Winter by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Author:Karl Ove Knausgaard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2018-01-23T00:00:00+00:00

The Crypt

The same year that the third great Viking ship found in Norway was excavated, at Oseberg, the town of Ålesund burned. At that time the Viking ships were displayed in makeshift exhibition halls, and the great Ålesund fire hastened the process of building a separate museum for them. The architect Fritz Holland proposed building an enormous crypt for them beneath the royal palace in Oslo. It was to be 63 metres long and 15 metres wide, with a niche for each ship. The walls were to be covered with reliefs of Viking motifs. Drawings exist of this underground hall. It is full of arches and vaults, and everything is made of stone. The ships stand in a kind of depression in the floor. More than anything it resembles a burial chamber, and that is fitting, one might think, both because the three ships were originally graves and because placed in a subterranean crypt beneath the palace gardens they would appear as what they represented: an embodiment of a national myth, in reality relics of a bygone era, alive only in the symbolic realm. The crypt was never built, and the power of history over the construction of national identity has since faded away almost entirely. There is another unrealised drawing of Oslo, from the 1920s, with tall brick buildings like skyscrapers along the main thoroughfare, Karl Johans Gate, and Zeppelins sailing above the city. When I look at these drawings, of a reality that was never realised, and feel the enormous pull they exert, which I am unable to explain, I know that the people living in Kristiania in 1904, as Oslo was called then, would have stared open-mouthed at nearly everything that surrounds us today and which we hardly notice, unable to believe their eyes. What is a stone crypt compared to a telephone that shows living pictures? What is the writing down of Draumkvedet (The Dream Poem), a late-medieval Norwegian visionary ballad, compared to a robot lawnmower that cuts the grass automatically?

Since the art of narration is fundamentally about credibility, few stories are more difficult to pull off than counterfactual ones. While stories set in parallel realities or in the future are in principle entirely detached from events in our world, and in that sense are free, counterfactual stories are closely connected with them, and what they demand of us, that we disregard everything we know and let this massive and extensive knowledge weigh less than a single line of reasoning in a single book, is difficult to comply with. On the other hand, every single moment of life stands open in several directions, it is as if it had three or seven doors, as in a fairy tale, into rooms that all contain different futures. These hypothetical offshoots of time cease to exist whenever we make a choice, and have never existed in themselves, a little like the unknown faces we see in dreams. While the past is lost for ever, everything that didn’t happen in it is doubly lost.

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