Chekov's Gun

Recent political events, Knausgaard's fiction, and Houellebecq's "Serotonin"

Karl Ove Knausgaard went around for many years claiming that he was sick of fiction and couldn’t stand the idea of made-up characters and invented plots. People understood this to be an explanation of why he had decided to write six long books about his own life. There was some truth in this, but the simple contrast between fiction and reality was complicated by the fact that Knausgaard referred to his autobiographical books as novels. Were they real? Was the Karl Ove of the story the same as the author? It seemed like it, but then why call them novels? The problem lay with the word “fiction.” Like a German philosopher, Knausgaard had his own definitions for words that we thought we all agreed on. Here’s how he explains his meaning of “fiction”:

At that time, I was also tired of fiction in a broader sense. It seemed to me that fiction was everywhere—TV news, newspapers, films, and books all provide a flood of stories, a continuous dramatization of the world. So what I did, naively, was to try to take the world back.

“A continuous dramatization of the world.” Fiction is not the novel, then, but the incessant urge to interpret and narrativize experience, instead of simply presenting things as they are: the truth. Of course, when one thinks they are seeing the truth they may be simply telling a different story, and they may have blind spots; but still, one can try, one can write against interpretation. This is what Peter Handke, one of Knausgaard’s favorite authors, does in The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick. He’ll write a sentence that goes something like, “The house seemed unoccupied because the door was open,” and then he’ll follow that sentence with, “The house seemed unoccupied even though the door was open.” Which one is it? What is the connection between an open door and the presence of someone in a house? We connect events through language, create patterns of cause and effect, and in this way, create meaning. But what if the meaning is a lie? What if, instead, we simply described things empirically and refused to draw conclusions? “The door was open. He wondered whether someone was inside.” Moment by moment narration, while hypnotic, can also be tedious, however. An entire novel constrained by the limits of personal experience, with no attempt at interpretation or analysis, may lack the momentum to sustain a reader’s interest. This is where memory comes into play. “The door was open. He wondered whether someone was inside. In childhood, when he would visit his grandparents during summer, the screen door had always been left open.” Now, maybe, just maybe, we have something. A story always comes through eventually, but to create a true one, a true fiction, it may be necessary to resist the story for as long as possible.

The feeling that Knausgaard expresses, being sick of TV news and “the flood of stories,” is one we know well in 2024, 15 years on from the publication of Book One of My Struggle. Today, this is perhaps truer than ever. Do you see, by the way, that I do it, too? It’s there, in my language, the desire to narrativize, to dramatize: “Now more than ever…” How many times have we heard this in the past few years? This sickness is around us in the forms Knausgaard mentions, but now it’s been accelerated with AI and ChatGPT, and it’s inside our own writing and speech. We are heavy with text, drama, narrative, spin, spectacle…I am also talking about the upcoming election, of course. I’ve felt it more in the past few days, ever since a bullet grazed the former president’s ear¹. Who was the shooter? What were his political views? Where was the Secret Service? What kind of gun was it? Was he bullied? Was he an incel? Trauma? Antifa? False flag? Deep state? What did he want? Why did he do it? What does it mean? What does it MEAN?

And then, before the blood had dried, the takes appeared, distantly at first, one, maybe two specks on the horizon. If you put your ear to the ground, you could hear the stampede approaching. Then, quickly, a flowing mass rushing towards us, overwhelming us, drowning us, giving us answers and interpretations ready for us to repeat when we came up for air.

Well, I…I want to say I refuse, but that would give my statement too much importance, and it sounds too similar to “accuse,” and really, I’m not proposing anything valiant or heroic. Let me use our contemporary lexicon. I opt out. Yes, I opt out. Don’t worry, I’ll still cast my vote—democracy simply must be protected, and I can’t give up my privilege, yes, my privilege of choosing between the two candidates placed before me. I will exercise my freedom of choice, just like when I decide whether I want a Big Mac or a Whopper. They’re really quite different, you know. To quote “SharksFan4Lifee” on reddit:

I gravitate towards the Whopper over the Big Mac. This is because the Whopper uses the BK standard patty (not the patty used in smaller BK burgers), while Big Mac’s use the small cheeseburger patties. Whopper has leafed lettuce, Big Mac only shredded. Whopper has normal cut onions, Big Mac only diced onions. Whopper has tomatoes which I love, and Big Mac’s dont. Big Mac’s have too much bread with the middle bun, Whooper has the correct amount of bread (in proportion to the rest of the sandwich). Big Mac is good though, I don’t dislike it.

So, yes, Biden, or whoever the Democratic nominee is, has my vote. My voting state is Vermont, and I don’t even live in the United States anymore (when a citizen lives abroad, their vote counts for the last state where they resided), so please don’t accuse me of both sides-ism or not caring. I’m making a big effort to cast a meaningless vote in the state that always goes blue before any other state. Why? I don’t know, man, I don’t know. I just feel the need to do it. I’m voting because it matters. I’m voting even though it doesn’t matter. I’m voting.

I recently finished reading Michel Houellebecq’s novel Serotonin. It is, to my mind, his darkest book, and the feeling one has upon finishing it is a deep sense of despair. I don’t really want to talk about the book, though, just one part in particular. At a certain point in the novel, the protagonist, a middle-aged man with no family, who has sabotaged all his chances for happiness and quit his job in an attempt to leave society (a classic Houellebecqian character), goes to a rural part of northern France to visit his one remaining friend, an old university classmate who runs a failing farm. Both men have been ground to dust by whatever you want to call it—capitalism, toxic masculinity, repressed trauma—but really, by life. Life can be too much when the things that make it meaningful and joyful, or at the very least, bearable, have been taken away. The two old friends meet up, but they don’t have much to talk about. Too much has happened, the thread has frayed too much. After a few days, the narrator, having noticed that his friend has a gun collection, tells him that he’d like to learn how to shoot. At this request, the friend changes:

He seemed delighted that I’d brought up a tangible, technical subject, relieved most of all that I wasn’t going back over the previous night’s conversation…

His voice had become livelier, and I sensed in him an enthusiasm that I hadn’t seen for years—since our twenties, in fact…

He was really in an uncommonly excited state.

I’ve heard it said that a middle-aged man ends up with two hobbies, two things he can discuss with others: sports and history. It’s an exaggeration, but the point stands: for a certain type of man, the man Houellebecq has described for years, there are few topics that can bring him out of himself and allow him to connect and bond with other men. Guns may be third on the list. The appeal of the gun, or more precisely, the act of shooting, is described by the narrator’s friend like this:

It’s truly extraordinary, the moment when you have the target at the center of your scope you don’t think about anything anymore, you forget all your worries.

This is, I think, the appeal of golf as well—to play well, you must clear your mind and enter a state of intense focus. And then, there’s the element of visible progress. Your score begins to drop, the ball begins to fly farther and straighter, you begin to hit the target. There’s something of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance here, too. Bikes and cars might as well go fourth on the list.

The narrator begins training with the gun, a sniper rifle called the Steyr Mannlicher HS50. His friend advises him:

Precision shooting has a lot in common with yoga: you try to be one with your own breathing.

Shooting achieves the same goal as yoga, but it’s a “male-coded” activity—a bizarre descriptor that I’ve begun hearing and reading. The narrator improves his shooting and practices regularly for a couple weeks. In the novel, this takes place over just a few pages. And then the gun disappears. The story takes other turns—a confrontation between the narrator’s friend, along with a group of local farmers, and the police, as they attempt to stop the importation of foreign milk, and a visit to another small town where one of the narrator’s ex-girlfriends lives. The narrator begins, in effect, to stalk her, yet without ever making his presence known. He drinks pints of beer and watches her workplace from a bar across the street. He discovers that she has a small child but neither a husband nor a boyfriend. The novel slips into a sort of fugue state here, and then, some 50 pages after the Steyr Mannlicher has disappeared from the plot, the narrator tells us:

It’d been around two months since I’d used the Steyr Mannlicher, but the parts fit together smoothly, with accuracy and precision. The craftsmanship was truly remarkable.

When I read this line, I had a physical reaction. There was a pain somewhere in my upper body, and perhaps I even made a slight noise, a gasp. The sense of doom created by the narrator’s offhandedness, and the reappearance of the gun after I’d been lulled to sleep, made me think that I finally understood Chekov’s line about a gun needing to go off once it’s been introduced in a story. The gun, eventually, does go off.

Perhaps it’s just the fact that I finished Serotonin a few days before the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, but I find myself viewing this event through the lens of Houellebecq’s book. The fictions that are all around us, the meaning that people are searching for, the way politicians are using this event to their advantage, it all makes me sick. Houellebecq’s book, although a novel, is truer than many fictions. It makes me think of Dostoevsky’s “Author’s Note” at the beginning of Notes from the Underground:

The author of the diary and the diary itself are, of course, imaginary. Nevertheless it is clear that such persons as the writer of these notes not only may, but positively must, exist in our society, when we consider the circumstances in the midst of which our society is formed. I have tried to expose to the view of the public more distinctly than is commonly done, one of the characters of the recent past. He is one of the representatives of a generation still living.

This is, I think, an admirable goal: to write in a descriptive mode, not a prescriptive one, and to try one’s best to describe things as they are. Thomas Matthew Crooks, the would-be assassin of Donald Trump, used an “AR-15 style” gun that his father had bought 11 years earlier. He drove an hour from his home, where the 20-year-old lived with his parents, to Trump’s rally. He bought bullets along the way. He was wearing a t-shirt with the logo of a popular YouTube channel about guns. Two people are now dead, one of them being the shooter. Why did he do it? What does it mean? I don’t know. When a gun enters a story, it tends to go off.

1. This essay was published a month ago on 3 Quarks Daily. In one sense, it is “dated” considering what has changed politically in the past month, but in another sense, in our perpetual present where momentous events are swept away and replaced by new events the next day, it is evergreen…

https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2024/07/chekovs-gun.html