Materializing Memory in Art and Popular Culture (Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies) by László Munteán & Liedeke Plate & Anneke Smelik

Author:László Munteán & Liedeke Plate & Anneke Smelik
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2016-12-08T05:00:00+00:00

Figure 6.1 Listing the girls in his class (Knausgård, 2012, p. 40). Photograph by Inge van de Ven.

Knausgård deviates from this narrative convention by opting for the far less common anaphoric singulative mode. This is a subtype of the singulative, where what happened n times (n being >1) is narrated n times (nN / nS), with each mention in the text corresponding to one occurrence in the story. We find a parody of this practice in Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605), when Sancho Panza tells the story of a fisherman who wanted to transport three hundred goats in a boat that had room to contain only one. As Sancho narrates, it becomes clear that he intends to tell the event three hundred times, once for each trip, causing Quixote to exclaim, impatiently: ‘Take it that they are all across … and do not go on coming and going like that, or you will never get them all over in a year’ (1993, p. 154). This subtype of frequency is not commonly used since it obviously amounts to an inefficient way of storytelling, namely, narrating without compression. It brings narrative closer to the ‘paradigmatic’ ordering system of the database, where a whole range of possible choices is presented.

This anaphoric singulative frequency goes a long way in accounting for the extraordinary volume of the My Struggle series. In Boyhood Island (2014a), for instance, the author seems to have felt the need to include all the girls he ever fell in love with as a boy. The reader learns how he admires the girl from a distance and then makes a third party ask her to be his girlfriend. He then takes his time to recount the joy he felt when she says yes, followed by insecurity because he does not know what to do with her. After a couple of days, she breaks up with him, allowing the reader to witness the dramatic heartbreak this causes. Then the whole sequence is repeated. Knausgård refuses to choose only the most important objects of his affection, to compress some of the characteristics of others and amalgamate them into one character, as a pars pro toto. Bound to take every minor episode of his life exceptionally seriously, he wants to preserve them all. If one wants to compare him to Proust, it would be more accurate to say that Knausgård is Proust for the Facebook generation, who does not need to choose between hundreds of ‘friends’. His writing is the equivalent of sharing ‘Too Much Information’ on social media, ‘instagramming’ pictures of every meal, ‘twittering’ personal details, or posting overly revealing selfies. My Struggle lacks a (recognizable) plot because narrativity is dispersed and fragmented. The syntagm or narrative is secondary and implicit: If something resembling a plot emerges, it occurs when the reader, as the living equivalent of an algorithm, searches for patterns and meaningful connections in the mass of details. We must therefore accept the absence of a causal grand narrative to Knausgård’s autobiographical recollections.

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