Great American Novels, Irish Crime Fiction & Knausgaard

 I came very late to Ursula K. Le Guin, but have fallen hard for her. Ia m also a great fan of Raintree County, which I consider both a Great American Novel and a great American novel. So, I read Ursula K. Le Guin: Who Cares About the Great American Novel? with interest and attention.

But I want to add this note: To me, the keystone of the phrase “the great American novel” is not the word American but the word great.

Greatness, in the sense of outstanding or unique accomplishment, is a cryptogendered word. In ordinary usage and common understanding, “a great American” means a great American man, “a great writer” means a great male writer. To regender the word, it must modify a feminine noun (“a great American woman,” “a great woman writer”). To degender it, it must be used in a locution such as “great Americans/writers, both men and women . . .” Greatness in the abstract, in general, is still thought of as the province of men.

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Who wants “The” Great American Novel, anyhow? PR people. People who believe that bestsellers are better than other books because they sell better than other books and that the prizewinning book is the best book because it won the prize. Tired teachers, timid teachers, lazy students who’d like one text to read instead of the many, many great and greatly complex books that make up literature.

Art is not a horse race. Literature is not the Olympics. The hell with The Great American Novel. We have all the great novels we need right now—and right now some man or woman is writing a new one we won’t know we needed till we read it.

I think there is much to her arguments – that is why I have highlighted these. As for Raintree County, it is a great and greatly complex book.

Irish crime fiction is a thing, although I know it only through Tana French, and now Anjili Babbar On The Rise of Irish Crime Fiction:

MO: How can crime fiction address social issues?

AFB: I actually think that crime fiction is an ideal vehicle for exploring social issues, because it gets to the heart of people’s priorities, their visions of justice, and the way they act under pressure. The authors I discuss in Finders tackle issues like women’s health and child abuse in Ireland, and they offer outsiders’ perspectives on a number of American issues, too, like the health care system and recent developments in American politics. Sometimes they draw connections among cultures, as in discussions of systemic prejudice and the dynamics that reinforce generational poverty. But possibly the most poignant issue in the context of contemporary global issues is tribalism. The Troubles are a clear example of the extremes to which tribalism can take us and the anaesthetization to human loss that can result. One theme that comes up repeatedly in Irish crime fiction is fatigue from the pressure to blindly embrace optimism for the future, which can include both a disallowance of mourning and a failure to address underlying issues that led to tragedy and inequity in the past. Adrian McKinty, whose Duffy series is set during the Troubles, warns that what happened in the North could happen anywhere; Brian McGilloway’s contemporary Lucy Black series builds on that, suggesting that Brexit and present-day manifestations of bigotry and xenophobia are reminders of the fragility of progress. The idea is that we need to be mindful to not fall into dangerous patterns, and to remember our shared humanity, even when we don’t seem to have a lot of shared ground—and Irish authors are in a unique position to make that argument.

Karl Ove Knausgaard: The Man, The Myth, The Legend:

Something Knausgaard seems to believe above all things, when it comes to writing, is that “you have to get inside the text… if it feels separate, if you see it from the outside, you collide with it. It doesn’t work.” When he starts a novel, his way of getting into it is “to know almost nothing.” He continued, “I've never done meditation, never been into religion in any way, but it's a feeling that you're connected, somehow, to the writing.”

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Knausgaard believes that our contemporary way of being is too stagnant—designed, he said, to avoid any possibility for change. “Maybe especially with the technology we have now, because it's about preserving,” he mused. “Photography is about preserving. Audio is about preserving. Records are about preserving. Computers are about preserving. It’s an algorithm which is a recipe, and something comes out. But it's decided. It's decided, it's decided, and it belongs in the past. It isn't evolving. I wanted a transgressive thing. I wanted a disturbance between these things we know and the things that are established.”

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Shame is one of Knausgaard's projects—slipping past or outside of the self and into a register of a different self, not aware enough to recognize that at some point he’ll be looked at, examined, swiped at. It’s the only way, he told me, to touch the truth the shame holds inside of it up close. It’s the only way to make the life one needs to make inside the thing that one is making. Instead of capturing something from the outside, he said (that would be a sort of preservation, presentation), it is the writer’s job to build the life of a work of art from the inside out.

“What is really boring,” he said. He spoke earlier, laughingly, about his work being boring. The books are long and exacting. You spend pages with Syvert thinking about how to pay his bus fare; pages of Syvert thinking about when and how to turn on his phone once he gets to Russia and exits his plane. About this, Knausgaard said, he has no choice but to give those mundane moments to you: “Because you’re seeing the world from a specific place, because you can’t see it from anywhere else.” There were other times he used the word “boring” pejoratively, but here, it felt like he was proud of it.

The boring that he seems to most abhor is the boring that comes from writing as if you know exactly what you’re doing, as if there is no mystery. “What really makes the writing boring is to present something in writing,” he said. “So if you know something and you present it, then nothing happened, and then it's kind of lifeless. So it's all about being at the point where you don’t really know… You can’t just put a form onto a subject. It has to become. And that goes for everything I believe in, really. It’s that knowledge somehow stops. It ends. And then it moves to the self and living.”

sch 9/27