I ran into an old friend at “The Renaissance Nude”. It was by Raphael until it was attributed to Raphael’s teacher, Perugino. The pipe-player was Marsyas until experts started to i.d. him as Daphnis. Moreover, the Getty hung it in a LGBT corner, implying that Apollo and the piper are a couple. Does it make a difference?
If they’re a couple they don't seem to be having a good time. Apollo looks down – in both senses – on his companion. The piper is so absorbed in his music-making that he isn’t paying attention – despite the fact that Apollo is making an exhibition of his physical splendor. The piper is bald and not at all a Greek god, but Perugino (or whomever) has given him the beauty of someone wholeheartedly engaged in an absorbing task. He's the one you focus on.
Here’s where the name becomes significant. If he’s Daphnis, he’s going to be caught up in love triangle with some local nymphs which ends so badly for him that he devotes the rest of his life to sad songs. If he’s Marsyas, Apollo will take offense at his presumption in being a musician, and skin him alive. A lot going on in a 524-year-old, 15” x 11” rectangle.
The exhibition was such that it is possible to mention “the other Peruginos” on display, i.e. the big decoration with scenes from the Metamorphoses in the background and a “Combat between Love and Chastity” in the foreground; and an electrically charged “Baptism of Christ,” with Christ’s feet seen through the pale blue water of the Jordan.
But before the naked people from the Renaissance, we experienced how Rococo ladies got dressed at Maxwell Barr’s brilliant lecture/demonstration. He took us through the mechanics and logistics of how aristocratic Frenchwomen dressed throughout the day. I will never look at eighteenth century lace again without thinking about the extraordinary quantities of labor they embody, and their consequent function as a signifier of wealth.
Not to mention the labor of the women who put on and took off these signifiers! Barr encouraged our patient model to give frequent updates on how she felt at different stages - under the corset, the layers of heavily embroidered fabric, balancing on un-sensible shoes, ....
See my review of the Getty Villa's production of Bacchae, published today in the L.A. Review of Books.
The small scale, and unfussy – but careful – craftsmanship steer the Tim Burton bric-à-brac (tombstones, towers, ruins, grotesques, storm-tossed crags) safely clear of cliché.
Doodles, but ones that anticipate abstract expressionism, conceptual art (the signed rocks!) and Raymond Pettibon.
The extent of the work was a surprise, suggesting that this activity was more than an after hours amusement.
The silhouettes of towers emerging out of violet horizons were not just words for him.
[Illustration: Victor Hugo, "Stains," circa 1875, ink and wash on paper. (Bibliothèque nationale de France ©BnF)]
The sixth and final volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle is 1152 pages long: exactly the same number of pages in my copy of the KJV Bible.
1.
But instead of old and new revelations, this book continues KOK’s story through the publication of the first volumes of the cycle, stressing, as always, his experiences of guilt and shame. Here he describes how the publication of the first volumes variously outraged, disconcerted, infuriated, or moved the family and friends who appeared in them, under their own names.
KOK’s project of self-analysis would have been incomplete without an account of this apotheosis of all his previous personal and literary crises.
As in an epilogue, characters from the earlier volumes reappear to comment on their portrayal in his books. The responses range from equanimity (I see you use my name but that character is not me) to rage (I am not only suing you and your publisher, but assisting the media in defaming you).
A 21st century Scandinavian Six (or more) Characters Pestering Their Author.
2.
KOK interrupts this story with a 400-page literary/philsophical ramble through the question of proper names in literature, Ulysses, The Sound and the Fury, poems by Rilke and Celan, Hitler’s My Struggle, The Death of Virgil, Leonardo’s anatomical dissections, Cain and Abel, the tribes of Israel, the rise of Nazism, Victor Klemperer’s Lingua Tertii Imperii, the holocaust, the Utøya massacre, the distinction between “we” and “you”, ….
Perhaps the exasperating horribleness of this part is deliberate. Faced with the biggest crises of his life, KOK retreats into book-talk and meditations on the devil.
3.
The concluding section leaps back to life. It’s harrowing and unsparing. Like like all the best episodes in the cycle, the accumulation of local, alien details paradoxically renders the the story universal. The alien world of a Norweigian expat in Malmö, trying to take care of his kids, work, and deal with Swedish psychological services for his wife, in all its horrifying specificity becomes a story everyone knows.
With the twist that this volume was written as these events unfolded. Rendering the reader uneasy with the literary pleasure it offers.
The result is a very grim satire on writers, artistic ambition, and the unhappiness produced in the world by irresponsible monomaniacs. Think of O. Henry’s “Confessions of a Humorist" rewritten in grim earnest.
It’s also an ars poetica, arguing at first for an absolute and unyielding need to write, and the ambition to excell. But in the end, it’s abandoned.
It might also be a plea for privacy against publicity. KOK’s story is unique, but the situation couldn’t be more common. Most of us aren’t publishing six-volume memoir/novels, but quite a few publish on social media, with mixed levels of care about the privacy of ourselves and others.
4.
And so? What does the whole cycle add up to?
The swim cap episode is permanently fixed in my brain. Even though it happened to someone else, in a place I have never been and know nothing about, it pinches like memory of my own life. Likewise KOK's account of his father’s wedding party, cleaning the house after his father’s death, and this volume's story of his wife’s breakdown and recovery.
KOK insists that the cycle is about his relationship with his father. Yes, but much more present are his wife and kids. How it came about. Why he is the way he is. Hence how they became what they are.
To tell this story he employed a dangerous technique: no fictional situations, no fictional settings, no fictional characters. Not even fictionalized names. As if he couldn’t write frankly about his world if he made things up. I don’t think he could have found the will to write otherwise.
Is there result a novel at all? It’s a work of art. Scenes are composed with artistic skill.
Perhaps the most searing of all comes near the end of the final volume. His wife is immobilized in bed by depression while he is having dinner with his kids and their grandmothers in the next room. Silence. Then his mother-in-law speaks:
“Without looking at me, Ingrid said: ‘Have you considered the consequences of writing about your children? … How it will be for them when they grow up? Everyone knowing who they are? Have you taken that into account? That they’re vulnerable?’”
He responds …
“I don’t think that any of what I’ve written is dangerous,”
… but notes that …
“It sounded hollow, she looked at me, we continued to eat, the children slipped down from their chairs, they hadn’t noticed anything unusual, there hadn’t been any raised voices.”
KOK is rebuked, and he knows it. He has no answer. He has trifled with his family, what matters most to him in the world. Or does it? His wife’s recovery is gradual, intermittent, unspectacular, with ups and downs. Again the writing is KOK at his best. But the fact that he was writing about it while it was happening, gives the literary triumph an unsettling aftertaste.