Joshua Rothman on the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard’s latest novels, including “The School of Night” and “The Third Realm.”
Maybe it’s not surprising that, in middle and high school, my favorite writer was Stephen King. Later, I fell into the vortex of “Twin Peaks,” and of David Lynch more generally. The world is full of bad actors—cheats, liars, tyrants, sickos—who are, ultimately, mere human beings; at least, this was how rationality would have it.
But King and Lynch were interested in evil, an abstract force. An outmoded concept, evil was baggage from a pre-modern age, the least useful way to interpret bad behavior. And yet it still exerted a pull, I thought, because every so often people do things so terrible that our rational, psychological vocabulary feels impoverished. Did I believe in evil? No. But I believed that people believed in it. And sometimes I could think of no other word for the insensible malevolence that seemed to steer people and events toward awful ends. And yet my mom’s boyfriend didn’t say that he saw evil in the corner. He said that he saw the Devil. To matter to us, abstract forces have to become concrete. At that point, they risk becoming hackneyed, unimpressive, absurd, even silly. “What was hidden in the depths would often appear so flat when brought to the surface,” an artist named Tove thinks in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s novel “The Third Realm.” “The meaning would be squashed if the symbols were too familiar.” Tove wants to depict the intensity of having a body—a violent, irresistible reality that breaks down the boundaries between living things. But she can’t do it—in fact, she laments that her drawings look like New Yorker cartoons. This doesn’t mean that the intensity she recognizes doesn’t exist, only that she’s failing to properly understand or represent it. It could be that some of the forces that shape our lives will always resist being represented. They may be too big or strange to fit into our heads. “My Struggle” followed a writer in search of inspiration, and so its abstractions had a certain flavor: they tended to be artistic, aesthetic, elevating. But in Knausgaard’s latest series of novels—the fourth, “The School of Night,” arrived in English earlier this month—the ineffable is stranger. The books are entirely fictional, and so Knausgaard, freed from the strictures of his biography, has turned toward less domesticated unknowns. Broadly, the cycle tells a supernatural story set in an absolutely realistic world. In the first book, “The Morning Star,” published in English in 2021, a new star appears in the night sky. Its light is bright enough to cast shadows. What is it? “You only had to look at it,” one character says. “Something silent and intense streamed from it. It was almost as if it possessed a will, something indomitable that the soul could contain, but not change or influence.” The star, he goes on, communicated a “feeling that someone was looking at us.” But who? And what sort of meaning did it contain? No one can say. After the star emerges, everything becomes uncertain. One character, an undertaker, notices that death seems to have been suspended. People see ghosts, have visions, and suffer prophetic dreams. Atheists experience faith and priests become atheists. Marriages fracture, or almost do: instead of settling into new equilibriums, relationships grow harder to define. Fringe philosophies and scientific theories seem suddenly apt. There are sounds and shadows in the forest; the Devil, or devils, may be walking the earth. The uncertainties introduced by the star make undeniable the uncertainty of human life in general. We already live on islands of rationality surrounded by seas of mystery. We build dikes to hold back death, time, and meaninglessness, but still remain essentially unsure about the fundamental conditions of our existence. The novels rifle through the history of thought and culture, tracing the paths existential unknowns have carved. The second book in the series, “The Wolves of Eternity,” is concerned partly with techno-futurists who seek to defeat death through science; “The Third Realm,” from 2024, follows Norwegian black-metal bands who begin summoning the Devil for theatrical effect but end up believing in, and channelling, dark forces. There are countless ways to domesticate the unknown by cozying up to it, and many of them are found in the novels: addicts embrace self-destruction, romantics read the Romantics, and so on. Still, the advent of the star unsettles these familiar pathways. The unknown actually appears, as in an allegory, and it doesn’t explain itself. Knausgaard started the first book during the pandemic, he told me. “And I wrote into the pandemic. And that book is about a danger from outside, threatening.” He recalled sitting with his family in London, hearing the sirens, understanding that a large, unknown, and overwhelming force had arrived in the world. The new books take this feeling and generalize it. We’re all going to die; we all get older, our lives and the world flowing away from us, and so we try to habituate ourselves to time and to death. Still, these forces rise up, as alien as ever, reminding us that it’s not they who live in our world, but we who live in theirs. Knausgaard slips easily into this way of looking at life. In London, he haunted Deptford, the part of the city where the playwright Christopher Marlowe is buried; “The School of Night” is concerned partly with Marlowe’s play “Doctor Faustus.” “I knew I wanted to set a novel there,” Knausgaard told me. “Because I’m incredibly fascinated with the fact that what separates us is time, and I don’t know what time is.” The novel’s protagonist, Kristian, thinks that the essence of death is “absence”: absence is “the shadow of death.” When we feel the absence of the dead, that’s because we no longer coincide with them in time—and yet time, though clearly real, is also profoundly mysterious. Are the dead absent, or is time somehow an illusion? For those who grieve, like Kristian, no question could be more important. What does it mean to live without an answer? This view of things was like a barrier between me and the books. Two experiences broke it down. First, I attended a conference on artificial intelligence, where I moderated a couple of panels; I had conversations with scientists about what consciousness is, and whether machines could have it, and I was struck by how even people at the forefront of our technological civilization embrace quasi-mystical speculations about souls and minds that might have made sense hundreds of years ago. They thought of themselves as hyperrational, but lived with mystery, too. And then I had a series of conversations with my son, who is seven, about death. Over a period of months, he asked me, “Will I die?” and “Will you die?” He had more questions: Why do living things age? Is Heaven real? Will we ever know what happens after death for sure? On his own, he arrived at the ancient philosophical idea with which Knausgaard begins “The School of Night”: “There is no reason to be afraid of death,” Kristian writes, since “when we exist, death is not; and when death exists, we are not.” This, he notes, is more or less “how Epicurus put it a long time ago.” Seven, it turns out, is the age at which philosophy begins. I have my own views, which I believe are reasonable and rational, about consciousness, aging, death, and Heaven. Moreover, as a parent, I like to have answers, and to suggest that there’s a sensible way to look at life and the world. I did my best to answer my son’s questions authentically and appropriately, in ways that respected his intelligence and autonomy. But the effort left me feeling almost ashamed. I present myself to him as someone who knows a lot about many things. But, on the most fundamental questions, I was evasive. The truth was that I had helped usher him into a world we don’t understand. Just putting my thoughts into words seemed to turn them into lies. “If I could articulate what I’m feeling . . . you would understand,” Kristian goes on. “But I can’t, for in language there is hope, in language there is light. The night is without language.” In total, Knausgaard told me, he thinks his new series will comprise seven books. He’s writing them intuitively, without knowing how everything will end up; as each novel unfolds, he said, “I just hope for a kind of a miracle.” It would be wrong to expect the novels to explain themselves—in a series about life’s inexplicability, that would be false. But through a kind of asymptotic, negative process, they seem to be closing in on a vision of life in which it’s defined by what we will never know. ♦
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