Karl Ove Knausgård: evaluation

Transcript context

…My take on The Scream? You know, that’s what happens when you’re writing. You just start. I just sat down with a Munch book and thought, “Okay, I’ll write a book about Munch. Let’s see where this goes.” Then you just enter it, and then comes something back, and then, two months later, you have a book. The Scream is one of the most iconic paintings there is. Everyone, I think, has seen it. It’s so recognizable. And almost we have an intimate knowledge of it. We see it, you know? But the painting is about the opposite. It’s about something very strange. It’s hard to do this in English, but it’s about the world being almost unrecognizable. It’s seeing how strange the world is. And we do this in that painting that we instantly recognize. And it’s a painting about anxiety, and anxiety is incredibly painful. So, it is a painting about pain. But we see a million dollars, we see its fame. We don’t see that. But the interesting thing for me when I wrote about it was what kind of paintings Munch had access to and how they painted at that time. Because no matter how painful things were, they were always taking place in a space, in a room. And having that space, having that room, you know the events in that room will one day be over. Something new will take place there. If Madame Bovary is very painful — the ending — but you know that world will continue. And there is a kind of a comfort in that. There isn’t an acuteness in it. You could see it. You know it will pass. And you observe it from the outside, so you see it at a distance. You see something painful — a sick girl — at a distance, and it’s in another room, and it will pass. There is a comfort in that. But Munch does set in that painting to remove that room, to remove that space. Because all the landscape is subdued to the person in the painting. So it’s his landscapes. There’s no room in it; there’s no neutrality. When that person is gone, the landscape is gone. So, there is no space, and there is no time. It’s instantly painting, it’s acute. It’s like it’s happening now, and we share the space with the painting. And in that is the radicality of the painting — that there’s no space and there’s no comfort. It’s an acute thing. It’s instant, and you have to relate to it. You can’t see that painting without relating to it. I mean when you saw it for the first time. And the interesting thing now, I think, is that that’s a fair description of the world — how it is now. It is an instant world. We get access to painful things that happens when it happens. Today, there was a massacre in New Zealand. The minute it happens, we know about it, we relate to it, we feel the pain, and we see the pictures. That didn’t just happen. That didn’t happen at Munch’s time. It was unheard of. Now that’s the world. We live in the world of Scream. There’s no space between us and the world. Everything comes bombarding us, you know? So, what art has to do now is the opposite. It has to create space. It has to recreate rooms. the world of Scream. There’s no space between us and the world. Everything comes bombarding us, you know? So, what art has to do now is the opposite. It has to create space. It has to recreate rooms. And I was thinking about that and also writing in the book about — I was at an exhibition of Anselm Kiefer here in London. It was the White Cube. It was absolutely magnificent, but there was no people in it; it was only spaces, only room. And it was kind of mythological rooms. It was like it was giving space to events that wasn’t even there, back somehow. I think both Kiefer and Munch are great artists, but they live in different times and they had different missions. For Munch, it was very important to give access directly to pain and to distorted vision of the world, and to give a more true account of how it is to be, I think he wanted to do. And now it’s the opposite because now we need space and we need comfort and we need time and we need something. I’m not sure if art is what should do that, but that’s what I felt when I started to write about Munch. And another interesting thing is that exactly the same thing is going on in the literature at that time, you know? You have the epic novel with all the characters, all the rooms. Tolstoy is a very good example because that is a book about rooms. And then you have, for instance, Knut Hamsun in Hunger, which is just one person and his distorted version of the world that exists. And when he dies, the world disappears. Karl, thank you very much for coming by.…

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