Author Archives: andrew gallix

Literary Bondage

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Here’s an extract from my Guardian Books piece on the oulipo that went up today:

As Gabriel Josipovici argues in What Ever Happened to Modernism?, modern literature was forged out of a refusal to submit to external constraints, with the novel a “new form in which the individual could express himself precisely by throwing off the shackles that bound him to his fathers and to tradition”. The flipside of this emancipation of the writer (or privatisation of writing) was, as Walter Benjamin pointed out, isolation. No longer the mouthpiece of the Muses or society, novelists could only derive legitimacy from themselves. “Going back to the world of genres is not an option, any more than is a return to the world of the ancien régime,” writes Josipovici. The Oulipo escapes the Romantic cul-de-sac of unfettered imagination (or its Surrealist avatar, chance) by reintroducing external constraints, which are self-imposed.

Not a Plain Is

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Rachel Kushner, “Lipstick Traces,” Bookforum December/January 2013

I suspect the reason Lispector’s philosophical fiction has inspired such dramatic devotion is that people feel she is talking to them, about the most basic but complex human experience: consciousness, the alienating strangeness of what it is to be alive. She attempts to capture what it is to think our existence as we are in it — in the “marvelous scandal,” as Lispector puts it, of life. We are not a plain is, but an awareness of this is, which is to say totally cut off from the world by the human capacity to conceive our part in it.

The In-Between Things

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“I want to evoke all the things that are a part of our lives, but not of our stories — the washing up, the changing of diapers, the in-between-things — and make them glow. Though a five-page description of what’s in a closet is not exactly page-turner stuff, I thought of this project as a kind of experiment in realistic prose. How far is it possible to go into detail before the novel cracks and becomes unreadable? Oh, it’s a shameful venture, no one wants to be boring or banal, but that was what I set out to do. The first book is centered on death, and it’s like bathing in triviality, and then death. When death is near, everything is meaningful, everything glows, everything is intense. The second book has the same pattern, except that the center of the book is the negation of death, i.e. falling in love. So: bathing in a sea of triviality, then love. Around love, everything is meaningful, glowing, intense. This is the structure of life: large chunks of meaninglessness. Time just passes away, nothing really happens, and then death, or love, or birth.”
– Karl Ove Knausgaard, “Bookforum Talks With Karl Ove Knausgaard” by Trevor Laurence Jockims, Bookforum 24 June 2013

Failing With Total Dedication

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Karl Ove Knausgaard, “Bookforum Talks With Karl Ove Knausgaard” by Trevor Laurence Jockims, Bookforum 24 June 2013

Bookforum: Are there other projects you’re working on now you’d care to mention, ones growing out of, or away from, My Struggle? I guess I’m thinking of the claim made in Volume 2 that writing My Struggle felt like committing literary suicide.

Knausgaard: It was a literary suicide. There is nothing left; I can never again write something from the heart without repeating myself, but I wanted it that way: In Volume 6 I even wrote a couple of lines about future novels, stories I’d thought of, just to kill them off. The last sentence in that book is: “And I’m so happy that I’m no longer an author.” So what I work on now are things associated with literature. I have written a collection of essays, which are going to be published this fall, I have translated a book from Swedish, which will be out in late May, and I have written a screenplay for a film based on my first novel. I have also started a small publishing venture with some friends. This spring, we published three novels — by Judith Herman, Christian Kracht, and Maria Zennström — and in the fall we have six books on the list, among them Peter Handke and Katie Kitamura. Doing all this makes me long for some real writing, but I don’t have what it takes: a capability to fail for years. That is what writing is for me: failing with total dedication.

Nothing But Digressions

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Karl Ove Knausgaard, “Completely Without Dignity: An Interview With Karl Ove Knaudgaard” by Jesse Barron, The Paris Review 3 July 2013

In Min Kamp, I wanted to see how far it was possible to take realism before it would be impossible to read. My first book had a strong story, strong narration. Then I would see how far I could take a digression out before I needed to go back to the narration, and I discovered I could go for thirty or forty pages, and then the digressions took over. So in Min Kamp I’m doing nothing but digressions, no story lines.