After the End of Autofiction

Revisiting the search for meaning in The Morning Star

Over at The Republic of Letters, Derek Neal has a very good piece on the genre that has come to be known as Autofiction. Neal makes many good observations, but what stood out to me is the idea that writers like Knausgaard seek to represent some notion of truth, in particular “existential truth.”

Moi and Pierce, then, help us understand the boom in autofiction in the 2010’s—this “reality hunger” is not a new concern, but one that takes on increased importance in a world that seems to come to us in pre-mediated and pre-packaged forms, and one in which the notion of a “self” is further refracted through social media and the internet. If we live in a “post truth” world, the solution is not to insist on simplistic notions of facts or truth, but to deeply consider how facts and truth are created. Taking this idea seriously, memoir and autobiography become impossible as genres, and the only way to write authentically about oneself is through autofiction. As Moi writes, “the subject may well be a construction, but there is still something it is like to be me, or you.”

Neal places this effort to represent direct, unmediated experience in a tradition running from Don Quixote through Hamlet, among others. I think you could also see it in Tocqueville’s proposition that democratic societies tend toward an everyday form of Cartesianism, in which to know something is to know it yourself.

This kind of existentialism creates a kind of dynamic that is hard to sustain. To write about direct experience requires mediating that experience through not only writing in general but a particular genre form, which sooner or later, usually sooner, becomes conventionalized and mannered.

Knausgaard himself said that, eventually, his style in My Struggle would “come to feel as conventional as what it refused to imitate.”

Knausgaard, Neal suggests, now seems “to be writing more traditional fiction.”

I’m not sure what traditional fiction is, but I can say that The Morning Star is a pretty weird book, as are the other two that have appeared so far in that series. When I read The Morning Star a few years ago, I tried to write down what it showed about writing “after the end,” that is to say, after an authorship devoted to autofiction had run its course.

I won’t recap the whole thing here, but a few bits seem useful to this conversation, not because I think they resolve anything, but because they help frame what The Morning Star is doing, and how it takes up the familiar tension between lived experience and literary form in new directions. If anything, re-reading them now makes that tension feel even more unstable.

This is how I tried to make sense of it at the time. It might be overstated, or too certain in hindsight, but it still captures what I think is at stake, especially the extent to which the desire for immediacy runs through all of Knausgaard’s work, not just My Struggle.

Having discussed religion and death, let us finally come to a weighty topic: writing and reading. This is one of Knausgaard’s fascinations—and not just because he is a writer, but because he sees writing as part of the same complex as religion and death. Egil captures this sentiment while browsing bookshops in search of books about the dead, reflecting to himself: “the written language forms the horizon of our cultures, as death forms the horizon of our lives.” In A Time for Everything, Bellori, like Knausgaard, succumbs to an acute form of logorrhea as he obsessively tries to bring to word the fullness of direct experience, before finally giving up, even on the authority of scripture. The truth cannot be contained in the word, he realizes. In all his novels, there are scenes where Knausgaard’s characters lose the ability to express themselves verbally and resort to guttural cries of “AHHHHHHHHHHHHH.” While some critics lament this as lazy writing, it represents Knausgaard’s ongoing effort to examine direct experience at the edges of language.

What I was circling there is the idea that language, no matter how stripped down, eventually becomes its own surface. The effort to write directly, to bypass mediation, leads not to transparency but to another kind of construction, often louder and more desperate. What stands out to me now is how deeply that earlier reading leans on the idea of writing at the edge of speech: trying to say what can't quite be said, or maybe shouldn't be said at all. The Morning Star sharpens that problem by explicitly tying it to a somewhat obscure text by Kierkegaard, and especially to his attempt to distinguish between poetic expression and (often silent) religious experience.

The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air is one of Kierkegaard’s “edifying” writings. In contrast to his pseudonymous works, which were written for readers operating outside the religious register and designed to provide them an indirect path into it, these were meant for readers already there. They therefore speak directly, without the layers of irony that mark his more famous texts. Directness is in fact the pervasive mood of The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air: to understand that text is to live its ideas; there is no other way to properly understand what it says. Like the lily and the bird, the religious person does not agonize but is fully absorbed in the demands of the situation. This is their teaching, and it is what inspires Egil’s moments of religious ecstasy.

But there’s something strange about the way Egil handles this text. Or rather, what he leaves out. He takes the silent directness of the Lily and the Bird as a good thing, and models his own aspirations on it. But he passes over one of Kierkegaard’s most important complications, the fact that there is another character in his text, along with the lily and the bird: the poet. Yet Egil and Knausgaard make no mention of the poet in their texts, leaving that figure completely out of their discussion of Kierkegaard. And in Kierkegaard’s telling, the poet is a somewhat dangerous and corrosive element:

The poet” sounds almost exactly like the Kierkegaardian religious teacher, and even says some of the same phrases. And yet, Kierkegaard makes it clear that by saying these things in the mode of a poet, the poet ends up not saying them at all. Even worse, doing so gives the illusion of knowing: the religious experience becomes material for the poet to write about. And this turns it into nothing, or maybe something worse.

That tension between the poet’s aestheticization of experience and the religious teacher’s attempt to inhabit it is not just Kierkegaard’s problem. It is Knausgaard’s too: the moment you start to describe directness, you risk turning it into an object, which is precisely what it resists.

Is My Struggle a gripping effort at self-knowledge that models the highest aspirations of our times, or a massive act of narcissism in which breakfast cereal exists to feed the author’s ego, and his wife’s struggle with bipolar disorder is interesting material for his writing career? When Knausgaard wrote that the end of The End marked the end of his authorship, he obviously did not mean he would stop writing. Perhaps The Morning Star can be read as an effort to develop a different kind of authorship, more in the mode of the neo-Kierkegaardian religious teacher. But the spectre of “the poet” remains, and The Morning Star’s recurrent you are doomed could just as easily be read as referring to the inevitable fate of a contemporary writer seeking to escape that fate.

Kierkegaard’s “poet” highlights the situation writers like Knausgaard find themselves in after “the end.” Can one represent directness without already aestheticizing it? Or is the poet always there in the background, turning every lived moment into staged material? The problem of saying too much and therefore saying nothing has perhaps become more acute in an age where every utterance risks turning into content for the next post.

Neal’s excellent piece is a nice occasion to return to that piece and those themes.

For my part, I’ve been wondering how the later books in the Morning Star series would take up or unsettle that reading. So far, they’ve mostly left me puzzled. Each time I’ve gone in hoping to have something useful to say about them, and each time I’ve come away silent.