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The Norwegian novel, My Struggle, by Karl Ove Knausgaard is the most famous autobiographical work in recent memory. His honest portraits of reality help us reflect on our own deep secrets and forgotten memories. However, this does not change the fact that Knausgaard’s life is painfully banal. Yet this is the beautiful truth of his story, that modern life is average. This notion is complicated by later volumes not yet translated into English, wherein the author writes about how his life was warped by celebrity. But based on the first few novels in the series, we must consider a pressing issue: this 3,000 page blog post has immersed autobiographical writing in literary fiction; after this, how are we to write?
David Foster Wallace, an oft-too-technical postmodernist but a genius nonetheless, anticipated the reaction that would follow his own literary output, which in his later career he himself began to define. In 1993’s “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” he wrote:
“The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows.”
The “New Sincerity,” which was inaugurated in literature by A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, was easy to conflate with much of the juvenilia that became hip in New York poetry circles after the turn of the century. More refined practitioners created tedious yet modern, “comedies of manners,” which, while well-written, were better suited for TV than the novel.
But the next literary rebels will eschew this sentimental, over-credulous fiction. They will take what has been done and try to make it better, as all artists do; they will refract what has come before through their own consciousness. They will risk overindulgence, grandiosity, absurdity, bizarreness, mannerism, a too-deep descent into the fantastic and “the unreal.” The next “dangerous” literature will elevate the everyday out of banality into a higher realm.
As Knausgaard points out in My Struggle, when life slows down enough for us to really live it, and for it to become totally real, we often say the opposite: that was unreal. Knausgaard defines this sense of unreality in oh-so-real terms. His description of mundane events become mythical in their universality. But his fiction hovers over the bland. Far more interesting it would be to depict reality in terms of the unreal, so that a flash of sun, a fly buzzing against a window pane, or the smile of a loved one launches the reader into the realm of the imaginary and the mythical. Only in the unreal—in the incredible—can the real really exist. Reality, the ordinary bits of life, are in fact unreal; quotidian routines fade into oblivion while that time we fell in love is a slow-motion sequence that seems hours long. Anyone who has spent months or years in front of a computer screen would agree; an entire life lived as such is an essence of seasons and motions, a mere shadow on the wall of life’s cave.
That written in Knausgaard’s style after Knausgaard will be forgotten. It has been done. It is too ordinary. The next literary rebels will hearken to a more modernist notion: that only in the mind does the real exist. This has been forgotten; it is an idea a hundred years old, already revolted against two or three times. It is natural that we return to it, since all art is one circle drawn over another, spiraling upward and outward in a pattern of human consciousness.
The average person may relate to a story about another average person, but great literature entertains and teaches. It is easier to learn from another’s failures, oddities, and derangements when they are so sunk in their own reality as to believe that they are right no matter what. The next literary rebels will define those pivotal moments in which habit shatters and forward movement occurs. These writers will remove us from banality and show us the immortal within ourselves—the heights of achievement, the nadirs of failure. In this, divinity exists, a painting of Picasso or a cantata by Bach is proof enough. This is what those next rebels will seek to recreate. Any less would only be average.
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