To be called a paedophile in the cyclopes’ biggest newspaper is not a pleasant experience. It’s not the end of the world, of course, and it is a legitimate opinion, but it came from a professor of literature, and there’s no other country I know of where literature professors call their writers paedophiles and tell them what they should and shouldn’t write about. That could only happen in the land of the cyclops.
I’ll admit that I haven’t had a lot of luck connecting with the work of Karl Ove Knausgård; I have found something offputting and exhausting in following his "fictional" explorations into the difference between the real and “the real”. Even so, I acknowledge that he’s a major contemporary voice, and having found this opportunity to read his opinions free from the artifice of novel-making, I settled in with an open mind. Most of the essays in In the Land of the Cyclops are about art and artists and their creative processes, with a particular focus on imagery that might make the viewer/reader uncomfortable or confused. And although I hadn’t known anything about the circumstances that led to Knausgård writing the title essay (from which the opening quote was taken), it seems after the fact that this collection represents the philosophy of an artistic ideologue; someone devoted to smashing through all boundaries that culture or society might think to impose on artistic endeavors. Once again, I had trouble connecting with Knausgård’s ideas here, but I cannot deny that he is a major thinker whose essays are provocative and relevant. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
When August Strindberg placed his camera on the ground and let it take pictures of the clouds in the sky, it was that progression he was pursuing and trying to complete, towards the world beyond the human world, the way it is in itself, seen by the soulless eye. With that, the purging of the heavens that had been going on for at least a hundred years was achieved: the clouds were not painted, not composed, not even seen, merely registered by a mechanical apparatus without will or thought, a machine for the recording of the most willless, thoughtless and arbitrary entities imaginable: formations of cloud. In this a place emerges, but it is not the world without human presence, for the world is not something that is, but something that becomes, and all pictures of the world as it is are thereby utopian in the original sense: they are nonplaces. Which is to say, art.
This collection treats a diverse array of subjects, but for the most part, the thirty-three essays concentrate on defining and exploring “art”. When it comes to writing, Knausgård often cites the tension between themes of the horizontal (relativistic) and the vertical (the absolute); the liminal space between human interiority and externality; and the basic impossibility of using words (a cultural construct) to describe the world as it actually is. When it comes to the visual arts, Knausgård makes the case that where a painting or photograph can evoke something preverbal, they are in that moment capturing something truthful and real. To this end, Knausgård writes about (among other topics): The feminist modern photography of both Cindy Sherman and Francesca Woodman (I wish the ARC included the photos promised in the finished book but everything Knausgård mentions is Googlable); the literary career of fellow Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun; there are book reviews of Michel Houellebecq's Submission and Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (“the perfect novel”, “the best novel that has ever been written”); Knausgård often invokes the films (and notebooks) of Ingmar Bergman; and frequently references Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, and Homer’s Odyssey (where else can you find a cyclops and pigmen both?) The tone is consistently scholarly, the topics fundamentally esoteric, and this collection demanded of me careful reading to make meaning.
That the world with which we are so familiar is a meticulous construct, and that the connections we take to be so obvious are in fact arbitrary, is something all visual artists and photographers know, for it is the resistance they encounter when they work, the weight that must be lifted. Any photograph involves selection, the focus on something deemed important, and in this lies an element of compulsion. In photographic art, that selection involves artistic proficiency, and such proficiency, which is preexistent, is determinative of what may be seen. How can we see beyond it? The compositional process and all its various choices mean inevitably that the photographer becomes part of the picture. How can we get beyond that?
By using “In the Land of the Cyclops” as the title essay, and including so many other essays that champion the artistic merit of some pretty challenging material, I can only conclude that Knausgård’s primary goal with this collection was to argue for the artist’s freedom to explore uncomfortable subjects. I can go along with that. I was exposed to some new ideas and some new art in this book — always a welcome experience — and it reaffirmed my idea of Knausgård as an important contemporary voice (even if I don’t completely connect with him, and even if this collection kept putting me to sleep; I think my brain just kept wearing out as it tried to keep up.)
