Orde in de chaos – Ben Lerner over ‘Mijn strijd’ van Knausgård

De Amerikaanse dichter/romanschrijver Ben Lerner bespreekt ‘Mijn strijd’ van Karl Ove Knausgård in een lang essay op London Review of Books. Hij heeft het ondermeer over de strijd om vorm te geven aan het vormloze van uiteenlopende ervaringen als kind. Hier maakt hij een interessante vergelijking met het fascisme:

“Even if Knausgaard’s ‘literary suicide’ is an enabling fiction, the association of death (particularly violent death) with the end of My Struggle is troubling. Here we must reckon with the long shadow cast across the volumes by the title. Are we supposed to think of Knausgaard as a failed artist whose violent will-to-order is somehow analogous to Hitler’s? English-language readers know from interviews that Volume 6 includes hundreds of pages about Hitler (and presumably about Knausgaard’s title) and also addresses the massacre perpetrated in 2011 by Anders Behring Breivik at a summer camp near Oslo. That the book – while deeply concerned with death throughout – comes to focus on mass murder as it reaches its own terminus (‘I am no longer an author’) is a way of declaring the inextricability of violence and closure. To put it reductively, Hitler and Breivik are two men – or perhaps two man-children, albeit in a much more sinister sense than Baudelaire’s – who responded to the value vacuum, the bad infinity, opened up by modernity with murder and murderous ideologies; they reacted to the terror of formlessness with the ‘false totality’ of fascism (though this might be overstating the coherence of Breivik’s worldview). Having only read the books that have appeared in English, I remain agnostic about the tremendous gamble of the title. But whatever one ultimately thinks of it, its significance is felt as a live issue across the books, intensifying the suspense around the problem of closure inherent to Knausgaard’s method. It makes the question of how the book will end inseparable from the question of fascism and its disastrous attempts to bring coherence to what it perceives as chaos.” (London Review of books)

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