Professional paper
Knausgaard and the New Death of the Symbolic
Veljko Žvan
orcid.org/0000-0003-2532-2383
; Design Study, Faculty of Architecture, University of Zagreb
Abstract
”Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the there itself. There, that is writing’s location and aim. But how to get there?” (Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle 1).
Using photographic memory the author has spread his life over three thousand five hundred pages. Rude, gloomy, hard, mostly unbearable and hideous reality without any symbolic value kills hope for possible recovery right from the very beginning. Is it possible for us to understand better, by reading Knausgaard’s books (as well as Houellebecque’s and Franzen’s, for example), the inhumane reality (market and media oriented, above all) that apparently has given up itself and is not able to create higher values, not even artistically. And that is something we have been used to reading classic, even more recent literature?
Keywords
Knausgard; symbolic; houellebecq; literature; art; diary; essay
Hrčak ID:
200711
URI
Publication date:
28.5.2018.
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