Life is a River

On Knausgaard's The School of Night, and why Faust endures

Hi everyone,

Thanks to all the new subscribers over the past fortnight — it’s great to have you here. I’ve now emerged from the National Archives (more on that soon) and am back at the laptop plough.

Over the past two weeks I’ve had essays published in two other places: in Works in Progress, on the existential crisis Swiss watchmakers faced in the early 1980s, and what their story says about human craftsmanship in a world that often feels it no longer needs it. And in the Metropolitan Review, on the phenomenology of Tom Cruise, and why in Mission: Impossible films, the villains have to Google things and the heroes do not.

Below, something on Knausgaard, Faust, and Glen Powell.

Have a great rest of the week,

Aled

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In November 1974, John Stonehouse, the Member of Parliament for Walsall North, decided he’d had enough. Out of government, in dire financial straits, and battling to escape a past which we now know involved working as a spy for the Czech secret service, he flew to Miami, and vanished from the surface of the earth — the only clue to his fate being a suspiciously neatly folded set of clothes left in a beachside cabana next to what is now a Soho House. For a few weeks his disappearing trick succeeded, until a bank teller in Melbourne figured out that ‘Clive Mildoon,’ the man mysteriously depositing vast sums of money, was not who he said he was. Stonehouse was arrested, and brought back to London.

Today, the rogue MP is mainly seen as just another of those oddities that prospered in the strange, decayed politics of 1970s England. I confess to feeling a little more sympathetic. In fact, for most of the past few centuries, this does seem to be the default way to have escaped one’s problems. Get into debt, destroy a marriage, or do something even more shameful; not to worry, a change of location will solve most problems, if not forever. You could become the mayor of Middlemarch, lord of Patusan, or even seduce Lady Lyndon over a game of cards. Nor was political life a disqualification. In Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her?, after George Vavasor loses a by-election, breaks his fiancée’s arm, and attempts to murder her ex, he takes the only way out: a steamer to America. Punishment enough, in Trollope’s world at least.

This was the world Stonehouse wished he still inhabited, in which the impulse to disappear was not purely fantastical. In all fairness, he wasn’t far wrong. The only reason the canny assistant for the Bank of New South Wales checked in with her boss was that two weeks earlier another pillar of London society, Lord Lucan, had disappeared in the night. Lucan caught the boat, the MP for Walsall North missed his. Now, due to the terms and conditions of entrance into modern life, the boat no longer exists. The ability to jack it all in, up sticks, and become an entirely new person is essentially a fantasy. Nowadays, the change has to come from within, altogether a much harder task.

The world is better for it. Yet, what to do with all that unexpended desire? Use it to tell stories. Have Dick Whitman steal the identity of a dead comrade, travel to New York, and set up shop on Madison Avenue. Have Walter White start wearing a hat, shack up in a Fleetwood Bounder in the desert, and make it as Heisenberg. Rust Cohle keeps his name, at least, but he ran away from the rest of his life long before True Detective started. Even when it’s not meant to, the idea somehow finds a way in: on the official Succession podcast after Logan Roy’s death, Brian Cox let his pet theory be known: Roy had faked his own death, setting himself up for a ‘new life for himself somewhere in the north of Scotland.’ Every study of male interiority, it seems, must come with an escape rope attached.

My favourite example so far this year is Glen Powell’s unexpectedly enjoyable comedy series, Chad Powers. Russ Holliday, quarterback for the Oregon Ducks, makes such a grievous error that his career is not just over, but any chance of a life in the public eye is gone entirely. Yet Russ must play football, and so joins a new team, the enjoyably named Georgia Catfish, as quarterback Chad Powers — literally cooking moulds and gluing on prosthetics each night, Phantom of the Opera (or Mulan, occasionally) playing, to build himself a new body and become a new person. As his coach puts it at the end of the first episode, channelling Heraclitus: ‘Life is a river, son. Tonight, you become a catfish.’

Fortunately for Powell, he now finds himself with a new ally: Karl Ove Knausgaard, who in The School of Night, the latest in his Morning Star series, returns to the theme of escape. This is ironic, given the previous three books in the series (all of which I loved) have generally done the opposite. Indeed, when reading them, you often feel the characters should be much keener to escape than they actually are. There’s Emil, the child-dropping daycare assistant who should probably take another role not only for his sake, but for Bergen’s children as well. Turid, a nurse who chases a patient into the woods, only to stare, transfixed, upon finding him being anointed by an ox-headed man. Run away, Turid! Or nineteen-year-old Line, who sleepwalks her way into a death metal concert all too heavy on the death and light on the metal.

Knausgaard’s Russ Holliday is Kristian Hadeland, a world-renowned photographer. Everything’s gone wrong for Kristian, and so he’s decided to escape, ditching his car somewhere near Bristol and doubling back to one of the remotest islands off the west coast of Norway. His job now, as island hermit, is to tell us how he got there.

Kristian is, as we are left in no doubt, very good at taking photographs. His secret, however, is that he’s had some help along the way. Knausgaard, unlike Powell, makes the source explicit: The School of Night is a Faust story: the first man to truly transform himself without needing to change his postcode.

Like Marlowe’s doctor who wowed the Elizabethan crowds, Kristian is a moody European who travels to London to charm, enchant, and devastate. His Mephistopheles is a cheerful one: a genial, if direct, drifter with a penchant for Norwegian speed skating called Hans, capable of delivering such lines as ‘your soul will become only grubbier and grubbier’ with an easy smile. Kristian himself is harder to like: a narcissist who mistreats his benighted parents, cheats on his wife with the casualness of habit, and matter-of-factly informs his four-year-old that death will one day come for him. It’s a testament to how much of a generational freak Knausgaard is as a writer that we never quite resent him. His narcissism, as we read, becomes our own. Plus, we know the fall is coming. Hans has told us so.

Kristian also has some help from other quarters. The novel is set mostly in 1980s Deptford, the grubby, haunted London usually reserved for M. John Harrison. It’s a treat to view the city through Knausgaard’s eyes. Guinness gets a mention (‘almost a meal in itself’) as well as other drinks (‘England was an instant coffee nation’), as does the ‘ear splitting screech’ that any good tube-going Londoner will know and loathe. There’s an Arthur Machen ritual played for laughs involving the boiling of a dead cat, ABBA gets a pasting at one point, and the only mention in literary fiction, to my knowledge at least, of the phrase ‘touching cloth.’

There’s something else that helps Kristian, I think. When Faust is retold today, writers generally take one of two paths. The first keeps things faithful: the protagonist gets something unearned. Think of the powers God bestows on Jim Carrey in Bruce Almighty, the pill Bradley Cooper takes in Limitless, or the abilities Remy the rat gives Linguini in his quest to wow the critics of Paris in Ratatouille (surely the closest we get to a happy Faust?).

Ratatouille aside, such unearned success is usually difficult to stomach. So the contemporary Faustian pact offers something different: not the ability to obtain talents or powers, but the chance to use the talents the character already has, usually after having had them taken away. No one can question, after seven seasons of Mad Men, that Don Draper is pretty good at writing ads. Nor, after six episodes of Chad Powers, are we under any illusion that Russ Holliday was not a world-class dual-threat quarterback before he put on the Powers prosthetics.

In The School of Night, Knausgaard keeps things ambivalent. Hans gives Kristian a nudge here and there creatively, but towards the end of the book, when we see the entire sweep of his work, it’s clear that much of this is Kristian’s own. The only moment of true inexplicable intervention instead is, like for Don or Chad, is a literal get-out-of-jail card. The question then becomes a simple one: does Kristian deserve a second chance?

By the end of the book, it’s abundantly clear he doesn’t. Unlike Faustus, the undoings are firmly Kristian’s own: a heady desire to show off his own genius to those he hardly knows; and a gross inattentiveness to the only person he knows beyond himself. Hans is only there to, in a sense, provide one final last gift to Kristian, as he finds himself alone on his Norwegian island.

It’s at this point I should probably mention the last time we visited the island Kristian retreats to, or its real life inspiration at least. It’s in the fifth book of Knausgaard’s other major series, My Struggle. Here the character is not Kristian, but Karl Ove. A moment of infidelity leads to a phone call in the night. His wife Tonje is listening in. Their young marriage disintegrates. Karl Ove decides the only way to exit this catastrophiser’s dream is to escape. And so he leaves Bergen, catching a series of boats until he reaches Bulandet, the furthest island from the Norwegian mainland.

It’s not exactly hard to see why Knausgaard’s taken us back there. Two men, both at their lowest ebb, each with their own deals with the devil. Kristian’s we already know. Knausgaard’s is his attempt to write his way into a new life, regardless of the cost to the scores of intimates and minor acquaintances, each gunned down alike, in one of the great drive-bys of literary fiction. Whilst Kristian, we know, does not deserve his chance, Knausgaard, by the end of My Struggle, hopes we believe he does: the several thousand pages we’ve just read, his case for the defence.

I suppose that’s what keeps drawing us back to Faust each year, particularly in a time when the do-over is no more, and everybody, even Kristian and Karl Ove, have to leave their island eventually. We might not be able to pack it all up to some foreign shores, or do a deal with the devil to obtain powers beyond our own earthly limits, but that doesn’t mean change is an impossibility. That’s the good news.

The bad, as Knausgaard can’t stop telling us, is that such change, the internal kind, is so difficult to achieve. And even if you do - Chad Powers takes the Catfish to unprecedented success, yet when his deceit is discovered by his closest confidante, she tells him she wished he had killed himself - you probably won’t get thanked for it.

Most writers choose one or the other: the Faustian fantasy of transformation or the grinding reality of what it takes to be yourself with more skill. The best refuse to choose.