Knausgaard’s My Struggle: The Interplay of Authority, Structure, and Style in Autobiographical Writing

ABSTRACT

This article explores the relationship between style and structure in the first book of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series. A comparison of the stylistic features of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Confessions, Blake Morrison’s And When Did You Last See Your Father?, and Knausgaard’s My Struggle: Book One, illuminates the contradictory way in which key fictionalising aspects of style in autobiographical writing—the sense of immediacy, and the intertwining of honesty and spontaneity—can appear to bolster Philippe Lejeune’s autobiographical pact in such a way as to potentially distort or overplay the writer’s authority. The critical reception of My Struggle: Book One shows how reviewers are often complicit in reinforcing this distortion. This paper argues that Knausgaard deploys a neatly meshed range of strategies to counterbalance this potential effect of autobiographical writing, both through his modulating of style against the structural design of his book, and through the stance he adopts outside the work. The latter includes his deliberately ambiguous positioning of the book in terms of genre, and his deployment of a controversial title that both inflects the reading of the work and continues to generate considerable resonance in the discourse that surrounds it.

KEYWORDS:

• Memoir
• authority
• autobiography
• Knausgaard

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Michael Sala is a lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle, Australia, where he received his PhD in 2012. His first book, The Last Thread, was published in 2012, went on to win the UTS/Glenda Adams Award for New Writing in the NSW Premiers Literary Awards 2013, and was the Pacific Region winner of the Commonwealth Book Prize 2013. His fiction and essays have been published in a range of journals and anthologies.

Notes

1 Published as My Struggle: Book One in America, and with the more tentative title, A Death in the Family: My Struggle Book 1, in England. In the German edition, there is no sign of ‘Mein’, or ‘Kampf’, but simply and safely, though somewhat inaccurately, Sterben.

2 I would follow the line of Paul De Man’s argument that this dynamic is replicated in the more widely discussed incident of the ribbon, in which the theft of a ribbon by Rousseau, and his subsequent deception at the expense of a girl, becomes an exhibitionistic exposure of shame that once again mobilises the reader as onlooker and enabler of the display. Writes De Man, ‘One is more ashamed of the exposure of the desire to expose oneself than of the desire to possess; like Freud’s dreams of nakedness, shame is primarily exhibitionistic’ (Allegories of Reading 285).

3 It might also be pointed out, however, that Knausgaard’s very decentring of style in this passage is itself a stylistic feature of his work, and that his ‘breaking down’ of style is another. I would argue that Knausgaard is engaged in multiple levels of play here—his gesture is ironic.