(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Knausgård has now done something new – broken with the autobiographical project and returned to the fiction. In the short story The birds under the sky appear three generations of women. The protagonist and narrator are a nurse and also take care of her mother, while her daughter is silent and oppositional. The old man is sick and will soon die. The nurse is at the center: She gives and gives and is apparently the incarnate goodness. The daughter is negative and her mother gets an inexplicable outburst of rage. The self-narrator draws inspiration from Søren Kierkegaard's religious speeches in the book The lily of the field and the bird under the sky (1849), which she read at a nursing course in Denmark.
Submission and obedience
We will learn what we have forgotten about the lily of the field and the bird: silence, obedience and joy. At Kierkegaard, however, the birds and lilies gather together under the weight of reflection. The poor bird becomes an allegory that suffers from Kierkegaard's massive projections:
"The Exemption from Suffering is not the Bird; but the silent bird exempts from what makes suffering heavier, others' misunderstood participation, for what makes suffering longer, the much talk of suffering, for what makes suffering worse than suffering, to the sin of impatience and sorrow. For do not think that it is but a little falsehood of the bird, that it is silent when it suffers, though in its innermost, however silent it may be to others, does not say that he who complains of his destiny, accuses God. and People, and let 'The Heart Sin in Sorrow'. (11, 21) No, the bird is silent and suffering. ”
Kierkegaard is not silent at all, but very talkative when explaining why the bird is silent. This is how he runs his own edifying speech in the trench.
Knausgård's female “I” also wants absolute trust and devotion to God: “Everything was about the world not being opposed to them. And that the future did not exist. The kingdom of God was the moment, as the lily of the field and the bird under the sky were always in. The bird was in the moment, therefore it could build a new nest exactly where the chicken coop had taken its young for the last four years. The past did not exist, and the future did not exist, only the nest existed, and eventually the little birds. That the chickpea would come and take them, did not exist at the moment, so they did not relate to it.
It does not touch what befalls the bird, Kierkegaard wrote.
Is it possible to think that way for us?
That what happens to us does not concern us?
It would free us from all suffering, and from all pain. And it would open the kingdom of God to us.
I noticed that I was smiling. " (62)
Knausgård cuts a little from Kierkegaard and puts it in the nurse's mouth. The chicken coop and the pigeons link the text to her own experience. Kierkegaard's enervating bouquet, where he uses the lilies in the field and the birds as a talking pipe, disappears. Knausgård simplifies, he removes the authoritarian tone and makes the point more edible. Therefore, he is more dangerous as an ideology producer. He creates with simple means an "unpredictable" transcendence, the joy the nurse had when she read Kierkegaard, becomes "inexplicable". No words suffice, but if she were to try anyway, it sounds like this:
“When I read it, it felt like I was standing at the edge of God's kingdom.
That the kingdom of God was here, but that we were shut out from it. And that the lilies and the birds were the entrance. "
They are kind and they are bad
Mystification with regard to the unpredictable has its parallel in how little the I-narrator knows about his closest. She lacks words to grasp what's moving in them. The only thing that could save this goodness regime from the kitsch would be to expose why both the nurse's mother and daughter carry some evil. Somewhere it must have come from, but where? It is inexplicable. For the protagonist, people are bright or they have shadows in them. If the dualism between evil and good had been less adventurous, the narrative might have been saved both thoughtfully and aesthetically. The nurse is constantly wondering why her daughter and mother are so aggressive.
In a discussion before Bergen Festival's premiere of "Waiting" – which was loosely based on Knausgård's text – the director, Catalan Calixto Bieito, denied associating the set with Fuglene by Hitchcock. But all the crows and the owl that show up when someone is dying are commanding an underlying sense of terror. Also in this short story is a Hitchcock ultra light effect at Knausgård.
Maybe it would have been better to go deeper in itself than
to dream of the Kingdom of God?
The nurse constantly worries that something is wrong: The daughter does not answer the phone, maybe she is a suicide candidate? There is something suspicious and security addict in her enduring turmoil – perhaps it would have been better to go deeper in itself than dream of the Kingdom of God? No matter how much she does, it builds up a conflict. She is never angry and always good, here is the problem. Both her daughter and her divorced husband are missing something, she believes. They are not "whole people"! The nurse's goodness should be reversed. Then the horror of a stifling genius would become clear in all its cruelty.
Religious kitsch
When postmodernism came to Norway, it became fashionable to cultivate popular culture. The taste hierarchy should be turned upside down. Kjetil Rolness' Vulgar and wonderful – a study in exquisite bad taste (1992) is a monument to the spirit of the time from the late 80's and early 90's. The natural was to be challenged. Against spontaneous, heartfelt and sincere feelings, Rolness put the dandy, who would live and die in front of the mirror. But criticism and hierarchies did not disappear for that reason. Some B movies are better than others – so we do not get outside of quality criteria.
Today, postmodernism has become a hoax for Jordan Peterson and others, a scorn for everything that went wrong. One has become religious and longs for a firm foundation of values. Release, autonomy and enlightenment are out. The road now goes back to tradition, religion and authorities that cannot be tested by reason.
Where postmodernism cultivated the kitsch, Knausgård now focuses on nature as an alternative to artificiality and arbitrariness. But nature worship becomes a kitsch copy of Kierkegaard, whose own tirades also lean towards self-parody. The good is the natural, the innocent is attached to nature metaphors. But the bird does not sing for joy, as Kierkegaard thought, but to attract a partner and defend its territory. If one tries to establish an ethic on nature's alleged state of innocence, one easily ends up in the opposite: social Darwinism.
One has become religious and longs for a phase value basis. Liberation,
autonomy and enlightenment are out.
In the staging of "Waiting", Bieito slapped the birds, a deer and a child being born, with the waiting Solveig figure singing Grieg. In the same way, Knausgård manipulates by cutting Kierkegaard into the short story. He legitimizes the woman's traditional caring profession in religiously charged nature metaphors – and yet some have imagined that he has become a feminist!
Kitsch criticism need not despise people's tastes from an elite standpoint; it can, conversely, reveal the kitsch in supposedly serious art and literature. As art approaches kitsch, aesthetic communication goes against manipulation. We are now back to Erlend Loes Naive. Super: the goldfish with a one-second memory like utopia?
To bathe in emotion
Society development increasingly prefers a human being without past and future, so we do not need the spontaneous experience of the Kingdom of God at the moment. Christopher Lasch wrote about psychological survival in troubled times in The Minimal Self (1984). He saw a tendency to renounce the past and future – and live one day at a time. Storyless and without projects, people are easily influenced by kitsch writers who bathe readers in emotion.
Rolness noted in 1992 that the kitsch is impossible to get rid of as long as man longs for the unattainable – a state without fences, without discomfort, without hoarseness, where everything is just though, there will always be substitutes that can provide comfort – a glimpse of the ideal, a promise of redemption. "
Existentialist authenticity kitsch appears to be an alternative to postmodern nihilism, but is in reality part of the problem. Naturkitsch-based religiosity is not the solution to postmodernism's value nihilism, but an attempt to expel Satan with Belsebub.
Knausgård has now become a moose at sunset – leading to the lemma march towards God.
Also read: Double moral interpretation of Knausgård
