A Good Passage from Karl Ove Knausgaard

I'm onto volume two of Karl Ove Knausgaard's excellent series of autobiographical novels, My Struggle. (As I've said previously, the title's echo of a more famous work seems to be deliberate and ironic.) 

It's really excellent, and I'm surprised I'm enjoying it so much, because I mostly don't like modern literature (to put it mildly). I generally find it pretentious and banal.

Anyway, when volume two begins Knausgaard (a Norwegian) is living in Sweden with his wife and young children, and finds himself musing on the eternal question of heredity vs. environment:

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... Such an attitude can at first sight seem 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.

...Out with spirituality, out with feeling, in with a new materialism, but it never struck them [his parents' generation] 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, and this gives way to the fascinating phenomenon whereby crowds of people assert their individuality and originality by shopping in an identitical way, while those who once ushered all this in with their affirmation of equality, their emphasis on material values and belief in change, are now inveighing against their handiwork, which they believe the enemy created...

Although Knausgaard goes on to add that "like all simple reasoning this is not true either", I think he's pretty much right.

(These kind of political or historical reflections have not been very common in the novel so far, but I anticipate they'll get more frequent as it goes along, from what I've read about it. So far it's been more about the protagonist's individual lived experience.)

A Word for Today

Scofflaw. Never heard that one before!

Read about its meaning and origin here!

Boring Criticisms of Social Media

I haven't been on Facebook or Twitter since the end of 2024. Well, whoop-de-doo for me. I mostly left for petty reasons. I only mention it in case it gives my case here a little bit more "cred".

Basically, I get tired of hearing boring criticisms of social media and I'm very sceptical of them.

I'm not banging the drum for social media. I'm just jaded from hearing the same criticisms over and over, and always with an air of something profound and insightful being said.

So here we go...

1) People use social media to present a false image of their lives.

True. But how is this different from any other aspect of human life? As Dr. Gregory House says, "Everybody lies". There was a time when Irish people would stay away from Mass because they didn't have good enough clothes, and we all know about the "good room" that was only used for visitors. Putting on a show seems to be a perennial human behaviour. 

It took me a long, long time-- well into my forties-- to realize just how extensively people play up their achievements and experiences. I was very naive.

Someone who didn't put on a show (to some extent at least) would probably be treated as a weirdo and avoided.

You could say all these false images are coming at you thicker and faster on social media than they ever did before. Maybe. Is it so different from channel-hoping or flicking through glossy magazines?

2) Social media is polarising.

I notice the mainstream media only object to polarisation when there are two poles (or more, so to speak). They are perfectly happy to whip up intense emotions when it's on the right side. (For instance, fostering animosity to the Catholic Church.)

What's wrong with polarisation, anyway? I think a healthy society should have clashing ideologies and intense debate. Conformism is much more dangerous. (And that's what we have in Ireland.)

If you ask me, the internet's biggest virtue is that it makes it very difficult to suppress dissent.

3) Social media dumbs down public discourse and shortens attention spans.

Please. I can't remember a time when people weren't complaining about "soundbites". It was a constant refrain when political spin-doctors like Peter Mandelson and Alistair Campbell first came on the scene, in the late nineties. It only takes a glance at history to realize there were always soundbites in politics. "Homes fit for heroes", "Up Dev", "Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right", etc. etc. You might argue these were slogans, but really, what's the difference?

Before that the "shortening attention span" claim was made about video games and channel-hopping.

I don't buy for a second that attention spans are shortening. Netflix bingeing has become a very familiar phenomenon, and the public appettite for massive multi-volume literary works such as A Song of Ice and Fire seeems instiable. Also, movies are actually getting longer.

On the other hand, just look at some television from the early days of the medium. It was mostly pretty vapid stuff. I think it was even more vapid than it is today. (But more wholesome, too. I watched an episode of Mr. Ed the other day and keenly felt the loss of wholesomeness in entertainment since those days.)

4) People crave dopamine hits from "likes", views, etc.

Again, what's different? When have people not been approval junkies? You could argue that social media accelarates this tendency. Perhaps it does, but I think this can be overstated.

What frustrated me about social media, personally, was that (in my view) a thoughtful and substantial post would get so little engagement compared to something more trivial or polemical. But again...is that anything new?

There are legitimate criticisms of social media and I don't think society would be any worse off if social media just disappeared tomorrow morning.

What really bothers me is the way people produce these cliches as if they were wonderful insights that haven't been said a million times already.

Or people who say with affected bewilderment: "I don't understand social media", like they want some kind of a prize for it. Grrr!

I guess this is all the comedy of humanity and I should regard it with affectionate indulgence. But then, can my undue irritation be a part of the comedy of humanity, too?

I Hate Political Correctness.

I hate political correctness.

I hate defences of political correctness.

I hate the false equivalence of political correctness with some imaginary opposite extreme.

I hate the suggestion that political correctness is something that mostly happens on university campuses and in quirky places like Seattle.

I hate the term "political correctness gone mad", since political correctness is already mad.

I hate attemps to justify political correctness with ironic, knowing humour.

I hate the equation of political correctness with good manners and courtesy. People's careers and lives have rarely been destroyed because of a lapse in good manners or courtesy. (The British TV chef Fanny Cradock was a rare exception.) Nor do conventions of good manners and courtesy change overnight, arbitrarily.

I hate the pretence that political correctness has been an organic evolution rather than a series of sudden changes imposed (mostly) from above.

I hate the pretence that there's a "political correctness of the right". Yes, there are sacred cows on the right, but the right doesn't have the power to impose those on people in general, outside their own (generally beleagured) institutions. Even when the right is in government in any given country, the left is in permanent control of education, the public sector, the entertainment industry, etc. There's no symmetry here.

I could go on and on, but I won't.

Too Much Tolerance Kills Conversation

Just a thought. It's very dull to have a conversation with somebody who's too tolerant. There has to be some resistance to make conversation interesting. If everything comes down to "live and let live" and "each to his own"...well...there isn't really much to say, except for exchanging information.

The opposite is also bad, of course. But I'm not sure it's equally bad. I think I'd rather have lunch with a fanatic than with a soggy liberal.

The joy of conversation is to enter into a topic. I've noticed that conversation in our consumerist, pluralist society tends to simply flit from subject to subject-- since there's nothing much to say about any of them. Once you've compared notes, where do you go?

The intiial idea of a liberal society was that the search for truth (and meaning, I suppose) was so important that everybody had to make that journey for themselves. And I agree with this. I think it comports with human dignity. (Which is not to say that we can't have a Christian character to our institutions; I think we should. Nobody is oppressed by having to listen to a prayer being said, or by having a Christmas crib in a public building. But the long history of religious and political persecution shows that forcing people to believe or not believe anything is always a bad idea.)

I also think the search and the journey has a value, even a sublimity, of its own.

But that's not to say we can't try to persuade each other. In fact, I want people to try to persuade each otther. Society should be a hubbub of religious, political, and cultural debate. That was the whole point of an open society. (Everybody should read On Liberty by John Stuart Mill.)  It doesn't mean you should be a pain in the face about pushing your beliefs on people.

The stage magiciaIn and atheist Penn Teller put it well, in this much-quoted rhetorical question: "How much do you have to hate somebody to not proselytize? How much do you have to hate somebody to believe everlasting life is possible and not tell them that?"

And even if you don't believe in everlasting life, or the matter at hand isn't religion, why wouldn't you want to argue for your vision of a good society?

The times in history that I'm drawn to are the ones where ideas and debates were thick in the air-- such as the Gaelic Revival and the Irish Revolution in Ireland, or the late nineteenth century in Russia, or the nineteen-thirties in Britain.

But even if you're talking about something non-ideological, such as cinema or architecture, "whatever floats your boat" doesn't float the boat of human interaction very far.

Of course, we have the worst of both worlds today-- where a supposed pluralism is unspokenly dominated by an utterly intolerant secular-globalist progressivism.

(An afterthought: I've always been baffled when the term "bore" is applied to somebody who has an obsessive interest in a subject and won't shut up about it. That might be irritating, to be sure. But give me that kind of "bore" any day ahead of the the more usual sort of bore-- somebody who has no consuming interests or passions, and who really has no conversation beyond general knowledge and received opinion.)

I Don't Care About Spoilers (Much)

Am I unusual for not caring very much about "spoilers" in movies and books? 

I've never felt that a movie is "spoiled" because you know what's going to happen. If that was the case, rewatching a movie (or re-reading a book) would be a diminished experience, whereas it's generally an enhanced experience (if it's worth watching in the first place).

If I know I'm going to watch a film in the very near future, or if I'm trying to decide whether I should, then I will avoid reading plot summaries. Usually.

But if it's simply a film I might see in the future, I don't go to any such efforts.

I've frequently found myself having conversations of this kind:

"And then his face is all burnt by acid and he disappears for years and...well, I won't tell you what happens in case you want to watch it some day."

"No, it's fine, tell me." (My immediate curiosity is piqued.)

"No! You might watch it some day."

I can't help thinking that surprises and twists are the cheapest tools in the storyteller's toolbox. Necessary, but far less important than dialogue and characterization and the stuff that never ceases to please.

Is My Hunger for a Roman Fleuve Going to be Satisfied?

"Roman fleueve" means "river novel" in French, and a roman fleuve is a long story that is serialized over several novels.

I've always liked the idea of a roman fleuve. It seems potentially very satisfying.

I tried reading the most famous of them all, A La Recherche du Temps Perdu by Marcel Proust, about fifteen years ago. I really couldn't get into it, it was very heavy, with lots of long descriptive passages (which I hate). To be honest, I didn't even get through the first volume.

Like everybody, I'd heard about the famous scene involving the tea-cake at the start, where the taste of a tea-cake dipped in tea brings back memories of the narrator's life, and initaties the reminiscences. The description of this scene really seems to speak to everybody; it's the sort of thing nobody forgets once they've heard it described. We're all fascinated by memory, I think.

Around the same time, I read most of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. The catalyst event in this roman fleuve is the narrator watching snow falling into a brazier, which is also a very appealing image. The title is also tremendously evocative.

The idea of an entire story, a very long story, which is all part of the same reverie (in some way) greatly pleases me. I'm not sure why. The idea pleases me in the same way that the atmosphere of "In My Life" by the Beatles pleases me. Or the title of Maurice Baring's memoirs, Puppet Show of Memory. (Baring was a friend of Chesterton and Belloc, a writer and a Catholic convert.)

Sad to say, though, I was disappointed by A Dance to the Music of Time. I gave up about halfway through, or maybe even further. I found it a bit too light and humorous and not what I was looking for. Proust was too heavy, and Powell was too light. (Interestingly, Philip Larkin read the book towards the end of his life, and told Powell in a letter that his only complaint was that it wasn't long enough.)

I've also read some very long multi-volume series in genre fiction. Lord of the Rings, of course, a couple of times. I've read most of Robert Jordan's colossal Wheel of Time series, although rather ridiculously I flagged towards the very end and gave up. The same applies to The Dark Tower series by Stephen King.

The Stand by Stephen King is a single-volume work but it still has an epic character, both because of its length (I read it in its longer "uncut" version) and because of its subject matter. (A deadly plague leads to the collapse of American civilization, and the survivors form two camps-- one good, one evil.) King was consciously trying to write an American Lord of the Rings, and I think he succeeded to a great extent.

The Stand is more like a life experience than a book. I've thought about reading it again, but it's quite a commitment. (Actually, on my thirtieth birthday, I watched the 1994 TV miniseries on DVD; it seemed a suitably big marker for a big birthday.)

But genre novels don't really satisfy my hunger for a roman fleuve. I want something about real life, modern life. Something from the point of view of a single narrator.

Anyway, I've started reading a roman fleuve called My Struggle (I think the title is ironic), by a Norwegian called Karl Ove Knausgaard. There are six volumes of it and it's 1.3 million words long. It was published between 2009 and 2011. I came across a reference to it on TV Tropes (a website to which I'm addicted) and it intrigued me. It's an autobiographical novel and apparently various people in the author's real life are not wild about its candour.

The series has been a massive hit in Norway, and abroad, but nobody I've mentioned it to has heard of it. Even very bookish types.

I'm a hundred and fifty pages into the first volume and it's very promising so far. No unreasonably protracted descriptive passages. The characters are recognisable people. And the flights of introspection, and angst, aren't too self-indulgent. So far.

Knausgaard is a standard-issue lefty, as far as I can see, and one interview I skimmed had him make the usual critical references to Brexit and the Big Bad Wolf in Washington. I understand that it gets more political later. So far it has been pretty apolitical. Religion doesn't feature much so far. There's a sort of prologue at the beginning which shows us the narrator as a small boy, and it's mentioned that he's a Christian (much to his father's disapproval). By the time the main narrative of the first volume begins, he describes himself as an anti-Christian, although with the suggestion that this is just youthful posturing. At the point I've reached now, he's fallen madly in love with a classmate who's a Christian, even though her parents are not. But none of this is treated as central to the plot and nobody seems to get at all het up about religion.

I think I'm drawn to the idea of a roman fleuve because I'm fascinated by the texture of life, its overflowingness. The different flavours of different days and different stretches of time. It's the "in-betweeny" moments that appeal to me the most. I liked this description of the first day of the year, after a rather epic New Year's Eve party sequence, in which the protagonist in a friend's house watching The Guns of Navarone on video casette:

"Oh, this is fun", Trygve said as the first frames from the film appeared on the screen. Outside, everything was still, as only winter can be. And even though the sky was overcast and grey, the light over the countryside shimmered and was perfectly white. I remember thinking all I wanted to do was to sit right there, in a newly built house, in a circle of light in the middle of the forest and be as stupid as I liked."

We have the first five volumes in my library. I've requested the sixth to be bought. I can get it on inter-library loan, in any case.

Maybe I'll lose interest long before that.Or maybe this will finally be the roman fleuve I've been yearning for!