Meaning and Technique in Knausgaard’s The Morning Star

Depending on who you are, the name Karl Ove Knausgaard might represent that of a genius, or a relative curiosity. 

Either way, he is obviously best known for his 6-volume novel, My Struggle, which tends to be described as ‘Proustian’ – which it is, at least superficially, because it is autobiographical, long, and brilliant.

The volumes include the intimacies of an affair, the alcoholism of his father and grandmother, the confession that he sometimes shakes his kids, and the other countless indiscretions of thought and action that all of us commit on a daily basis, and privately expect will see us condemned, whether we tend to religiosity or not – since is everyone’s basic fear not that they are a terrible person? We might wonder why anyone would write something in such personally excoriating detail. As to why Knausgaard wrote such a thing – I, for one, am very glad he did – he has said at several places that he was driven, in large part, by a loss of the faith in the fictional form.

 When we have been writing and reading for a long time, we reach a point where it becomes harder and harder to believe that somebody was an opera singer in Algiers in 1937 or a lady-in-waiting in some Victorian country estate. The essential fictionality of the novel begins to sicken us, Knausgaard says, and we can no longer see the point in a record of something that did not happen. 

It comes as a surprise, therefore, that Knausgaard’s latest project is straightforwardly fictional – not auto-fictional or autobiographical or a novelistic memoir or whatever it is that we have agreed to call My Struggle – which is to say a novel, or more accurately, a quintet of novels. 

As of 2024, the series is complete in Norwegian, but so far, only the first three have been given their English translation (by Marten Aitken). Since the translation of book 3 (The Third Realm) has been circulating in bookstores for a few months by now – and since I also discovered that some reviewers have been unfairly harsh (wrong) – I have decided to revisit the first book in the sequence, The Morning Star. 

In particular, I’m interested in The Morning Star at the level of technique: how does a nearly-700 page novel about the nature of reality become readable?

Premise

An enormous star, almost a second sun, appears in the sky. This phenomenon causes, or appears to cause, a series of events which are bizarre, sometimes frightening, sometimes revelatory, at times supernatural or perhaps hallucinatory. People go mad, others find God, and some lose their belief, flocks of crabs cross the road miles from the sea, one man (maybe) glimpses the afterlife, and a band is murdered in a possibly Satanic ritual. 

These events play out in the lives of nine different characters, each of which is given a first person POV, in two parts of Norway, in a mere two days. The novel is incredibly hybrid, encompassing domestic drama, theological treatise, slice of life, supernatural phantasmagoria, and crime-thriller. There are even more modes than that if you consider realist/romantic distinctions.

Background

A lot of the symbolic meaning in The Morning Star is to do with the Book of Revelations (from which the epigraph is taken) and the Bible more generally (which, as it happens, Knausgaard has helped to translate). Imagery of light, for example, abounds — largely stemming from the central motif of the new and mysterious star. A tension throughout is to do with whether this star represents Christ or Lucifer, and the twinning of apocalypse and revelation. 

I suspect the novel’s true structure is the fugue, only instead of musical themes, there are repeated situations and images. Perhaps the most important repetition is to do with death and resurrection — whether or not a person or animal is actually dead, is something that occurs at a few points. This is appropriate considering Revelation’s subject matter, which is perhaps the focus of the whole quintet – but in a way that is ambiguously divine, and ambiguously revelatory.

Except, as with any novel worth reading, we’d do it a disservice by pinning it on a singular 'theme.' The interests of this novel are broad, and far-reaching – the end credits include impressive names like Aristotle, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Philsotratus. And yet when you get to the end, you haven’t sat through a dense philosophy lecture but instead read a wonderful novel.

This is something that continually intrigues me about Knausgaard – that he writes very serious, very erudite books, and yet is massively popular. 

Of course, writing ‘literary’ fiction doesn’t mean that a writer can’t be popular. There are other writers for whom this is also true. Ian McEwan’s Atonement also springs to mind. But the explanations for that book’s popularity are more obvious – that it had a very successful film adaptation and that it was set during WW2. 

Knausgaard's popularity, however, strikes me as the consequence of a sort of Aristotlean aesthetic. Insofar as he's concerned with fancy concepts like mimesis and catharsis, but hasn't forgotten that art is also supposed to be entertaining.

Scenes and ideas

There’s a good line in one of Hemingway’s novels, where he says that if he wanted to make an intellectual point, and to avoid being misunderstood, then he should’ve written an essay, and not a novel. 

This speaks to the requisite balance of mimesis and digesis in the novel, as well as the tired question of the ‘death of the author,’ neither of which I feel like getting into. But Hemingway’s basic point is that a novel is a story, and it has to have scenes. It’s all well and good for writers to read Plato, though if they want to have a one-hundred page exegesis on the Republic, it (usually) can’t be shoved nakedly into the text. 

This is something Knausgaard handles well – he manages to write something which is philosophically dense without the density of reading Kant. Aside from being revealed symbolically, the philosophies are smuggled in with the action, never violating the reality of the scene. 

For example, we have the following idea introduced quite naturally, in a conversation between two men drinking whiskey in an office. The speaker, Arne, is a professor:

‘But the world and reality aren’t the same thing — the world is the physical reality in which we live, whereas our reality is in addition to everything we know, think and feel about the world. The point being that the two layers are quite impossible to tease apart. The kingdom of the dead was once a part of our reality. But it’s never been a part of the world’ (36).

Then, as if to remind us that the text isn’t going to give us a lecture, the Egil responds:

‘Eww’ (36).

I want to foreground this quote (not ‘Eww,’ the other one) because in my interpretation, it’s as near a key to whole novel as one is likely to get.

The Morning Star’s ultimate interest is in this difference — between reality and the world; the way in which they can bleed into each other. But there’s also a meta-textual project going on: by reading The Morning Star, the star and its supernatural phenomena become part of our reality, if not our world.

One of the errors that I made when I started the book, was thinking that it was a straightforwardly naturalist/realist novel.

At least as far as the early chapters are concerned, this isn’t a hard mistake to make. There are highly naturalistic elements. Scenes are so detailed in their reality that we have characters putting pods into washing machines, chopping and frying food for breakfast. Such mundane tasks even become plot points. In an early Arne chapter, a good part of tension comes from being late in fixing dinner for his children.

This sounds boring, I know. And yet, one of Knausgaard’s specialties is in making mundanity strangely compelling. A lot of this is to do with subtlety and precision. For instance, we can see one character’s view on their own relationship represented in their description of a couple walking by:

‘A couple my own age went inside holding hands, though only with the tips of their fingers, as if they were only loosely together’ (143).

But the project of The Morning Star is not straightforward naturalism. At first, because I thought it was, I attributed elements of strangeness to the character’s irrationality; only there is far too much unnatural stuff for this to be the case. A naturalist novel doesn’t have giant stars, insane wildlife patterns, and (maybe) a portrayal of the afterlife.

Except I’ll leave proving all that stuff about reality and the world to the scholars – what I want to look at is Knausgaard’s technique. How can we have a book that is about Kierkegaard and the Second Coming and yet is still so pleasurable to read? 

Character in Crisis

With most ensemble/ multi-perspective novels, changes in POV can be a irritating for a reader. Often, the irritation comes from having just reached an interesting point with character 1 but then jumping into a slow build of character 2. I found this with Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive, for example, and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad. Except Knausgaard cleverly avoids this problem, and it is all the more impressive for having nine POV characters. 

His main method is to introduce each character during a personal crisis. Without giving character names,  examples include: opening with character who works at a kindergarten accidentally dropping a toddler on his head; another with a pet who has just been killed and a spouse who is on the edge of psychopathy.

This has choice has two important effects. One is to maintain reader interest, avoiding the switching-at-interesting-moment problem. We don’t mind so much that we’ve moved from Arne at a crucial moment if Iselin is also at a crucial moment.

Introductory character descriptions in most novels are static and often part of the slower set up which we must pass through to reach the exciting stuff. I’m talking about descriptions which start, ‘Mr. Smith was the sort of person who…’ With Knausgaard’s method, such information is suggested through the interior reaction to an exciting scene. It’s a sort of advanced ‘show don’t tell.’

The second effect is that this technique allows us to learn a great deal about the character. Generally, we learn much more about people by seeing how they react to crisis than how they react to calm. A crisis response doesn’t give us the whole picture, of course, but if we want to know the whole character — we need to know how they wash dishes and how they respond to a psychotic partner. 

One of the great pleasures in reading, and especially with this novel, is in figuring out the difference between who a character tells us (or themselves) they are, and how they actually behave.

They are all at least a bit dishonest, like us.

Paragraphing

Knausgaard regularly uses one-liners. This is reasonably common in genre fiction, but less common in literary fiction. One reason for it being uncommon is that it is easy to do shoddily. We’ve all read rubbish like:

Bang.

Oh no.

His heart thumped.

You get the idea.

But Knausgaard uses one-liners fantastically, and especially within character thought, or ‘interiority.’ In more literary stuff, interiority can often be the least pleasant part of the reading experience. It’s what makes Ulysses such a pain — especially with Molly Bloom, where three or so sentences span a hundred pages. 

Knausgaard, however, breaks up characters’ thoughts as if they were dialogue. This is intuitive, insofar as we think of thoughts as being interior dialogue. The following comes after the character Emil has walked out on his band, basically because they were nasty about his song. He is waiting to see if his friends will follow him:

‘No one came.

They were probably sitting there laughing at me.

But it was my band. They were my songs.

I started off up the hill.

I’d made a fool of myself. Shown them how weak I was.

But I couldn’t go back. That would be even weaker’ (101).

A simple idea, but an effective one. Or at least, the effect is to look simple. The trick here is that Knausgaard gets away with giving us a lot of interiority by making it appear in tiny chunks. 

Style

The word that comes to mind here is balance. Much of Knausgaard’s writing is straightforward, unadorned, and moves quickly. But then there also moments of heightened lyricism, or sort of Proustian reflections. To give a sense of this contrast: one of Iselin’s chapters opens with her working as a grocery clerk:

‘The old lady came towards me past the confectionary with her shopping bag hanging from her arm. She was wearing a beige overcoat, despite it being more than thirty degrees outside’ (110).

But on the first page of Arne’s perspective, when he is trying to exact what about his boys being asleep gives him pleasure, he lands upon this:

‘That nothing ever stopped, that everything only went on and on, day became night, night became day, summer became autumn, autumn became winter, year followed year, and they were a part of it, at that very moment, as they lay sound asleep in their beds. As if the world were a room they visited’ (6).

Or you can be reading a string of simple, declarative sentences and then be hit with a starburst of radiance. At the top of page 77 we have the relatively banal:

‘The TV came on in the living room.

I pulled my Mac out of my bag, put it down on the desk and plugged it in at the socket.’

And then at the bottom of the page, we have the wonderfully precise:

‘I parked on a pier, turning off the engine but leaving the headlights on, each beam opening a tunnel in the darkness which the rain lacerated with hundreds of scratches.’

I’ve never read a better description of a headlight through the rain. Whenever I see one now, I can only see it being like a tunnel. The lacerating rain is brilliant too – because the effect of rain on a light beam is aggressive, it isn’t floaty and soft the way dust affects a light beam, for example. Look at your headlights in the rain at the next opportunity.

But this stuff about balance between the simple and the radiant — it’s much harder to copy than, say, paragraph techniques. It requires immense writerly control. The clearest takeaway is that a great novel isn’t built out of 500 pages that all sound like the ending of The Great Gatsby. Even if it was possible to write 500 pages like that, it still wouldn't work. The images would crowd each other out.

If The Morning Star teaches us anything, it is that, after all, life is at turns mundane and at turns glorious. Even if there were to be a crazy star and the coming of the apocalypse – you’d still have to wash the dishes.