Growing Up: Knausgård on Proust, Boyishness, and (Straight) Time

Gay Icon

As Jacqueline Rose and others have argued, the (adult) concept of childhood innocence has been associated with longing at least since the nineteenth century, because growing up is associated with a loss of capacity to be profoundly and magically absorbed in the world, and being grown is associated with analytical distance and the realization or aftermath of trauma (Rose 1984). Both Proust and Knausgård might be described as using boyhood memories to keep “faith with the childhood potential for unimpaired experience” (Theodor Adorno quoted in Litvak 1997, 75). But Proust’s faith-keeping, according to Litvak, also resembles a gay strategy for surviving “heterosexualization,” whereby “growing up” in fact means shutting down … various receptivities that make it possible to find the world interesting. … Belated and regressive at once, Proust’s narrative “behindsight,” his tale of the tail, insists preposterously on going back and staying back, dwelling on, and in, everything that a normal mind will have learned to disregard as beneath serious consideration. (Litvak 1997, 75, 88; emphasis in original) Knausgård also includes material that is “beneath serious consideration” or “improper” to the sphere of art (too much information, lists, banalities, clichés), but he opens his monumental novel by going back without “staying back” in the sense described above. Instead, he uses memories from childhood as a way to understand and engage more profoundly with the adult here and now. He moves rapidly through boyhood by means of a few examples, interposing meditations on adult experience (loss, lack of fullness) in order to arrive at the present moment of writing. His retrieval or re-creation of boyish engagement with the world in these first pages does not provide readers with the opportunity to linger shamelessly in queerer aspects of childhood and adolescence. Rather, it leads more directly to his primary interests: authorship/ fatherhood and growing up. I am not claiming that the belated and regressive (and anal, meaning both uptight and interested in shit) are never part of Knausgård’s retelling of boyish memories—but simply trying to understand why his retelling retains serious and normative qualities that might be labeled straight, especially when read in close proximity to the silliness and queerness of Proust.

Before moving on to comparative analysis, I wish to name one critical difference that I aim to establish in this article: Proust’s status as a gay icon should matter when we compare Knausgård and Proust. The existing scholarship mostly overlooks Proust’s importance for early queer theory and engages in comparison to assert Knausgård’s formal and thematic novelty. Poul Behrendt—to take one example—resists Proust’s significance for Knausgård, arguing that the lack of dissonant or analytical narration in Min kamp makes him an “Anti-Proust” (Behrendt 2011, 317). He describes Proust’s narrator as a “sengeliggende superjeg” [bedridden superego], asserting that À la recherche du temps perdu is founded on “selvbiografiens retrospektive fortællerinstans” (Behrendt 2011, 322) [autobiography’s retrospective narrative authority]. I resist the implications of Behrendt’s insistence on Proust’s authority, in large part because the phrase “bedridden superego” fails to explain the qualities that have earned À la recherche du temps perdu its status as a work of “behindsight” (Litvak 1997).5 Behrendt’s portrayal clashes with the experience of reading À la recherche du temps perdu, with its digressions and postponements, with its focus on the accidental, or the truths of “constraint” and “chance” rather than necessity (Proust quoted in Deleuze 2000, 16). Roger Shattuck suggests that the length, characterization, and style of À la recherche du temps perdu “may leave the impression that Proust’s novel is as overwhelming and as shapeless as life itself” (Shattuck 2001, 84). He also insists on the unity of Proust’s novel, or on the “sturdy structures” that counteract its digressive and incoherent characteristics (84). For Shattuck, arrival at an awareness of this unity is a “reward” for the reader who takes the time to look for answers to the question: “Does anything hold all these incidents together other than the thread of [the protagonist’s] responsive yet bumbling personality?” (78, 84). What sounds like an authoritative if sickly control mechanism in Behrendt is rather less commanding in Shattuck—a tenuous “anything other than”—regardless of any formal dissonance between the experiencing “I” and the narrator. Moreover, for some readers, the reward is precisely the narrator’s “bumbling” sensitivity, the process of getting lost rather than the moment of being found. This difference in readerly desires, expectations, and affecting experiences is what Litvak describes when he finds Proust’s genius in his “lack of will power” (Litvak 1997, 89). Knausgård’s readers might share these kinds of readerly desires or feel equally absorbed in his narrator’s memories of childhood. As stated above, I am resisting the qualitative implications of Behrendt’s portrayal of Proust here, and admit that the difference between Proust and Knausgård when it comes to lingering in boyishness might be one of quality and degree rather than kind.

Unlike the existing comparative scholarship on Proust and Knausgård, the research that inspires me here is motivated by À la recherche du temps perdu’s status as “the most vital center of the energies of gay literary high culture” (Sedgwick 2008, 213) and “the definitive gay inscription of sophistication” (Litvak 1997, 74). Litvak aims to define Proust’s unique form of sophistication, which is produced not only by the epistemological dynamics of the closet—what it takes to be/ not to be in the know—but also by a particular form of “naïveté,” which Litvak describes as disinterest in getting serious and growing up (Litvak 1997, 74). The combination of sophistication and naïveté is queer, according to this logic, because it allows readers to reclaim the familiar association of non-hetero desires and immaturity for less homophobic purposes. According to both Litvak (1997) and Mavor (2007), Proust’s novel depicts a postponement of acquiescence to straight-normative roles and outcomes. Whatever one might argue Knausgård is doing with boyishness in the opening pages of Min kamp, it would be a stretch to describe it as postponing straight-normative roles and outcomes. On occasion, Knausgård even expresses a troubled desire to acquiesce, or to be “man enough” to learn to live in the now by facing up to shame and attempting to leave it behind.

Queer and straight are metaphors often used to refer to realms of sensibility and differing orientations toward the normative. They are inspired by, but also detachable from, sexual and romantic desires and practices. Significantly, my delineations of queer and straight have little to do with how Proust (or Marcel) or Knausgård (or Karl Ove) have sex or whom they desire, and much to do with the fact that Knausgård places “the Father” at the symbolic heart of his opening volume while placing Proust in a pre-reproductive and adolescent past (Mavor 2007, 368). Growing up means removing the mother in Proust too—at least according to Marcel’s parents—but this is precisely what Marcel refuses to do. Referring to Proust and alluding to J. M. Barrie (via the un-kissable Peter Pan), Mavor defines the central concept of her book—“reading boyishly”—as a persistent form of queer (im) maturity, a precocious lingering in the childish project of plotting for mother’s kisses (Mavor 2007, 370). She writes: “Because of the prohibition against the mother, and the impossibility of kissing oneself, the project is doomed, but perhaps this is part of the fun, to be forever ‘plotting’” (370–2). Knausgård certainly offers readers a compelling portrait of his child-self. Like Marcel, his boy character is plotting, or acting on a strong desire to make contact with parents, despite the risk of punishment. On the other hand, he reserves precocity for the adulterated narrator; and we don’t find our way back to the mother in Book 1 because we cannot get behind the father.

Homage

I now turn to Knausgård’s anxious memory of family life on a particular evening in 1976, which is legible as an homage to Proust, with striking similarities in terms of theme and plot, and a very distinct feel when it comes to the echoes of childhood experience in adult life. Knausgård’s fiction in these opening scenes is more rapidly paced and focused than that of Proust. He does not digress, as in Proust, to address the conversations and opinions of extended family members or guests. Moreover, shifts between memories and the time of writing are sharper in Knausgård’s early pages, as he moves more rapidly from recall to analysis. But there are striking similarities between the early pages of Min kamp and those of Proust’s novel nonetheless: Knausgård attempts to stretch consciousness back to the boy that he was, writing about the meaning of life and death in what appears to many readers to be a mixed-genre format: essay, memoir, fiction. More specifically, the narrator recalls, like Proust’s Marcel, a domestic atmosphere at the onset of evening and the anxieties of supper and bedtime routines. Knausgård’s descriptions of boyhood involve, as they do in Proust, a complicated arrangement of absorption in the world and the self through-and-as absence from the world and self (momentarily forgetting where one is, getting lost in a room, a book, an uncanny sensation, a feeling). On the evenings in question, disruption of routine leads both boys to stay up late, plotting. They both achieve a more relaxed state by sobbing, although Marcel is granted “la douceur” (Proust 1919, 63) [the sweetness] of a night with his mother, while Knausgård returns to his room unnoticed and alone, carrying a feeling of shame so intense that it erases awareness of his surroundings. In Min kamp. Første bok, an unsettling resemblance to the father replaces Proust’s poignant attachment to the mother.

In Du côté de chez Swann, the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu, the goodnight kiss takes place on one of those dreaded nights when the family has company, when Marcel does not normally get a kiss from his mother. On other nights, the object of her visit to Marcel’s bedroom is described as a “baiser de paix” (Proust 1919, 24) [kiss of peace], longed for because it postpones the terrors of being alone and (not) sleeping, painful because it would soon be over. Although Marcel knows that his mother wants to wean him from the habit because it irritates his father, on this particular night, Marcel has “un mouvement de révolte” (Proust 1919, 44) [“a fit of rebelliousness” (Proust 2003, 28)]. He dares to send a letter down to his mother. Even after being told that Mama will not come, he dares to stay up and wait for her in the hallway, despite certainty that punishment will be severe. Against Marcel’s expectations, his father (described as unprincipled and thus unpredictable) encourages his mother to spend the night with him. Able to contain his tears in front of his father, he begins sobbing when alone with his mother. She calms his tears by reading to him: Je savais qu’une telle nuit ne pourrait se renouveler; que le plus grand désir que j’eusse au monde, garder ma mère dans ma chambre pendant ces tristes heures nocturnes, était trop en opposition avec les nécessités de la vie … pour que l’accomplissement … pût être autre chose que factice et exceptionnel. (Proust 1919, 63)I knew that such a night could not be repeated; that the greatest desire I had in the world, to keep my mother in my room during those sad hours of darkness, was too contrary to the necessities of life … for its fulfillment … to be anything other than artificial and exceptional. (Proust 2003, 43) In the Proustian universe, desire itself, embodied in tears, is endless authenticity, while the achievement of that which is desired is both unnatural and extraordinary. Significantly, the goodnight kiss scene is actually “fully particularised in time, place, and persons,” or episodic rather than iterative (Shattuck 2001, 76). What Marcel-the-narrator meditates on is something Marcel-the-boy already knew: that this experience was singular.

In Min kamp, Knausgård-the-narrator finds his way back to his eight-year-old self through a short reflection on death in the era of techno(post)modernity, which concludes with a list of catastrophic images. The last of these images is of an empty ocean, shot from an airplane off the coast of Northern Norway, where a fishing boat had sunk the night before. The boy watches news coverage about the lost vessel: “Jeg sitter alene og ser det, en gang på våren, antageligvis, for min far er ute i hagen og arbeider. Jeg stirrer på denne overflaten uten å høre hva reporteren sier, og plutselig stiger omrisset av et ansikt fram” (Knausgård 2009, 11) [“I sit alone watching, sometime in the spring, I suppose, for my father is out working in the garden. I stare at the surface of the sea without hearing what the reporter says, and suddenly the outline of a face rises” (Knausgård 2012, 7; translation altered)]. The boy runs outside to tell his father, who takes a break from his work—breaking up rock with a sledgehammer—in order to ask whether it was a diver. Upon hearing that it was not a person, the father lights and takes a deep drag on a cigarette. He stares at something in the distance before asking whether it was Jesus. Pleased to hear that it was not Jesus, the father takes another drag before instructing his son: “Ikke tenk mer på det” (2009, 13) [“Don’t give it another thought” (2012, 9)]. The reader is suddenly made aware that Knausgård’s narrator is thirty-nine as he jumps into a short reflection comparing boyish meaning with adult—and adulterated—knowledge. When he returns to 1976, only the time between his father grabbing and swinging the sledgehammer has passed. The verb tense, however, has shifted from present to past. Moreover, the face on the sea has changed: “Selv om det bare hadde gått et par minutter siden sist jeg tenkte på det, hadde det alt forandret seg. Nå var det pappas ansikt jeg så” (2009, 15) [“Even though only a couple of minutes had passed since I last considered it, everything about it had changed. Now it was Dad’s face I saw” (2012, 12; translation altered)]. Neither the eightyear-old boy nor the first-time reader knows it yet, but the shift from the face on the sea to “Dad’s face” inaugurates a symbolic chain of countenances of fathers and sons, which will include Knausgård’s own face (reflected back at him, once he has become his father’s peer) and Christ’s face.

Swann’s Way and Book 1 of Min kamp depict exceptional evenings in their opening remembrances, as well as interrupted routines and aesthetic experiences that make life in childhood homes uncanny, or full of the stimulating contrast/concurrence of the fantastic and the mundane. For example, Marcel describes the effects of the figure-casting lamp, placed in his bedroom to distract him from the unhappiness of being sent to bed. The lamp makes him uneasy because it invades a space otherwise familiar. The very doorknob, “qui différait pour moi de tous les autres boutons de porte du monde en ceci qu’il semblait ouvrir tout seul, sans que j’eusse besoin de le tourner, tant le maniement m’en était devenu inconscient, le voilà qui servait maintenant de corps astral à Golo” (Proust 1919, 20) [“which differed for me from all other doorknobs in that it seemed to open of its own accord, without my having to turn it, so unconscious had its handling become for me, was now serving as an astral body for Golo” (Proust 2003, 10)]. Mercifully, the dinner bell breaks the spell, enabling Marcel to return to a mundane world of family and beef casserole, and to his mother’s embrace. Like Marcel, Knausgård describes his boyhood self as alternating between states of absorbed and expansive consciousness, from habit to deviation, boredom to excitement, comfort to anxiety. Boyhood yields to memory/writing in both novels because “l’influence anesthésiante de l’habitude” (Proust 1919, 20) [“the anesthetizing influence of habit” (Proust 2003, 10)]—a kind of thoughtless and undifferentiated experience made possible by acquaintance and repetition (exemplified by Marcel’s doorknob)—was disrupted and made conscious by the exceptional and fantastic.

On the spring night in 1976, in the second (past tense) sequence, during which Knausgård-the-boy passes time in his room, eyes rubbed with a sweater provoke an underwater fantasy, itself provoked by a made-for-TV adaptation of Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island. Terror seeps in like cold water and takes hold, despite the familiar surroundings and objects of the bedroom. To ease his fear, Knausgård peruses his school timetable and then picks up a book. Although reading breaks the hold of terror, the book absorbs him in turn. When his father announces supper, he has to struggle to break loose from that as well. Supper’s open-faced sandwiches are as ignorant of the lizardlike “menneskeaktige skapninger” (Knausgård 2009, 19) [“humanoid creatures” (Knausgård 2012, 16)] that occupied the underwater caves of the mysterious island as is Marcel’s beef casserole ignorant of Golo and Bluebeard.

After the kiss scene, Marcel claims that his childhood sobs “n’ont jamais cessé” [“have never really stopped”], despite unexpected changes in his life and the impossibility of return: “Il y a bien longtemps … que mon père a cessé de pouvoir dire à maman: ‘Va avec le petit’” (Proust 1919, 55) [“It was a very long time ago … that my father ceased to be able to say, ‘Go with the boy’” (Proust 2003, 37)]. In Proust and Signs, Gilles Deleuze describes the general entanglement of past and present in À la recherche du temps perdu: an “old sensation tries to superimpose itself, to unite with the present sensation,” but the superimposition or union fails because “the present sensation set its ‘materiality’ in opposition to the earlier one” (Deleuze 2000, 20). Finally, neither the material, bodily sensation of the present (evidence of survival) nor memory can fully dominate. Thus, “nothingness dawns” between then and now, and the present becomes a time of simultaneous reclamation and forfeiture (Deleuze 2000, 20). The determining powers of the past and of the past’s desires remain, even as they are denied by the flow of time away from those hours during which Marcel could cry in the presence of his mother.

Knausgård also describes something like a dawning nothingness in his short meditation on the adulteration of meaning: the loss that growing up and gaining the dual perspective of father’s son and father’s peer represents for him.6 A break in the text introduces, for the first time, the older “I” associated with the narrator-novelist, who contrasts the latent but fulfilling meaning of childhood with the kind of meaning that can only be captured in ideas like family or career: knowledge, or the kind of abstract meaning that robs one of time and meaning (Knausgård 2009, 13–5; 2012, 9–11). Having striven to attain proper perspective, Knausgård now realizes that this perspective ushers in awareness of passing time. Better understanding decreases “smerten [verden] forårsaker” (2009, 14) [“the pain (the world) inflicts on you” (2012, 11)], but it also destroys the resistance created by an alternatingly expansive and absorbed boyish experience of the world. Knausgård closes this passage as follows: Mitt bilde av min far den kvelden i 1976 er … dobbelt: på den ene siden ser jeg ham som jeg så ham den gangen, med åtteåringens øyne, uforutsigbar og skremmende, på den andre siden ser jeg ham som en jevnaldrende, gjennom hvis liv tiden blåser og stadig river større biter av mening med seg. (2009, 15)My picture of my father on that evening in 1976 is … twofold: on the one hand I see him as I saw him at that time, through the eyes of an eight-year-old: unpredictable and frightening; on the other hand, I see him as a peer through whose life time is blowing and steadily sweeping bigger chunks of meaning along with it. (2012, 11; translation altered) Time and distance have drawn Knausgård closer to his father. Their relationship has shifted from one of (full) painful experience to one of (empty) resemblance. Having become his father’s peer, Knausgård understands that this man also experienced the nothingness dawning in—or, rather, sweeping through—his own life. Unlike Marcel, Knausgård does not state explicitly that this evening continues to echo through his life. It is clear, however, that a “sentiment of collapse” (Deleuze 2000, 20) and a sense of loss (perhaps not irreparable) has installed itself in his “bio-graphy.” This sentiment emerges from the shift from feeling to understanding, an understanding of meaninglessness made possible by likeness to the father, and by the fact that the first perspective remains, even as time continues to flow by, taking boyish and fulfilling meaning with it. The fear and uncertainty inspired by the father persist like the sobs enabled by Marcel’s mother, underlying and intensifying the increasing, and differently frightening, emptiness of adult life.

The remaining pages of Knausgård’s spring scene address time spent alone in his room before and after supper; the evening meal shared with his older brother, Yngve; the attempt to share his vision of a face rising from the sea; and a distinctly lonely memory of sobbing. After supper, he stays up late. Like Marcel, he plots, considering how he might manage to hide in the hallway, to witness the evening news with his parents. He is cold but cannot put on a sweater because that would make his venture look too calculated. He puts his ear to the door, thinks about whether he can still abort the mission. The quality is strikingly similar to Proust in this scene: the excitement and intense planning, the knowledge that one risks punishment, the conviction that it is somehow worth the risk. However, it turns out that they didn’t show the same footage, and the father said something unintelligible that made the mother laugh. While the “stern Father becomes the kind Father” in Proust, mother and father are united in perceived mockery in Knausgård (Mavor 2007, 386). The feeling of shame is so strong that he “så ingenting, hørte ingenting, tenkte ingenting” (Knausgård 2009, 28) [“saw nothing, heard nothing, thought nothing” (Knausgård 2012, 24)] on the way back to his room. The boy then lies down on his bed, switches off the light, and weeps into his pillow: “Det hjalp, omtrent som det å kaste opp hjalp når man var kvalm” (2009, 28) [“It helped, in much the same way that vomiting helps when you are nauseous” (2012, 24)]. Alone and uncomforted, Knausgård cries to release emotional tension. In comparison with Marcel, he takes an unsentimental attitude toward his tears. Marcel’s sobs are like convent bells dampened or made inaudible by daytime noise, but resounding again in “le silence du soir” (Proust 1919, 55) [“the silence of evening” (Proust 2003, 37)]. Although Knausgård uses the analogy of throwing up to explain the soothing function of tears, he does not offer any bridging commentary from the time of writing. He simply jumps, yet again, to the present moment, when “[det har] gått mer enn tretti år” (Knausgård 2009, 29) [“more than thirty years have passed” (Knausgård 2012, 25)]. This lack of bridging commentary appears to support Knausgård’s claims to be writing against interpretation and association, against the romance of fiction, which holds out hope for another world—a utopia—and thus blocks “kunsten å leve” (2009, 34) [“the art of living” (2012, 30)].

Both Proust and Knausgård describe forms of erasure as they transition into major moments of (desire for) recall in the present: Marcel’s taste of the madeleine cake dipped in tea and Knausgård’s consideration of his aged face. In each case, erasure obscures spaces of boyhood, or the once familiar pathways that the narrators have long since left behind. Just before he ponders the nature of involuntary memory, or how an entire environment from the past can emerge from a cup of tea, Marcel returns to iterative mode: C’est ainsi que, pendant longtemps, quand, réveillé la nuit, je me ressouvenais de Combray, je n’en revis jamais que cette sorte de pan lumineux, découpé au milieu d’indistinctes ténèbres … comme si Combray n’avait consisté qu’en deux étages reliés par un mince escalier, et comme s’il n’y avait jamais été que sept heures du soir. (Proust 1919, 63–4)So it was that, for a long time, when, awakened at night, I remembered Combray again, I saw nothing of it but this sort of luminous panel, cut out amongst indistinct shadows … as though Combray has consisted only of two floors connected by a slender staircase and as though it has always been seven o’clock in the evening there. (Proust 2003, 44) Marcel states that, if asked, he could certainly supply this play of illumination and shadow with other details. This would involve, however, “la mémoire volontaire” [“voluntary memory”], and so contain nothing of the past itself: “Tout cela était en réalité mort pour moi. Mort à jamais? C’était possible” (Proust 1919, 64) [“It was all really quite dead for me. Dead forever? Possibly” (2003, 44)]. The rest of Proust’s volume involves, among other things, resistance to this particular form of deadness, as the narrator remains open to the possibility of regaining time through art before “un second hasard, celui de notre mort” (Proust 1919, 64) [“a second sort of chance event, that of our own death” (Proust 2003, 44)] puts a stop to the gifts of involuntary memory.

Knausgård, too, can use voluntary memory to describe the pathway that he took to his room. In the present moment of writing, he knows the spaces and objects that surrounded him in 1976, but the past itself is contained in the feeling that made these surroundings invisible: shame, induced by his parents’ laughter. Kraften i den plutselige skammen var den eneste av følelsene i barndommen som kunne måle seg med redselen i intensitet, ved siden av det plutselige raseriet, da, og alle tre hadde til felles at jeg selv likesom ble utradert. Det var bare den følelsen som gjaldt. Så da jeg snudde meg og gikk tilbake til rommet mitt, var det uten å ense noenting. (Knausgård 2009, 27–8)The force of the sudden shame was the sole feeling from my childhood that could measure in intensity against that of terror, next to sudden fury, of course, and common to all three was the sense that I myself was being erased. It was only that one feeling that mattered. So as I turned and went back to my room, I noticed nothing. (Knausgård 2012, 24; translation altered) Although the Norwegian word “gjaldt” (mattered or counted) suggests validity, force, and debt rather than the double meaning of the English word matter, this experience of shame nonetheless refers to both significance and materiality (Knausgård 2009, 27). It is highly embodied, having a profound impact on the boy’s experience of space and structure. Moreover, this feeling of shame persists in adult life, despite the clamor of the here and now.

The time line of Knausgård’s (partially) involuntary return to the past is difficult for the reader to reconstruct because, unlike Marcel, he does not describe his “madeleine” until the beginning of Part 2 of Min kamp. Første bok. It is nonetheless clear that Knausgård offers an origin story in the opening scenes of his novel, and that the “sensuous sign” of this primary emotional experience is the face (Deleuze 2000, 19). At the beginning of Part 2, we learn that Knausgård’s memory of the face on the empty sea itself surfaced when he was failing to write a third novel and perceived the face of Christ in his parquet flooring (Knausgård 2009, 190). Several scholars have compared and contrasted this image with Proust’s madeleine. Andersen, for example, describes Knausgård’s associative vision—the face that looks like Christ—as a de-sensualization and inversion of the evocative experience in Proust, given that the sign is visual, its influence gradual; we hear much more about the effect (memories) before we hear about the cause (Andersen 2013, 168–7). The present moment of writing is a time for observing Knausgård’s own enigmatic face and thinking about the here and now. The writer-narrator observes his reflection in the window. It is impossible, he claims, not to “tenke på dette ansiktet som dystert” [“consider this face gloomy”]: Hva er det som har satt seg i det?Idag er det den 27. februar 2008. Klokken er 23:43. Jeg som skriver, Karl Ove Knausgård, ble født i desember 1968, or er altså i skrivende stund 39 år gammel. Jeg har tre barn, Vanja, Heidi og John, er gift for andre gang, med Linda Boström Knausgård. Alle fire ligger og sover i rommene rundt meg, i en leilighet i Malmö … (Knausgård 2009, 29)What has engraved itself in my face?Today is the twenty-seventh of February. The time is 11:43 p.m. I who write, Karl Ove Knausgård, was born in December 1968, and so at the time of writing am thirty-nine years old. I have three children— Vanja, Heidi, and John—and am in my second marriage, to Linda Boström Knausgaard. All four are asleep in the rooms around me, in an apartment in Malmö … (Knausgård 2012, 25; translation altered) We have already been told that the face on the sea became Knausgård’s father’s face. The narrator is now himself a father, surrounded by his own wife and children, with a face marked by time: “To dype furer går ned pannen, en dyp fure går ned langs hvert kinn” (Knausgård 2009, 29) [“two deep furrows divide my forehead, one deep furrow intersects each cheek” (Knausgård 2012, 25)]. His question about the source of these furrows engraved on his face might be rhetorical. We might read on to find the answer in later volumes, or simply look to the following paragraph: late nights, passing time, having children, getting married (twice), securing a place to live, growing up.

Disavowal

Queer time does not exist independently of straight time; and those who choose to look will find queer as well as normative logics in both Proust’s and Knausgård’s novels.7 J. Halberstam defines queer time as developing “in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction” (2005, 310). They add: “Queer uses of time and space … also develop according to other logics of location, movement, and identification” (310). Perhaps one could extend the descriptor “queer” to Knausgård’s decision to leave Norway—if this decision were not described as leading directly to a reproductive future. On occasion, Knausgård even appears to lament straight time, which José Esteban Muñoz calls a “temporal stranglehold” (2009, 32) in his highly influential book about queer time and feeling, Cruising Utopia: “Straight time tells us that there is no future but the here and now of our everyday life. The only futurity promised is that of reproductive majoritarian heterosexuality, the spectacle of the state refurbishing its ranks through overt and subsidized acts of reproduction” (22). According to Muñoz, those who “do not feel the privilege of majoritarian belonging,” particularly queers of color, cannot afford to give up hope for another world because the present is “impoverished and toxic” for them (27). For Knausgård, on the other hand, the present is—or should be (he tells himself)—“enough” (Muñoz 2009, 27). Although the narrator in Min kamp. Første bok mourns one aspect of the story that straight time tells—you will die like your father; you will be replaced by your children; you are running out of time—he also appears to buy into present-ism, making no attempt, even in fiction, to “duck the kiss of Father Time” or to “stay inside the womb of Mother-Who-Knows-No-Time” (Mavor 2007, 384). One of the ways in which Knausgård makes Proust look queer by comparison involves his re-establishment of the customary association of nostalgia with wasted time and shame.

Knausgård places À la recherche du temps perdu in a past dominated by nostalgia and assures readers that such perversity has been disabled by life with children. His prior mode of being, when he read Proust’s novel and was married to his first wife, now seems adolescent and barren because it was a way of living thoughtlessly (without adult awareness of the pressures of passing time) that wasn’t leading to a future (children). The present now fills up one’s days, eradicating even recent memories and putting an end to one’s ability to feel as if one has time and can take it (Mavor 2007, 339). When “one is old,” Mavor writes, “one panics at the thought of wasting time … the adolescent has life before him. He can laugh at the artist’s ambitions” (2007, 339). While such a state of panic is postponed and postponed and postponed in À la recherche du temps perdu, it is made explicit early on in Min kamp. Knausgård’s entire passage on the now that being father to three small children has inaugurated is a meditation on the link between children, the future, and the death of the father/artist: “Det er barn som trekker meg ned. Det er noe dypt uverdig ved det” (Knausgård 2009, 38; emphasis in original) [“It is children who are dragging me down. There is something deeply unworthy in this” (Knausgård 2012, 34; translation altered)]. He both reconfirms what he has already asserted about being his father’s peer (another man losing touch with meaning) and shames himself for being “unworthy.”

Knausgård’s first marriage took place during the period of his life that he describes as being suited to reading Proust, a phase defined by disposable attachments and now viewed as adolescent for its focus on the past and (non-procreative or futureless) present only. The second marriage is from a time when the narrator apparently stopped being nostalgic and chose, without thinking, a life of detachment—only to find his sense of time radically altered by new and oppressive forms of attachment. The opening lines of this section bring the reader to the present moment for the third time in the novel: “Det er den 4. mars 2008. Jeg sitter inne på kontoret … mens jeg tenker på det jeg har skrevet og hvor det leder hen” (Knausgård 2009, 32) [“It is the fourth of March 2008. I am sitting in my office … while I think about what I have written and where it is leading” (Knausgård 2012, 28; translation altered)]. Only 6 days and a few pages have passed since February 27, when the narrator stated his date of birth and named the members of his immediate family, who were sleeping around him. The reader might get a feeling of déjà vu here: Knausgård repeats the same given names and some of the same activities: sleeping and wondering about the significance of one’s surroundings, one’s relationships, one’s writing. The time of day now prevents his face from confronting him in the glass pane. He looks out the window and describes what he sees, nothing of which evokes feelings of belonging.

The questions that Knausgård poses about how he arrived here in his current state are provoked in part by what he describes as a thoughtless mode of being (up until now) and by this lack of belonging: “Kanskje jeg har vært ute etter akkurat det, for det finnes absolutt noe i det tilknytningsløse jeg liker, kanskje til og med trenger, men noe bevisst valg har det ikke vært” (Knausgård 2009, 32) [“Maybe that’s exactly what I was looking for, because there is certainly something in this lack of attachment that I like, maybe even need. But it was not a conscious choice” (Knausgård 2012, 28; translation altered)]. This repudiation of intention suggests that motives for past choices can only be puzzled over in the present, in response to signs of passing time and to sudden changes in location. In any case, the narrator is now certain that his former life and marriage were futureless endeavors. He had not considered leaving his country or his wife then: “Tvert imot, vi så for oss at vi skulle få barn og kanksje flytte til Oslo” (2009, 32) [“On the contrary, we imagined having children and maybe moving to Oslo” (2012, 28–9)]. The imagined future of this past, however, turned out to be nothing but a futureless present. The “daværende [nåtid]”—literally, then-existing now-time—was full of daily practices, food, people, and travel, and “beriket” [“enriched”] by the dream of having children (2009, 32; 2012, 28–9). From the peri-reproductive perspective, it appears empty and impoverished. As he imagines must have been the case for his father before him, the grown-up narrator has learned to use abstract concepts such as family—that is, imagined children as the enrichment of an imagined future—to make sense of his life; but he also describes a new form of experiential fullness created by the needs of others, which prevent absorption in art and the self and threaten the kind of focus required for writing.

Knausgård’s interest in the past, his reason for reading À la recherche du temps perdu, has given way to a reproductive familial existence too demanding and mindless for reading monumental novels while dwelling on what happened before. He contrasts past and present experiential time through a series of space-time metaphors: reaching a finish line or destination, taking a boat through a lock, watching sand fall through one’s fingers. What was once perceived as distance-to-be-covered— between current location and glowing, exciting achievement—becomes a rising lock and longing for height achieved: “For hver dag som går, vokser lengselen etter øyeblikket da livet når kanten, etter øyeblikket da porten går opp og livet endelig siger framover igjen” (Knausgård 2009, 35) [“With every passing day the desire grows for the moment when life will reach the top, for the moment when the sluice gates open and life finally moves on” (Knausgård 2012, 30)]. This kind of filling up is nothing like the boyish experience of being filled “til randen” (2009, 13) [“to the brim” (2012, 13)] on a daily basis. Boyish fullness is related to discrete episodes and does not give rise to the kind of desire that emerges from struggle with sensations like slowness, monotony, and seeping frustration, which are also signs of the seeping away of life, with minimum and discontinuous forward movement. The overall structures of life are established, as they were for Knausgård’s father in 1976—“Bortsett fra i detaljene, er alt seg alltid likt” (2009, 34) [“Apart from the details, everything is always the same” (2012, 20)]—and the sensations swing between emptiness and overcrowding, replacing childhood’s expansion and absorption. Knausgård now turns to writing to rescue himself from this feeling of meaningless sameness. According to Martin Hägglund, he does so by transforming the structure of À la recherche du temps perdu, or by attending to the struggle of the present moment of writing rather than by going back to stay back, which in Proust sometimes means giving in to the seductions of the past and of a literature focused on analysis of that past: “Your nostalgia, then, can come to shelter you from the demands of a life that still has to be lived” (Hägglund 2017).

A primary problem with both meaningless sameness and nostalgic attachments to the past rather than to the here and now is waste: that adolescent quality cultivated by Proust and so admired by Litvak and Mavor. The life that Knausgård lives together with his family at once protects him from an unproductive and shameless relationship to the past and threatens his “stort behov for å være alene” (Knausgård 2009, 36) [“great need for solitude” (Knausgård 2012, 32)]: “At tiden løper fra meg, forsvinner som sand mellom fingrene mens jeg gjør … ja, hva? Vasker gulv, vasker klær, lager middag, vasker opp, handler, leker med barna …” (2009, 36) [“Time is slipping away from me, running through my fingers like sand while I … do what? Clean floors, wash clothes, make dinner, wash up, go shopping, play with the children …” (2012, 32)]. Knausgård’s metaphors demonstrate paradoxical sensations: filling up and emptying out, lock/sluice and sand running through his fingers. His list mimics his lock metaphor, as domestic activities fill page space: “henger klær opp til tørk, folder klær sammen og legger dem i skap, rydder, vasker bord, stoler, skap” (2009, 36) [“hang some clothes to dry, fold others, and put them away, tidy up, wipe tables, chairs, and cupboards” (2012, 32)]. Life is full of activities that jeopardize the writing project, but this fullness also registers for the adult author as an emptying process, as lack of control with insufficient returns. Knausgård’s children prevent him both from finding enough time to guarantee a future by means of a masterpiece and from engaging in writing-as-homeopathy—or combating nostalgia with a good dose of proper reminiscence. Significantly, this particular depiction of wasted time is explicitly associated more with “women’s work” than with adolescence, perhaps evoking the childwoman configuration that can animate a form of effeminophobia (fear of being feminized, one of the meeting points between homophobia and misogyny).

Knausgård’s first reference to À la recherche du temps perdu is not the only instance in Min kamp. Første bok, where thinking about the past is classified as sick or morbid. Toward the beginning of Part 2, the narrator remembers lying sleepless beside his pregnant wife, feeling slightly guilty about his lack of paternal enthusiasm. Although he claims, in the moment of writing, that “fortiden [er] nå knapt værende i tankene” (Knausgård 2009, 33) [“the past is now hardly present in (my) thoughts” (Knausgård 2012, 29–30; translation altered)], he also confesses that memories have been present in his dreams, even in Stockholm. The prevailing feeling in these dreams, which lingers in his body for hours after waking up, is “fornedrelse” (2009, 202) [“humiliation” (2012, 202)]—an echo, as he himself suggests, of childhood shame: “Det var som om jeg i drømme ikke hadde vokst opp” (2009, 202) [“It was as though in my dreams I had not grown up” (2012, 202)]. Knausgård stresses again that the move to Stockholm constituted a break with a life that had persisted since childhood, and that nostalgia-provoking memories have lessened since then: “Det var virkelig ingenting å beklage. For nostalgien er ikke bare skamløs, den er også forrædersk. Hva får egentlig et menneske i tyveårene ut av en lengsel mot sin barndom? Mot sin egen ungdom? Det lignet en sykdom” (2009, 202) [“This really was not anything to regret. For nostalgia is not only shameless, it is also treacherous. What does anyone in their twenties really get out of a longing for their childhood years? For their own youth? It resembled a sickness” (2012, 203; translation altered)]. The association of nostalgia with shamelessness and treachery indicates a dearth of proper and true behavior: such twenty-somethings are not but should be ashamed.

Knausgård’s ability to write as a man involves, it seems, distinguishing between childish and adult understanding and experience, as well as vigilance lest he forget that a certain kind of nostalgia is sick. It is difficult to decide whether he is self-ironizing when he appears to accuse himself, shamefully and indirectly, of having engaged in shamelessness. In any case, when Knausgård pivots on Proust, he differentiates the shameless practice of nostalgia from the struggle (or passive happenstance?) by means of which such shamelessness is replaced by a shameful desire to take time back from one’s own children. His references to dwelling in the past reproduce the normative, moralistic understanding of nostalgia as “an abdication of personal responsibility, a guilt-free homecoming, an ethical and aesthetic failure” (Boym 2001, xiv). His continued interest in remembering the past (which is not the same thing as going back to stay back) suggests at least some degree of irony, but not complete failure: Knausgård cannot get over the past, but he succeeds in feeling guilty about it.

Conclusion

Should Proust’s status as a gay icon and his refusal to stop being a “mama’s boy” matter for comparisons of À la recherche du temps perdu with Min kamp? I say yes; but answers to this question will depend on what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has called the epistemology of the closet (2008). They will depend, in other words, on the privileges of knowledge and ignorance, on who (and how one) is looking, and on what that looker wants (or does not want) to know. In “Shame and Openness,” Toril Moi notes that shame is “the predominant theme” both in Min kamp and Knausgård’s earlier novel Out of the World (Moi 2013, 207). Her description of Knausgård’s monumental project resembles what I will call a straight coming out, or a coming out that denies Sedgwick’s epistemology: the “shameful person must break the other’s power to define him by going on the offensive, by expressing himself, by revealing his inner life” (Moi 2013, 208). Come out, Moi suggests, and you will escape your alienation; you will be free of the habit of internalizing others’ judgments. According to Sedgwick, however, coming out does not actually authorize clean distinctions between defensive and offensive positions, between in and out, or closed and open. In fact, coming out is never complete because knowing the self and its truths will always depend upon and reproduce forms of ignorance: “Even to come out does not end one’s relation to the closet, including turbulently the closet of the other” (Sedgwick 2008, 8, 81).

Although he appeals to childhood memories, Knausgård does not reclaim or take pleasure in the shamelessly effeminizing relationship between mother and son. Instead, he tells the shameful story of father and son. He comes out, yet straight masculinity remains a kind of reverse open secret.8 That is, while it is no secret that masculinity is a major theme in Min kamp, the comparative project thus far has managed to put the queerness of À la recherche du temps perdu back in the closet.