Like many in academia, I like to take advantage of winter break to catch up on pleasure reading (which to me means long, rambly novels) in between sessions of syllabus planning. I dithered, as I packed my bags for my annual holiday visit to my family in December, over whether to take on Karl Ove Knausgaard’s monumentally long autobiographical novel My Struggle or Elena Ferrante’s neopolitan novels. I’ve been having many fits of pique lately about the ways in which straight white male authors are still fêted out of all proportion to their accomplishments (see: Jonathan Franzen…actually don’t, just read Nell Zink, who takes on his themes in exponentially more interesting ways and skewers him neatly in the process), which has meant that I’ve read very few books written by straight white men lately. Uncharacteristically, I decided to try to overcome my feminist rage for a moment (perhaps I was moved by the Christmas spirit?) and went with Knausgaard, tucking the 400 page first volume of My Struggle into my carry-on bag.
In spite of myself, I loved it. I tore through book one during that holiday visit and bought book two as soon as I returned home. I have always gotten wrapped up in stories of the quotidian – tell me what your nighttime teeth-brushing routine looks like in detail and I’ll listen with rapt attention. Want to go into unnecessary depth about how you get to your favorite cafe? Lay it on me, I love to hear about subway transfers. Most of all, though, I love accounts of that teenage rage for experience and the incredible (and always disappointed) hope that kids have about how intense and meaningful adult life will be. When there’s an account of that teenage rage that also includes artistic ambition (aka a künstlerroman, or the artist’s version of a bildungsroman, the classic coming-of-age tale), all the better. So of course I love Knausgaard’s work for his obsessively reported details of quotidian life and for his exploration of his youthful desire to do something great.
[The heroic artist, perpetually smoking. Image via flavorwire.]
But I’ve also been thinking a lot as I read about what it means for a man to write a bildungsroman or a künstlerroman and what it means for a woman to do the same. Usually these narratives include a dawning self awareness, a realization of how myopic one was and how much bigger and more difficult the world is than one initially thought. It is the classic tale of the fall of the naïf into knowledge. Part of what is so captivating about My Struggle is how resolutely it avoids those sorts of realizations. Karl Ove Knausgaard the character is able to recognize that his teenage band was bad, to be sure. He can look back on one of his first interviews and see how he messed it up. But when it comes to the personal, to serious self-searching, Karl Ove never attempts to reach any sort of transcendent understanding of his own motivations, or to dig for the roots of the ideas he has about the world. His mourning for his dead father in book one takes the form of an obsessive description of cleaning up the house that his alcoholic father trashed before his death, as well as admissions that he cried often during this period. When in book two he relates how, in a drunken rage, he carved his face up with a piece of glass after being rejected by a woman he wanted, Karl Ove relates the incident with clinical precision, never stopping to analyze why this was the form his rage took, or whether it was rage or something else that made him act this way. What made me stop in my tracks, however, was the very simple anecdote in book one of young Karl Ove getting rejected by another teenager he was attracted to, and casually thinking in response, “Bitch. Fucking Bitch.”
There
is no reflection about this thought. Karl Ove never has to struggle
to understand his relation to women or to patriarchy. He never has to
think about his casual misogyny, or, later in the narrative, the
shirking of his parental duties, because he has bigger fish to fry:
Art. Life. The Meaning of Things. These so obviously eclipse gender
and identity as concerns (as if these could ever be separated…)
that Karl Ove simply never takes the time to think about those issues
(at least in the first two volumes – I’ve only just begun volume
three). They are for his wife and girlfriend to figure out. They do
not touch him. He gets to retreat to his office where he can be alone
for days, in spite of his girlfriend’s vehement protestations that
she needs help taking care of their young children, because his art
trumps all else. The important realization in this künstlerroman
is that adult life is a process of disenchantment (“the
difference between a child’s reality and an adult’s, was that
[things] were no longer laden with meaning” [361-362]),
and that art is meant to help us cope. No greater self realization
required. To be sure, an argument could be made that this is
simply the story of an impossibly singleminded, flawed individual,
and as a self-portrait it is aiming for transparency rather than
critique. But I don’t think that’s all that’s happening. To be a
straight white man writing a künstlerroman
is to be an unmarked individual writing about the Importance of Art.
To be a woman writing the same is never so simple.
A few weeks ago I went to a double feature of The Diary of a Teenage Girl (based on the hybrid graphic novel by Phoebe Gloeckner), a künstlerroman about a white teenager in 1970s San Francisco, and Girlhood, a bildungsroman about a black teenager in the Paris suburbs. Each features a scene, less and more realistic, of self-realization and internal change that seem to me to be crucial parts of the contemporary female coming-of-age story that make it a fundamentally different genre than the genre in which Knausgaard is working. For the protagonist of The Diary of a Teenage Girl, her understanding of herself as an artist can only come about through and after disastrous sexual encounters in which various partners reduce her to her worth as a body. For the protagonist of Girlhood, self-realization means understanding that none of the social orders she knows work for her, and she must make her way alone (no girlfriend at home to cook her meals and wash her clothes) if she doesn’t want to compromise herself. This is not the artist choosing to be alone in his office. Though Diary offers a more optimistic take than Girlhood, both show that such high-minded retreat simply isn’t an option for the women in these bildungsromans.
In The Diary of a Teenage Girl, the fifteen year old protagonist Minnie has a sexual relationship with her mother’s predatory boyfriend, Monroe. As she explores her sexuality, she also develops her artistry, testing out the value of her drawings at the same time that she tests out the value of her body to Monroe. When she shows him her work, he tells her that it’s weird and that she shouldn’t show it to anyone else. After many twists and turns and a disastrous end to the relationship, Minnie one day comes across Monroe as she sells her drawings on a boardwalk. Monroe, who had previously seemed to Minnie to be worldly and exciting, suddenly appears as what he is: a self-deluded charlatan, rapidly approaching middle age, with zero to show for his years of life. She thinks to herself, “I’m better than you,” meaning both that she was always too good for him, and that she has talent and potential that Monroe never had. She goes on to relate that she is no longer worried about whether or not she’s attractive to men (an obsession of hers at the beginning of the film), and that if she winds up without long-term romantic relationships in her life, she’ll be perfectly happy. It is an incredibly satisfying, if fantastical, moment precisely because fifteen year-old Minnie is able to understand that her worth isn’t tied to her body – the easily internalized message she starts off her life with – and that she can create things she cares about in spite of men like Monroe who would tell her to stop. This is one version (the happy version) of the female künstlerroman: the story of the realization that patriarchal expectations will ruin you and your art if you let them.
[Bel Powley as Minnie. Image via villagevoice.com]
Girlhood has a harder message: if you are a woman and you don’t like the options that have been laid out for you (in this case, exchanging sex for economic security or getting married and bearing children), you’re on your own. We follow sixteen year-old Marieme as she grows from obedient student to shoplifting, fist-fighting girl gang member to employee of a small time drug dealer. Her time in the girl gang is joyful, and briefly her world seems to expand beyond the dreariness of life in the working-class apartment complex she calls home.
[The bande des filles in a happy moment (Marieme, played by Kadja Touré, is second from the right). Image via theguardian.com]
But we quickly see that options for life after the gang are few. We meet a former member of the gang with an infant on her back, signaling one undesirable path to adulthood (“It was hard at first, but I’m used to it now,” the new mother reports). Back at home Marieme’s brother physically and verbally abuses Marieme and her sisters, shutting off the option of a happy domestic life. Marieme refuses to follow in her mother’s footsteps, working as a janitor, out of pride and desire for more. When she ultimately makes the decision to start working for a local drug dealer, we assume that this means she will end up being sexually exploited in some way, but Marieme manages to avoid this option as well, cutting her hair short, binding her breasts, and dressing in baggy khakis and sweatshirts. This upsets her boyfriend, who fights with her but then promises that he will marry her so she can stop living like she is. Marieme smiles, initially pleased, asking “You would marry me?” But she quickly rejects the offer, explaining that he would marry her and give her children, and she does not want that life. The exchange asks too much of her – she has seen what it means for a woman to have a child (self-sacrifice, retreat from the social world, backbreaking drudgery to keep everyone fed and housed). In the final scene we see Marieme ringing her mother’s doorbell, considering a return to the safety and boredom of respectable working-class life one last time, then turning away before she is buzzed in to the apartment complex. She looks upset, and then she steels herself, sets her face, and walks off into a different life, alone. It’s moving and heartbreaking because we know that Marieme’s unwillingness to compromise isn’t going to be rewarded or applauded. In this version of the bildungsroman, we’re reminded that the fall into experience is always more fraught for women than for men, and more often than not results in an understanding that the search for an expansive, meaningful life will be lonely at best. (Genre, as Virginia Jackson reminds us, is “a heartbreaker.”)
I’m not saying anything new in pointing out that straight white men aren’t asked to refract their identities through others or to constantly tie their worth as human beings to the attractiveness of their flesh or to their ability to have children. But I feel compelled to say it in relation to Knausgaard precisely because it’s so easy not to say it about his books. Critical reception has largely focused on how honest it is, how objective, how reporterly. But what good is honesty without reflection? We don’t need “honest” reports of misogyny – any woman anywhere has intimate knowledge of how misogyny works and what it does to her on a daily basis. I’ll keep reading Knausgaard, but I’ll do it hoping that somewhere in the thousands of pages he’s written he’s stopped to think for even a sentence about why he gets to search for Truth while his girlfriend (also an artist) gets to change diapers.