extinguishing the fire
by Douglas Messerli
Karl Ove Knausgaard En Tid for Alt, translated from the Norwegian as A Time for Everything by James
Anderson (Brooklyn: Archipelago Books, 2009)
For that reason, of course, most fundamentalists would abhor this
religious fiction; in fact even some church liberals might describe the work as
heresy. Yet Knausgaard's prolix sentences draw one into to the Biblical stories
in a way that helps one to make sense of the spiritual issues of each.
In this writer's retelling of the Cain and Abel story, for example, Abel
is a talented and appealing figure, drawing everyone to him through his singing
and storytelling and intense good looks. He is beloved by all, particularly by
his Father. Cain is more stolid, less attractive, slow to speak; yet in many
respects he is the more loving of the two as he carefully analyzes family
relationships, painfully seeking a way to ingratiate himself with both his
father and brother. Because he is so gifted, Abel is also often cruel, unable
to contain his sometimes destructive curiosity. When a family sheepherder is
found dying of wounds inflicted by a bear, the brothers agree that they must
kill him so that he no longer suffers. Yet Abel draws out the process in an
attempt, so it appears, to explore the body parts; Cain is forced to step in,
ending the boy's life quickly by thrusting a rock upon his head.
Later, Abel tries to reenter Eden in an attempt to find the Tree of
Life, and is horribly burned by the Angels. In his deep love for his brother,
Cain gently nurses him again to life, yet Abel, thought to be in a coma during
his illness, later mocks Cain's gentle musings. Ultimately, Cain's murder of
Abel seems almost inevitable, the only way, perhaps, to save Abel from his own
self-destruction.
Similarly, the simple Bible story of Noah is focused less on Noah and
his construction of the Arc than on the family he has left behind in the
valley, fleshing out their daily activities, their loves, fears, and hates. The
God who destroys them indeed is an angry and jealous God, and the dark black
visage of Noah and his arc rises up in this telling as a kind of cruel and
uncaring force, not unlike the all-white Moby Dick.
Threading these various tales together is Knausgaard's retelling of the
story and writings of the Sixteenth century figure Antinous Bellori, who, after
seeing two angels at the age of eleven, spent most of the rest of his life
studying and contemplating the lives of the angels, collecting his findings in On the Nature of Angels.
His questions are profound. Why, for example, did God destroy the Earth?
Yes mankind had been evil, but how had that evil changed so significantly that
God was determined to begin the process over again, to destroy all but a single
family? Why did the angels appear infrequently as messengers from God in the
early part of the Bible, but appear more often to people in later ages until
finally, with the Birth of Christ, they completely disappeared, only to return after
Christ's death with increasing frequency, this time as small and bothersome
baby-like beings, "tubby little infantile figures" who, as the
composer Scarlatti reports, had to be rooted out of the house because of their
robbery of food and dirty activities?
In an attempt to understand these radical changes, Knausgaard, with
Bellori's help, explores the changing role
of angels, from messengers to beings who sometimes behaved, in the case of the
Lot story, more like men. Knausgaard through Bellori believes he can explain
the cause of God's anger and his destruction of mankind through apocryphal
writings in The Book of Enoch and The Book of the Apocalypse of Baruch
which suggest that the angels had taken wives and partners in their mingling
with human beings, producing the "giants in the earth," the Nephilim,
described in the Bible. According to Enoch, beside their carnal lust, the
angels had grown too close to man, sharing with human beings "knowledge
about everything from medicine, mining, and weaponry to astronomy, astrology,
and alchemy," knowledge that man, apparently, was never meant to have. It
was not mankind that had changed, it was the relation of man and the sacred
that doomed the human race.
If all this text (452 pages before the "Coda") sounds a bit
like heretical nonsense, one might recall that Bellori's writing was labeled as
such. But Knausgaard's work is not so much a religious exegesis, but a
fictional speculation in the guise of a religious exegesis, a form, I am
certain, that will put off many readers. Some English critics (where this book
bore the less lyrical title of A Time for
Every Purpose Under Heaven) criticized the work for its extended arguments
and overinflated sentences.
Yet any attentive reader can realize that Knausgaard is a superb stylist
(as is the book's excellent translator, James Anderson), capable as he is also
of a more pared-down narrative evident in his "Coda."
This last section "explains," or perhaps I should say
"reveals" those significant changes in the relation of humans to the
divine. In Henrik Vankell's isolated and gull-covered island, man is
represented as a sinner who has no one to turn to, but is able only, as so much Scandinavian literature and film
reiterates, to turn within. We are
never told what terrible crimes Vankell (a character who appears in two other
Knausgaard fictions) has committed or what awful act of self-destruction his
father committed that helped mold Vankell's being. We only know that he has run
from human company and finds his only solace in the silence of this barren but
beautiful landscape.
On the day we follow him he does, primarily, what he does every day:
walk various routes along the ocean according to set and ritualistic patterns,
eat, fish (quite ineffectively), and watch the few islanders move about. But on
this day, his mother calls having had bad dreams which she sees as tokens of
something about to happen. A ship that inexplicably enters the harbor,
terrifies Vankell. Yet there are no other signs that he might accomplish the
horrifying self-immolation that by book's end he has achieved. Slowly, without
explanation, he cuts himself down his chest and mutilates his arms and face,
sitting in a hot tub of water, apparently awaiting death.
But then who could be telling this first-person story? Despite his
self-punishment he has perhaps survived, a survival which may signify that
despite this man's immense separation from his spirit, he has found a way of
truly forgiving himself, perhaps in the telling of this spiritual story.
Los Angeles, December 6, 2009
Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions (March 2010).
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