ABSTRACT

The notorious length of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle is the result of an ever-increasing preoccupation with speed: as much time went into the first few pages as went into all of the final volume’s 1,248 pages. Not surprisingly, critics’ appraisals were inversely related to this speed, beginning with nearly unanimous praise and ending with nearly unanimous condemnation. But it is the final volume that reveals the kind of work the novel really is: Against an innate, nearly automatic inclination to produce “what people liked,” Knausgaard wanted to write how “he really [thought] things [were].” This desire is one Michael Fried would call “antitheatrical,” in that Knausgaard did not want the novel to be for the audience. Yet Knausgaard felt that form and the meaning form produces, which for Fried were the primary means of antitheatricality, might actually have been what people liked about My Struggle. Writing quickly, then, was a way of not giving the audience what they wanted – meaning – by making the text an object – by making it meaningless. My Struggle, despite appearances, is not the epitome of readability; it is a text that wants to mean nothing so that it might truly reject any appeal to the audience.

摘要

卡尔·奥夫·克瑙斯加德 (Karl Ove Knausgaard) 的《我的奋斗》( My Struggle ) 臭名昭著的篇幅是对速度的日益关注的结果：前几页花费的时间与最后一卷 1,248 页的全部时间一样多。毫不奇怪，评论家的评价与这种速度成反比，开始几乎是一致的赞扬，最后几乎是一致的谴责。但它是最后一卷，揭示了这部小说真正的作品类型：克瑙斯高反对一种天生的、几乎无意识的创作“人们喜欢的东西”的倾向，他想写出“他真的[认为]事情[是]”。这种愿望被迈克尔·弗里德称为“反戏剧”，因为克瑙斯加德不希望这部小说是为了观众。然而，克瑙斯加德认为，形式和形式产生的意义，对弗里德来说是反戏剧性的主要手段，实际上可能是人们喜欢《我的奋斗》的原因。那么，快速写作是一种不给观众他们想要的东西的方式——意思是——通过使文本成为一个对象——通过让它变得毫无意义。《我的奋斗》尽管有外表，但并不是可读性的缩影；这是一个不想表达任何意义的文本，因此它可能真正拒绝对观众的任何吸引力。