Kornbluh and Knausgaard: A Closer Look into the Debate around Autofiction
What is "autofiction?" A new book claims it's about the style of "immediacy," but does a reading of Knausgaard's "My Struggle" support this claim?
Immediacy, Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism is the literary theory book of 2024. The book’s main target, as the title implies, is an artistic style that author Anna Kornbluh identifies as “immediacy,” or the absence of mediation. Instead of a piece of literature using artistic devices such as plot, character development, or symbolism, the artwork presents itself as unfiltered, authentic real life. Kornbluh’s example illustrating this claim is Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. She writes:
As a rule, autofictions follow the fight plan Knausgaard outlines for eschewing the devices of fictification (character, plot, and narrative). Rather than building character, they advance a protagonist who is the same as the author in name and circumstance and real friends and real family and, above all, real voice. Rather than narrativity and plot, they purvey first-person present-tense uneventful short-spans, just elliptical ruminations in real time. Redacting fictional construction, duration, and figuration, autofiction delivers identity, instantaneity, it-ness. It moves “to get to the things in themselves” [quoting Knausgaard]. Through these varying neutralizations of literary synthesis, autofictions put fictionality itself under erasure, crowning immediacy as writerly imperative for the moment.
Kornbluh’s characterization of autofiction brings two questions to mind:
1) Is this an accurate definition of autofiction?
2) If so, is its stated goal, “to get to the things in themselves,” a valid artistic goal?
Let’s begin by responding to the second question. Kornbluh’s argument rests on the opposition between art and “real life.” She implies that art which “get[s] to the things in themselves” is somehow deficient, which is surprising, because other theories of art take this to be one of the main goals of art. Let’s look, for example, at one of the most famous passages in the history of literary theory, from Viktor Shklovsky’s “Art as Device” outlining the artistic technique of “defamiliarization” or “estrangement” (sometimes called ostranenie), which was published in 1917, long before the period of “too late capitalism”:
Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects "unfamiliar," to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object: the object is not important...
It is evident that Shklovsky disagrees with Kornbluh’s criticism of “get[ting] to the things in themselves.” In fact, the goal of Shklovsky’s artistic device of defamiliarization/estrangement is to get to the things in themselves, to show them as they really, truly are, to allow the reader to see real life stripped of its habitual illusions. Here’s Shklovsky again:
Habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war. “If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been…” After we see an object several times, we begin to recognize it. The object is in front of us and we know about it, but we do not see it—hence we cannot say anything significant about it. Art removes objects from the automatism of perception in several ways.
Shklovsky then goes on to analyze passages from Tolstoy in which Tolstoy describes something without naming it. For example, he describes the punishment of flogging in detail but without using the word “flogging,” so that the reader can understand what flogging is in a new way, without preconceived ideas. If one simply says, “he was flogged,” the reader will fill in this description with their own associations, their own mental picture of what “flogging” is. But if the word is removed and the act is described, the reader’s “automatism” will be circumvented. Another way to view something in a new way, as if seeing it for the first time, is to write about it from an unusual viewpoint. The example Shklovsky cites is when Tolstoy describes the concept of private property from the point of view of a horse. In both cases, Tolstoy is making “the stone stony,” allowing the reader to see with new, fresh eyes. He is getting at the things in themselves by stripping away the usual fictions with which we cover them up.
This is what Knausgaard means when he says, “the duty of literature is to fight fiction,” which Kornbluh cites at the very beginning of her book’s section on writing. Kornbluh takes this quote out of context to make it seem that Knausgaard is against the idea of literary fiction itself—and in fairness to Kornbluh, at times he does make this claim—but this is not his meaning here. The full quote in context, which refers to politics, is:
Now, this starts to get complicated because what populism and the far right offer is exactly that—an emotion-based belonging. A common history, a common culture, a common people. It is “we,” it is “us.” But that “we” is general—it doesn’t really exist, it’s a fiction. So the duty of literature is to fight fiction. It’s to find a way into the world as it is, to open a road we can glimpse for a second or two before a new fiction has covered it again.
Knausgaard is not talking about literary fiction here; he is talking about the lies, the fictions we tell ourselves in order to give our lives meaning. He has also called My Struggle “anti-ideology.” To refer to Shklovsky, it would seem that Knausgaard is fighting fictions, “habitualizations,” and lives lived “unconsciously” in an attempt to “make the stone stony.” In the same interview, Knausgaard contrasts the task of the historian with the task of the novelist. Speaking of the historian, he says:
They are by nature about the big picture, the general structures and the long-term tendencies. What a novel can do is the opposite—it can go into the particular, into the concrete, singular life. That’s the only thing that really exists. The Rust Belt, the joblessness, the poverty, the opioid epidemic—they only exist as seen or experienced by particular individuals.
Kornbluh references this quote, too, but she doesn’t include the last line—which connects the personal to the social—and she frames the quote by contrasting Knausgaard’s vision, which she calls “micrology,” with “the novel as a theory of the world and a theory of possible worlds.” But does it have to be one or the other? Knausgaard suggests the novel starts at the level of the human, and only then can it convincingly illustrate larger concerns. The universal is shown by focusing on the particular, to paraphrase Joyce. In the same interview, Knausgaard also mentions, as a means of justifying his desire to “get to things in themselves,” that “nowadays things are less and less things in themselves—they are in a position, you know?” This is reminiscent of Shklovsky’s claim: “After we see an object several times, we begin to recognize it. The object is in front of us and we know about it, but we do not see it.” So, how do we see it?
This brings us back to my first question: Is Kornbluh’s characterization of Knausgaard’s “autofiction” accurate? Kornbluh claims that Knausgaard “eschew[s] the devices of fictification (character, plot, and narrative)” and “purvey[s] first-person present-tense uneventful short-spans, just elliptical ruminations in real time” in the pursuit of “get[ting] to the things in themselves.” I’ve shown that I agree he does want to get to the things in themselves, but I view this as a valid objective of literature, not as a misguided result of the false consciousness of too late capitalism. Now, does he get to those things in the way Kornbluh indicates? When asked about his writing process for My Struggle, Knausgaard said this:
I did exactly the same thing as in my two other novels. […] It’s not about representing myself, it’s not about telling about my life, but it’s more like a search into it like a novel will search into something. And it’s looking for something other than my own life, something in my life. And in doing that I used all the tools of a novel.
Knausgaard, at least, disagrees with Kornbluh about his project. In another comment on Knausgaard’s fiction, Kornbluh supports her point that, “instead of character, there is real person” by quoting Book 6 of My Struggle: “Tonje isn’t a ‘character.’ She is Tonje. Linda isn’t a character. She is Linda…They are real.” In the same New Yorker interview where Knausgaard talked about fighting fiction, he explained his use of real names:
Someone was talking to me about the book, and she said that when my father’s name first appears, it’s almost shocking. His presence is different when he has a name—it’s a connection to the real world. And literature always has a gap, a veil between it and the real world. It has to be like that, and it should be like that . . . and then I took real people and put them behind that veil, into this closed world. Seeing their names, it’s like a glimpse of their real existence.
Crucially, Knausgaard’s father’s name doesn’t appear until Book 6, after some 3,000 pages. He has been “put behind the veil,” and the use of his name is simply a device used to bring him into the real world for a moment, a device that Knausgaard understands to work only because he has put his father into the world of literature for the first five books. It seems Knausgaard understands himself to have done this with all his characters. Even though he makes this statement about characters being real in Book 6, which is about the process of writing My Struggle and the public reaction to it, the majority of the series takes place during other parts of Knausgaard’s life. Book Three, for example, is set during Knausgaard’s childhood. Book Four is about his late teenage years. And so on. Far from “elliptical ruminations in real time,” My Struggle is the story of an entire life and an entire world—frequently, like the 1970’s rural Norway in which Knausgaard grew up, it’s a world that no longer exists, situating My Struggle in the genre of novel where the narrator attempts to recreate a lost world from memory so that it might exist again, if only in his mind. Is this not a theory of a world? A theory of a possible world?
I have now written 1,700 words defending Knausgaard against Kornbluh’s criticism. However, some readers may be critical of my method, as I’ve simply used passages of Knausgaard talking about his project and put them in opposition to Kornbluh’s statements. This is dangerous. Why would we trust an author about their own work? Why wouldn’t we dig into the text to see what it’s actually doing? I agree, I think we should do that. I think that’s how literary criticism should be done, in close relationship to the text itself. Yet Kornbluh, outside of a passage from Book 2 used as an epigraph, never cites or references any text from the books besides a couple sentences from Book 6, which happen to be sentences where Knausgaard has “removed the veil.” If we analyze the text itself, what will we find?
At the end of Immediacy, Or, the Style of Too Late Capitalism, Kornbluh provides examples of her preferred type of literature, which is written in the third person, features free indirect discourse, and favors the past tense over the present. Kornbluh believes these techniques distinguish this type of literature from autofiction as they “evoke ideas beyond the personal, capable of historical and institutional and ideological expanse, and…do so in conjunction with finely figurative social realism rather dissimilar to…empiricist realisms.” Let’s contrast Knausgaard’s My Struggle with one of the novels that Kornbluh cites of other authors, which supposedly exemplify a different type of literature in contrast to Knausgaard’s “immediacy.”
The first author Kornbluh cites is Colson Whitehead. Referring to his eight novels, she notes that they “unseat the presentism of autofictions while strategically threading resonances and continuities between various pasts (industrial, infrastructural, institutional) and the present of systematic inequality.” Kornbluh cites two paragraphs from Harlem Shuffle which “bolt perceptions of the built form to speculations on lives unlived…” To put it simply, Kornbluh appreciates narratives that connect past to present and show how a person’s environment impacts the people they become. She notes how “the seemingly static details of setting become the vehicles of history in motion…” But Knausgaard does this, too. Book Two, for example, largely deals with the differences between the Norway of Knausgaard’s birth and Sweden, where he lives throughout the book. This allows Knausgaard to reflect on historical and political change throughout his life and to cast the present in the glow of the past. He lays out his vision early on in Book 2:
When I was growing up I was taught to look for the explanation of all human qualities, actions and phenomena in the environment in which they originated. Biological or genetic determiners, the givens, that is, barely existed as an option, and when they did they were viewed with suspicion. Such an attitude can at first sight appear humanistic, inasmuch as it is intimately bound up with the notion that all people are equal, but upon closer examination it could just as well be an expression of a mechanistic attitude to man, who, born empty, allows his life to be shaped by his surroundings. For a long time I took a purely theoretical standpoint on the issue, which is actually so fundamental that it can be used as a springboard for any debate – if environment is the operative factor, for example, if man at the outset is both equal and malleable and the good man can be shaped by engineering his surroundings, hence my parents’ generation’s belief in the state, the education system and politics, hence their desire to reject everything that had been and hence their new truth, which is not found within man’s inner being, in his detached uniqueness, but on the contrary in areas external to his intrinsic self, in the universal and collective…out with spirituality, out with feeling, in with a new materialism, but it never struck them that the same attitude could lie behind the demolition of old parts of town to make way for roads and car parks, which naturally the intellectual left opposed, and perhaps it has not been possible to be aware of this until now, when the link between the idea of equality and capitalism, the welfare state and liberalism, Marxist materialism and the consumer society is obvious because the biggest equality creator of all is money, it levels all differences, and if your character and your fate are entities that can be shaped, money is the most natural shaper…It is not the case that we are born equal and that the conditions of life make our lives unequal, it is the opposite, we are born unequal, and the conditions of life make our lives more equal.
Knausgaard’s goal in Book Two is to explore the contradictions he outlines in the above passage and see how his own life has played out in this environment. It is evident that he is a romantic, he believes in something akin to the soul, and he is skeptical of purely material explanations for human behavior because this precludes the spiritual. This places him firmly in opposition to Kornbluh. In fact, the worldview of his parents, described as “looking for the explanation of all human qualities, actions and phenomena in the environment in which they originated,” could be used to describe Kornbluh’s as well—remember Kornbluh’s preferred literature is one that “evoke[s] ideas beyond the personal, capable of historical and institutional and ideological expanse, and…do[es] so in conjunction with finely figurative social realism rather dissimilar to…empiricist realisms.” We can accept that My Struggle does focus on “the personal” and “empiricist realisms,” but we should now be beginning to see that it does this to fight against a modern world devoid of meaning. Far from being ignorant of social and historical realities, Knausgaard is aware of them, writes about them endlessly, and opposes them. His focus on the individual and the self is a response to a world that has sought to destroy them, not narcissistic navel gazing.
Knausgaard’s ideal world is described a few pages earlier:
Several hours had passed since we arrived, the sun was lower in the sky and something about the light it cast over the trees reminded me of summer afternoons at home when we either drove to the far side of the island with mum and dad to swim in the sea or walked down to the knoll in the sound beyond the estate. The memories filled my mind for a few seconds, not in the form of specific events, more as atmospheres, smells, sensations. The way the light, which in the middle of the day was whiter and more neutral, became fuller later in the afternoon and began to make the colours darker. Oh, running on the path through the shady forest on a summer day in the 70s! Diving into the salt water and swimming across to Gjerstadholmen on the other side! The sun shining on the sea-smoothed rocks, turning them almost golden. The stiff dry grass growing in the hollows between them. The sense of the depths beneath the surface of the water, so dark as it lay in the shadow beneath the mountainside. The fish gliding by. And then the treetops above us, their slender branches trembling in the sea breeze! The thin bark and the smooth leg-like tree beneath. The green foliage . . .”
This is a purely romantic passage, exalting the beauty of nature and, crucially, returning to Knausgaard’s childhood and becoming an idyllic fantasy in the process. Yet this passage is simply a flash of light in a long narration of a family vacation that threatens to unravel into chaos at any moment. Knausgaard, his wife, Linda, and their three young children (all under four years old) are driving home from a stay with their friends; they’ve left early as their friends have no children and are unprepared for what confronts them. As they drive, a series of misfortunes befall the family—finding a restaurant only to be told they can’t eat there, going on foot to a new restaurant that takes them through an industrial area, abandoning this idea when the walk is too far, turning around and driving to McDonald’s, then stopping at a place called “Fairytale Land,” “where everything was of the poorest quality,” wasps sting them, flies bite them, the rides are overpriced, and the coffee is undrinkable. Again, this is Knausgaard’s struggle, finding meaning in the material life that has trapped him. He contrasts the memory of nature and childhood with the present reality of industrial areas, fast food, and run-down amusement parks to illustrate the idea he clarifies a few pages later: “out with spirituality, out with feeling, in with a new materialism, but it never struck them that the same attitude could lie behind the demolition of old parts of town to make way for roads and car parks.”
The memory of a hectic family vacation then gives way to the memory of attending a children’s birthday party in Sweden. Knausgaard mentions the various topics of conversation among adults at various points of the party: “cheap air tickets…buying CO2 quotas…the newly introduced chartered train journeys…pension arrangements…TV screens…various teaching styles…house prices.” At one point, another parent questions Knausgaard on his new book which is “about angels” (again, the material versus the spiritual), but the conversation dies out quickly. Knausgaard then comments on the food served to the children: “some kind of salad dressing…what I thought was a dressing but which turned out to be a “dip” on a board beside a dish of carrot sticks and one of cucumber sticks…beans, salad, the ever-present couscous and a hot dish I assumed was chickpea casserole…Bravo, a sugar-free apple drink.” Remember, this is a birthday party. There is also a “white layer cake…decorated with raspberries,” but one parent is quick to point out, “it’s healthy too. There’s hardly any sugar in the cream.” One cannot help but contrast this with the food Knausgaard eats as a child in the other books, the liver paste, the boiled eggs, the toast, and indeed, Knausgaard comments on the food at the party by writing:
Why couldn’t they have given them sausages, ice cream and pop? Lollipops? Jelly? Chocolate pudding?
What a stupid, bloody idiotic country this was. All the young women drank water in such vast quantities it was coming out of their ears, they thought it was “beneficial” and “healthy”, but all it did was send the graph of incontinent young people soaring. Children ate wholemeal pasta and wholemeal bread and all sorts of weird coarse-grained rice which their stomachs could not digest properly, but that didn’t matter because it was “beneficial”, it was “healthy”, it was “wholesome”. Oh, they were confusing food with the mind, they thought they could eat their way to being better human beings without understanding that food is one thing and the notions food evokes another. And if you said that, if you said anything of that kind, you were either reactionary or just a Norwegian, in other words ten years behind.
Knausgaard’s goal, as always, is to reveal what he sees as the hypocrisy of the world he lives in by contrasting it with the past, often by focusing on the material versus the immaterial (“food is one thing and the notions food evokes another”). Book 2 is full of opposing binaries: the time of Knausgaard’s childhood in the 70’s with the book’s present in the 00’s, the countryside with the city, localism with globalism.
After reading these sections and the way I’ve presented them, we may begin to feel cautious and worried. Is Knausgaard, as the Swedes say, a reactionary? Is he idealizing the past in a dangerous way? In the interview quoted earlier, however, Knausgaard revealed himself to be acutely aware of these misleading temptations:
Now, this starts to get complicated because what populism and the far right offer is exactly that—an emotion-based belonging. A common history, a common culture, a common people. It is “we,” it is “us.” But that “we” is general—it doesn’t really exist, it’s a fiction. So the duty of literature is to fight fiction.
Knausgaard, while lamenting the loss of a past that was his own, seeks to move beyond the false political dichotomy of liberalism and fascism. He highlights what he sees as the meaningless produced by liberalism, locates the appeal of populism and fascism in the shared sense of belonging that it provides, and then reveals its fundamental falseness, its fiction. At the end of Book 2, after having spent some 500 pages criticizing the present and romanticizing the past, Knausgaard returns to his childhood home in Norway. First to Kristiansand, where he lived as a teenager, and then to Tybakken, his first home. He tells us he doesn’t intend to visit Tybakken, but somehow events conspire so that he ends up there. A curious state of events for a book that doesn’t have a plot, that the main character would find himself returning to where it all began at the end of the story. Knausgaard writes:
Beneath us I saw the little island of Gjerstadholmen, further behind it Ubekilen Bay. To the right, Håvard’s house. The bus stop, the forest below, where in the winter we had made ski slopes and in the summer walked down to the rocks to go swimming.
“In there,” I said.
“Where? To the left? Jesus, you didn’t live there, did you?”
Old Søren’s house, the wild cherry tree, and there, the estate. Nordåsen ringvei.
My God, it was so small.
“There it is. Straight ahead.”
“Where? The red house?”
“Yes. It was brown when we lived there.”
He parked the car.
How small everything was. And so ugly.
“Not a lot to see,” I said. “Come on, let’s go on. Up the hill here.”
A woman in a white Puffa jacket was walking down pushing a buggy. Otherwise there wasn’t a sign of life anywhere.
Olsen’s house.
The mountain.
We had called it the mountain, but it was only a little hill. Siv’s house behind it. Sverre and the others’ house.
Not a soul. Yes, there was. A huddle of children.
“You’ve gone quiet,” Geir said. “Are you overwhelmed?”
“Overwhelmed? No, more like underwhelmed. This is so small. There isn’t anything here. I’ve never experienced that before. There’s nothing at all. And at one time it was my everything.”
“Ye-es, Karl Ove,” he said with a smile. “Straight on?”
All the places I carried inside me, which I had visualised so many, many times in my life, passed outside the windows, completely aura-less, totally neutral – the way they were, in fact. A few crags, a small bay, a decrepit floating pier, a narrow shoreline, some old houses behind, flatland that fell away to the water. That was all.
In this one scene, Knausgaard complicates the fictions he’s told throughout the book, revealing the choice between an idealized past and an impoverished present to be a false one. The task, instead, is to view things “the way they were, in fact.” Knausgaard is interested in truth expressed via literature, because the duty of literature is to fight fiction, and the truth is not always revolutionary.