Fiction of Our Climate: On Karl Ove Knausgaard's "The Morning Star"
Karl Ove Knausgaard | The Morning Star | Penguin Press | 2021 | 688 Pages
Another contender for a literary novel that may offer an adequate appraisal of and response to our climate crisis is Karl Ove Knausgaard’s The Morning Star. Considering how its characters struggle to assimilate a cataclysmic event, this review makes part two of a four-part series in conversation with Amitav Ghosh’s 2016 critique of climate fiction. In The Great Derangement, Ghosh identifies four elements ripe for exploration in novels serious about wrestling with climate change: the nonhuman, the cataclysmic, the extractive mindset, and the collective. The four novels I consider, while they touch on more than one of these elements, foreground each in turn. My first review covered Joy Williams’ Harrow, which takes the extractive mindset of Christian dominion to its logical conclusion, the loss of the nonhuman world that makes us human.
The Morning Star opens a door to the nonhuman (animals that verge on the superhuman) and the collective (multiple points of view), but above all lets in the cataclysmic, leading us to reflect on how and whether it is possible for the human mind to comprehend and effectively respond to something radically outside of the ordinary. Time and nature are out of joint as Knausgaard draws on the Christian apocalyptic tradition of purgatory, catabasis, resurrection, and the vanity of Ecclesiastes.
The Morning Star is structured in two parts—First Day and Second Day—capped by a final narrative that begins as an essay on death. Multiple first-person perspectives (nine in all) alternate without a set pattern, beginning with Arne, whose life looks very similar to an autofictional Knausgaard’s: a middle-aged, alcoholic professor on holiday with his three children and bipolar artist wife, he is working on a novel and preparing for a class on kingdoms of the dead in literature. Other central characters include Kathrine, a priest with two children and a husband she doesn’t want to go home to; Jostein, an overweight, alcoholic, promiscuous reporter who lost the crime beat and covers the arts section; Turid, Jostein’s wife, who works as a caretaker for the intellectually disabled; and Egil, Arne’s divorced neighbor who used to make documentaries, lives off his father’s money, and is estranged from his ten-year-old son.
As these ordinary lives unfold over two days, ominous signs—omens—unsettle the narrative. Arne goes fishing with his sons and nets a miraculous number of fish, far too many to eat, but brings them all home anyway. Meanwhile, a mass of crabs streams over the roadway, a badger enters a house, a bird of prey seizes a sparrow in the middle of the city, and a red deer approaches a driver in a stopped car. Unseen, unknown animals make throaty, clicking noises behind people’s houses. The weather is strangely hot, the heat lasting after sunset, held in stones that should feel cool. People keep surviving accidents or conditions—a child’s fall from a changing table, a family’s terrible car crash, a man’s apparent brain death—that should be fatal. Several characters hallucinate, and we are left to wonder whether their symptoms are due to mental illness, a brain tumor, or being in touch with what is happening or has happened or will happen elsewhere.
The novel initially feels straightforward, opening one character’s plotline after another, unified only by the appearance of the eponymous morning star. Other than Jostein and Turid, who are married, and Arne and Egil, who are neighbors, the nine narrators’ lives at first seem completely independent of each other. Over time, we start to notice tangential intersections in hotels, pharmacies, bars, emergency departments, and funerals, tipping us off that the chronology isn’t straightforward. As we begin to wonder about the significance of these lives and their interconnections, the mysterious disappearance of four young men who played in a Satanist death metal band disrupts the quotidian, if foreboding, plot. Knausgaard’s signature narrative style is well-suited to the genre of horror. Its phenomenological immediacy heightens our awareness of what is avoided and denied and will come back to haunt, perhaps literally. Everyone has a guilty secret or a secret guilt.
At first, I found it impossible not to read all the characters, not just Arne, as Knausgaard’s alter egos. Beyond the factual similarities, the style of their inner monologues shares many of his trademark tics in My Struggle, in particular the self-questioning, the narrow focus on commonplace perceptions to deflect looming concerns, and the brief philosophical meditations. The pull of addiction, the love of music (the novel includes its own playlist), and the artist’s eye on the natural world are likewise familiar tropes from Knausgaard’s autofiction. The characters’ external body-awareness tends to ring false—they don’t feel like inhabited bodies but like disembodied minds, filled with the author’s philosophical concerns and personality. But after the first few sections, characters began to differentiate—Iselin is persuasive, and Solveig, Jostein, and Turid are all able to put their own imprint on the world. Arne, Kathrine, and Emil, on the other hand, continue to read like the Knausgaard of My Struggle, as they grapple with dissatisfaction and with disconnection from those who depend on them: “I was cowardly,” Emil assesses himself. “Shied away from conflicts, from work, from people. I avoided every demand, sought the path of least resistance, drank too much, thought only of myself.”
In a moment of introspection that could belong to any of the middle-aged characters in the book, Kathrine says:
That is what life is like, is it not? When we’re young we think there’s more to come, that this is only the beginning, whereas in fact it’s all there is, and what we have now, and barely even think about, will soon be the only thing we ever had. There had been no new abundance of friends… and no new abundance of thoughts; the ones we’d had then were the ones we still have now.
It's the specter haunting the book: that there might be nothing new under the sun. Which brings us to the star.
The star’s appearance in each section is magical, reflecting each character’s essence or dilemma. Kathrine first feels terror looking at the star—“something terrible was going to happen”—but later looks again and wonders, as she has wondered if she might be pregnant, however improbable, “Why couldn’t it be a sign of something good? Of new creation, new life?” Egil, who is looking for meaning, finds the star full of it: “Something silent and intense streamed from it. It was almost as if it possessed a will, something indomitable that the soul could contain, but not change or influence. The feeling that someone was looking at us.” No one can hold the star’s gaze for long, just as no one can stay empathic for long. Time and again we see each character blocking out reminders of those who desperately need and depend on them: distracting themselves from dire thoughts, ignoring texts and phone calls, resorting to alcohol or pills, losing themselves in art, writing, music, or food. The novel is full of flawed caretakers and of children who, separated from and returning to their parents, enact scenes of (in)credible anger and reproach; it bears witness to the suffering of the very young and the very old, the meek, the ill, the vulnerable. More than the looming superhuman horror, the horror I feel is for them.
After Arne leaves his wife to recover in the psychiatric ward, he stops for a meal and thinks to himself:
No, I ought to be feeling down… The fact that I wasn’t told me I was lacking in empathy, something that occasionally concerned me, because empathy was something you were supposed to have. The propensity to care about other people.
It’s a moment notable for its almost slapstick irony, its detachment from instinctual human compassion underscored by a reflexive acceptance of social mores. The novel’s especially flawed characters free Knausgaard from his reflexive earnestness. In an impressive feat, he turns Jostein, lacking in both empathy and insight, into a plausible catabatic hero, whose amnesiac spell in purgatory is a counterpoint to Egil’s vision of being “a person without a name, without a history. To be nothing more than a human being.” It’s a section that returns us to the Knausgaard of A Time for Everything, in which he is able to describe the otherworldly, mythical Biblical past so matter-of-factly that we believe in it. It also contains this happy dialogue: “Are you a Denier? … Are you denying that you’re dead? … No one has ever had a reasonable conversation with a Denier. It can’t be done.”
The Morning Star reads like the offspring of A Time for Everything and My Struggle—it might be called Out of Time or Our Struggle, with a gesture beyond the individual’s concern for freedom toward the dilemmas of society. In a paradoxical, nearly absurd train of thought, Vibeke, who appears late in the novel in a single section that feels both out-of-place and integral—its picture of devoted, happy familial and marital love a thematic counterpoint to the others—finds hope for humanity in the way prejudice seeded early in life can suddenly emerge in older people. If ideas ingrained in society were once new, she thinks, that means that new ideas, too, have the hope of becoming habitual.
For the impossibility of changing the course of the world, as like a moth we steered directly into the flame, was only seeming. I thought about saving the rainforests. I thought about banning fossil fuels. I thought about how terribly we treated animals. And if I thought about those things, others would too, and a pattern would form, more and more people would share those same ideas, until eventually they became a truth with which our actions could only accord.
…Or was that just idealistic nonsense?
It’s the kind of nonsense that the novel enacts: ideas creating their own reality. The new star heralds apocalyptic events—a metaphoric stand-in for the cataclysmic events promised by climate change—that serve as both warning and possibility for change. Yet in the same way that Vibeke’s final question undercuts hope, Knausgaard undercuts his own fiction and shows all his cards. Only once does he allow himself a magic trick: there is a moment in Kathrine’s narrative when I suddenly know, without knowing how, who will be in a coffin. It feels like a miracle, prepared too subtly for me to trace. But even as the supernatural elements of the novel ramp up, nothing is ever as uncanny as the initial suspicion of strangeness, disappointingly deflated when Egil mentions The Augsburg Book of Miracles as the source of signs, omens, and new stars. The new star, Knausgaard feels compelled to say, is not a new idea.
The capstone essay—before it breaks away into a final narrative—is similarly deflating, explaining what we have surmised. Written by Egil and read privately by Arne, who dismisses it as pretentious, it unabashedly draws on the epic poetry and kingdoms of the dead Arne plans to teach—and so feels like an authorial intrusion. We often hear of how technology and consumerism—the global economy—have shrunk the world. The Morning Star instead mourns the way science has shrunk our mental conception of the world and its mysteries. Egil writes of death:
Death similarly was taken from the cave and out into the forest, out of the darkness and into the light, where it appears to us as it is: a slight fissure in a blood vessel in the brain, a few microscopic bacteria in the bloodstream, a tiny cell beginning to multiply in the pancreas.
What is happening here is death is becoming smaller and smaller, and so compelling has this development been that it is no longer inconceivable that death at some point will reach its nadir and vanish.
I suspect that when Knausgaard writes about death, he is equally talking about fiction. He seems driven to shrink fiction as much as possible, as he did in My Struggle, to test what he most wants to believe in: even, in Christian terms, to tempt it. When the narrative moves us from the state of tension, knowing and not knowing, to spelling out a particular disaster, I feel a loss of fiction’s potentiality. Detailing cataclysmic climate disasters isn’t the novelist’s gambit, I imagine Knausgaard saying, but instead Jostein’s prerogative as a journalist. What the novel can do is reveal through metaphor and irony our modes of concealment the way that “living in the present” can be either cure (a mindful attunement to nature and to each other) or disease (indulgence in unsustainable, even cruel hedonism).
If we can’t comprehend mortality, our own death, how can we comprehend climate change and its ultimate end, extinction? What is climate change but a lack of empathy, writ large? The counterbalance to the lack of empathy humans exhibit in the novel is their frequent, credible immersion in their natural setting, showing a real attention to and love for nature and its nonhuman inhabitants. Kathrine remembers reading a poem by Rilke in which a tree speaks of its God. She reflects:
It was the first time the thought of God transcended me and what was mine.
The trees were living creations, and God was their creator.
The darkness, the earth, the moisture: this was the God of the trees.
What was my God?
What was my warmth?
She traces it to Jesus’s teachings: “All were equal, all were a part of something greater, and in that greater thing was God.”