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Note on Knausgaard’s My Struggle (vol. 1) 1
"To write a novel means to carry the incommensurable to extremes in the representation of human life. In the midst of life’s fullness, and through the representation of this fullness, the novel gives evidence of the profound perplexity of the living.” —Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller (sec. V)
C. Watson �1
Dear C——,
First, let me apologize for such a lengthy reply (I guess Knausgaard isn’t alone in his proclivity towards hot-air). I don’t, of course, expect you to read all this drivel, but thought I’d send it on the off chance that you’d be interested. I definitely got carried away. And I’ll admit straight away that there’s more than a chance of Knausgaard being aware of the all the “strikes” I attempt to make against him, in what follows. My disenchantment with Knausgaard places me firmly in a minority, which—to anyone even slightly less thick than I—might serve as a warning sign for obtuseness. As you suggested, I reread the two sections in pp. 218-226 (which I go into at length below), but the short of it is that I unfortunately remain underwhelmed. Your points about Knausgaard’s back and forth struggle and contradictoriness (what I call his “teetering” below) are well taken. However, my problem does not, in principle, lie in the transitions between the banal (flat) cataloguing of his life and his (to me, sloppy) philosophical excursions. (Despite my nearly unqualified adoration of Vladimir Nabokov, I don’t follow the master in his hatred of the novel of ideas.) Rather, I have a problem with the writing itself, with its absence of mystery, depth and richness. Colin Toíbín at the end of his recent Lannan appearance at the Lesic says that he not only wants to convey the mystery of real things but also to deepen their mystery and, at the same time, allow the reader to see it more clearly (http://www.lannan.org/events/colm-toibin-with-michael-silverblatt/). Knausgaard, it seems to me, hardly attempts this, or has given up on its effectiveness and/or possibility (pace his statement, p. 192, “Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows.”—interesting how often he feels the need to inform the reader what “writing” or “literature” is, cf. also 197). You cite a passage from page 222 that starts “What I sought to do was affirm what existed…” But in my copy, which I seem to recall as the same as yours, that “sought” is an “ought.” It makes a big difference. Does he even try? That is, does he genuinely try? Your insistence on rereading made me also reread the section (212-218, esp. 216-18) just before the philosophical excursus of 218-226, where—lo and behold—I did find subtlety, nuance, adumbration and even what I take to be prolepsis! He fails to evince the Proustian feat of seeding time bombs that accrue more and more varied meaning as the narrative advances. But, hey, I’ll take whatever I can get from this chap.
Family Life… Urp!
In this section (212-218, esp. 216-18), Karl awakes late; chats with his pregnant wife, Linda, about her understandable anxiety over the prospect of giving birth for the fist time; then, sets off to his office. The dominant tone of the section is, it seems to me, twofold, referencing death and aggression. The fact that Linda is very near to term might cause one to expect the hopeful themes of life and birth to come to the fore. But KO (Karl Ove) portrays his wife’s pregnancy as more menacing than momentous: she glares at KO when he reacts blithely to her anxiety; they eat “in silence”; and she’s described as towering above him as he ties his shoes to make his escape. While Karl has slept “[l]ike a log” (212; an inanimate object and a simile!), it may have snowed. And the resulting brightness from the snow’s reflexion initially seems optimistic. Yet, this too serves as a mere avenue to his primary themes of death, resentment, aggression and dissolution. He imagines the rote callousness of the maternity ward, “an endless cycle” for its employees, with “women … howling and screaming, yelling and groaning,” (214) before following his wife’s “swollen” (212) face to a man shoveling snow off a high roof. “The year before … a boy had been killed by a lump of ice,” so everyone in Sweden is now “crazy,” including possibly his wife (“are you out of your mind?” he asks, presumably rhetorically—the “real” Linda is bipolar; 214). So, the
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death of a child is pondered in the context of impending birth. Yeah, the baby and the bath water (from snow melt…)! Once out of the flat, the environment is no better. He catches sight of a neighbor—promptly described as having a “pinched mouth and radiating hostility”—whose junky brother despises said neighbor’s girlfriend and has “a hunted look.” (216) Just before facing the streets of Stockholm, he decides on a quick smoke in the courtyard behind his building. He passes the laundry room, where even the “whine of a spin cycle” is “strangely angry.” (ibid) Having positioned himself in the middle of the courtyard, KO muses on Stockholm’s Kungstornen (which I’ll return to below), and this leads him to note how it is usually impossible to enjoy this courtyard, because of the nursery whose attendees are now mercifully lunching inside. This nursery occupies the back half of the courtyard, where its charges (when present) tend to terrorize KO’s fag-breaks. “[S]creaming and shouting,” they often breach the low dividing fence—a “forbidden line”—and “flock” around KO, sometimes harrying him by swooping past in laughter. (217) He compares their “cacophony” to “a cliff of nesting birds,” a simile (that’s two!) which might recall the equally unpleasant maternity ward. His thoughts then narrow in on the “boy who was the pushiest … who was usually picked up last,” and whom KO always makes a point of saluting—“two fingers to my brow, I may even have raised my ‘hat.’ Not so much for his [said seagull-boy’s] sake … but for my own.” (ibid; italics mine) And here, of course, it is hard not to think of the neglected bully who was Knausgaard himself as a boy (cf., e.g., 113), as well as his obliging/long-suffering playmates, Per or Jan Vidar—for seagull-boy is sometimes seen “messing around in the sandpit … with some other unfortunate.” (ibid) During KO’s particularly troubling wish to have all “sentimentality, sympathy, empathy” “scraped off like cartilage around … an… athlete’s knee,” a different kind of scream rents the air. (ibid) Opposite to the nursery is an “old people’s home. I visualized someone lying in their bed, not moving, completely out of touch with the outside world, for the screams could be heard late at night, early in the morning, or during the day.” (ibid) So, are we not here given—albeit proleptically—the paralyzed, “bedridden,” besotted father who “erected a barricade” against the world in his equally bibulous mum’s flat to smoke and drink himself to death? (cf. 239-42) And if we add the conflation of KO with the pushy seagull-kid, do we not have a somewhat sordid family portrait-in-thought? A reunion of sorts? “What a piercing scream,” indeed! (218) You can run but you can’t hide, Karl. A rock and a hard place. The troubling prospect of inheritance. Will the fruit fall far from the proverbial-fag-smoking tree? The “neighbor … folding a white sheet,” as in a morgue—Shakespeare’s “sheeted dead,” and the more recondite implications of “the steps down to Tunnelgatan” (218; see addenda), which end the section, further adumbrate (perhaps overly gilding the lily?) the theme of death so overtly introduced in the next section. And so, Knausgaard is evidently capable of teaching a writing course, if push comes to pen. But consider another author’s treatment of the themes of childhood and parental death: Joyce’s semi-autobiographical Daedalus considering the young Sargent, while assisting with a maths problem, early on in Ulysses.
Ugly and futile: lean neck and thick hair and a stain of ink, a snail's bed. Yet someone had loved him, borne him in her arms and in her heart. But for her the race of the world would have trampled him underfoot, a squashed boneless snail. She had loved his weak watery blood drained from her own. Was that then real? The only true thing in life? His mother's prostrate body the fiery Columbanus in holy zeal bestrode. She was no more: the trembling skeleton of a twig burnt in the fire, an odour of rosewood and wetted ashes. She had saved him from being trampled underfoot and had gone, scarcely having been. A poor
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soul gone to heaven: and on a heath beneath winking stars a fox, red reek of rapine in his fur, with merciless bright eyes scraped in the earth, listened, scraped up the earth, listened, scraped and scraped. Sitting at his side Stephen solved out the problem. He proves by algebra that Shakespeare's ghost is Hamlet's grandfather. Sargent peered askance through his slanted glasses. Hockeysticks rattled in the lumberroom: the hollow knock of a ball and calls from the field. Across the page the symbols moved in grave morrice, in the mummery of their letters, wearing quaint caps of squares and cubes. Give hands, traverse, bow to partner: so: imps of fancy of the Moors. Gone too from the world, Averroes and Moses Maimonides, dark men in mien and movement, flashing in their mocking mirrors the obscure soul of the world, a darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend. —Do you understand now? Can you work the second for yourself? —Yes, sir. In long shaky strokes Sargent copied the data. Waiting always for a word of help his hand moved faithfully the unsteady symbols, a faint hue of shame flickering behind his dull skin. Amor matris: subjective and objective genitive. With her weak blood and wheysour milk she had fed him and hid from sight of others his swaddling bands. Like him was I, these sloping shoulders, this gracelessness. My childhood bends beside me. Too far for me to lay a hand there once or lightly. Mine is far and his secret as our eyes. [Yes, pace KO’s Rembrandt, the eyes are not windows to the soul!] Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants, willing to be dethroned. The sum was done. 2
Now, when you’ve caught your breath, consider Leopold Bloom shopping for kidney. The scene rivals anything in Knausgaard for being quotidian. And there’s a much more scandalous animal-comparison. But here, as in the Daedalus/Sargent passage, we learn so much more about the character through his thoughts. And the physicality of the images! The ephemeral made poetically immortal! The way (just as in the Daedalus passage) words and images resound, carrying us ever onward to new thoughts. What Yeats called the “Emotion of Multitude”! The stale categorizing of 3
Modernism? I beg to differ. If anything, we need a return to Modernism’s (Joyce’s, Proust’s, Wolf’s, Mansfield’s) deflation of the abstract, it’s implosion (through the poetic elevation of experience) of the tyrannical disjunct of body/soul feeling/thought physical/mental.
A kidney oozed bloodguts on the willowpatterned dish: the last. He stood by the nextdoor girl at the counter. Would she buy it too, calling the items from a slip in her hand? Chapped: washingsoda. And a pound and a half of Denny's sausages. His eyes rested on her vigorous hips. Woods his name is. Wonder what he does. Wife is oldish. New blood. No followers allowed. Strong pair of arms. Whacking a carpet on the clothesline. She does whack it, by George. The way her crooked skirt swings at each whack. The ferreteyed porkbutcher folded the sausages he had snipped off with blotchy fingers, sausagepink. Sound meat there: like a stallfed heifer. He took a page up from the pile of cut sheets: the model farm at Kinnereth on the lakeshore of Tiberias. Can become ideal winter sanatorium.
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Moses Montefiore. I thought he was. Farmhouse, wall round it, blurred cattle cropping. He held the page from him: interesting: read it nearer, the title, the blurred cropping cattle, the page rustling. A young white heifer. Those mornings in the cattlemarket, the beasts lowing in their pens, branded sheep, flop and fall of dung, the breeders in hobnailed boots trudging through the litter, slapping a palm on a ripemeated hindquarter, there's a prime one, unpeeled switches in their hands. He held the page aslant patiently, bending his senses and his will, his soft subject gaze at rest. The crooked skirt swinging, whack by whack by whack. The porkbutcher snapped two sheets from the pile, wrapped up her prime sausages and made a red grimace. —Now, my miss, he said. She tendered a coin, smiling boldly, holding her thick wrist out. —Thank you, my miss. And one shilling threepence change. For you, please? Mr Bloom pointed quickly. To catch up and walk behind her if she went slowly, behind her moving hams. Pleasant to see first thing in the morning. Hurry up, damn it. Make hay while the sun shines. She stood outside the shop in sunlight and sauntered lazily to the right. He sighed down his nose: they never understand. Sodachapped hands. Crusted toenails too. Brown scapulars in tatters, defending her both ways. The sting of disregard glowed to weak pleasure within his breast. For another: a constable off duty cuddling her in Eccles lane. They like them sizeable. Prime sausage. O please, Mr Policeman, I'm lost in the wood. —Threepence, please. 4
OK, perhaps a bit unfair to compare Min Kamp to what many consider to be the greatest novel in the English language. But my point is that there really is no comparison. And yet, we are bombarded by critics hailing Ove’s oeuvre as a contemporary classic! I’m sorry, but from this perspective the egg is rotten—ovo putido!
The Excursus (pp. 218-226)
Knausgaard (whose middle name means something like “edge of a weapon” when traced back to the Old Norse word “egg”, and so—a todo mariachi—un huevon!) bemoans the “whole of the physical world” being elevated into “this sphere” of abstract understanding and theory (221). He bemoans the erasure of mystery in this sublimation or comprehension (the emphasis being on the root meanings of those two words). Yet, though he quotes Nietzsche (ibid.), he doesn’t seem to have read him adequately. (Perhaps his use of Friedrich is like that of the books in his studio: not “about knowledge but about the aura knowledge exuded”, 219.) For, Nietzsche never tired of pointing out that what we take to be the most familiar or “known” is always the least known, most unfamiliar, most other. “What is familiar means what we are used to so that we no longer marvel at it, our everyday, some rule in which we are stuck, anything at all in which we feel at home.” (The Gay Science, sec. 355—Das Heimliche, “what is homely,” is alway at the same time Das Unheimliche, “the uncanny,” as Freud would later argue.) This is why truly great writers, like Joyce or Katherine Mansfield, often employ what contemporary theorists call defamiliarization, viz., when a writer makes, to follow David Lodge, “us ‘perceive’ what we already, in a conceptual sense, ‘know’, by deviating from the conventional, habitual ways of representing reality.” 5
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But Knausgaard will have none of this. His project, it seems to me, is to “convey” experience as flatly and banally as possible (clichés and all) ad infinitum, in order (perhaps?) that the very substantial absence of mystery and nuance will somehow point to (a la gestalt) their existence in some mystical realm beyond his work of “fiction.” Fiction—the great works of fiction of the past and those being created contemporarily (e.g., Coetze, Banville, Munro, Toibin, etc.)—has somehow been nullified or steam-rolled by the behemoth of late turbo-capitalist media culture (KO’s egotism is breathtaking! “The America of the Soul”—such originality and insight!), and must somehow be combated by a “fiction” which is really no fiction at all. Again, one has to ask, Is he taking the piss? Is it not perhaps just his own “nothing” that’s "found expression”? Is this his real “struggle”? His absence of wonder? His absence of feeling and empathy (explaining the one-dimensionality of virtually every character to pass through his pages)? If so, one can only hope that the considerable royalties have gone some way towards alleviating his plight. ;-) But I digress. As almighty Wiki tells us, "Kungstornen (English: King's Towers) are twin tower skyscrapers, individually named Norra Kungstornet and Södra Kungstornet [so cute], in Norrmalm [sic], Stockholm… Together, they are considered the first modern skyscrapers in Europe… Their construction was inspired by American models, particularly the architecture of Lower Manhattan of the time [1920’s, as Karl tells us].” Yeah, “The America of the Soul”, again. Oddly enough, our humble narrator responds to the view of these towers from the courtyard "with longing, as so often before.” (216) But the question is, Why should these Yankee knock-off rasca cielos evoke longing? And, more pressingly (well, kinda), What is the troubled Huevo’s longing for? But this, as far as I’m able to make out, is never overtly disclosed (yeah, I guess I will have to read on…).
Our minds are flooded with images of places we have never been, yet still know, people we have never met, yet still know… The feeling this gives that the world is small, tightly enclosed around itself, without openings to anywhere else, is almost incestuous, and although I knew this to be deeply untrue, since actually we know nothing about anything [Note the either/or, all-or-nothing vacillation so typical of our teetering huevo—what some might call a “Lutheran” Weltanschauung], still I could not escape it. The longing I always felt, which some days was so great it could hardly be controlled, had its source here. (221, emphasis mine)
So, we are given (albeit quite abstractly, if not nebulously) the cause or source or… what? the spur? of Karl Ovum’s “longing”, but not its object. (Yeah, where is Lacan with his objet petit a when you need the surly little frog?) Nonetheless, it does make sense of why the Kungstornen would bring on a fit of longing: they stand as particularly priapic symbols of when the rot set in. (Remember, the closest we get to a positive experience beyond “The America of the Soul” is in certain pre-twentieth-century paintings, cf. 223.) But Knausgaard goes on to say that
[i]t was partly to relieve this feeling that I wrote, I wanted to open the world by writing, for myself, at the same time this is also what made me fail. The feeling that the future does not exist, that it is only more of the same [Jesus wept, Karl! Ever heard the injunction BE HERE NOW!?], means that all utopias are meaningless [again with the all-or-nothing codology, Karlchick?]. (p. 221-2)
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That’s right, writing as therapy, and therapy (a la Jacques Lacan) as interminable (Karl wants to “combat fiction with fiction” ENDLESSLY! (222)), because, after all, utopia is as groundless as the notion of sanity. “Literature has always been related to utopia…” (ibid) OK, maybe. “…so when the [sic] utopia loses meaning, so does literature.” (ibid) Whoa! NOPE! Doesn’t necessarily follow, Karlitos. Unless the Norwegian for “related” actually means “identical with.” Besides, “Literature’s” relation to utopia is precisely what the best Modernist writers attempted poetically to implode (see above). But, of course, Karl is far from done with teetering (i.e., we have yet to see him fulfill his first and middle initials—to become K.O.’ed by truly crawling up his own derrière. Sorry! Couldn’t help myself). “What I ought to do was affirm what existed, affirm the state of things as they are…” (Again, so sophomoric—as if "the state of things as they are” were not controversial!) But the boy can’t help it, to pilfer from Bonnie Raitt, “a conviction was rooted inside me [charming…], and although it was essentialist [√], that is, outmoded [√] and, furthermore, romantic [√], I could not get past it, for the simple reason that it had not only been thought but also experienced…” What, one might ask, does this admission mean? Our boy Karl is incapable of crawling out from under what he admits to being an obsolete, erroneous and preposterous caricature—Casper David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Mists, ERGO we should feel obliged to read three-thousand-plus more pages of his “fiction"? But wait! We are now segued into the next section, wherein perhaps the lamest ever description of an epiphany is… what? pronounced?
… just staring at the burning red ball in the sky [a metaphor, Karlitos! Bravo! Will it be the only one in the entire oeuvre?] and the pleasure that suffused me was so sharp and came with such intensity that it was indistinguishable from pain. (222; emphasis mine)
And again, another “but,” for, as Karl himself says, “exactly what was significant? And why? A train, an industrial area, sun, mist?” (223) Now, one might imagine that the prudent thing to do at this juncture would be just to leave it, to walk away. But not Sr. Huevon. Instead, we now get a watered-down-Hegelian (cf. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 1835) take on “the sublime” in pre-twentieth-century art (or at least Karl’s seemingly arbitrary list thereof—“I didn’t know what it was about these pictures that made such a great impression on me.” (ibid)), which somehow lands us with the so-obvious-to-verge-on-trite observation—like, duh—that people tend to avoid the reality of death now-a-days at all costs. (Yeah, my nearly unqualified adulation of Vlad may be nearing totality!) Again, “…the pleasure that suffused me was so sharp and came with such intensity that it was indistinguishable from pain.” (222) Does this not recall the teenage Huevo’s previous description of his first “achievement” of “sexual maturity” while dry-humping the unfortunate Susanne, sad simulacrum of her cousin Inger? “[S]omething in me seemed to crack. It was like a pain shooting through my abdomen, followed by a kind of spasm in my loins.” (79) True, we might be tempted initially to argue that there is an important difference between the two descriptions in terms of “meaning”—something over which Karl clearly has his knickers in a twist. After all, when our humble narrator so painfully spunks his trousers, he tells us that “[f]rom one moment to the next, her naked breasts and her naked thighs lost all meaning.” (ibid) Seemingly in contrast, the “burning red ball” experience “seemed to me to be of enormous significance. Enormous significance.” (222; yes, we must be told repeatedly, because Knausgaard would never stoop to attempting to convey or show its significance through poetically descriptive writing—the lame metaphor serving only to emphasize his disdain, a “red ball” being as purple as Karl gets.) Yet, in neither instance is it the event that loses significance, but rather where this “significance” resides:
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“When the moment had passed the feeling of significance did not diminish, but all of a sudden it became hard to place: exactly what was significant? And why? A train, an industrial area, sun, mist [Susanne/Inger’s thighs? Karl’s “burning red” balls?]?” (222-3) And so—hey, presto!—meaning must be detached from the body, beyond the body, according to Huevo-man (pace his observation at the end of this section about death being “beyond the term and beyond life, but … not beyond the world.”). Or are we back to my hunch about Knausgaard mounting a none too elaborate yet certainly lengthy PISS-TAKE? An Infinite Jest (to borrow from another critically inflated writer)? Death-wish, orgasm, la petite mort, writing as interminable wanking. Cheers, Karl! And now, consider Harold Bloom’s explanation of the literary idea of the sublime in European Enlightenment.
In the European Enlightenment, [the literary idea of the sublime] was strangely transformed into a vision of the terror that could be perceived both in nature and in art, a terror uneasily allied with pleasurable sensations of augmented power, and even of narcissistic freedom [think of KO’s perverse knee-op. wish, p. 217], freedom in the shape of that wildness that Freud dubbed ‘the omnipotence of thought,’ the greatest of all narcissistic illusions. [Think, too, of the incendiary, if not repugnant, implications of the book’s title!] 6
All of which brings me back to those two priapic towers. They fill KO with longing, and are significantly different when considered at night.
[L]ight bound them together… [and] it was as if the statues ‘talked’ at night. Not that they came to life, they were as lifeless as before, it was more that the lifeless expression was changed, and in a way intensified. During the day there was nothing; at night this nothing found expression. (216)
If we are meant to wonder what these (to a Scandinavian) well-known towers represent for KO, can we avoid considering the father-son portrait proposed previously? That is, can we avoid seeing them as anything other than stand-ins for the lifeless vacuity that was/is Knausgaard’s relationship with his ol’ fella (cf., e.g., 42), whose death is the subject of the section starting on page 226? Perhaps Knausgaard’s true struggle is over ridding himself of a childhood longing for a relationship with his father that never was, or was incessantly denied, incessantly vacuous? Even if poignant, this is also undeniably pathological, to say the least, as KO’s longing seems continually confused or conflated with the negative relationship that did in fact transpire. As just stated, the latter is consistently portrayed as a vacuity, a kind of death. And it is interesting to note that Knausgaard’s description of the sublime in Constable’s clouds—the feelings aroused (207)—is (if Bartlett’s translation is to be trusted) strikingly similar to how he later describes death, the death that “is the same as the word ‘death’” (226): both are without limits, “inexhaustible.” “The felling of inexhaustibility. The feeling of beauty. The feeling of presence. All compressed into such acute moments that sometimes they could be difficult to endure. And quite inexplicable.” (207) “Death,” as Benjamin famously wrote, “is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can 7
tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.” Yet, I would venture that one important implication of this gnomic utterance is the idea that only in narrative, unlike real life, may death be controlled, i.e., predicted and manipulated literarily. When this is done satisfactorily in the correct measure and with due complexity, subtlety and mystery, the result may (occasionally) be affective “fiction” (cf.
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the attached Peter Brook essay, Freud’s Master Plot). But, hey, to echo Everyman Huevo Knausgaard’s own inimitable words: “[W]hat on earth do I know…” (222) Best wishes,
Chris
Addenda:
Wiki on “Tunnelgatan (Tunnel Street) is a street in Stockholm, Sweden, which stretches from Sveavägen to the Brunkeberg Tunnel. Tunnelgatan is also associated with the murder of Olof Palme [liberal Prime Minister of Sweden, was assassinated on 28 February 1986 in Stockholm, a week after making a famous anti-aparthide speech], which occurred at the tunnel mouth on Sveavägen street, and the killer fled up the stairs [the stars down which Knausgaard descends]. A section of the street has since been renamed as Olof Palme Street. Although more than 130 people have confessed to the murder, the case remains unsolved, and a number of theories as to who carried out the murder have been proposed.”
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All of these references carry weight in Scandinavia (e.g., also look up Beatles by Lars Saabye Christensen, which teenage Karl is reading, and "the Treholt spy case”, both p. 166). Wiki on “Olof Palme: A pivotal, renowned, and polarizing figure domestically as well as in international politics since the 1960s, Palme was steadfast in his non-alignment policy towards the superpowerssuperpowers, juxtaposed to support of numerous third world liberation movements following the process of decolonization including, most controversially, economic and vocal support for a number of Third World governments which were guilty of gross violations of human rights. Most famously, he was the first Western Head of Government to visit Cuba after its revolution, giving a speech in Santiago praising contemporary Cuban and Cambodian revolutionaries. Frequently a critic of US and Soviet foreign policy, he resorted to fierce and often polarizing criticism in pinpointing his resistance towards imperialist ambitions and authoritarian regimes, including those of Francisco Franco of Spain, António de Oliveira Salazar of Portugal, Gustáv Husák of Czechoslovakia, B J Vorster and P W Botha of South Africa. His 1972 condemnation of the Hanoi bombings, notably comparing the tactic to the Treblinka extermination camp, resulted in a temporary freeze in Sweden–United States relations. Palme's steadfast opposition to apartheid, which he labeled "a particularly gruesome system", gave rise to theories of South African involvement in his death, which were further fueled when Eugene de Kock claimed South African security forces had orchestrated his death. His murder by an unapprehended assailant on a street in Stockholm on 28 February 1986 was the first of its kind in modern Swedish history, the first of a national leader since Gustav III, and had a great impact across Scandinavia.[2] Local convict and addict Christer Pettersson [think of the of Karl’s drug addict neighbor with “a hunted look in his eyes”, pp. 215-6] was convicted of the murder but was acquitted on appeal by the Svea Court of Appeal.”
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All references to My Struggle are to Knausgaard, Karl Ove, My Struggle (Book 1), trans. Don Bartlett, 1
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2012.
Pp. 28-29, Joyce, James, Ulysses (the 1922 text), New York: Oxford U. Press, 2008.2
http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/53174/3
P. 57, ibid. note 2.4
Lodge, David, The Art of Fiction, Penguin, 1992, London (paperback).5
P. 197, Bloom, Harold, ‘Freud and the Sublime: A Catastrophe Theory of Creativity’, in Agon: Towards a 6
Theory of Revisionism (New York: Oxford U. Press, 1982).
The Storyteller, sec. XI, Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 2007)7
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