WOOD
Have you felt a kind of religious ecstasy in your life?
KNAUSGAARD
No, but they say one of the main things about religious ecstasy is a feeling of selflessness—that you yourself disappear. I feel that when I read Dostoyevsky. I can have that feeling. I can just disappear. I don’t know why, and I don’t know what it means. It’s the same thing looking at art. I feel so moved by it, but I don’t know why. And what is that? Is it just emotions? And why should emotions be important, a little movement in your soul? For me, I think I’ve just substituted literature and art for religion. Yes, that is a very conservative, Romantic part of this project. Most contemporary art is completely without that dimension. Anselm Kiefer has it very much. Some do, but I think most art is just playing with words and concepts.
WOOD
One reading of your work would be that you have a religious sensibility, but you can’t find any refuge in God because God has disappeared. In that sense you are a typical Western secularist, and this creates in you a tremendous sadness, but also a kind of anger. In Book Two you say Dostoyevsky used to mean so much, and now who is Dostoyevsky taken seriously by? By adolescents, by students. You go on to say that all those massive questions—of theodicy, of the eternal salvation of one’s soul—have been displaced in contemporary culture by political questions, questions of fairness and justice. I suppose this would be the point where a reader who didn’t like you would say, Here he goes on his conservative rant, attacking the welfare state.
KNAUSGAARD
It’s worse than that, I think. In Sweden, for instance, the Realpolitik—I mean the real power politics about money and class—has just disappeared, having been replaced by feminism and multiculturalism. Which is to say, by things you can have opinions about without facing any consequences.
WOOD
Because everyone agrees about them?
KNAUSGAARD
Yes, and because they’re largely a matter of language—you can’t say this, and you can’t say that—while the real problems are finding a place somewhere else, so you don’t have to take them into consideration. There is a new kind of moralism evolving, where the obligation is to the language—there are some words you can no longer say and some opinions you no longer can express. This is a kind of make-believe. It makes everybody comfortable, they feel good about themselves, because they mean well—while at the same time there is a whole generation of immigrants locked out from education, work, and privileges and there is anger growing in the part of the population that doesn’t have its voices heard, or whose opinions are considered evil and kept out. So the anti-immigration party here keeps growing and growing. In My Struggle, this is reflected in the gap between what I should think and what I actually think, how I should feel and how I really feel, how the world should look and how it really looks. This is the difference between ideology and reality, politics and literature.