller, Orwell frames his discussion of Miller with the story of their first meeting. It was 1936, and Orwell was on his way to Spain to serve the Republican cause, which Miller bluntly told him was “the act of an idiot.” Orwell recounts, “He could understand anyone going there from purely selfish motives, out of curiosity, for instance, but to mix oneself up in such things from a sense obligation was sheer stupidity” (2009: 129-30).

After Spain, where Orwell was branded a Trotskyite and a fascist and forced to flee, he comes to agree, or at least sympathize, with Miller’s basic position. Moreover, he concludes that a literature of utter passivity and complete acceptance is far preferable, and more honest, than high-minded and resolutely political writing from the likes of Auden and Spender. In a world of such turmoil and flux, any art attaching itself to a cause, or worse yet a party, is doomed to failure. To capture the full extent of Miller’s detachment, Orwell borrows an image that Miller himself once used to describe good friend Anaïs Nin: he compares her “to Jonah in the whale’s belly.” Orwell writes:

And however it may be with Anaïs Nin, there is no question that Miller himself is inside the whale. All his best and most characteristic passages are written from the angle of Jonah, a willing Jonah. Not that he is especially introverted—quite the contrary. In his case the whale happens to be transparent. Only he feels no impulse to alter or control the process that he is undergoing. He has performed the essential Jonah act of allowing himself to be swallowed, remaining passive, accepting.

“Short of death,” Orwell calls this “the final, unsurpassable stage of irresponsibility” (132), but the implication is that sometimes irresponsibility is more principled than its opposite. The complexity of Orwell’s figuration lies in the dialectical twist whereby Miller is trapped in the belly of the whale, but the whale is transparent. I want to formulate things slightly differently and instead say that he is inside the whale, but the whale happens to contain the entire world. Read against the grain of its original intent, the whale becomes an image not of separation but of worlded connectedness. It points to an alternative, monist strain of worlded thought that appears everywhere in Beat writing and runs counter to the Beats’ supposed isolationism and indifference to the wider world.

Ahab’s white whale as blank screen or “empty cipher” is akin to what some critics fear has become the transcendent sameness of the transnational. The prominent Americanist Donald Pease speaks for them when he remarks that in its rise to become a dominant paradigm transnationalism writ large has “exercised a monopoly of assimilative power that has enabled it to subsume and replace competing spatial and temporal orientations—including multicultural American studies, borderlands critique, and postcolonial American studies—within an encompassing geopolitics of knowledge” (2011: 1). Worse yet, this shift toward the “unmarked” space of the transnational mirrors and recapitulates the same global flows of capital and corporate power that transnationalist critics want to interrogate (10).[3] Transnationalism as worlding, however, with its counter-hegemonic animus, its emphasis on materiality, on local histories and lived experience, and its attention to the always uneven encounter between the local and the global, is particularly well-suited to retain the lessons of older critical formations, especially postcolonial theory. With roots in Spivak’s planetarity and Said’s global-materialist outlook, worlding privileges precisely those “peripheralized geographies and diasporic populations” that, for Pease, have been marked and marginalized by the transnational (10).

Miller’s whale is more like worlding’s messy immanence—its belly a subterranean space that supplies what Ginsberg has called “the bottom-up vision of society” (in Raskin 2004: xiv), or what cultural historian David Pike characterizes as “the view from below” (2005: 8-12). The world as such is an oppositional term that upholds the local and the contingent in the face of the deracinating transcendence of global space. At its core, worlding entails a dialectic of near and far; it adopts the in-between-ness of James Clifford’s “translocal” sense of cultural adaptation (see in particular 1997) and Rob Wilson’s global/local (Wilson and Dissanayake 1996; Wilson 2000). Lawrence Buell (2007) associates these shifting spatial scales with the planetary “ecoglobalism” of environmental writers and activists, for the world/planet is fundamentally an ecological vision of a world-organism: earth as ecos (“home”) and lived space. Via the Beat ecopoetics of Gary Snyder, the etymology of “eco-” as oikos (house, family) is made worldly and worlded in Earth House Hold, Snyder’s 1969 collection of “Technical Notes and Queries to Fellow Dharma Revolutionaries.” That is to say, the lived, material experience of the near-at-hand (one’s “household”) is, in Snyder’s conception, the necessary ground upon which one might imagine communal ties that run much deeper than the nation (oikos as earth/planet). The world, then, becomes a necessary “third term,” as Christopher Connery has labeled it (2007: 3), preserving the local within the global as it confronts the relentless logic of East-West, colonialism-nationalism, communist-capitalist, self-other.

Along with Spivak and Said, Immanuel Wallerstein and his pathbreaking “world-systems analysis” are part of a recognizable and increasingly consolidated canon of worlded thought. I want to hold on to their classic formulations of the worlded world even as I open up to a more expansive genealogy that comprises poetry, philosophy, and the sciences in addition to literary and cultural theory and criticism. Wallerstein makes a crucial distinction when defining “world-system.” He writes that “a world-system not is the system of the world, but a system that is a world and that can be, most often had been, located in an area less than the entire globe” (2004: 98). The world indicated by Wallerstein’s world-system is neither identical to nor coterminous with the world as empirical object (Wallerstein uses “globe” to mean the latter). It is thus a non-totalizing totality, a totality in the Marxian sense: that is to say, a critical concept that functions descriptively but also works to denaturalize what it describes. Just as our “species-being” is determined by, yet exceeds, the “totality of social relations” under the prevailing economic system. As Lukács points out, for Marx the totality itself is dialectical; it is precisely the universality of capitalism that sets the stage for the universal liberation of proletarian revolution. (Transferring things from base to superstructure, Peter Bürger will make an analogous argument when he writes that it is only after the Aestheticists declare the supremacy of “art for art’s sake” that avant-garde movements like Dada can come along and attempt to negate any distinction between art and life.) Wallerstein’s differentiation between a conceptual world and an empirical globe points to the dual nature of world as both physical and figural, topological and tropological. And the space opened up by this distinction is what makes the worlded imaginary possible.

The Marxian world-system as non-totalizing totality means that civilization progresses in dialectical fashion from one world to the next (e.g., from the feudal world to the capitalist world). But what if multiple worlds, an infinite number of worlds, can exist simultaneously? This is the conclusion to draw from the work of biologist and proto-posthumanist Jakob von Uexküll, whose concept of Umwelt (environment, life-world) posits that each species’s sensorium is fundamentally unique and constitutes a world unto itself. In Uexküll’s most enduring work, A Foray into the Worlds (Umwelten) of Animals and Humans (1934), he asks readers to take an imaginary stroll with him:

We begin such a stroll on a sunny day before a flowering meadow in which insects buzz and butterflies flutter, and we make a bubble around each of the animals living in the meadow. The bubble represents each animal’s environment and contains all the features accessible to the subject. As soon as we enter into one such bubble, the previous surroundings of the subject are completely reconfigured. Many qualities of the colorful meadow vanish completely, others lose their coherence with one another, and new connections are created. A new world arises in each bubble. (2010: 43 [emphasis added])

The author will emphasize the salutary estrangement involved in such a pursuit when he writes, “Only when we can vividly imagine this fact [of the “bubbles”] will we recognize in our own world the bubble that encloses each and every one of us on all sides” (70). Uexküll’s perspective, which radically decenters human consciousness and imagines a dense, rhizomic web of inputs and interactions among all life forms, is picked up by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus and has come back to the fore in the field of animal studies and among today’s theorists of a posthuman biopolitics.

This talk of worlds and bubbles is strangely reminiscent of Leibniz even, whose rationalist abstractions seem miles away from Uexküll’s empiricist phenomenology. Yet Leibniz’s “monad” is but the metaphysical counterpart to Uexküll’s model of ecological interdependence. On the surface, the self-sufficient monad—a substance without windows or doors, as Leibniz puts it—seems to be an image of extreme isolation, but the exact opposite is true. His “monadology” only works because we live in a universe where everything is connected to everything else and everything affects everything else; transculturally speaking, it is a version of Indra’s net. The philosopher writes, “This interconnection or accommodation of all created things to each other, and each to all the others, brings it about that each simple substance [i.e., monad] has relations that express all the others, and consequently, that each simple substance is a perpetual, living mirror of the universe” (1989: 220). Leibniz also plays on the tension between singularity and multiplicity inherent in the monad, and like Uexküll he is interested in perspective, writing, “Just as the same city viewed from different directions appears entirely different and, as it were, multiplied perspectively, in just the same way it happens that, because of the infinite multitude of simple substances, there are, as it were, just as many different universes, which are, nevertheless, only perspectives on a single one, corresponding to the different points of view of each monad” (221).

In “Inside the Whale,” Orwell ponders the idea of “books that ‘create a world of their own,’ as the saying goes”—books that, like Tropic of Cancer, “open up a new world not by revealing what is strange, but by revealing what is familiar” (2009: 11). Burroughs’s Junky presents itself as exposé of the junk world (where there are not only junky habits and junky lingo but junk time and “junk cells” with their own “junk metabolism”). Ginsberg plays up this junk world in an early preface he wrote for the novel, which he promises will reveal a “vast underground life” and a “world of horrors.” The final pages of Junky prepare readers for the yagé world, which will soon become the world of Interzone in Naked Lunch, and so on. These are all instantiations of a “world-horizon come near” that Rob Wilson writes about in The Worlding Project (2007: 212). The zero degree formulation of the world-horizon in Beat writing is Dean Moriarty’s ecstatic “It’s the world! My God! It’s the world!” near the end of Kerouac’s On the Road, uttered after Sal and Dean cross the Mexican border. Such sweeping gestures always run the risk of erasing difference in the name of an essential oneness across time and space, but their sublime expansiveness is what also leads Beat writers to a more grounded or “situated” understanding of their world-historical moment of decolonization and Cold War geopolitics. This is especially true for Burroughs, whose worlded imaginary gives rise to complex textual geographies.

Worlding Burroughs

Barry Miles has been a prolific chronicler of the counterculture. I first encountered his work when I read The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso in Paris, 1957–1963 (2000). His still authoritative account of the Beats in Paris, much of which gets reprised in the “City of Light” section of Call Me Burroughs, has proven indispensable to understanding those years of fertile experiment at 9 rue Gît-le-Coeur, especially Burroughs’s intense collaboration with painter and writer Brion Gysin, whom he had met in Tangier but didn’t really connect with until Paris. Despite the earlier book’s strengths, in Beat Hotel Miles makes a key claim that seems to me to encapsulate the most reductive tendencies of so much Beat scholarship. Describing Burroughs’s experience of Paris and his refusal to humor Ginsberg by joining him on trips to museums and sightseeing excursions, Miles writes that “his was more a landscape of ideas, and in many ways he could have been living anywhere” (2000: 160). A theme running through Beat Hotel figures Paris as a missed opportunity for Burroughs and the other Beat writers living there. It turns out, for example, that Burroughs was oblivious to the presence of the Lettrist/Situationist group who also made the Latin Quarter their base of operations and were engaging in similarly provocative textual experiments. The parallel evolution of the cut-up method alongside the Situationist practice of détournement is really quite remarkable, evidence that the Beats were soaking up similar energies and looking to common ancestors in Dada and Surrealism.

The “landscape of ideas” thesis becomes more problematic when applied to Burroughs’s oeuvre. It means that a prominent setting like the Interzone of Naked Lunch gets read as a nightmarish abstraction or drug-induced hallucination rather than the satirical depiction of Tangier in the years immediately preceding and following Moroccan independence that it is. Since Miles’s Beat Hotel was first published, scholarship on Burroughs has made a spatial turn mirroring the “transnational turn” in literary and cultural studies more broadly. Brian Edwards, Oliver Harris, Allen Hibbard, and others have recently sought to restore a sense of place to the study of Burroughs’s work. These developments are echoed in the structure of Call Me Burroughs, which suggests a spatial turn in Miles’s thinking as well. His biography is organized chiefly by locale, with discrete sections on St. Louis (where Burroughs was born and raised), Mexico, New York, Tangier, London, and Lawrence, Kansas (where he lived for sixteen years before his death there in 1997), making Call Me Burroughs an itinerary as much as a chronology of the author’s life and work.

Call Me Burroughs is not the first biography of the author that Miles has written. That would be William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible, a slimmer volume published in 1992 that serves as a blueprint for the later book. (Miles inherited the project to write a follow-up from Burroughs’s longtime agent and partner James Grauerholz, who had compiled a vast archive but could not complete the undertaking.) The moniker refers to the persona Burroughs acquired while strung out on opiates in Tangier. In Call Me Burroughs, Miles writes:

He was famously known as el hombre invisible to the Spanish boys in Tangier; this came from a conscious effort on his part to blend in so well that people would not see him, as well as the fact that, in his junk phase, he was gray and spectral-looking. … Bill practiced getting from the Villa Muniria to the place de France without being seen. He walked down the street, his eyes swiveling, checking everybody out. … Sometimes he could get through a whole line of guides without anyone seeing him, which in Tangier is a very good test. (2013: 296)

The invisible Burroughs is unattached, non-aligned, and where Miles might have used the image to show how it gives the author’s work from and about Tangier a greater critical purchase, which it certainly does, Miles uses it instead to paper over the complexities of Burroughs’s attitude toward the momentous events that were unfolding around him. It is odd that in a book that assumes a kind of politics on Burroughs’s part—tied to a critique of power and language (its “viral” carrier) and a sincere belief in the potential of transgressive writing practices like the cut-up method “to do something about it” (335)—mostly sidesteps the much-debated question of the author’s “Moroccan politics.” In the pages just preceding the description of Burroughs cited above, Miles quotes a long passage from Naked Lunch dealing with the rise of nationalism in Morocco; he also quotes from the complicated and richly performative “Jihad Jitters” letter to Ginsberg (dated October 29, 1956, also the date of Tangier’s integration into Morocco—i.e., the end of the International Zone). But rather than follow this up with an acknowledgement of the difficult issues being raised in these texts, Miles cuts to el hombre invisible and thus performs a disappearing act of his own.

Readers of Naked Lunch are vexed by what seems like the author’s inability or unwillingness to confront the realities of Moroccan independence and the end of the International Zone. Those who read Naked Lunch through the earlier Yage Letters, as the palimpsestic nature of both texts demands, may instead see a complex engagement with colonial legacies in the Maghreb and around the world. Initially conceived as “Naked Lunch, Book III: In Search of Yage” (Junky and Queer were books I and II), Burroughs’s epistolary account details his 1953 trek through the upper Amazon in search of the mythical hallucinogen ayahuasca, or yagé.[4] He arrived in Bogotá in the midst of Colombia’s long-simmering civil war, and Yage Letters is full of barely concealed political content. The centerpiece of Yage is Burroughs’s expansive, even utopian, ayahuasca vision of a great Composite City “where all human potentials are spread out in a vast silent market” (2006: 50). Language and imagery from the Composite City sequence will reappear throughout his later works, notably in Naked Lunch, where the passage is reproduced nearly verbatim; the Composite City becomes the Interzone while still retaining its earlier referents and resonances from Yage. South America becomes North Africa, and similar examples proliferate across an oeuvre that, as Burroughs once told an interviewer, is “all one book” (1989: 86). Recognizing these resonances and mapping the composite geographies and composite texts they produce just might be the key to answering some persistently thorny questions that surround Burroughs’s work.

Burroughs’s Moroccan politics are equivocal, to be sure, but in Yage Letters he displays no such ambiguity. Through Lee, his epistolary alter ego, Burroughs repeatedly expresses his solidarity with the Liberals against the Conservatives, whom he aligns with the “dead weight of Spain” (2006: 10). The predation described throughout Yage is characteristically, for Burroughs, set in sexual terms but represents world-historical forces, which appear as the not-so-hidden underbelly of Wallerstein’s world-system, or a sinister variation on Wai Chee Dimock’s “deep time.” After his first, failed trek into Colombia’s Putumayo region, Burroughs recounts:

On my way back to Bogota with nothing accomplished. I have been conned by medicine men (the most inveterate drunk, liar and loafer in the village is invariably the medicine man), incarcerated by the law, rolled by a local hustler (I thought I was getting that innocent backwoods ass, but the kid had been to bed with six American oil men, a Swedish Botanist, a Dutch Ethnographer, a Capuchin father known locally as The Mother Superior, a Bolivian Trotskyite on the lam, and jointly fucked by the Cocoa Commission and Point Four). Finally I was prostrated by malaria. (16)

Not only have the power relations between predator and prey been inverted in Burroughs’s getting ripped off by the “local hustler,” but in one long parenthetical aside he lays bare the entire colonial and postcolonial history of oppression and exploitation in the Americas: economic, political, religious, and otherwise. And by including the “Swedish Botanist” and “Dutch Ethnographer” in his litany, he even foregrounds the notion of scientific knowledge as an epistemological violence that his own narrative is attempting to circumvent. It should come as no surprise that he recasts this history in terms of sexual violation. Both as an individual—“I thought I was getting that sweet backwoods ass”—and as an American citizen, Burroughs, through the persona (Lee) that emerges in his narration of Yage, writes himself into this chronicle of domination and abuse. The force of Burroughs’s critique derives in equal measure from his complicity and from the critical distance provided by his status as an “exile.”

At one point in the narrative, prevented from leaving the town of Puerto Asís while his tourist card is set in order, Lee muses, “If I was an active Liberal what could I do … aside from taking the place over at gun point? (2006: 22-23), implying that he is one in spirit or sympathy and that it wouldn’t take much to force him over the line. Later on in Yage Burroughs writes, “What we need is a new Bolivar who will really get the job done” (38). Burroughs’s statement is echoed in a (real) letter written to Ginsberg from South America: “Wouldn’t surprise me if I ended up with the Liberal guerillas” (1994: 159) which also anticipates his “Jihad Jitters” routine. Reflecting on the possibility of rioting and revolution in the streets of Tangier in a letter to Ginsberg dated October 29, 1956, Burroughs writes, “If they stage a jihad I’m gonna wrap myself in a dirty sheet and rush out to do some jihading of my own” (339).^[5] He tells him earlier in the letter, “The possibility of an all-out riot is like a tonic, like ozone in the air. … I have no nostalgia for the old days in Morocco, which I never saw. Right now is for me” (337), and in a subsequent dispatch meant to allay Kerouac’s fears about his upcoming trip to Morocco, he presses, “I will say it again and say it slow: TANGER IS AS SAFE AS ANY TOWN I EVER LIVE IN. … ARABS ARE NOT VIOLENT. … Riots are the accumulated, just resentment of a people subjected to outrageous brutalities by the French cops used to strew blood and teeth over a city block in the Southern Zone” (349). At moments like these Burroughs is clearly sympathetic to the Moroccans’ anticolonial aspirations and their right to self-determination, but he can also be cynical and mocking. In Naked Lunch he portrays imagined riots as grotesque orgies of violence, yet even here Burroughs’s kaleidoscope of obscene violence is meant, as it was for Beat hero Antonin Artaud, to shock his audience out of its moral complacency and to confront the West with its original sin of imperialism.

Thinking transnationally means thinking about and beyond borders of all kinds, and Burroughs’s work keeps transgression front and center. Transnationalism as worlding is interested in transgressive acts; at the same time, it seeks to be transgressive: counterhegemonic, reading against the grain, writing against Empire and globalization transcendent. These last are tricky business, as Pease and others have noted, and a worlded critique needs to account for its own entanglements. Where transgression is concerned, one must ask who has the privilege, authority, and power to transgress—who gets denied passage, is the crossing undertaken willingly, and to what ends? Derrida claims in Rogues that transgression and sovereignty are always linked, and Beat writers, primarily though by no means exclusively white and male and carrying US passports, were at liberty to move about in the world in a way that most others are not. But it turns out that by and large the Beats were hip to these dynamics as well, making strategic use of their privilege in order to thematize cultural difference and comment incisively on Cold War geopolitics.

The performance of transgression is a productive way to read Burroughs because for him crossing physical borders always seems to precipitate other kinds of breakthroughs. In particular, Burroughs’s “travel writing” throws into sharp relief legacies of western imperialism and the United States’ expanding postwar footprint abroad: every travelogue is also about home. Travel writing in the West came into its own during the age of discovery and is closely linked to colonialism and the modern world-system.[6] In Yage Letters, the author describes being mistaken for “a representative of the Texas Oil Company traveling incognito” and thus “treated like visiting royalty.” He explains that the “Texas Oil Company surveyed the area a few years ago, found no oil and pulled out. But everyone in the Putumayo believes the Texas Company will return. Like the second coming of Christ” (2006: 24). What reads as a statement mocking the childlike faith of the locals is in fact directed against a long history of exploitation and oppression, an unbroken chain from the Spanish missionaries to United Fruit. And while he doesn’t seem to mind the benefits his mistaken identity afford him—he fails to correct anyone, after all—he uses these instances of misprision to launch a critique of US military and economic policy in Latin America.

In Burroughs’s writing, the author’s own privilege is consistently figured in the recurring type of the “ugly American,” a stock character who first appears in the routines of Queer and manifests a particularly virulent form in Naked Lunch with the characters Clem and Jody. But even where they appear identical with the author himself, the ugly American remains a textual construction on Burroughs’s part. As Oliver Harris argues, Burroughs is playing the ugly American. It may come off all too naturally, but it is a performance nonetheless. In Call Me Burroughs Miles writes about Burroughs’s long-held belief that he was inhabited by what he called the “ugly spirit,” a malevolent force that pursued him like a ghost. Miles’s biography opens, in fact, with a sweat lodge ceremony performed late in Burroughs’s life to try to rid him of the spirit once and for all. Burroughs felt that his was an especially difficult case, as Miles recounts:

Burroughs had warned the shaman of the challenge before the ceremony: He “had to face the whole of American capitalism, Rockefeller, the CIA … all of those, particularly Hearst.” Afterward he told Ginsberg, “It’s very much related to the American Tycoon. To William Randolph Hearst, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, that whole stratum of American acquisitive evil. Monopolistic, acquisitive evil. Ugly evil. The ugly American. The ugly American at his ugly worst. That’s exactly what it is.” (2013: 2)

The ugly spirit corresponds on a psychic level to an ugly nation rapaciously at work in the world. “Particularly Hearst” indicates a theme Burroughs often sounds (Henry Luce a common variation): a news monopoly made all the more insidious by his conviction that to control information is to shape reality. The force of Burroughs’s critique derives from the fact that he doesn’t hesitate to implicate himself along the way. A scion of the Burroughs family (his grandfather invented the adding machine), his monthly allowance meant that he was at liberty to pursue writing as a career. Burroughs’s maternal uncle Ivy Lee is “considered to be the founder of public relations” and counted John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Joseph Goebbels among his clients and advisees (12-13). Coming to terms with these personal histories meant grappling with the cause and effect of American power in an American century.

The most profound forms of transgression in Burroughs are textual and have to do with the denaturing of form and genre. Yage Letters is exemplary here as well: although its epistolary presentation promises a direct, unvarnished account of the author’s ordeal in the Amazon, those reading Yage for vicarious drug kicks are likely to be disappointed. The book is about much more, and the “letters” mask a fiction. Large portions of the text did originate in real missives sent to Allen Ginsberg, as did much of Burroughs’s early work—he once notably told Ginsberg, referring to Naked Lunch, “Maybe the real novel is letters to you” (1994: 217)—but by the time Yage is finally published by City Lights in 1963, the text has been thoroughly cut-up and rearranged and redacted. Like so much of the author’s corpus, it has also been marked by a good deal of contingency. Burroughs settled on the epistolary after trying out other forms and genres. One early draft resembled an ethnographic report, and the “final” version of Yage still bears the traces of ethnography, which he lampoons to great effect.

Burroughs had studied anthropology as a graduate student at Harvard in the 1930s and later took classes in Mesoamerican archaeology at Mexico City College. While in South America he even accompanied renowned Harvard ethnobotanist Richard Schultes on one of his Amazon expeditions. It was with Schultes that Burroughs records his first experience taking yagé, and an early, non-epistolary draft of the Yage manuscript looks very much like ethnography. Through this lens, Junky begins to read like ethnography as well (from a participant observer, no less), this one dealing with the heroin subcultures of New York and New Orleans. And readers will recognize something of the anthropological in Burroughs’s later depictions of Interzone, in “The Mayan Caper” episode from The Soft Machine (1966) and in his catalog of The Cities of the Red Night in that later novel.

Like Junky, whose prologue declares, “There is no key, no secret someone else has that he can give you,” Yage reveals and withholds simultaneously; Burroughs “scientific” account of ayahuasca and the rituals surrounding it may be as much a fiction as the letters themselves. Its opening lines suggest as much: Lee begins, “I stopped off here [Panamá] to have my piles out. Wouldn’t do to go back among the Indians with piles I figured” (2006, 3). With this frank admission, suggests Harris, the narrator immediately relinquishes any claim to objective distance or impartiality in what follows (2006a: xxv). At a deeper level, what this too-personal tale calls into question is the entire notion of scientific objectivity and transparent ethnographic knowledge. With Yage Burroughs anticipates the breakthroughs of poststructuralist anthropology by some years, whose practitioners (e.g., James Clifford, Clifford Geertz) would seek to account for the power differential inherent in the relationship between observer and subject, questioning the ideological assumptions that shape all knowledge of the Other.[7]

For many, “Beat politics” means Allen Ginsberg chanting Hare Krishna at a Vietnam War demonstration. In this context Burroughs’s ethos appears as a non-politics of absolute rejection or disciplined disavowal—the “Absolute ZERO” ([1960] 2001: 208) of the junky that Deleuze fixates on. But, as Deleuze knows, the greatest so-called nihilists (Dostoevsky, Nietzsche come to mind) are the most profoundly affirmative, and Burroughs does not share Ahab’s will to death. His affirmation lies in the performative creation of transgressive communities like the whole “wild boys” mythology of the late 1960s and the queer utopias imagined in Cities of the Red Night (1981). In Miles’s biography, Burroughs’s project extends well beyond the written word and emerges as a transformational politics of the everyday. His remark to Bowie that “the artists should take over this planet because they’re the only ones who can make anything happen” is a version of Bürger’s “integration of art into the praxis of life”—the avant-garde attempt to redefine both art and politics simultaneously.

At the heart of Burroughs’s work is a constant vigilance against “Control” in all its aspects. Significantly, these are often figured by Burroughs as a kind of colonization, whether it be the parasite of language (his famous “word virus”), possession by the “ugly spirit,” or a more historically situated encounter. Cities of the Red Night, a beautiful and important book that Burroughs worked on through much of the 1970s, tells the story a loose confederation of sixteenth-century outlaws bent on toppling Spanish and British rule in the Americas. The novel’s layered plot unfolds in the present as well, where a shadowy organization plots world domination from its South American headquarters, and I am again reminded of Artaud, who envisioned a first production of the Theatre of Cruelty to be called The Conquest of Mexico and justified it by writing, “Ce sujet a été choisi … à cause de son actualité” (This subject has been chosen … because it is of the present moment” ([1938] 1964: 196). Poised upon the world-historical moment of decolonization—the constant “present” of Burroughs’s writing—Burroughs is perfectly positioned to launch a postcolonial critique of Empire’s new hegemony.

Miles’s biography came at a propitious moment in Burroughs and Beat studies. In 2014 Burroughs’s centennial year was marked with museum and gallery exhibitions, readings, performances, film screenings, and several major conferences, all proof of his continued relevance not just in the literary world but also among visual and performance artists, musicians, filmmakers, and troublemakers of all kinds. For scholars of Burroughs’s work, the past decade has seen a flowering of historically minded, materially grounded, and theoretically capacious criticism. This has in large measure been made possible by the assiduous research and recovery work of editors, archivists, and critics including Miles, James Grauerholz, Bill Morgan, and especially Oliver Harris, whose recent string of “redux” editions is making legible the labyrinthine textual histories of so much of what Burroughs wrote. Amid these developments, and despite some missed opportunities, Call Me Burroughs will deservedly become the standard reference on the author’s life for scholars and fans alike. Its greatest contribution lies in uncovering the experiences and above all the places that animated a body of work as significant as that of anyone writing in the latter half of the twentieth century.

*          *          *          *          *

Notes

[1] The epithet refers to Ted Morgan’s early biography, Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs, first published in 1988.

[2] Bowie, who based his Ziggy Stardust aesthetic in part on Burroughs’s 1969 novel The Wild Boys, is among the many musicians inspired by Burroughs.

[3] Whether one agrees with Pease’s basic contention—and more is at stake, after all, than disciplinary boundaries—probably has something to do with whether one agrees with Hardt and Negri that globalization and Empire’s new order are in fact liberatory because diffuse power engenders proliferating sites and modes of resistance while the totalizing pressure of capital’s global reach brings us that much closer to universal emancipation.

[4] “Naked Lunch, Book III” is the title Burroughs gave when he published the “Composite City” letter in Black Mountain Review in 1953. See Oliver Harris 2006b for a complete textual history.

[5] October 29, 1956, also happened to be the date of Tangier’s official reintegration into a newly independent Morocco and the end of the International Zone.

[6] It was during the Enlightenment that Denis Diderot and the philosophes began to see the critical potential of the travelogue: Diderot’s Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1772) purports to “supplement” the just-published Voyage autour du monde by Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, the first Frenchman to circumnavigate the globe.

[7] James Clifford has written about “ethnographic surrealism,” particularly in relation to Georges Bataille and the Documents group.

References

Adams, Rachael. 2009. Continental Divides: Remapping the Cultures of North America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Artaud, Antonin. (1938) 1964. Le théâtre et son double. Paris: Gallimard.

Buell, Lawrence. 2007. “Ecoglobalist Affects: The Emergence of US Environmental Imagination on a Planetary Scale.” In Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature, edited by Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell, 227-48. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Burroughs, William. (1960) 2001. “Postscript … Wouldn’t You?” In Naked Lunch: The Restored Text, edited by James Grauerholz and Barry Miles, 207-10. New York: Grove.

——. 1994. Letters, Vol. 1: 1945-1959. Edited by Oliver Harris. New York: Penguin.

——. 1989. Conversations with William S. Burroughs. Edited by Allen Hibbard. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Burroughs, William, and David Bowie. 1974. “Beat Godfather Meets Glitter Mainman.” Interview by Craig Copetas, Rolling Stone, February 28. www.rollingstone.com/music/news/beat-godfather-meets-glitter-mainman-19740228.

Burroughs, William, and Allen Ginsberg. 2006. The Yage Letters Redux. Edited by Oliver Harris.

Clifford, James. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Connery, Christopher L. 2007. “Worlded Pedagogy in Santa Cruz.” Introduction to The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization, edited by Rob Wilson and Christopher L. Connery, 1-11. Santa Cruz, CA: New Pacific.

Edwards, Brian. 2005. Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Grace, Nancy M., and Jennie Skerl, eds. 2012. The Transnational Beat Generation. New York: Palgrave.

Gray, Timothy. 2006. Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim: Creating Countercultural Community. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

Harris, Oliver. 2006a. Introduction to Burroughs and Ginsberg, Yage Letters, ix-lii.

——. 2006b. “Not Burroughs’ Final Fix: Materializing The Yage Letters,” Postmodern Culture 16, no. 2. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v016/16.2harris.html.

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. 1989. “The Principles of Philosophy, or, the Monadology.” In Philosophical Essays, translated by Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber, 213-25. Indianapolis: Hackett.

Melehy, Hassan. 2016. Kerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory. London: Bloomsbury.

Miles, Barry. 2000. The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso in Paris, 1957-1963. New York: Grove.

——. 2013. Call Me Burroughs. New York: Twelve.

Orwell, George. 2009. All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays. Boston: Mariner.

Pease, Donald E. 2011. “Introduction: Re-mapping the Transnational Turn.” In Re-framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies, edited by Winfred Fluck, Donald E. Pease, and John Carlos Rowe, 1-47. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press.

Pike, David. 2005. Subterranean Cities: The World Beneath Paris and London, 1800-1945. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Raskin, Jonah. 2004. American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Snyder, Gary. 1969. Earth House Hold: Technical Notes and Queries to Fellow Dharma Revolutionaries. New York: New Directions.

Tietchen, Todd. 2010. The Cubalogues: Beat Writers in Revolutionary Havana. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

Uexküll, Jakob von. 2010. A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans. Translated by Joseph D. O’Neil. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2004. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Wilson, Rob. 2000. Reimagining the American Pacific, from South Pacific to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

——. 2007. “Afterword: Worlding as Future Tactic.” In The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization, edited by Rob Wilson and Christopher L. Connery, 209-23. Santa Cruz, CA: New Pacific.

Wilson, Rob, and Wimal Dissanayake, eds. 1996. Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Edward Mendelson, Early Auden, Later Auden: A Critical Biography (Princeton UP, 2017)

Reviewed by Daniel T. O’Hara

This essay has been peer-reviewed by the boundary 2 editorial collective. 

Edward Mendelson’s Early Auden, Later Auden: A Critical Biography combines with minor revisions, as its author notes in the new preface, the two earlier separate volumes published eighteen years apart in 1981 and 1999, respectively. Of specific revisions, the most important is the addition of a postscript about Auden’s “secret life.” This does not consist of sensational or lurid adventures, but of Auden’s selfless, quiet giving and other acts of unannounced and otherwise unremembered charity. However, although updating scholarship where needed, including references to a recently discovered journal (2004) from August-November 1939 and eliminating as much repetition as possible, this one volume edition contains the earlier ones pretty much as they were. This includes introductions overviewing each volume to come, hefty numbered parts delineating and subdividing periods into chapters in Auden’s life and career of his English and then American affiliations. Auden spent his summers after World War II first in Ischia, an island off the coast of Naples, and then beginning in 1958 in Kirchstetten, a village that is forty kilometers from Vienna. He would winter usually in New York City, unless he was teaching around the USA at different universities and colleges for a term or two (one up to three years), from the University of Michigan to Swarthmore College. For five years in the second half of the 1950s he was the Professor of Poetry at Oxford, for three-week periods in the fall semesters. Oxford made allowances for Auden’s needing to be in New York to make money with his many and diverse prose projects of reviews, articles, prefaces, essays, editorial and anthology work. Mendelson’s separate biographies ended with epilogues wrapping up each of the original installments, and as the reader notes, they remain in place here. This all makes for a monumental, not to say magisterial 895-page tome by the literary executor of the Auden estate.

Of Mendelson’s many remarkable accomplishments, it is the shift he makes in how we view and value the divide in the career between early English and later American Auden that stands out. When in 1981 the first volume appeared, it was the early English modernist Auden who was still loudly celebrated, with the later American Auden as progressively never quite measuring up, whether seen as a Christian existentialist humanist or postmodernist poet. To be sure, there were recognized rare virtuoso exceptions in the later work, such as a handful of lyrics (“The Shield of Achilles” [1955] being one famous instance) and perhaps Caliban’s final prose poetry address to the audience in “The Sea and the Mirror” (1944), done in the late most baroque style of Henry James’ The Golden Bowl and The American Scene. But also, then the later Auden was seen as progressively becoming lost both in the quixotic quest for creating a truly modern epic poem (his “For the Time Being” and “the Age of Anxiety” being viewed at that time as being wholly abstract and prolix failures); and in the la-la-land of Californian or more generally American popular culture, with all those lax poetic lines in the loose verse of the final five years of his life so filled with obviously narcissistic self-references. Mendelson, ever the smart partisan of the later Auden, has now won the battle, and reading this one-volume compilation makes the reader feel its rightness even more. Just as he had demonstrated in Early Auden (1981) that the English modernist “masterpieces,” however delightful or provocative at the time, such as “The Watershed” (as later named by Auden), were in fact more gamesmanship and puzzles than they needed to be, conflating Conradian spies and “secret sharers” with cruising gay lovers in Laura Riding/Thomas Hardy-like lines and enjambments; so, too, he revealed in Later Auden (1999) that the American Auden contained not only some of his greatest poetry, in original innovations in traditional styles of the canzone, the sestina, and the Italian sonnet, but simply some of the greatest poetry created in the twentieth-century, concerned like no other poets in the West were at the time with the worldly history and possible global future of the city, of citizenship, and of civilization itself.  This is not to say that Mendelson presents his critical perspective polemically, but in fact, he presents it as modulating, in response to the process of reading the poems themselves, so that he can say in his new Preface honestly: “If I were to rewrite the two books today, they would be even more admiring of their subject than they already are” ( ix).

To see his achievement on behalf of the later “American” Auden, we must turn to “The Murderous Birth,” Chapter VIII in Part One “Vision and After” of the “Later Auden,” which is largely an elaborate original reading of “The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare’s The Tempest” (1944). I realize some of the irony using the nationalizing descriptors, of course, but as I hope to show, in tweaking a bit Mendelson’s reading of Caliban as Jamesian, the American label holds even truer than it at first appears.

The kernel of Mendelson’s reading arises amid summarizing what Auden did for himself in writing “The Sea and the Mirror”:

By writing “The Sea and the Mirror” as a series of monologues for fictional characters borrowed from Shakespeare, Auden could write autobiographically in a deeper and more comprehensive way than ni his first-person lyrics. He expressed a different aspect of himself in each character, without masking that aspect behind a self-consciously public face. . . . To think his death I thought myself alive. The murder that never quite occurs in “The Sea and the Mirror” [as Sebastian notes], was [really not in the play but] a murder that repeatedly did not quite occur in the thirty-five years of Auden’s life (534; author’s italics).

What Mendelson means, and he supports this nugget of evidence by a prior step-by-step presentation and elucidation of supporting imagery from other poems, criticism, letters, notes, and so on, is suddenly and finally revealed in a brief rather blurted out note of intended consolation to Beata Wachstein, one of Elizabeth Mayer’s two daughters, who had recently suffered a miscarriage. Mendelson describes the note as “commiserating on her miscarriage in a blithe tone that concealed the private depths of his theme” (534). He then cites the note itself, linking it to one of Caliban’s most diabolic formulations addressed to the audience for this imagined performance of Shakespeare’s play, after which we the readers listen to the actors still apparently in character making sense of their magical experiences:

“‘Just a note to say how sorry I am about your misfortune, and to wish you better luck next time. My mother had a miscarriage before me, for which I cannot be sorry, because if she hadn’t, perhaps I shouldn’t exist.’ Or, as he has Caliban say [as Mendelson interpolates here]: ‘We should not be sitting here now, washed, warm, well-fed . . . unless there were others who are not here . . . others who have not been so fortunate, others who did not succeed in navigating the narrow passage’” (535).

For Mendelson, Auden confesses in this note to the final piece of the fateful nightmare scenario in which, somehow even before his conception, Auden, as Sebastian does with his living brother in the play, thought his unborn sibling’s death in order “to think myself alive.” This murderous cogito explains, Mendelson concludes, the presence of the life-long phantasm of obsessive guilt and ironic self-consciousness haunting the life and the work, taking the form in “The Sea and the Mirror” as Prospero’s cursed slave, Caliban. Auden’s own original sin is then this murderous birth because his very conception required the displacement into a miscarriage of the lost completely innocent child that was thus not to have been born.

This bizarre paradox of repressed unconscious thinking is actually a now rare but once more familiar rhetorical figure, that of metalepsis or transumption. Harold Bloom brought it to critical attention in his theory of the anxiety of influence more than forty years ago, but it has now largely faded from discussion. Basically, it is the revisionary trope of displacing a prior reality, even as a later reality thereby may assume the imaginary position of creating and revising this prior reality. Just as Auden by giving Shakespeare’s Caliban the image of the late James’ voice, his style of speaking in his writing, so, too, Auden would displace both James thereby and at least Shakespeare’s original invention in this instance, albeit not Shakespeare himself, though certainly surpassing Browning’s revision in “Caliban on Setebos.”

The cost of such flagrant lying against time is guilt primarily at the strongly violent, transgressive, even homicidal wishes involved in such post-romantic or modern revisionism in which the belated poet imprisons the precursor in the former’s chosen invention, thereby making the precursor over into the later poet’s creature. Mendelson sees such guilt in terms of the consequences of these transgressive or murderous wishes, following Auden’s lead, even as he recognizes it as delusional in actuality, except when it comes to Auden’s ambivalence about his own homosexuality. Mendelson concludes that Auden’s negative feelings about being gay arise from and compound the guilt he assumes for his impossible murder of his miscarried potential sibling, as if this extreme negativity proved he was divine or demonic, after all:

In his darkest imaginings about himself, [Auden] connected his illusory sense of guilt about his own birth with his inescapable sense of guilt about his homosexuality, his sense of it as criminal and isolating. The crime was that his sexuality was itself a punishment for an earlier crime. The obscure offense against childbirth that he had committed by being born was now punished . . . by another obscure offense against childbirth. (535)

Caliban, of course, becomes Auden’s revisionary vehicle for this transumptive metaphoric transformation. He is an instance of what I would more specifically call the revisionary phantasm. This is the autobiographical fiction representing the wish for divine power vis a vis others, known and unknown, in everyone, anyone. This mega-personification or giant form and the scenario accompanying it stands for the power of art to influence and determine the identities of others, those known personally or otherwise.

Whether Mendelson’s reading is entirely fair to Auden—is the revisionary autobiographical phantasm and its scenario throughout the critical commentary Auden’s or Mendelson’s?–it does point (on the poet’s part) to a system of belief in daemons (a la Yeats and Goethe—or Plutarch?), spirits of genius with feelings for or, more likely against, the poet, as in “There Will Be No Peace” (1956):

     Though mild clear weather

                               Smile again on the shore of your esteem

                               And its colours come back, the storm has changed you:

                               You will not forget, ever,

                               The darkness blotting out hope, the gale

                               Prophesying your downfall.

                               You must live with your knowledge.

                               Way back, beyond, outside of you are others,

                               In moonless absences you never heard of,

                               Who have certainly heard of you,

                               Beings of unknown number and gender:

                               And they do not like you.

                               What have you done to them?

                               Nothing? Nothing is not an answer:

                               You will come to believe – how can you help it? –

                               That you did, you did do something;

                               You will find yourself wishing you could make them laugh,

                               You will long for their friendship.

                               There will be no peace.

                               Fight back, then, with such courage as you have

                               And every unchivalrous dodge you know of,

                               Clear on your conscience on this:

                               Their cause, if they had one, is no thing to them now;

                               They hate for hate’s sake (Auden: Collected Poems [1991], 617).

This is a remarkably lucid presentation of the nameless, faceless sources of guilt that so often in the poet’s life—or even prior to his birth–can be given something of a local habitation and a name, an embryonic figuration of personhood (at least), which then serves repeatedly as stand-in for the driven nature of the career. When we combine this belief in the daemonic, in daemons—as part of whichever psychologizing system or allegorizing psychomachia we follow Auden into reformulating this visionary belief in genius—we just may begin to hear another more familiar American voice than James’ reverberating now on Auden’s moonless night—rather than under the original “pale sagging moon”—that is flooding the shore with reiterations of “the sea”:

Delaying not, hurrying not, 

Whisper’d me through the night, and very plainly before day-break, 

Lisp’d to me the low and delicious word death, 

And again death, death, death, death, 

Hissing melodious, neither like the bird nor like my arous’d child’s heart, 

But edging near as privately for me rustling at my feet, 

Creeping thence steadily up to my ears and laving me softly all over, 

Death, death, death, death, death. 

Which I do not forget, 

But fuse the song of my dusky demon and brother, 

That he sang to me . . . on Paumanok’s gray beach, 

With the thousand responsive songs at random, 

My own songs awaked from that hour, 

And with them the key, the word up from the waves, 

The word of the sweetest song and all songs, 

That strong and delicious word which, creeping to my feet, 

(Or like some old crone rocking the cradle, swathed in sweet garments, bending aside,) 

The sea whisper’d me (Whitman [2002]: 253).

Auden, as a radical anti-romantic modernist, was to be sure no fan of Whitman’s, just as he was not fond of the other romantics (American or British); but then, given Whitman’s large embrace of his “brother” Death, whose proper name or “word,” Whitman eagerly speaks as himself, and Auden’s dread of the specter of the potential sibling he “murdered” so he could be born originally–if one credits Mendelson’s argument fully—how could one expect otherwise? In the land of the id, Mendelson shows us learning so well from Freud and some of his most maverick followers, all contradictions are possible, equally true or false, at any one time.

Beyond this familiar point (to Auden), however, there is a more salient one. Auden, seventy or more years before our time with its post-colonialist sensitivities, underscores via Caliban’s address to the audience–to the readers—how the liberal minded benefactors of those impoverished and sacrificed in wars and other preventable events must be held publicly accountable as any rabid imperialist, is also guilty up to the hilt: “We should not be sitting here now, washed, warm, well-fed, in seats we have paid for, unless there were others who have not here; our liveliness and good humour, such as they are, are those of survivors, conscious that there are others who have not been so fortunate, others who did not succeed in navigating the narrow passage . . . .” (Auden, Collected Poems 1991, p. 428). Why? Perhaps, as we have learned, thanks to Mendelson’s monumental achievement, because there is no peace. Or, so Antonio, Prospero’s Iago-like brother, would confirm as he sings to himself at the end of the speeches of the other characters, who don’t know they are actors right before Caliban, who does know, begins his address to the imagined audience of actual readers (us):

One link is missing, Prospero,

My magic is my own;

Happy Miranda does not know

The figure that Antonio,

The Only One, Creation’s O

Dances for Death alone

(Auden [1991]: 422)

Condescending mercy ever breeds no justice, as Prospero will ever discover, it appears, and no justice means for sure no peace can be forthcoming from any of our demons.

References

Auden, W. H. 1991. Collected Poems. Ed. Edward Mendelson. London: Faber and Faber.

Mendelson, Edward. 2017.Early Auden, Later Auden: A Critical Biography.  New Preface.

Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Whitman, Walt. 2002. Leaves of Grass and Other Writings. Norton Critical Editions. Ed.

Michael Moon. New York: W.W. Norton.

by Joseph S. O’Leary

This essay has been peer-reviewed by the b2o editorial collective. 

Now that Stephen K. Bannon has been removed from the White House (August 18, 2017), it has become possible to consider his six months’ presence there as a unified, substantial whole. One stumbles already at the words “unified” and “substantial,” for though Bannon is more “all of a piece” than President Trump, the unity seems to reduce to vacuous slogans or vague ideologies such as “nationalism” and “populism,” supposedly pitted against the “globalism” of others in the White House. Trump, as Slavoj Žižek says, using a mathematical term sported by Alain Badiou, is an “inconsistent assemblage”; his very inconsistency is his strength, frustrating efforts to pin him down, as he instinctively changes tack in opportunistic response to audiences and situations—racist, or pretending to be, on the campaign trail, but stoutly declaring he hasn’t a racist bone in his body when challenged. In contrast, Bannon sticks to his ideological guns pertinaciously, but there is an emptiness to his consistency and a frustrating lack of substance to his presence. So he too, like Trump, is “as the air, invulnerable, / And our vain blows malicious mockery.”

Now Bannon is yesterday’s man, and however he may rage, unshackled, against his former boss from his Breitbart pulpit, his words will be “but a spume that plays / Upon a ghostly paradigm of things.” Even his recital of his palmy days—“I said, ‘Look, I’ll focus on going after the establishment.’ He [Trump] said, ‘Good, I need that.’ I said, ‘Look, I’ll always be here covering for you’”—is destined to become an old wives’ tale, perhaps to share over an ebbing fire with Sarah Palin, about whom he once made a hagiographical movie. It is hard to write of these people without falling into the key of ridicule. But Noam Chomsky might approve: “The performances are so utterly absurd regarding the ‘post-truth’ moment that the proper response might best be ridicule. For example, Stephen Colbert’s recent comment is apropos: When the Republican legislature of North Carolina responded to a scientific study predicting a threatening rise in sea level by barring state and local agencies from developing regulations or planning documents to address the problem, Colbert responded: ‘This is a brilliant solution. If your science gives you a result that you don’t like, pass a law saying the result is illegal. Problem solved’” (Yancy and Chomsky, 2017).

Looking back, one recognizes that Bannon’s brief career at the pinnacle of power must be deemed a triumph, since he achieved to an astonishing degree just what he aimed at. His boast in The Hollywood Reporter, “I am Thomas Cromwell in the court of the Tudors,” the power behind the throne and the real agent of revolutionary change, was not a vain one (Wolff, 2016). Like Cromwell, he sometimes failed to steer his monarch, who axed him in the end, but he did succeed in changing beyond recognition the State he served. Bannon modeled himself on Lenin as well: “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment” (Radosh, 2016). In pursuit of this goal he had encouraged Sarah Palin, Lou Dobbs, and Jeff Sessions to run for President, sighting in them likely instruments of his revolutionary aim. Under normal circumstances such a sophomoric scheme would get nowhere, but Bannon knew the man of destiny when he saw him and adroitly won his confidence. As the world contemplates the shambles of American government today, surely Bannon can justly take some credit?

A Slippery Customer

To measure the difficulty of finding an effective critical perspective on Bannon and Trump, one need look no farther than to an article in Civiltà Cattolica titled “Fondamentalismo evangelicale e integralismo cattolico” and penned by editor Antonio Spadaro, SJ, along with Marcelo Figueroa, editor of L’Osservatore Romano in Argentina. This authoritative piece takes the ideological stand-off between Pope Francis and President Trump beyond cartoonish slogans—“Care for the poor. Care for the earth, Embrace the immigrant. Strive for peace,” on one side, “Scrap benefits. Bring back coal. Build a wall. ‘I love war,’” on the other—and offers a more detailed hermeneutic of Francis’s allusions and frowns (such as the one that, quite deliberately, spoiled his photograph with the Trump family). But the article’s focus on a “mingling of politics, morals and religion” that “divides reality between absolute Good and absolute Evil,” seems rather beside the point. George W. Bush talked about an “axis of evil” and claimed that it was the USA’s duty to “free the world from evil,” but such language has little real purchase in the Trump world, any more than the language of truth and falsehood; such terms have become a thoroughly debased currency.  However, it is true that Bannon seems to have an entrenched view of apocalyptic warfare between good and evil: journalist James Ulmer claimed that Bannon “hoped to destroy the Hollywood establishment” and would say: “We’re the peasants with the pitchforks storming the lord’s manor.” Bannon “was always making these grand, hyperbolic analogies between good and evil, the culture of life versus the scourge of death that, in his view, Hollywood had become. Hollywood was the great Satan” (Bruck, 2017).

When Spadaro and Figueroa decry the “dominionism” that sees ecologists as “people who are against the Christian faith” and sees “natural disasters, dramatic climate change and the global ecological crisis” as confirming “their non-allegorical understanding of the final figures of the Book of Revelation and their apocalyptic hope in a ‘new heaven and a new earth,’” their remarks are again off-key. Biblical references have a merely occasional and tactical function in the Trumpian regime of truth. The ideology behind Trump’s ecological recklessness may well be nothing more than dislike of liberal fads espoused by Obama and Hillary Clinton and belief that they are bad for American business.

When the Civiltà Cattolica authors recite elements of the alleged Trumpian creed—“Theirs is a prophetic formula: fight the threats to American Christian values and prepare for the imminent justice of an Armageddon”—and offer a theological diagnosis—“Such a unidirectional reading of the biblical texts can anesthetize consciences or actively support the most atrocious and dramatic portrayals of a world that is living beyond the frontiers of its own ‘promised land’”—they seem to be floundering. They identify the “dominionism” of Rousas John Rushdoony as “the doctrine that feeds political organizations and networks such as the Council for National Policy and the thoughts of their exponents such as Steve Bannon, currently chief strategist at the White House and supporter of an apocalyptic geopolitics. … Rushdoony’s doctrine maintains a theocratic necessity: submit the state to the Bible with a logic that is no different from the one that inspires Islamic fundamentalism.” Most people have never heard of Rushdoony—perhaps Bannon and Trump haven’t either—and Bannon’s name does not figure on the leaked membership list of the secretive Council for National Policy. So the claim made here looks less like a brilliant piece of detection than a tilting at windmills.

“Appealing to the values of fundamentalism, a strange form of surprising ecumenism is developing between Evangelical fundamentalists and Catholic Integralists,” an “ecumenism of hate” marked by a “xenophobic and Islamophobic vision that wants walls and purifying deportations.” Does this grasp the mind of Donald Trump? Probably not, since he does not work with a consistent ideology. Does it reflect the views of Stephen Bannon? Who can say, since Bannon remains quite discreet about his actual beliefs. The authors then turn on some noisy American bloggers, no doubt to their great delight: “There is a shocking rhetoric used, for example, by the writers of Church Militant, a successful US-based digital platform that is openly in favor of a political ultraconservatism and uses Christian symbols to impose itself. … It has created a close analogy between Donald Trump and Emperor Constantine, and between Hillary Clinton and Diocletian.” For some fundamentalist supporters, it’s true, Trump is the equivalent of King David, chosen by God as his anointed, and who can be forgiven anything, including adultery and murder, because of his status as the Lord’s instrument. But these are a fringe element. In general the article may comment correctly on troubling developments in the American religious landscape, but it does not close in on Bannon and Trump themselves. I would add it to the honorable list of failed attacks on Trumpism, on all of which Trump has thrived, from his rhetorical massacre of his fellow-contestants in the Republican primaries in 2016 down to the broad approval his reactions to the Nazi rally in Charlottesville secured despite condemnation from politicians and the media. For his supporters the New York Times and the Washington Post are every bit as biased and vicious as Fox News is in liberal eyes, and Trump knows he has nothing to lose by lashing out at “lying media.”

Bannon has a previous history with the Vatican, as contributor to a conference of the Human Dignity Institute held there in 2014. The chairman of this Institute, Cardinal Raymond Burke, is Pope Francis’s foremost critic and an icon for diehard Catholic traditionalists. He holds that “Islam wants to govern the world”; “Islam is a religion that, according to its own interpretation, must also become the State. The Koran, and the authentic interpretations of it given by various experts in Koranic law, is destined to govern the world” (Catholic Herald, 2016). Bannon’s speech referred to a coming “brutal and bloody conflict” with “this new barbarity that’s starting.” The barbarity has two faces: soulless capitalism, and “a global war against Islamic fascism.” “It’s very difficult to know what Bannon is saying, because he’s so fuzzy,” commented theologian Matthew Fox: “His definition of Christianity is very archaic”; “it’s peculiar that he never uses the word ‘justice’” (Fox, 2017). But here again the trail peters out, for I do not know of any indication of further substantial links between Burke and Bannon, though they are said to have exchanged emails. Catholicism does not appear to have had any marked presence in the White House during Bannon’s tenure. 

The Silent Sage

 Bannon is a simpler figure than Trump, yet a more elusive target, because of his silence and invisibility, based on his policy that “darkness is good” and “I am not doing media,” which, along with his reputation as an intellectual and a cogent thinker, lends him inscrutable dignity. The White House, a “dump” according to its present occupant, is said to be haunted, and Bannon loomed there rather spectrally. He did not provide the Trump presidency with a backbone or a secure framework, a task that has defeated even the “axis of adults” now surrounding the incumbent—Generals John Kelly, James Mattis, Joseph Dunford, and H. R. McMaster, along with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. An opportunistic ectoplasm, Bannon made his influence felt as occasion offered. One can imagine him overawing his presidential protégé by a pregnant silence, or dropping laconic counsels at well-chosen moments into the depths of the presidential mind. Flourishing amid the insubstantiality and surreal evanescence of a White House that had become a reality show, that is, an unreality show, Bannon could inject a series of reactionary prompts on such matters as ecology, immigration, the transgender ban, the Iran nuclear agreement, the war in Afghanistan. One wonders how he would guide the unsteady finger that hovers over the nuclear button.

This dignified eminence began to be punctured toward the end of his tenure, when Bannon flickered into eerie prominence in Anthony Scaramucci’s job-ending interview with a reporter he later compared with Linda Tripp. Scaramucci’s fantastical image of an auto-fellator exploiting the president’s strength to boost his own brand, and his gangster-style threats: “The president knows what he’s going to do” and “has a very good idea of the people that are undermining his agenda,” were good for a laugh, but the threats turned out not to be idle ones, though Scaramucci’s own head rolled before Bannon’s. Then came a second lurid flare: Bannon’s own astonishing interview with The American Prospect, seemingly a hasty effort to express his views forcefully while he still had the White House position he knew he was doomed to lose within days. He used the opportunity to focus not on Islam, but on Asia, now apparently a more real threat: “We’re at economic war with China. It’s in all their literature. They’re not shy about saying what they’re doing. One of us is going to be a hegemon in 25 or 30 years and it’s gonna be them if we go down this path.” Contrary to Trump’s threat of “fire and fury” to North Korea, Bannon said: “There’s no military solution, forget it. Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that ten million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here, they got us.” When Bannon actually speaks, he is emphatic and grandiose; but when his words are no longer backed by the title of Chief Strategist they will lose most of their weight.

Does Bannon write? Does he even tweet? One solid text by him would provide something to chew on, instead of having to speculate about the influences that feed his rhetoric. According to James Hohmann (2017) these include Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest (a critique of J. F. Kennedy’s advisers), William Strauss and Neil Howe’s The Fourth Turning (an absurd theory of historical cycles), Steven Emerson’s American Jihad, and Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile (polemic against big government). This somewhat nerdy list does not yield a satisfyingly sharp profile, and in the absence of such the entertainment industry and even leading politicians have resorted to crude caricature (on Saturday Night Live) and ineffectual name-calling (“Nazi,” “white supremacist,” “Rasputin”). Bannon has also expressed himself in agitprop movies that are far outclassed by those of Michael Moore. One of them, Generation Zero, orchestrates a tale of cultural decline dating from Woodstock in 1969 with over-wrought images of an apocalyptic abyss. Its sees the USA as gripped in a fore-doomed “fourth turning,” which must lead to a big war. As Micah L. Sifry (2017) writes: “Bannon doesn’t just believe that we are in an existential conflict with Islam or with China.  It seems he wants to exacerbate those conflicts into a new world war.  As a believer in Strauss and Howe’s theory of history, Bannon fantasizes that he can use that cataclysm to forge a completely new order.”

That a man in thrall to such a tawdry and dangerous ideology was allowed to attend the Principals Committee of the National Security Council from January to April 2017 troubled people greatly. Far from acting to restrain the president’s belligerent attitude towards the media, the judiciary, environmental protection, Obamacare, and the rights of immigrants and gender minorities, Bannon was suspected of acerbating it and feeding the president a fascist script. The contempt that Bannon expressed in his American Prospect interview for “ethno-nationalism” as a “fringe element”—“we gotta help crush it”—does not extend to his own economic nationalism; nor does it quite dispel the suspicion that he advised the president to spread the blame for Charlottesville equally between right and left (Kuttner, 2017). Yet it is clear that Trump needed no one’s advice for that, as shown in the pugnacious press conference of 15 August 2017. This press conference eerily echoed a CNN interview recorded, but not aired, two hours earlier with Jared Taylor, editor of the neonazi American Renaissance. “Same ideas, same ideology, same talking points,” noted Uygur (2017) on “The Young Turks;” but that does not necessarily make Trump anything as substantial as a white supremacist; he merely parrots the memes of the Charlottesville apologists who sprang up across the social media in the days preceding his press conference. In any case it remains possible that the chaos in the White House is entirely Trump’s doing, and that Bannon’s ministrations have had only atmospheric effect, so that even his claimed triumph in reshaping US politics may turn out to be yet another mere illusion.

The Inaugural Address

Bannon’s most glorious moment was Trump’s Inaugural Address of January 20, 2017, if it is true that he contributed to its composition, to the point that it offers an undiluted expression of Bannonism. Both in its picture of American decline and its promise of a glowing future, the speech had a hollow unreality that was far from the norm of US political discourse but that reflected the essence of Trumpism as Bannon would define it, namely the hollowing out of democratic values and their replacement by populist pap: “January 20th 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again. The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Everyone is listening to you now. You came by the tens of millions to become part of a historic movement the likes of which the world has never seen before” (Time, 2017). Trump embodies a revolt of the masses, and has a visceral bond of mutual loyalty with the people who have thrust him to supreme power. But he is likely to redeem them from the burden of too much government and regulation not by inaugurating any new deal that would end poverty and inequality, but by casting them loose to fend for themselves. He paints this disempowerment as empowerment: “For too long, a small group in our nation’s Capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. … This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.” The willfully constructed scenario is mendacious on both sides: the negative picture bears no relation to actual achievements and efforts of previous administrations, and the promise of sudden, radical change is of a piece with Trump’s long history of false advertisement and unpaid wages. As a speech-act it is a salesman’s dazzling spiel, not a concrete commitment likely to be soberly enacted. It offers a blank check for unabashed plutocracy and kleptocracy, all covered by the assurance that this is what the people want.

But above all its apocalyptic scenario is fantastically unreal, bearing the stamp of Bannon’s fanaticism. Before Trump, America was a scene of utmost desolation; but now a golden age has suddenly dawned. Before Trump we saw “mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.” He does not mention the mass incarceration of Americans by the prison industry, on racist premises, with massive use of solitary confinement; nor the huge inequality between the plutocrats and the poor; nor the relative success of the USA in protecting the environment, reducing crime, providing health care, ensuring civil rights of minorities, all of which Trump seeks in practice to reverse.

The gap between glowing promise and mean practice is astronomical, yet the faith of Trump’s supporters is great enough to wing that abyss. The speech uses literary tropes to appeal to an apocalyptic imagination, and to dull the civic imagination traditional in America. Its use of the language of royal edicts underscores its tangentiality to sober reality: “So to all Americans, in every city near and far, small and large, from mountain to mountain, and from ocean to ocean, hear these words: You will never be ignored again.” Or the language may sound like the diktat of a revolutionary elite: “We assembled here today are issuing a new decree to be heard in every city, in every foreign capital, and in every hall of power.” The actual content of the grandiose decree turns out to be petty: Americans will no longer be pushed around, but will give priority to their own interests.

Understanding the Post-Truth Ideology

 We are now seeing daily how an entire population can sleepwalk into the clutch of an authoritarian regime, and how fragile are the ideals and structures of modern liberal democracy. Even the famed checks and balances of the US system are proving ineffectual, and some suggest that the only effective action is a coup of some sort. Much of what is afoot is standard fare—attacks on freedom of the press, academic freedom, freedom of opinion, and independence of the judicial branch—but something eerily new is also emerging. We are beyond Neoconservativism, and beyond the “moderate right.” We are moving into the territory of the “reactionary right,” the “radical right,” the “extreme right” (see Eatwell and O’Sullivan, 1989).

Trump’s new form of populist rightism draws elements from all these categories, but it also introduces an original twist that is principally located in the realm of epistemology. The reckless and compulsive lying of the President is a pathology, but one that has enabled him to sail to victory again and again. His claims that the head of the Boy Scouts of America phoned him to praise his deplorable speech to them as the greatest ever, and that the President of Mexico had phoned to compliment him on the wall, were so blatant and so easily refuted that one must wonder if “pathological” is a strong enough word; such a disconnect invites the label “psychotic.” But in the world of showmanship, business wheeling and dealing, and confidence trickstership, reality is what works, and the confident liar will feel he is more tuned in to things than the scrupulous fussers about veracity whom he scorns as losers. Reviewing three books titled Post-Truth, Leith (2017) writes: “Whereas the liar has a direct relationship with the truth value of what he or she is saying, and implicitly honours the truth by denying it, the bullshitter simply doesn’t care about whether his or her statement is true, half-true or outright false: he or she cares only about what it achieves. Here we are in the territory not of logic but of rhetoric.” Trump dismisses discomforting truth-tellers as liars, since truth and falsehood in his mind are reducible to what boosts the ego and what does not; he is presented with flattering reports twice a day by his excruciatingly servile staff. Truth holds no weight in his thought and rhetoric, as the language of “alternative facts” and the use of lying as a rhetorical method indicate. In contrast, Bannon is something of a true believer, asserting his tawdry ideology with real conviction. That is why Trump is President and Bannon is not.

“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it” (Arendt, 1966, p. 350). For the Nazis, as the 1947 US War Department film Don’t Be a Sucker says, truth was “their oldest and most persistent enemy” so “they decided to abolish truth,” via book burnings, propaganda, censorship, discouraging education, etc. This background lends gravity to the core scandal of Trumpism—its disregard for truth. But with Trump, this is not the cold calculation of a budding totalitarian leader. Rather it is inherent in his cultural milieu. Its matrix is a corruption of conservative culture. Ironically, though conservative critics of modernity frequently rail against relativism and cynicism, as conservatism has increasingly taken a postmodern turn this battle line has become blurred; those who originally stepped forward as champions of unchanging Truth have strangely morphed into intellectual opportunists who wave the banner of Truth as a weapon in their changing ideological battles.

But there has been a treason of the clerks on the other side too, among clever postmodern intellectuals, who can find their own distorted image in Trump’s parody. Our endless delicate talk about the contextuality, historicity, culture-boundedness, conventionality, socio-political determination, and endless deferral of the “truth-effect,” has been orchestrated by Trump with a vengeance, while Bannon flaunts the fateful word “deconstruction.” If postmodern attitudes to truth secrete any poisons, they have materialized in the deadliest form in the Trump ideology. Not a subtle and refined relativism, but a blanket discrediting of experts, eggheads, science, journalism, facts, and truth itself, is the staple of Trump epistemics. Building on old resentments, this tactic has so far been astonishingly successful.

One of Trump’s favorite locutions is “It’s true!” and he postures as the scourge of mendacity, be it that of the “lying media,” “lying Ted,” or “crooked Hillary.” But this is truth as ammunition for the will to power. When Trump finds a truth that works, it is raised to the status of a meme or a dogma to be intoned on all occasions. Sometimes the truth actually is true, as in his excoriation of the USA’s interventions in the Middle East. But it is not the true truths that are most to his taste or that he most often repeats. In a world where conspiracy theories flourish in proportion to their unbelievable strangeness, Trump’s weapon of choice is the untrue truth, proclaimed as a revelation that can be immediately sloganized, and stamped with his trademark “Believe me!” that recalls the “Amen, Amen, I say unto you” of the Gospels. As if challenging his supporters to ever braver acts of faith and loyalty, he not only advances implausible claims without a shred of evidence (as in the claim that millions voted fraudulently in the presidential election) but proclaims as fact matters that the simplest inspection of the empirical data shows to be false. One example of this “gaslighting” (from Patrick Hamilton’s play Gaslight about a husband who undercuts his wife’s perceptions, driving her mad) is Trump’s claim to have had a huge crowd at his inauguration, despite photographic proof to the contrary.

The incredible power of someone who can thus disable truth and fact must be very exciting, and indeed many addicts of such media as Fox News and Breitbart have known this excitement for years. Bannon, in his Breitbart career, has both shaped and been shaped by the culture of round-the-clock slander, fear-mongering, and lurid speculation, but in some ways he is more reminiscent of the Bush era neo-cons such as Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld. He builds up an image of the ideological enemy, first Islamic terrorism and more recently China’s bid for world hegemony, but he does not subscribe to the fashionably postmodern claim that there are no facts, only interpretations.

“The nature of reality is an open question in the age of Donald Trump. As the president regularly decries ‘the Fake News Media’ and journalists catalogue his many lies, the battles of our time seem not just political but philosophical, indeed epistemological” (Heer, 2017). But this “postmodern” twist to presidential politics goes back to Bill Clinton’s famous parsing of the meaning of “is” and Donald Rumsfeld’s sophistries. The denial of anthropogenic climate disruption by a host of specious arguments (whether advanced in good faith or as paid propaganda) was one of the earliest and most widespread manifestations of the turn to post-truth. Despite the clearest evidence of recent and sudden disruption, the post-truth apologists simply declared that climate change has always been happening (while ignoring the contrast between the this long-duration change and the suddenness of what has happened over the last century); some added a religious twist by denouncing the presumption and faithlessness of humans who usurped the Lord’s job of being the steward of creation and failed to trust him to make everything work out all right. Here the ludic attitude to truth has catastrophic impact in the real. Trump may turn out to be the most expensive joke of all time.

Jeet Heer’s quotations from Fredric Jameson do not quite capture what is new in the Trump phenomenon: “a society of the image or the simulacrum and a transformation of the ‘real’ into so many pseudoevents;” “a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense” where “depth is replaced by surface.” Trump thrusts his all too solid or sullied flesh on the world’s attention daily—no subtle play of depth and surface here. When Trump is Trump, holding a crowd in the palm of his hand or fiercely confronting the press, he grabs attention; only when he is scripted is he an utter fake, as in his nauseous “let us love one another” rhetoric after Charlottesville.

“For Baudrillard, ‘the perfect crime’ was the murder of reality, which has been covered up with decoys (‘virtual reality’ and ‘reality shows’) that are mistaken for what has been destroyed. ‘Our culture of meaning is collapsing beneath our excess of meaning, the culture of reality collapsing beneath the excess of reality, the information culture collapsing beneath the excess of information—the sign and reality sharing a single shroud,’ Baudrillard wrote in The Perfect Crime (1995). The Trump era is rich in such unreality” (Heer, 2017). That’s not entirely true, for there is an anemic or skeletal form that shows up through the frenetic flimflam of the Trump show, a pathetic reality—sad!—that stares back at us whenever we fix our eyes on the abyss, as in one act of blinding showmanship Trump fixed his own eagle eyes on the eclipsed sun.

A boy sobs alone in the corner of an empty room, not for any “excess of meaning” but for its absence. Unlike The Truman Show, in which the “excess of reality” is stunningly unmasked as unreal, this show is known to be mere show from the start. Its harking back to the 1950s, or the 1930s, or even the “good old days” of the 1850s, when blacks who protested would be “ripped from their chairs” or “carried out on stretchers,” may launch a thousand rallies, a thousand golf weekends or expensive shopping expeditions, but cannot take a single step forward in real historical time. In the time of his imagination Trump is a king, but in 2017 no such matter. He does not belong to the real 2017 at all. A time-traveling stray from a dream past, he cannot grasp the first thing about the “brave new world” of today nor exclaim with Miranda “How many goodly creatures are there here!” Generic praise—“doing a great job” (even in speaking of the long dead Frederick Douglass) or “fine people” (even in speaking of the white supremacists of Charlottesville)—is the most articulate response he can manage; and when that world rises before him in its unpleasant facticity, all he can do is shriek “It’s a lie! it’s fake!”  No, this is not Baudrillard’s “information culture collapsing beneath the excess of information” but an extreme exinanition of real information. The social media, held in thrall for two years already by one man’s pathology, battens on his empty soundbites, stunts, and gags. It’s a roller coaster, with lots of thrills, but always ending where it began.  Or is this the new real? Are we just entering the Age of Trump? Has our entire culture prepared this ghastly moment, when it implodes on its own unsuspected hollowness?

The Ghost of Ayn Rand

The effort to pin down Bannon’s outlook by studying his sources leads to strange destinations. Perhaps a catalogue of the things to which he is virulently opposed is more revealing. Generation Zero, his 2010 documentary, shows how the “capitalist system” was undermined by spoilt baby boomers and socialist policies that sapped the spirit of enterprise. In a lecture for the Liberty Restoration Foundation he accused baby boomers of “abandoning the tried-and-true values of their parents (nationalism, modesty, patriarchy, religion) in favor of new abstractions (pluralism, sexuality, egalitarianism, secularism).” “Unmoored from a Judeo-Christian moral framework, capitalism can be a force of harm and injustice—exemplified by the US’s economic decline” (Guilford and Sonnad, 2017). Bannon wants to reform America and he proceeds about his task with moral earnestness.

If the disruptive and unpredictable Trump is the Luther of this reform, a man who speaks from the gut and to the gut, and whose twitterstorms trouble the world’s ear as Luther’s printing avalanche did, then Bannon could be cast as his steady if shadowy Melanchthon, brooding on the principles of the movement and clarifying them. The President is a businessman and Bannon is an intellectual, a line-up that would gratify Ayn Rand, for it is exactly the combination she saw as replacing the ancient collusion of Throne and Altar: “Capitalism wiped out slavery in matter and in spirit. It replaced Attila and the Witch Doctor, the looter of wealth and the purveyor of revelations, with two new types of man: the producer of wealth and the purveyor of knowledge—the businessman and the intellectual” (Rand, 1961, p. 21). Ironically, Trump bids fair to rival all Attilas as looter, while Bannon purveys not knowledge but rather rigid formulas. A businessman unrestrained by business ethics (though he may see his presidency as fulfilling his social responsibility) and an intellectual hobbled by ideological fixation make a strange couple as they tread the halls of supreme power.

Does Rand haunt those halls? Ray Dalio, a hedge fund billionaire, declared: “Her books pretty well capture the mindset. This new administration hates weak, unproductive, socialist people and policies, and it admires strong, can-do, profit makers” (Dalio, 2016). Rand’s influence is strong in the world of business, especially in Silicon Valley. “Her overarching philosophy that ‘man exists for his own sake, that the pursuit of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose, that he must not sacrifice himself to others, nor sacrifice others to himself,’ as she described it in a 1964 Playboy interview, has an obvious appeal for self-made entrepreneurs” (Stewart, 2017).

Her appeal for Republican politicians seems just as strong. Her name keeps coming up, since she is probably the most convenient source for legitimizing their ideas. An article denying her influence nonetheless provides ample evidence of it:

The Washington Post’s James Hohmann recently devoted many column inches to trying, and failing, to paint the Trump administration as somehow Randian. His headline notwithstanding there’s virtually no evidence that Donald Trump is an Ayn Rand “acolyte.” Hohmann notes a report by USA Today’s Kirsten Powers, which, in full goes: “Trump described himself as an Ayn Rand fan. He said of her novel The Fountainhead, ‘It relates to business (and) beauty (and) life and inner emotions. That book relates to … everything.’ He identified with Howard Roark, the novel’s idealistic protagonist who designs skyscrapers and rages against the establishment.” Hohmann’s article goes on to note that three of Trump’s cabinet appointees show appreciation of Rand’s works. Rex Tillerson called Atlas Shrugged his favorite book in a 2008 feature for Scouting Magazine. Andy Puzder named his private equity fund in honor of a Rand hero, one of whose friends stated that he reads Rand in his spare time, and he recommended to his six children that they read Fountainhead first and Atlas Shrugged later. Rep. Mike Pompeo told Human Events, in 2011, “One of the very first serious books I read when I was growing up was Atlas Shrugged, and it really had an impact on me….” (Benko, 2016).

“In a 2005 speech, [Paul] Ryan said that Rand was required reading for his office staff and interns. ‘The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,’ he told a group called the Atlas Society” (Benko, 2016). In a 2009 campaign video, prompted by soaring sales of Rand’s novels, Ryan acclaimed her as “sorely needed right now” when “we are living in an Ayn Rand novel, metaphorically speaking,” due to President Obama’s “attack on the moral foundation of America.” Rand “did a fantastic job in explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism.” Three years later he embraced Aquinas, dismissing as “an urban legend” the idea he was inspired by Rand. “‘I reject her philosophy. … It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is going to try to paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas. … Don’t give me Ayn Rand!’” (quoted by Costa, 2012). All of this suggests that Rand has been officially banished from GOP circles, but the need of exorcism suggests that her ghost does linger. Indeed, some might say that authentic Randism would be preferable to the parody of it offered by Trump and Bannon.

But here Bannon eludes us again, for like his fellow-Catholic Ryan he is sharply critical of Rand in his speech to the 2014 conference in the Vatican; yet he speaks of her with a lingering sympathy, and treats her as an authoritative reference for understanding contemporary capitalist culture:

There’s a strand of capitalism today—two strands of it, that are very disturbing. One is state-sponsored capitalism. And that’s the capitalism you see in China and Russia. … The second form of capitalism that I feel is almost as disturbing, is what I call the Ayn Rand or the Objectivist School of libertarian capitalism. And, look, I’m a big believer in a lot of libertarianism. I have many many friends that’s a very big part of the conservative movement—whether it’s the UKIP movement in England, it’s many of the underpinnings of the populist movement in Europe, and particularly in the United States. However, that form of capitalism is quite different when you really look at it to what I call the “enlightened capitalism” of the Judeo-Christian West. It is a capitalism that really looks to make people commodities, and to objectify people … and that is a form of capitalism, particularly to a younger generation [that] they’re really finding quite attractive. And if they don’t see another alternative, it’s going to be an alternative that they gravitate to under this kind of rubric of “personal freedom.” (Feder, 2016)

The heroine of Rand’s first novel, We the Living (1936), indulges a violent Nietzscheanism: “What is the people but millions of puny, shrivelled, helpless souls that have no thoughts of their own, no dreams of their own, no will of their own, who eat and sleep and chew helplessly the words that others put into their mildewed brains? And for those you would sacrifice the few who know life, who are life? I loathe your ideals because I know no worse injustice than justice for all” (quoted in Merrill, 1991, p. 38) Robert E. Merrill believes that minor stylistic alterations in this passage in the second edition (1959), such as the replacement of “justice for all” with “the giving of the undeserved” and “men are not born equal” with “men are not equal in ability,” show how Rand kept Nietzsche’s “emphasis on achievement, on aspiration, on pursuing supremely important values” while “she was able to clear away the debris of his ethical monstrosities” (Merrill, 1991, 40). Nietzsche is caricatured for the purpose of this argument, and even so it seems clear that Rand remained a pop pseudo-Nietzschean in 1959 as in 1936. Merrill speaks of Rand in cultic tones: “A hundred years from now, if civilization survives its present crises, Rand will be seen as a giant among twentieth-century thinkers. Not only will Objectivism be recognized as a major contribution to philosophical thought; not only will Rand’s ideas be accepted as correct; but very likely our whole way of thinking about philosophy will have changed” (163). The grandiosity here and the awed expectation of radical change bear a resemblance to the Inaugural Address. This middle-brow philosophizing is matched by equally tawdry esthetic judgment: “Strictly as a writer, Rand will certainly be classed among the top ten of her century. Her novels are already classics by any sensible definition.… Our descendants will envy us that we were her contemporaries” (163). At a time when academics teach Star Wars as a classic epic, and when Bob Dylan is widely regarded as an exemplary Nobel Prize for Literature, this sophomoric, nay, adolescent level of thought has wide purchase. The semi-intellectual Bannon has sponged up such half-baked notions, which allow him to project wisdom and depth to the shallow and impressionable Trump.

For another Rand scholar, she opposed “a statist society in which there is a deadly alliance between government, science, and big business” (Sciabarra, 1995, 339) and in the passage quoted by Merrill “Kira may not be expressing a Nietzschean contempt for the masses as much as she is expressing a desire to break free of a system that crushes the individual under the weight of an undifferentiated collective” (105). Bannon aimed to smash up government in favor of individualistic libertarianism, and Trump projected the charms of such an ethos; but in reality that is another bait and switch, for the winners will be the faceless capitalist and militaristic institutions that increasingly force citizens into a collectivist lifestyle. Had Trump been a truly charismatic great leader after Rand’s heart, who would raise the masses from their hebetude, the danger to democracy would be much greater than that posed by the actual farce his administration has become. Democracy faces a double threat: from economic liberalism, deregulation, and unbridled capitalism on one hand, and from right-wing populism on the other. But the two forces collude: the liberals need the rightists either to maintain order (Weimar and Hitler) or as a bogey man to get themselves elected (Hillary Clinton and Trump, Macron and Marine Le Pen). Their candidate may alienate support on the left, who “lack all conviction” about his or her merits, thus leaving the door open to the rightist candidate, sustained by the “passionate intensity” or his or her gung-ho supporters. Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” written just after the Great War, is more and more on our lips as a new season of convulsions opens. “The centre cannot hold” and makes way for a “rough beast, its hour come round at last.”

The Ghost of Julius Evola

America for Bannon is an empty signifier, provided with an unreal paradisal past, an unreal apocalyptic present—the “crisis”—and an unreal future, blank and undefined. An anonymous article at summeroflove85.wordpress.com (2017), titled “The Unhappy Ghost of American Identity: Hauerwas, Bannon and the ‘Emptiness’ of National Promise,” notes that “most of Bannon’s claims are less to do with cultural essence and more to do with economic freedom of the nation ‘to do things’ (‘sovereignty’, ‘bringing back jobs, and ‘supporting deregulation’);” “That’s all a story-less politics can really do. It can only talk about conditions of action, it has no account of what actions should be preferred and why. Beyond the defense of doing and choosing, it has little substance.” Should we think of the fascist hyper-activism, energeticism, decisionism cultivated in the age of Gabriele d’Annunzio, F. T. Marinetti, Ernst Jünger, and Carl Schmitt? Perhaps, but Bannon lacks their wit and their power to grip; his preachy prescriptions are banal and deathly dull.

Still Bannon, playing Mephistopheles to Trump’s Faust and Rasputin to his Nicholas II, invites comparison with Baron Julius Evola who played, briefly, a comparable role for Mussolini. Here again connections are elusive. “While Bannon’s references to Evola don’t prove he sees eye to eye with the philosopher, the openness with which he mentioned the Italian philosopher suggests that Evola’s name is not only circulating in Bannon’s circles, but that Bannon does not consider Evola’s thinking particularly problematic” (Merelli, 2017). Bannon’s actual words, in response to a question about Russia, were: “When Vladimir Putin, when you really look at some of the underpinnings of some of his beliefs today, a lot of those come from what I call Eurasianism; he’s got an adviser who harkens back to Julius Evola and different writers of the early 20th century who are really the supporters of what’s called the traditionalist movement, which really eventually metastasized into Italian fascism” (quoted by Liverant, 2017). As in the case of Rand, Evola is put at a distance but his name keeps recurring. It is true, however, that his critics have been too quick to put Bannon in the same basket as these two thinkers.

When Mussolini came to power with his amorphous and flexible fascist ideology, many stepped forward to give it shape: “Like Gentile, all the most articulate hierarchs or ideologues who served the regime nurtured the illusion that they could be the mid-wives of a new Italy reborn in their image” (Griffin, 1991, p. 69). Evola, a Dadaist painter who believed that civilization was entering the “black age” or Kali Yuga of Hinduism (Griffin, 2007, p. 6), bears a resemblance to the composer of the Inaugural Address. Evola was a similar literary attitudinist, and Mussolini “early decided that Evola was an hysteric—but that his views might serve to convey, to equally hysterical fanatics in National Socialist Germany, Fascism’s seriousness of purpose” (Gregor, 2005, 218). Meanwhile, “Evola clearly held Mussolini and Fascism to have been nothing other than a ‘hypnotic’ side show that might be conveniently employed as a means of communicating the profound realities of a transcendent world to those capable of understanding” (219). It would not be surprising if Bannon had an equally cynical attitude to Trump, for his own apocalyptic world-view is far more sublime than what any ordinary politician can begin to comprehend.

Mussolini rued his use of Evola, who started an independent right wing movement that through its influence on Mussolini’s rump Republic of Salò rendered Fascism for the first time “complicit in the murder of Jews” (220).  Trump should have learnt from Mussolini’s mistake in “burdening Fascism with an ill-contrived and immoral racism” (221). Ideologists may look lightweight, but if given a hold on power they can swing things in a sinister direction. “Montini [the future Paul VI] identified Evola as suffering from ‘those strange forms of cerebralism and neurasthenia, of intensive cultivation of incomprehensibility, of the metaphysic of obscurity, of cryptology of expression, of pseudo-mystical preciosity, of cabalistic fascinations magically evaporated by the refined drugs of Oriental erudition’” (198). How many have trashed with equal flamboyance the intellectual misery of Trump and his supporters. But their kind of power is not measurable in those terms, and in fact is better secured by the intellectually mediocre who are adroit communicators. “The wholly Fascist intellectuals … were for the most part middle-notch figures, among whom one could distinguish the delirious Julius Evola or a dilettante in the vein of grandeur such as G. A. Fanelli, who defined Fascism as ‘integral monarchy.’ No one took them seriously” (Bobbio, 1973, 230-31). The doctrine of these thinkers had little consistent positive content beyond its opposition to democracy and socialism (232). Trump has found no major intellectual to lean on, no one like what Giovanni Gentile (Mussolini’s first education minister) was for Fascism or Carl Schmitt was for Nazism. Bannon may have seemed a lucky catch to him for a few months, but disappointment set in, for Bannon did not have the capacious and realistic political intelligence of figures in previous administrations who starred as the “brain of the president.” “The fact that totalitarian government, its open criminality notwithstanding, rests on mass support is very disquieting” (Arendt, 1961, vii). Trump enjoys the solid support of at least a third of the American population, and if he were called upon to be the leader in a terrorist or military crisis that support would shoot up. So it is perhaps fortunate that his charism is not of a higher order and that he has not found collaborators of genius.

One difference from Evola is that neither Bannon nor Trump are traditionalist in the European style. They would not say, with Evola in his defense statement of October 1951, “My principles are only those that before the French Revolution every well-born person considered healthy and normal” (quoted in Furlong, 2011, p. 9). Also missing among Trumpists is the mystic exaltation that Evola experienced and that led him to study Buddhism (see Furlong, pp. 2-12). Yet their contempt for empirical fact and their faith in instinct (“my temperament” as Trump calls it) does suggest a quasi-religious assurance, a belief in an alternative source of truth, a gnosis.

At the end of our brief inquiry, Bannon remains not so much an enigma as something of a blob. The alleged brain of Trumpism turns out to be a disappointing blank. There is nothing as substantial here as the neocon ideology of a previous deplorable regime. When the show ends, we will be left with a sense of empty exhaustion, for the sound and fury of this tale told by an idiot indeed signifies nothing. The morning after will be bleak and cheerless, but it will be a blessed relief to return to the light of common day, freed of all the ghostly ghastliness.

 References

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Benko, Ralph. 2016. “Ayn Rand’s Ghost Does Not Haunt the Trump Administration.” Forbes, December 18. www.forbes.com/sites/ralphbenko/2016/12/18/ayn-rands-ghost-does-not-haunt-the-trump-administration/#d474a6435fd0

Bobbio, Norberto. 1973. “La cultura e il fascismo.” In Fascismo e società italiana, edited by Guido Quazza. Turin: Einaudi, 209-46.

Bruck, Connie. 2017. “How Hollywood Remembers Steve Bannon.” The New Yorker, May 1. www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/01/how-hollywood-remembers-steve-bannon

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Costa, Robert. 2012.  “Ryan Shrugged,” National Review, April 26. www.nationalreview.com/article/297023/ryan-shrugged-robert-costa

Dalio, Ray. 2016. “Reflections on the Trump Presidency, One Month after the Election,” LinkedIn, December 19. www.linkedin.com/pulse/reflections-trump-presidency-one-month-after-election-ray-dalio

Eatwell, Roger, and Noël O’Sullivan, eds, 1989. The Nature of the Right: European and American Politics and Political Thought since 1789. London: Pinter.

Feder, J. Lester. “This Is How Steve Bannon Sees the Entire World.” Buzzfeed, November 15. www.buzzfeed.com/lesterfeder/this-is-how-steve-bannon-sees-the-entire-world?utm_term=.jhQL2mDvD#.rb7Jgpaxa

Fox, Mathew. 2017. “Steve Bannon on the Crisis of Capitalism and the Divine Right of Billionaires.” The Real News Network, 5 April 2017.

Furlong, Paul. 2011. Social and Political Thought of Julius Evola. London and New York: Routledge.

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Griffin, Roger. 2007. Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Kuttner, Robert. 2017. “Steve Bannon, Unrepentant.” The American Prospect, August 16. www.prospect.org/article/steve-bannon-unrepentant

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Merelli, Annalisa. 2017. “Steve Bannon’s interest in a thinker who inspired fascism exposes the misogyny of the alt-right.” Quartz, February 22. www.qz.com/909323/bannons-interest-for-julius-evola-unveils-the-sexism-at-the-core-of-trump

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by Martin Hägglund

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle has been widely celebrated and the English-speaking world is now awaiting the translation of the sixth and final volume, itself more than a thousand pages long. Drawing on the original Norwegian, Martin Hägglund here presents a reading of My Struggle as a whole, pursuing the existential stakes, philosophical implications, and transformative quality of Knausgaard’s project. 

This article has been peer-reviewed by the boundary 2 editorial collective and will also be published in boundary 2.

More than sixteen hundred years ago, Saint Augustine explored the experience of time through a simple exercise. You can still try it today. Choose a song that you love and learn it by heart. Keep practicing until you remember every part of the song and every shift in the melody. As you sing it, you will know how much of the song has passed since the beginning and how much of it remains until the end. Yet—in holding the song together—you will find that it is already slipping away. There is never a moment in which the song is present to you. You can sing it only by retaining the notes that have passed away, while anticipating the notes still to come. Even each individual tone is never present: it begins to recede as soon as it sounds and you have to hold onto it to hear anything at all.

This experience of time is, according to Augustine, at work in every moment of our lives. You may think that you are present here today. But in everything you do, you are divided between the past and the future. As you get up in the morning, part of the day is already gone and what remains of the day is still to come. Even if you wake up at dawn and just focus on the first hour of the day, you will never be able to seize it as a present moment. “An hour,” Augustine writes, “is itself made of fleeting moments. Whatever part of the hour has flown away is past. What remains of the hour is future” (Augustine 1963: 11: 15).[1]

You may then try to forget about the hour and direct all your attention to the present moment, concentrating on what you are experiencing right now. Yet, as you grasp the present moment, it is already ceasing to be. As Augustine observes, “if the present were always present and did not go by into the past, it would not be time at all, but eternity” (11: 14). Even the most immediate experience is marked by this temporality. There is never a presence that reposes in itself. Rather, every moment of time is disappearing. This is not to say that the experience of time is an illusion. On the contrary, it is at work in everything you do. Any experience requires that you hold onto a past that is no longer and project yourself into a future that is not yet.

Augustine dramatically describes the experience of time as a distentio that pulls you apart in two different directions. Living on in time you are always distended, torn between a past that you cannot fully recover and a future that you cannot finally predict. By the same token, there is no guarantee that you can sustain what you love. Happiness consists in having and holding (habere et tenere) what you love. But since both you and the beloved are temporal, your having and holding will always tremble with the anticipation of mourning. The moments you stretch out to keep in memory may be taken away and the possibilities you strain toward in hope may never arrive.

The result is a life where opportunity and danger are inseparable. The light of bliss—even when it floods your life—is always attended by the shadow of loss. “Either loss of what we love and have gained,” Augustine explains, “or failure to gain what we love and have hoped for” (Augustine 1982: 62). This is the condition of secular life. Augustine uses the Latin word saecularis to evoke how we are bound by time, through our commitments to a shared world and history, as well as to generations before and beyond us. The historical world in which we find ourselves is the saeculum and this world (hoc saeculo) depends on generation across time.

Instead of pursuing the passions of a secular life, Augustine urges his soul to turn toward God’s eternity as “the place of peace that is imperturbable” (Augustine 1963: 4: 11). This is the movement of his religious conversion. Augustine implores himself not to be “foolish” by trying to hold onto what passes away. Unless the soul turns toward the eternity of God “it is fixed to sorrows” (4: 10), since all things that are temporal will cease to be. With remarkable precision, Augustine locates the risk of mourning not only in erotic love but also in the basic enjoyment of his physical senses. Merely to enjoy the light that illuminates the world is for Augustine a dangerous temptation, since it makes him dependent on something that is transient. “That corporeal light,” he explains, “is a tempting and dangerous sweetness” (10: 34). Enjoying the light of the day leads him to want more light and to suffer when it is absent. Because he loves the light that makes the world visible, “if suddenly the light is withdrawn, I seek for it with longing. And if it is absent for long, I grow sad” (10: 34). Similarly, when Augustine recites and is moved by a song, he warns himself against becoming attached to the sounds and words that vanish in time. “Do no let my soul attach itself to these words with the glue of love [glutine amore] through the sensations of the body. For all these things move along a path toward nonexistence. They tear the soul apart with contagious desires” (4: 10).

Augustine’s aim, then, is to convert the passion of a secular experience that is bound by time into a passion for the eternity of God. He wants to persuade us that it would be better to enjoy the stillness of eternity than to suffer from the drama of living on in time, torn between the past and the future.

Yet Augustine’s own account gives us good reasons to reject his appraisal of eternity. The attraction of eternity is supposed to be that “there you will lose nothing” (4: 11). But if you can lose nothing in eternity, it is because there is literally nothing left to lose. Nothing that happens can matter anymore and it is no accident that the activities offered in Heaven turn out to be remarkably monotonous. “All our activity will consist in singing ‘Amen’ and ‘Alleluia’,” Augustine explains in one of his sermons, and “we shall praise God not just for one day, but just as these days have no end in time, our praise does not cease” (Augustine 1992: 163). Leaving aside the question of whether one could sing or praise something forever, the real question is why one would want to and how any significant aspect of who we are could survive the transformation to timeless rapture. Being absorbed in eternity, there would be nothing left for you or me to do, since nothing could begin or end. As far as I am concerned, I would be dead.

To pursue the latter perspective would be to write a secular—as distinct from a religious—confession. Such a confession would take up Augustine’s explorations of how the identity of the self depends on the fragile operations of memory and how the experience of time cuts through every moment. Like Augustine in his Confessions it would declare: “See, my life is distended” (Ecce distentio est vita mea). But unlike in Augustine, the distention of time would not be regarded as a fallen state from which we need to be redeemed by a religious revelation of eternity. Rather, the distention of time would be seen and felt as the opening of life itself. The task would be to “own” the fact that this is the only life we have—for better and for worse—rather than seeking to leave this life behind. While Augustine denounces the “glue of care” (curae glutino) that binds us to the world, a secular confession would maintain that it is only through finite bonds that we can seize our lives and become who we are.

My aim here is to trace such a secular confession in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. First published in Norwegian and now the subject of wide international acclaim, My Struggle can be read as a contemporary response to Augustine. Ranging over three thousand six hundred pages, the six volumes of My Struggle are framed by Knausgaard’s resolution to tell the truth about his life in detail. Augustine initiated this genre of confessional autobiography with a move that was particularly radical in his religious context. Before Augustine, texts devoted to the lives of holy men (hagiographies) were all written in the third person, with the saint himself withdrawing from the world, leaving someone else to recount his path to transcendence. In contrast, Augustine tells the story of his own life, confessing his doubts, his sexuality, and his sins. Rather than hiding behind the third person, he owns the first person like no one before. We learn about his aging body, his psychological dramas, and even his nocturnal emissions. “In my memory,” Augustine confesses, “there still live images of the past acts that are fixed there by my sexual habit. These images attack me… in sleep they not only are pleasurable but even elicit consent and are very like the act itself” (Augustine 1963: 10: 30).

To expose himself in such detail may seem to be risky for an aspiring theological authority, but for Augustine it is part of a strategy. He exhibits his finite life to inspire a sense of how shameful and inadequate it is by comparison to the eternity of God. This is what Augustine calls “making truth” (veritatem facere). To make truth is not only to tell the truth—to confess what one has done—but also to make truth come into being in oneself by relinquishing the sinful attachment to life in this world and instead turn toward God.

Yet Augustine’s vivid account of the life he is supposed to leave behind also opens the chance for a secular inheritance of his work, where making truth is not a matter of devoting oneself to God but of remaining faithful to a finite life. The great French writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the first to take up this possibility (in his own epochal Confessions from 1769) but Knausgaard pushes it further. Unlike Rousseau, Knausgaard does not claim to be exceptional and he does not hold out the promise of a timeless presence. He is the subject of an ordinary life that will irrevocably end and yet he devotes more attention to its minute details than would have been thinkable for either Augustine or Rousseau. The one obligation he recognizes as the writer of My Struggle is to be true to this life.

Thus, Knausgaard places himself under the obligation to account for his life as it is actually lived, only writing about things he has experienced while confessing to how he experienced them—no matter how quotidian, painful, or intimate the details may be. As readers, we get to follow the narrator and protagonist Karl Ove (avowedly identical to the author) in the midst of everyday life. At the time of writing My Struggle, he is in his early forties, absorbed and overwhelmed by being married with three young children. While this domestic life keeps getting in the way of his writing, he makes it a centerpiece of the story itself. We spend many pages going grocery shopping, pushing baby prams in the city, and attending to daily exchanges with his children. All is rendered with a fidelity to everyday life that neither idealizes nor deprecates the experiences in question. We become attuned to the weight of waking up too early while trying to meet the demands of family life, the sinking feeling of facing an apartment in chaotic disorder, and the numbness that follows from an endless array of tasks. Yet the same attunement also yields the radiant moments of everyday life. Precisely because Knausgaard perseveres in exploring his mundane existence, he loosens the hold of habit and makes us see the world anew.

The same holds for when Knausgaard shifts focus from his present life and descends into his past, excavating the world of being twenty-five, or eighteen, or twelve, or seven. His achievement is not simply an act of remembering but of reliving: inhabiting the way the world was given at a time, letting the constraints and the promises, the mistakes and the fortunes, reverberate with the same force they had when first experienced. The impact of falling in love at the age of seven, or despairing over the future at the age of twelve, is here revived with the same depth as the pain of losing a parent or the bliss of having a child in adult life.

As a result, Knausgaard enables the reader to turn back to her own life with a more profound attention and concern. This effect is one described not only by prominent critics but also by the large number of general readers who have been captivated by Knausgaard’s work. When My Struggle was released in Norway (selling more than half a million copies in a country of less than five million people), readers testified to how Knausgaard—in opening up his life through writing—had opened their own lives to them. The same testimony can be found among many of his readers in the US and elsewhere. The transformative effect of Knausgaard’s writing does not necessarily depend on sharing his cultural background or personal circumstances. You are a potential addressee of his work by virtue of being a time-bound, practically committed agent, who can be moved to explore and deepen the commitment to the life you are leading. Knausgaard’s writing can give you new access to your own life not necessarily because you identify with his experiences but because My Struggle exemplifies a devotion to life as it is lived—a devotion that you can take up and practice in relation to your own existence.

The key here is the sustained act of attention that characterizes Knausgaard’s writing. When he dedicates twenty pages to exchanges over breakfast with his daughters on a rainy Wednesday morning—or seeks to pry open every sensation and emotion that resonated in his twelve-year old self on the way home from swim practice one particular winter night—he is not simply imposing his life on us. He is teaching us (and himself) how we can remember what we tend to forget. By describing the quotidian in painstaking detail, he opens our eyes to how much is going on even during days when nothing seems to happen. And by resuscitating his former selves, he sensitizes us to all the vanished moments that remain inscribed in us—triggering memories that can open painful wounds but also bring you back to life.

The appeal of Knausgaard’s writing, then, is not that it forces you to see his life with your eyes. Rather, his writing enables you to see your life with his eyes—with the level of attention he bestows on a life. Thereby, you can come to recognize the myriad ways in which you are indeed alive, even when you seem dead to yourself or lost in the mundane events of everyday existence. As you take care of the tasks at hand, what you see bears the weight of your love and your evasions, the history of who you have been and may turn out to be. Evenings that no one else can remember live in you, when the snow touched your face or the rain caught you unprepared, when you were all alone and yet marked by all the others that have made you who you are. There are things you cannot leave behind or wish you could retrieve. And there is hope you cannot extinguish—whether buried or insistent, broken or confident, the one never excluding the other.

Such a distended life is what Knausgaard’s prose invites you to recognize as your own. Stretching toward the past and straining toward the future, an entire world emerges through you. You did not make this world, you were made by it, and now you sustain it. This is your life. There is nothing else. But what there is—and what you do—binds you to the world in ways that are deeper than you can ever disentangle.

The struggle, then, is how to make this life your own. That is the starting point for Knausgaard’s project. When My Struggle begins, he finds himself detached from the life he is living. He endures what he has to do, but he has withdrawn from being truly involved in what happens. At a remove from his existence, he feels as though he has nothing to lose and by the same token his life appears to be meaningless. “The life around me was not meaningful. I always longed to be away from it,” he writes. “So the life I led was not my own. I tried to make it mine, this was my struggle” (Knausgaard 2014: 67).

The struggle to make life his own is not a quest to become independent or self-sufficient. His life is not his own in the sense that he would be able spontaneously to decide who he is or what he is going to do. On the contrary, there is a keen awareness in Knausgaard of how we belong to a world we did not create and depend on others who exceed our control. To own your life is not to free yourself from this dependence. Rather, your existence is inseparable from the ways you are engaged in and committed to being in the world. For example, you may find yourself (as Knausgaard does at the beginning of My Struggle) married with children and overcome by a sense that you cannot make it work. You are trying to succeed—trying really to be there for your loved ones—but keep failing and feel yourself disintegrating in the process.

To disown your life in this situation is to settle for mere perseverance, going through the motions while numbing yourself and dreaming of being somewhere else. Knausgaard is attuned to this temptation and he himself repeatedly disowns his life. Yet the struggle he engages in through his writing is to own his life. He actively seeks to identify himself with what he is doing and acknowledge what he loves. This is an ongoing struggle. To own what you do and what you love is to put yourself at stake, to make your life depend on the fate of your commitments. To own your life is not to own what you love (it is not your possession) but to own that you love what you love. This is the condition for anything to matter to you—for anything to have meaning—but it also puts your life at risk. If you own what you do, you are bound to be deeply affected by how it is received. Precisely because you are engaged in a meaningful activity—precisely because you are doing something that matters to you—you are susceptible to the experience of failure. Likewise, if you own that you love what you love, you make yourself vulnerable to what happens. Your dreams may come true or your hopes may be shattered. You now have something that matters to you, but by the same token you have something to lose.

To own your life, then, is not to have it as your sovereign property. On the contrary, to own your life is to expose yourself. Only someone who owns his life—only someone who makes his life depend on what he does and what he loves—can have the experience of it being taken away from him.

Whence the temptation to disown your life: to bury your hopes before they fail to come true, to withdraw your love before it makes you suffer. These are paths of detachment, where you can come to seek protection from the pain of failure or loss by divesting yourself in advance. There are certainly situations where such strategies make sense and some degree of detachment is necessary to endure in our lives—otherwise anything could break us. But as a principle detachment is a dead end: it can lead to nothing but the destitution of meaning or a nihilistic rejection of the world.

The animating principle of Knausgaard’s writing is rather one of attachment, which is all the more profound because it remains faithful to the ambivalence of any attachment. The credo of his work, I will argue, is a phrase that recurs throughout the six volumes of My Struggle and is difficult to translate. “Det gjelder å feste blikket,” Knausgaard writes in Norwegian. The phrase could be rendered as “one must focus the gaze” or “what matters is to focus the gaze.” But the Norwegian verb that we would then translate as to focus (“å feste”) literally means to attach and the phrase is clearly a personal injunction rather than a simple statement. So a better translation would be: attach yourself to what you see, focus your gaze by attaching yourself to what you see. This is the imperative of My Struggle.

The imperative can be understood in three different senses. These senses are intertwined, but it is useful to distinguish them to see different aspects of Knausgaard’s writing. The first sense of the imperative is to focus your gaze on the life you are actually living. This explains why Knausgaard can devote more pages to apparently trivial activities than to transformative life events. If he is going to focus his gaze on the life he is actually living, he cannot just capture the moments of trauma or bliss that glow in the dark (birth, death, love, mourning); he must also capture the stretches of time out of which they emerge and the things he does on days he would not remember: setting the table, cleaning up the house, flipping through books, taking a walk on a gray afternoon, staring out the window. Knausgaard has an extraordinary ability to open up and dilate such moments, making even dull experiences come alive with the sensory, perceptual, and reflective richness of being in the world.

Yet it is not enough to focus your gaze on what you do, you must also acknowledge the ways in which you are attached to what you see. This is the second sense of the imperative. Accordingly, Knausgaard seeks to render the waves of boredom and elation, ambition and frustration, intense joy and absentminded occupation, which form the rhythms of his days. Above all, he tries to focus his gaze on what means the most to him. Here too it is a matter of acknowledging how he is attached to what he sees, even at the cost of confessing painful ambivalence. We learn of the absorbing love affair that brought him and his wife together but also of the fears, the petty grievances, the daily resentments, and the storming conflicts that almost tear them apart. In focusing his gaze on his children, there can be an exceptional tenderness in attending to their unique personalities and the daily dramas of their vulnerable, growing selves. But there are also detailed, excruciating accounts of how he loses sight of who they are and what they need—of parental love clouded by anger, exhaustion, or resignation.

Knausgaard’s writing could here be described as a form of mindfulness, but one must then separate mindfulness from Buddhist meditation, with which it is often associated. According to Buddhism, you should focus your inner gaze and attend to your attachments with the aim of detaching yourself from the struggles they entail. By paying attention to the thoughts and feelings that arise in your consciousness, you are supposed to learn to disengage from them—to not identify with what you think and feel. The goal is to attain a state of pure consciousness, where there is perfect serenity because you have ceased to care. Thus, while certain meditation techniques can be adapted for the secular purpose of reengaging with the world—helping you recover from negative experiences or simply increasing your concentration and energy—the religious aim of Buddhism is quite different. On a secular understanding, meditative detachment is a relative and temporary means employed for the sake of being able to better engage the struggles that follow from being attached to life. In Buddhism, on the contrary, absolute detachment is an end in itself. Since all attachments entail suffering, only absolute detachment can bring about the elimination of suffering that Buddhism holds out as your salvation. What ultimately matters is not who you are or what you do, what ultimately matters is that you attain a state of consciousness where everything ceases to matter—so that you can rest in peace.

The aim of Knausgaard’s mindfulness is the opposite. By attending to the struggles that emerge from his attachments, he seeks to identify more deeply with them: to become more attached to the life he is living. This is the third sense of his imperative. You must attach yourself to what you see—even at the cost of suffering—because without attachment there is no meaning: nothing to care for and no one who binds you to the world. To counter such nihilism is the animating ambition of Knausgaard’s secular confession. “Indifference is one of the seven deadly sins, actually the greatest of them all, because it is the only one that sins against life,” he writes at the end of the second volume. And in the final, sixth volume he presses home the stakes of being able to focus your gaze, attaching yourself to what you see:

I know what it means to see something without attaching yourself to it. Everything is there, houses, trees, cars, people, sky, earth, but something is missing nonetheless, because it does not mean anything that they are there. They could just as well be something else, or nothing at all. It is the meaningless world which appears like that. It is possible to live in the meaningless world too, it is just a matter of enduring, and that one will do if one must. The world can be beautiful… but it does not make any difference to you, it does not affect you. You have not attached yourself to what you see, you do not belong to the world and can, if push comes to shove, just as well leave it. (Knausgaard 2012: 365)

This is the position of someone who has disowned his life. What renders the world meaningless—or meaningful—is not an objective feature of what there is but proceeds from the degree of your attachment to what you see. This does not imply that you are free to decide the meaning of the world. But it does entail that any meaningful engagement depends on your attachment to others and to being in the world. Your capacity to attach is not simply up to you—it can be enabled or disabled by what happens to you—but whether and how you attach makes all the difference in the world.

The difficulty of owning such a life is an integral part of Knausgaard’s writing. He struggles with the temptation to disown his life and dwells on the many ways in which we may come to give up on our existence. The quotidian way is the slow death of a gradually increasing indifference, but prominent in his work is also the reckless renunciation of obligation at the depths of alcoholism, the short-circuiting of emotion at the heart of depression, or the ultimate self-destruction of suicide. Knausgaard explores these forms of disowning one’s life without recurring either to moralizing judgment or to condemnation. Yet, in and through these explorations, he recalls us to the fact that it is only by owning our lives—as essentially being in the world—that we have a chance at a meaningful existence. This is the secular conversion at work in Knausgaard’s confessions. By focusing his gaze on his life and attaching himself to what he sees, he turns us around: not toward eternity but toward our finite lives as the site where everything is at stake. Like all conversions, this is not one that can be achieved once and for all: it is a continuous struggle to own our lives. But unlike in a religious conversion, the goal is not for the struggle to come to an end. Rather, to own our lives is to acknowledge that struggle belongs to the very life we want to lead. If we want our lives to matter, we want to have something that we can lose.

Nevertheless, Knausgaard himself is liable to devalue his life from a religious perspective. At one point in the final volume, he is reading the Church Fathers (of whom Augustine is the most prominent) and comes to feel that his own experiences are impoverished in contrast to their mystical ecstasies. Knausgaard now maintains that his own search for meaning is pathetic compared to “the devotion of the mystics” (Knausgaard 2012: 610) and condemns himself as “one of the world’s many soulless and banal human beings” (611). This is in line with the sense of shame Augustine hoped to inspire. From a religious point of view, a finite life without redemption is indeed soulless and banal. This view is inherited even by many who do not have religious faith—regarding their lives as futile because they lack a sense of the eternal—and Knausgaard is tempted by it in a number of the essayistic reflections that pervade My Struggle. He repeatedly argues that art aspires to retrieve a sense of the holy, while lamenting that we can no longer attain it. “The longing and melancholia that Romantic art expresses is a longing for this,” he writes with reference to a religious sense of the holy, “and a mourning of its loss. At least that is how I interpret my own attraction to the Romantic in art” (610). On this conception, art would strive to open a world that is “holy” in the sense of being untouched by time and finitude, a world where everything is present in itself, but which we cannot enter because we are “fallen”: incapable of living in “the indifference of the divine” and “the all extinguishing light of the good” (409).

Since these religious ideas are so familiar—and supposedly profound—they are likely to be taken as a guide to Knausgaard’s work. Yet that would be a mistake. Throughout My Struggle (and particularly in the final volume) there are numerous statements or small essays that appear to present the philosophy of the book. Many of them are in conflict with one another or internally contradictory and to take them at face value would be to miss almost everything that is important in them. Knausgaard is a tremendous essayist, but his particular talent is to allow his essays to emerge as part of the narrative. The theoretical reflections exist on the same plane as the practical actions; they reflect how someone thinks and feels at a particular time rather than expressing the perspective of someone who is outside the narrative and in control of its meaning.

To understand the philosophical poetics of My Struggle, then, we must attend to what happens in the narrative alongside the many and often contradictory statements of intent. The view that our secular lives are soulless and banal—that we need to be saved from our time bound existence—belongs to the tendency to disown his life. While this tendency persists throughout My Struggle, the very writing of the book goes in the opposite direction. Far from regarding his life as soulless or banal, the writer of My Struggle depends on the faith that there is enormous significance and depth in the experiences of a finite life, one worthy of being explored down to the most subtle nuances and emotional reverberations. The aim is to attach himself more deeply to his life, rather than transcend it. From this perspective, it is Augustine’s mystical ecstasies that are soulless and banal, since they seek to leave the world behind in favor of an eternal presence where nothing happens. What is profound in Augustine is not the ascent to heaven but the descent into time and memory. It is the latter, descending movement that Knausgaard follows in his practice as a writer.

The key issue here is time. By using the first person like no one before, Augustine dramatizes what it means to be torn apart by time. Even his abstract philosophical speculations in the Confessions are marked by his concrete existence as he is longing and languishing, seized by hope or fear, elated by an insight or frustrated by an impasse. Accordingly, when Augustine pursues his philosophical analysis of time-consciousness in the Confessions, he also makes his reader feel how the problem of time is an intimate, personal concern. The investigation of time must itself be carried out in time and Augustine foregrounds the effort to articulate his own arguments, as an ongoing line of thought that at any moment may be broken. Likewise, when Augustine analyzes the work of memory, he does so by descending into “the caves and caverns” of his own memory (Augustine 1963: 10: 17), exposing the ways in which the integrity of his self is breached by a past he cannot fully recover. Moreover, as Augustine is writing his Confessions, he is still vulnerable to change and this drama becomes a part of the book itself. Intensifying the sense of his own vanishing presence, Augustine even highlights the fleeting time in which he composes his text: “Consider what I am now, at this moment [in ipso tempore], as I set down my confessions” (10: 3).

The same turn toward his own passing presence is pursued by Knausgaard in My Struggle. “Today is February 27, 2008. The time is 11:43 p.m.,” we read early on in the first volume, as he records the night when he begins to work on the book (Knausgaard 2013: 25). A couple of pages later we learn that six days have passed for Knausgaard at the time of writing, as we find him at his desk again: “It is now a few minutes past eight o’clock in the morning. It is March 4, 2008. I am sitting in my office, surrounded by books from floor to ceiling, listening to the Swedish band Dungen while thinking about what I have written and where it is leading” (28). These explicit marks of time recur throughout My Struggle, returning with a particular frequency in the final volume, when he is trying to complete the book. “I am sitting all alone as I am writing this. It is June 12, 2011, the time is 06:17 a.m., in the room above me the children are asleep, at the other end of the house Linda is asleep, outside the window, a few yards out in the garden, angular sunrays descend on the apple tree. The foliage is filled with light and shadow” (Knausgaard 2012: 227).

These apparently simple observations encapsulate the poetics of My Struggle. Knausgaard’s writing develops a careful attention to the time and place where he finds himself. The fundamental form of such attention is the turn toward what is happening at this very moment—trying to capture life as it unfolds right now. The aim is to slow down the experience of temporality, to dilate moments of time and linger in their qualities. This movement does not yield a stable presence but, on the contrary, a stronger sense of how the present moment is ceasing to be and has to be held in memory, as it opens onto a future that exceeds it. By instilling this sense of transience, Knausgaard seeks to awaken his own attention and the attention of his readers. He wants to counteract habit: to prevent himself from taking his life for granted and see the world anew. This attempt to break with habit—to deepen the sensation of being alive, to make moments of time more vivid—is necessarily intertwined with a sense of finitude. It is because his life is finite that he cannot take it for granted and his desire to linger in a moment is animated by the awareness that it is passing away. Indeed, the sense of transience is an essential part of the radiance of the moment itself. Seeing the world anew is inseparable from the sense that the world you see anew is finite. It has not always been, it will not always be, and therefore it must be seized before it vanishes.

Knausgaard’s great predecessor here is the modern writer who explored the experience of time more deeply than any other: Marcel Proust. Knausgaard recalls that he not only read Proust’s In Search of Lost Time “but virtually imbibed it” (Knausgaard 2013: 29) and My Struggle bears the imprint of many passages from Proust. The influence is visible already in the basic form of the project. In Search of Lost Time devotes seven volumes, stretching over more than three thousand pages, to a man recollecting his life. My Struggle apparently follows the same model, devoting six volumes, also stretching over more than three thousand pages, to a man recollecting his life. While Knausgaard transforms the Proustian project in an important way—to which I will return—it is illuminating to dwell on what he learns from Proust. The protagonist Marcel is himself in the process of learning throughout In Search of Lost Time. From early childhood, he wants to become a writer, but he is plagued by doubts about his talent and not until the end does he discover what the subject of his book should be, namely, his own life. Rather than a transcendent topic of writing, which has always left Marcel’s imagination blank, it is “this life, the memories of its times of sadness, its times of joy” (Proust 2003: 208) that he comes to see as the basis for his book. “The greatness of true art,” he argues, “lies in rediscovering, grasping hold of, and making us recognize…this reality which we run a real risk of dying without having known, and which is quite simply our life” (204).

Accordingly, Marcel emphasizes that his work will be devoted to “the thing that ought to be most precious to us,” namely, “our true life, our reality as we have felt it” (459). This is why he can dwell on the experience of falling asleep for more than thirty pages, or seek to distill every nuance of an erotic touch, a flickering memory, an awakening sensation. Through the power of his prose, he wants to sharpen our perception and refine our senses. The aim is not to transport us to another life, but to make us genuinely experience the life we are already living. And as Marcel understands, to achieve this aim we must transform our relation to time. If habit tends to deaden and dull our experience, it is because it reduces the impact of time on our senses. Even though every day is different and there is no guarantee that there will be another one, habit makes us feel as though our life has been all the same and will continue indefinitely. Thus, when we get used to seeing something we love, we tend no longer to notice its details or marvel at its existence. Likewise, when we get used to living with someone we love, we run the risk of taking him or her for granted and no longer appreciating his or her unique qualities.

The key to breaking habit, then, is to recall that we can lose what we love. Far from devaluing life, the dimension of loss is part of what makes it emerge as valuable. We may know that we are going to die, but the role of art is to make us feel what that means and thereby intensify our attachment to life. Accordingly, when Marcel comes to narrate his own life, he is all the more attentive to the impact and nuance of his past experiences. Even many events that were unremarkable or unhappy return with a luminous quality in his memory, since they appear as irreplaceable in the light of loss. The value of a past experience may thus be enhanced when it is infused with the pathos of being lost, just as the value of a current experience may be enhanced by the sense that it will be lost.

Yet Marcel pursues his insight only in relation to a distant past and not in relation to his ongoing life as he is writing. In Search of Lost Time ends with the revelation that leads Marcel to become an author and to write the book we have been reading. Nevertheless, we never learn under what circumstances Marcel is writing the seven volumes, how much time it takes, and what he is struggling with as he is trying to complete the book. To be clear, In Search of Lost Time is not Proust’s autobiography. It does not tell the story of Proust’s life but is the autobiography of the fictional character Marcel, who within the frame of the novel writes the story of his life. We know that Proust worked on In Search of Lost Time for more than thirteen years and was unable to finish the book before his death, struggling to enter revisions in the galley proofs up until the end. Within the frame of the novel, however, we do not get to witness an analogous struggle on the part of Marcel as the supposed author of the pages we are reading. Indeed, we have no sense of what his daily life is like as he is writing, or what happens to him during the years it takes to compose his autobiography. All his efforts are devoted to giving meaning and significance to his past, not to his ongoing life.

This is the structure that Knausgaard transforms. Within the frame of My Struggle, the current life of the narrator Karl Ove is itself part of the story and we are even told exactly how long it takes for him to write the six volumes. He begins to work on the first volume at 11:43 p.m. on February 27, 2008, and he completes the last volume at 07:07 a.m. on September 2, 2011. To be sure, the beginning and end of the narration cannot be dated with such complete precision, but what is important is the ambition to situate his writing as part of an ongoing life. We learn in detail about how his work on the book is interrupted by child care, practical worries, relationship troubles, and personal anxiety. All of these things belong to the subject matter of the book itself. The struggle is not only to recover the past, but also to grasp hold of and engage with the life that continues.

Knausgaard thereby reveals a difficulty that Proust tends to conceal. If you only focus on the distant past (as Marcel does) it is relatively easy to gain a new appreciation of your life, since you can transform the past into an object of contemplation that no longer makes any direct demands on your engagement. You can dwell on details you previously overlooked, absorb the impact of events you did not understand at the time, and even feel a surge of nostalgia for things you did not enjoy when you first experienced them. Indeed, the sense that all these things are irrevocably gone can make them appear more precious than they actually were. Your nostalgia, then, can come to shelter you from the demands of a life that still has to be lived. It is telling that In Search of Lost Time ends with Marcel withdrawing from the world to write his book. His life is effectively over and the only thing that remains for him is to tell his story. Of course, Marcel still has to live, but we are supposed to forget about this in favor of an immersion in the past. Thus, the few times we catch a glimpse of him in the act of narration, it is the image of someone who has reduced his engagements to a minimum and apparently places no value on his current life. “I, the strange human who, while he waits for death to release him, lives behind closed shutters, knows nothing of the world, sits motionless as an owl, and like that bird can only see things at all clearly in the darkness” (Proust 2002: 371).

In contrast, the structure of My Struggle looks like a deliberate inversion of the one that shapes In Search of Lost Time. While Marcel’s book ends with him becoming an author through the decision to write the story of his life, Karl Ove’s book begins with him already being an author who decides to write the story of his life and ends with the declaration that he is no longer an author after the completion of his book. “I will enjoy, really enjoy, the thought that I am no longer an author,” are the last words of My Struggle (Knausgaard 2012: 1116), followed by a separate page with two sole sentences that address his wife and children: “For Linda, Vanja, Heidi, and John. I love you” (1117). Where Marcel ends by retreating from life into literature, Karl Ove ends by retreating from literature and turning toward life. This is not a strict opposition, since Marcel retreats into literature to understand and appreciate life, while literature is an essential part of Karl Ove’s ability to understand and appreciate life. Nevertheless, the way he transforms the ending of In Search of Lost Time indicates the challenge Karl Ove poses to himself. The retreat into writing is supposed to lead back into his actual life and not out of it. Indeed, he explicitly wants to change and become a better person in his daily existence. In addition to recovering the past, his task in My Struggle is to keep faith with what he is seeing and living now—not years later when he is looking back on it.

By the same token, he has to confront the difficulty of appreciating his life and sustaining his deepest attachments. Loving his wife and children is not something that can be accomplished once and for all; it is an act of devotion that has to be sustained every day and one that can always fail, with joy giving way to tedium, loving care compromised by indifference or frustration, and the sense of wonder lost in deadening habit. The aim of My Struggle is not to purify one from the other, but to confront the daily, interminable battle between the two. This is why we find the narrator in the midst of life, rather than at a remove from life as in the case of Marcel. Karl Ove is never at rest and even when he retreats to the writing desk he is caught up in the practical engagements of everyday life. The engagements may be painful or passionate, tedious or elevating, but the point is to make them all glow in their particularity.

Thus, at different intervals in telling the story of his life, Karl Ove transitions from recounting the past to depicting himself at the time of writing. Within the space of a sentence, we can move from a young Karl Ove in action to his older self recollecting the events several decades later. The first time this happens is early in the first volume, when we learn about his current life situation on the evening in February when he begins to work on the book. After an immersive description of one night when he was eight years old, Knausgaard looks up from his desk and speaks to us in ipso tempore—at the very moment of writing:

As I sit here writing this, I recognize that more than thirty years have passed. In the window before me I can vaguely make out the reflection of my face. Apart from one eye, which is glistening, and the area immediately beneath, which dimly reflects a little light, the whole of the left side is in shadow. Two deep furrows divide my forehead, one deep furrow intersects each cheek, all of them as if filled with darkness, and with the eyes staring and serious, and the corners of the mouth drooping, it is impossible not to consider this face gloomy.

What has engraved itself in my face?

Today is February 27, 2008. The time is 11:43 p.m. I who am writing, Karl Ove Knausgaard, was born in December 1968, and I am accordingly, at this moment, 39 years old. I have three children, Vanja, Heidi, and John, and I am married for the second time, to Linda Boström Knausgaard. All four are asleep in the rooms around me, in an apartment in Malmö, where we have now lived for a year and a half. Apart from some parents of the children at Vanja and Heidi’s nursery we do not know anyone here. This is not a loss, at any rate not for me, I don’t get anything out of socializing anyway. I never say what I really think, what I really mean, but always more or less agree with whomever I am talking to at the time, pretend that what they say is of interest to me, except when I am drinking, in which case more often than not I go too far the other way, and wake up to the fear of having overstepped the mark. This has become more pronounced over the years and can now last for weeks. When I drink I also have blackouts and completely lose control of my actions, which are generally desperate and stupid, but also on occasion desperate and dangerous. That is why I no longer drink. I do not want anyone to get close to me, I do not want anyone to see me, and this is the way things have developed: no one gets close and no one sees me. This is what must have engraved itself in my face, this is what must have made it so stiff and masklike and almost impossible to associate with myself whenever I happen to catch a glimpse of it in a shop window. (Knausgaard 2013: 25-26)

This is not only the night when he begins to write the book; it also marks the degree zero of his project. The man who looks at himself here is someone who can barely recognize himself. He has withdrawn from the world, but by the same token he has disowned his life and lost hold of himself. The writing of My Struggle is an attempt to reverse this process, to turn him back toward his own life. He who never says what he really thinks and really means will now do so for thousands of pages. And he who does not want anyone to see him, who does not want anyone to get close to him, will now expose himself and make his life visible for anyone to see. This is not to say that he has a hidden kernel of identity that is independent of others and ready to be revealed at will. On the contrary, the difficulty of owning his life is that he is inseparable from the way he is acting in the world. Even withdrawing from others is a form of being with them and seeking to leave the world behind is itself a way of being in it. To own his life is to acknowledge this dependence, to recognize—for better and for worse—that he is attached to what he sees.

The project of owning his life, then, begins with a literal self-reflection. He sees his face in the dark window and has to grapple with what has happened to him. In a way, all of My Struggle can be seen as an attempt to answer the question he asks here: “What has engraved itself in my face?” He descends into the past to recover his life, but also to be able to engage the present and the future.

Consequently, he has to confront what Proust calls “embodied time” (temps incorporé). Embodied time designates how we carry the past with us, even when we are not aware of it or in control of how it affects us. This embodied time is for Proust the very condition of writing an autobiography. Because the past is inscribed in our bodies, we have the chance of reconnecting to our former selves, recalling not only what we did but also how it felt and thereby retrieving a genuine sense of our lives. For the same reason, however, our connection to the past is tenuous. We may never gain access to many of the experiences that are stored in us and—even when we do—the meaning of the past is never given in itself but refracted through our current sense of self and our projections of the future. Moreover, if our memories are embodied it means that they can be damaged or effaced by what happens to the body. The duration of the past is not secured by an immaterial soul, but depends on the retention of time in a frail and material body.

Thus, when Marcel discovers the importance of embodied time, he is haunted by an awareness of all the factors that may eradicate the memories that are retained in his body. “I felt the present object of my thought very clearly within myself… but also that, along with my body, it might be annihilated at any moment” (Proust 2003: 345-46). The discovery of embodied time inspires him to write In Search of Lost Time, but it also marks the precariousness of his project. At the end of the last volume, on the verge of beginning to write, Marcel worries about how brain damage or various accidents may prevent him from composing his autobiography. And indeed, before starting to work on his book, Marcel falls in a staircase and suffers from a memory loss that heightens his anxiety over not being able to write. “I asked myself not only ‘Is there still enough time?’ but also ‘Am I still in a sufficiently fit condition?’” (345). In pursuing the implications of embodied time, Marcel is thus finally led to the dead body, which underlines the finitude of the lived time to which he is devoted. “After death,” he writes on one of the last pages, “Time leaves the body, and the memories—so indifferent, so pale now—are effaced from her who no longer exists and soon will be from him whom at present they still torture, but in whom they will eventually die, when the desire of a living body is no longer there to support them” (357).

While the problem of the dead body only appears at the end of Proust’s novel, it is foregrounded from the beginning of My Struggle. Like Proust, Knausgaard wants to evoke the depths of time in our lives; how we go far beyond our physical location in space by bearing the past with us and projecting ourselves into a future. It is this distention of time that allows us to have a history and a lived experience. Yet, in Knausgaard there is a strong parallel awareness of how the dimension of lived time—with its hopes and fears, hidden riches and emotional upheavals—depends on a material body that will remain after the distended life has expired.

Thus, with a remarkable incision, the first sentences in the first volume of My Struggle force us to witness the very transition from a living to a dead body:

For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops. Sooner or later, one day, this pounding action ceases of its own accord and the blood begins to run toward the lowest point of the body, where it gathers in a small pool, visible from the outside as a dark, soft patch on ever whitening skin, as the temperature sinks, the limbs stiffen and the intestines drain… The enormous hordes of bacteria that begin to spread through the body’s innards cannot be halted. Had they tried only a few hours earlier they would have met with immediate resistance, but now everything around them is still, as they delve deeper and deeper into the moist darkness. They advance on the Havers Channels, the Crypts of Lieberkühn, the Isles of Langerhans. They proceed to Bowman’s Capsule in the Renes, Clark’s Column in the Spinalis, the black substance in the Mesencephalon. And they arrive at the heart. As yet, it is intact, but deprived of the activity for which its whole construction has been designed, there is something strangely desolate about it, like a production plant that workers have been forced to flee in haste, one may imagine, the stationary vehicles shining yellow against the darkness of the forest, the huts deserted, a line of fully loaded cable-buckets stretching up the hillside. 

The moment life departs the body, the body belongs to the dead. Lamps, suitcases, carpets, door handles, windows. Fields, marshes, streams, mountains, clouds, the sky. None of these is alien to us. We are constantly surrounded by objects and phenomena from the realm of the nonliving. Nonetheless, there are few things that arouse in us greater distaste than to see a human being caught up in it, at least if we are to judge by the efforts we make to keep corpses out of sight. In larger hospitals they are not only hidden away in discrete, inaccessible rooms, even the pathways there are concealed, with their own elevators and basement corridors, and should you stumble upon one of them, the dead bodies being wheeled by are always covered. When they have to be transported from the hospital it is through a dedicated exit, into vehicles with tinted glass; in the church grounds there is a separate, windowless room for them; during the funeral ceremony they lie in closed coffins until they are lowered in the ground or cremated in the oven. (Knausgaard 2013: 3-4)

For a novel that is so devoted to the first-person perspective, it is striking to begin with a view of life that only can be given from a third-person perspective. No one can experience the moment of death that Knausgaard describes. We can infer it when we observe another body at the moment of death, but when it happens to ourselves we are already gone. And yet we belong to this body that is not under our command. We are altogether dependent on our body—cannot exist without it—but our body is not dependent on us. After we are gone, it can remain as an object in the world, indifferent to our absence. Presumably, this is why the dead body is so uncanny and tends to be hidden away. The dead body reminds us that we are not only in the world but also of the world, made of materials that will degrade and decompose.

The materialist reminder runs throughout My Struggle. Specifically, Knausgaard employs a bifocal vision, where every existential phenomenon is seen both in its own right and as dependent on a physiological machinery. The paradigmatic example is the heart, which is the major and apparently conventional metaphor in My Struggle. The heart in Knausgaard is explicitly a metaphor for the living principle of his existence, expressed most forcefully in the intuitive experience of love. “The heart is never mistaken,” is the phrase he employs repeatedly, to explain his life changing decisions. The heart, then, designates his deepest and most intimate sense of self. At the same time, the heart is treated not metaphorically but literally. As in the opening paragraph quoted above, Knausgaard repeatedly lays bare the heart as a physical mechanism that is utterly indifferent to his sense of self. The heart beats and then it stops beating, whether he wills it or not. The dissection of his heart becomes not only an intimate confession but also an exploration of his own biological-material constitution, as though he were opening his heart in both a romantic and a chirurgical sense.

Knausgaard thus pushes the notion of embodied time to a stark conclusion. Looking at pictures of himself as an infant, he asks:

Is this creature [his infant self] the same person as the one sitting here in Malmö writing? And will the forty-year-old creature who is sitting in Malmö writing this one overcast September day—in a room filled with the drone of the traffic outside and the autumn wind howling through the old-fashioned ventilation system—be the same as the gray, hunched geriatric who forty years from now might be sitting dribbling and trembling in an old people’s home somewhere in the Swedish woods? Not to mention the corpse that at some point will be laid out on a bench in the morgue. Still known as Karl Ove. (Knausgaard 2015: 8).

Both the tenuous connections and the ultimate fragility of embodied time are here underscored, as he contemplates the radical changes of his body across a lifetime. In composing his autobiography, Karl Ove has to reckon with physical decomposition and is haunted by the absolute termination of his life that will take place when his body is transformed into a corpse. Alongside the existential commitment to his first-person perspective, there is an equally strong third-person perspective, where his life runs from the newborn child to the dead body in the morgue.

The key to Knausgaard’s writing is that these two perspectives are not mutually exclusive but interdependent. Knausgaard persistently recalls us to the automatic functions of our bodies, the decaying matter that we are made of, and the geological time that dwarfs the span of our existence. Yet this materialist perspective does not serve to diminish the importance of our lives. The fact that the duration of your existence is but a speck on the scale of geological time does not mean that it is insignificant. Likewise, the fact that your first-person perspective—the unique experience of your life—depends on a set of physical properties does not mean that it is an illusion. It only means that your life is finite.

Such finitude does not devalue your life, but is an essential part of why it can matter and take on significance, against the backdrop of its possible dissolution. “Death,” Knausgaard writes in the final volume, “is the background against which life appears. If death had not existed, we would not have known what life is” (Knausgaard 2012: 596). Death is the background against which life can light up as something cherished and irreplaceable, but it is also the background that can extinguish all light. “Death makes life meaningless, because everything we have ever striven for ceases when life does, and it makes life meaningful, too, because its presence makes the little we have of it indispensable, every moment precious” (Knausgaard 2014: 98).

Death is here understood as an existential category but it also opens onto the organic death of the body. Indeed, to confront the corpse—in its material existence—as the fate of everyone we love is a challenge Knausgaard repeatedly poses to himself and his reader. As we have seen, the first volume of My Struggle begins by depicting the moment of death in bacterial detail and the final paragraph of the same volume returns to the corpse, as Karl Ove visits the morgue to see the body of his deceased father one last time:

Now I saw his lifeless state. That there was no longer any difference between what once had been my father and the table he was lying on, or the floor on which the table stood, or the wall socket beneath the window, or the cable running to the lamp beside him. For humans are merely one form among many, which the world produces over and over again, not only in everything that lives but also in everything that does not live, drawn in sand, stone, and water. And death, which I had always regarded as the most important dignity in life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor. (Knausgaard 2013: 441)

This is a strict materialist view of death. A body has stopped breathing and thereby ceased to function as a living being, instead becoming an object among other objects in the world. “Dad was no longer breathing,” we read a bit earlier. “That was what had happened to him, the connection with the air had been broken, now it pushed against him like any other object, a log, a gasoline can, a sofa” (350). To see the living body thus reduced to its dead counterpart is to see that nature is indifferent to our interests and desires, leaving the body to wither away when we can no longer draw on the world to sustain ourselves. “He no longer poached air, because that is what you do when you breathe, you trespass, again and again you trespass on the world” (350). This ability to interact with the world—and project yourself into a future—is precisely what is lost in death. No longer poaching the air but simply subject to its physical pressure, the individual body decomposes and is incorporated into a cycle of matter in transformation.

There are two traditional ways of addressing this material death and the anxiety it may provoke. The first is to argue that we have an immortal soul that is separate from the decomposing matter of our bodies. Even though our bodies perish, we do not really die but ascend to a higher existence, independent of any body or endowed with an incorruptible body. The second strategy is to argue that we are continuous with matter and therefore have no reason to fear death. Because the matter of our bodies is transformed into something else, nothing substantial is actually lost but only takes on another form. This is, for example, the Stoic view of death. “Yes, you will cease to be what you are, but become something else of which the universe then has need,” as the Roman Stoic Epictetus holds in an influential argument (Epictetus 1995: 215).

While these two perspectives are apparently opposed, they are united in their denial that death entails the loss of a life we should try to hold onto. In the first case, we are told to detach from the life that is lost in favor of an immortal soul. In the second case, we are told to detach from the life that is lost in favor of the continuation of matter. Both perspectives thus deny the tragedy of death. Only a secular faith—which remains committed to a life that irrevocably is lost in death—can counter these two forms of denial. Indeed, only a secular faith can account for why death is a tragic loss at all. The sense of tragic loss depends on keeping faith in the irreplaceable value of a life that is gone forever. Nature does not care whether we live or die, but that makes it all the more imperative that we care and remember what has been taken away.

Precisely in and through a materialist vision of death, Knausgaard’s writing is devoted to secular faith. In forcing us to look at the dead body, he makes vivid what separates the dead from the living. For the living, time is distended: we recall a past and project ourselves into a future. This is the time of our lives, the time that Knausgaard is dedicated to exploring. The dead no longer see anything or feel anything, no longer recall a past and project a future. Our fidelity to the person who has died requires that we acknowledge this absolute loss of life. When faced with a dead body, we can remember that this body belonged to someone who lost everything in death—someone who is absolutely gone—and thereby we remain faithful to the memory of a person who is irreplaceable. Moreover, we can anticipate our own death—run ahead into the risk of losing everything—and thereby bring our own finite life into focus.

The remarkable thing with Knausgaard’s writing is how such mortality is allowed to be the source of both fear and love, terror and beauty. The fear of death is not something that should be overcome. Rather, it is an expression of love for a life that will cease to be.

Likewise, being bound to a mortal body can indeed be a source of terror. You may be crippled by injuries or ravaged by brain chemistry and in the end all the living spirit you gather will dissipate in dead matter. Yet, being bound to a body that is beyond your control is also the condition for being touched and moved, the chance of being receptive to the vanishing beauty of the world.

Even in the most serene moments of bliss, then, Karl Ove is aware of how the precious existence of those he loves is bound to their precarious and limited physical conditions:

      I looked at Linda, she sat with her head against the seat, with her eyes closed. Vanja’s face was covered by hair, she lay like a tussock in her lap.

      I leaned forward a little and looked at Heidi, who gazed back at me uninterestedly.

      I loved them. They were my crew.

      My family.

      As pure biomass it was not very remarkable. Heidi weighed perhaps ten kilos, Vanja perhaps twelve, and if one added my and Linda’s weight we reached perhaps one hundred ninety kilos. That was considerably less than the weight of a horse, I would think, and about as much as a well-built male gorilla. If we lay close together our physical range was not much to brag about either, any given sea lion would be more voluminous. However, regarding what cannot be measured, which is the only important thing when it comes to families, regarding thoughts, dreams and emotions, the inner life, this group was explosive. Dispersed over time, which is the relevant dimension for understanding a family, it would cover an almost infinite surface. I once met my grandmother’s mother, which meant that Vanja and Heidi belonged to the fifth generation, and fate permitting they could in turn experience three generations. Thus, our little heap of meat covered eight generations, or two hundred years, with all that entails of shifting cultural and social conditions, not to mention how many people it included. A whole little world was being transported at full speed along the highway on this late spring afternoon…. (Knausgaard 2012: 916-17)

The gentle happiness here is all the more radiant because of the bifocal vision. On the one hand: the tender evocation of an intimate love, where each member of the family is seen as an origin of the world, with “thoughts, dreams, and emotions” that distend beyond anything that can be measured. On the other hand: the reminder that this entire world depends on a limited “biomass” with a determinate weight and height, here even described as a “heap of meat” that is being “transported” along the highway. Remarkably, the latter perspective does not serve to denigrate the value of the lives that are woven together. They can be lost forever if the car meets a fatal accident on the highway, transforming their biomass into a heap of dead meat. Yet this risk is not held out as a morbid fantasy, but as a reminder of how their lives are a treasure that cannot be taken for granted. Anticipating death in the midst of life is a way of focusing his gaze on the ones he loves, attaching himself to what he sees, making their unique existence vivid.

The love that radiates here is the love of a life that is secular in Augustine’s sense: bound to time, marked by history, dependent on generations that have come before and may come after. Throughout My Struggle, this temporal dimension is shown to hold the key to the passions of our lives. The distention of time marks every moment, but it can be stretched out in different ways and discloses the depths of who we are. Thus, Knausgaard explores the sedimentation and resuscitation of events in an individual body, the crystallization of a moment through memory and anticipation, the texture of time in a love relationship, intervals of pleasure and pain, the dead time of trauma and the elation of bliss.

These are all forms of embodied time, through which we distend our lives beyond a physical location in space. But they are also bound to a limited body that cannot be left behind. The wager of My Struggle is to hold these two perspectives together. We are spirit but also matter and the former depends on the latter. We can compose our lives—give them form and meaning—but in the end we will disappear in a meaningless process of decomposition. Knausgaard makes us confront such decomposition, while keeping faith in the value of finite existence. He turns us back to our lives to see both form and formlessness, integration and disintegration.

My Struggle thus moves in the opposite direction from the book whose title it takes over. Knausgaard’s Norwegian title Min Kamp is a direct translation of Mein Kampf, the title of Adolf Hitler’s autobiography. This may seem like a gratuitous provocation, but the choice of title is motivated in the final volume, when Knausgaard devotes more than four hundred pages to Mein Kampf and its context. Knausgaard gives a detailed account of the crisis of the times, as well as the complications of Hitler’s childhood and early adulthood, while showing how Mein Kampf systematically subordinates Hitler’s life story to ideology. The grittiness of everyday life is veiled by euphemism, the complexity of persons reduced to a typology of characters, and everything that is failure or suffering integrated in a narrative of gradual purification. Most importantly, all ambivalence, all doubts and hesitations, are dissolved in a discourse of certainty.

In a remarkable move, Knausgaard here shows how Hitler excludes a second person mode of address. In Mein Kampf, there is an I, a we, and a they, but there is no you that would allow for an intimate relation. Hitler does not allow himself to be seen in any form of frailty and he does not obligate himself to anyone else in his or her frailty. He merges himself with a strong, idealized we and projects all weakness onto an external they. Hitler’s way of narrating his life is thus bound up with his larger ideological scheme for making sense of the world. In Hitler’s universe, there is a pure, good “we” that is in peril of being corrupted by “them”: the impure and evil others who most prominently are figured as the Jews. To the extent that we are in trouble—to the extent that our lives are unresolved or difficult—it is because of them, because of their corrupting influence. If only they (the evil forces) could be eliminated, we would be saved.

Nazi ideology is thus another version—a particularly sinister version—of the religious longing for purity. Knausgaard acknowledges and reckons with such longing for purity, but his writing is an active resistance to any temptation of purification. Indeed, My Struggle is devoted to the imperfection that Mein Kampf sets out to erase. Nothing will save us, since irresolution, difficulty, and frailty are an essential part of the lives we care about. And no one can offer us a final salvation, since everyone who enters our lives are themselves finite. To own our lives is to acknowledge this essential finitude, as both the chance of being together and the risk of breaking apart. This is why My Struggle—which apparently is so devoted to the I—ultimately turns out to be dependent on you. In turning toward you, Karl Ove exposes himself in his dependence on a world that is beyond his control. But he also trains you to see and to acknowledge your own dependence and the dependence of others. This recognition of finitude does not offer any guarantees that we will lead a responsible life and take better care of each other. But without the recognition of finitude the question of responsibility and care would not even take hold of us. To turn toward you—to focus our gaze on another and attach ourselves to what we see—is the deepest movement of secular confession. We are turned back to our lives, not as something that is our property but as a form of existence that is altogether finite and altogether dependent on others. This is not the end of responsibility; it is the beginning.

Martin Hägglund is Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities at Yale University. He is the author of Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov (2012), Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (2008), and Chronophobia: Essays on Time and Finitude (2002). The essay on Knausgaard published here is a part of his next book, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom.

References

Augustine. 1912. Confessiones. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Augustine. 1963. Confessions, translated by Rex Warner. New York: New American Library.

Augustine. 1982. Eighty-three Different Questions, translated by David L. Mosher. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press.

Augustine. 1992. Sermons 148-183, translated by Edmund Hill. New York: New City Press.

Epictetus. 1995. The Discourses of Epictetus, translated by Robin Hard. London: Everyman.

Knausgaard, Karl Ove. 2012. Min kamp. Sjette bok. Oslo: Forlaget Oktober.

Knausgaard, Karl Ove. 2013. My Struggle. Book One, translated by Don Bartlett. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Knausgaard, Karl Ove. 2014. My Struggle. Book Two, translated by Don Bartlett. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Knausgaard, Karl Ove. 2015. My Struggle. Book Three, translated by Don Bartlett. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Proust, Marcel. 1988a. À la recherche du temps perdu, volume III, ed. J-Y Tadié. Paris: Gallimard.

Proust, Marcel. 1988b. À la recherche du temps perdu, volume IV, ed. J-Y Tadié. Paris: Gallimard.

Proust, Marcel. 2002. Sodom and Gomorrah, translated by John Sturrock. New York: Penguin.

Proust, Marcel. 2003. Finding Time Again, translated by Ian Patterson. New York: Penguin.

[1] All citations of Augustine’s Confessions are given by book number and chapter number respectively. I employ Rex Warner’s translation (Augustine 1963), while sometimes modifying it in light of the original Latin (Augustine 1912). In a few places, the cited translations of Proust have also been modified in light of the original French (Proust 1988a and 1988b). All translations from the original Norwegian of volume 6 of Min kamp (Knausgaard 2012) are my own, since this volume has not yet been translated into English.