Knausgaard on Houellebecq

What a brilliant idea to assign a writer whose name is even more unpronounceable that the writer he is reviewing? What an equally brilliant idea to assign a writer whose work has achieved almost mythic status so that his review is immune from the usual editing accorded a piece so that the reviewer in question, a world class provocateur can take the kind of liberties that would not normally be permitted in an otherwise august publication priding itself on the illusion of objectivity. in making globalized statements about the work of another equally transgressive personality! The novel in question is Michel Houellebecq’s Submission: A Novel, a futuristic jeremiad about France as an Islamic state, published on the same day as the Charlie Hebdo massacre, during the week that Houellebecq’s image, in fact, graced the cover of the magazine. The Norwegian writer and author of Min Kamp (as in Hitler’s Mein Kampf), Karl Ove Knausgaard, begins his front page New York Times Book Review assignment (NYT, 11/2/15) by making the startling admission that he has never read anything by Houellebecq, despite the fact that the two authors, do for modern European sexuality what John Cheever and John Updike did for the sexual mores of 50’s suburban America and despite the fact that Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles had been particularly recommended to him, as a book of interest. He feels about Houellebecq the way way he does Lars von Trier; his reticence about both deriving from anticipated “envy." Here Knausgaard maintains his high standards of provocativeness by thumbing his nose at his editor for making the assignment. He goes even further, however, by pointing out that he hasn’t read any of the works of the l9th century author of Against Nature, Joris-Karl Huysmans, whose works are central to Submission. So fuck you “hypocrite lecture,-- mon semblable,-- mon frère!” Knausgaard employs a preternatural perspicacity along with his signature candor, as he concludes these “virgin" observations about his embattled continental colleague’s work: “The disillusioned gaze sees through everything, sees all the lies and the pretenses we concoct to give life meaning, the only thing it doesn’t see is its own origin, its own driving force. But what does that matter as long as it creates great literature, quivering with ambivalence, full of longing for meaning, which, if none is found, it creates itself?”

The Zeitgeist

The Zeitgeist is like a person who walks into a room and feels totally at home. “Zeit" in German is time and “Geist" is spirit. So the words literally means “spirit of the time." But there are, in fact, certain people and cultural artifacts that reflect the Zeitgeist of a time. Camus’s The Stranger, a book, by an obscure French intellectual, who had edited the resistance newspaper Combat, became a publishing phenomenon in 50’s America. Bob Dylan epitomized the Zeitgeist of the 60’s. He would have several other incarnations which would make him at the very least a fellow traveler in the Zeitgeist of the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s. However, that first album, The Free Wheeling Bob Dylan (which included songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Masters of War,”) with the picture of him walking down the street, a guitar strapped over his shoulder and his arm around a pretty girl was like the concept of a first cause in philosophy. Today Lena Dunham's  Girls seems to be a candidate for Zeitgeistmeister, to the extent that it portrays a whole post-modernist generation who have majored in ambivalence and see all of life as a work of meta-fiction in which reality has been mirrored so many times that it’s been reduced to chards of relativity. Opportunistic art entrepreneurs are always on the look out for the next Zeitgeistlich writer, artist or musician, but it’s hard to predict what the Zeitgeist will be since the pupa of its essence is often embodied in a personality like a Dylan whose imagination is like the ignition on an explosive device. Does Karl Ove Knausgaard reflect the Zeitgeist of Norwegians since one out of 8 of his countrymen own Min kamp. The book's incipient provocativeness seems an unlikely candidate for the Zeitgeist of a nation with such a reserved façade? Is the popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey a reflection of the Zeitgeist or is E.L. James’s novel merely a clever manipulation?  Salinger, David Foster Wallace, Annie Lennox and Sting all reflected the Zeitgeist of their respective times, as did Picasso, Jackson Pollock and now yes Damien Hirst? In the political sphere, do the beleaguered Barack Obama, the arrogant Vladimir Putin or even the horrific ISIS reflect the wobbly nature of our globe? And has our age become too complicated to produce philosophers like Plato and Aristotle whose tomes emanated an eternal Zeitgeist, however oxymoronic, that ultimately could tell us how to live?